Thread: How did you get into this Halloween hobby?

Tweet

So many ways to answer this question! Where did it start? In many places. Here is but one of those:

Back in the early 70's, as a small child, I became acquainted with Disney's "Chilling Thrilling Sounds of the Haunted House" LP record. This was a scary Halloween record and still, I think, one of the scariest ever made. The first time I heard it--on a Halloween night when I was maybe five?--it was coming out from inside the front doorway of a neighbor's house. It scared the hell out of me! Nothing was worse than IMAGINING the ghosts that were making those sounds.

A year or two later and I was visiting the home of another family in a nearby city. Don't remember what time of year it was...Thanksgiving maybe? The family had two daughters about the same age as me and my brother. And they had this record and liked playing it...spooky! And these two gals, they said Hey, let's make a haunted house! And then they turned the lights out in one of the rooms, put on that scary record, and moved around in the darkness making additional scary sounds and occasionally dropping an ice cube down the back of my shirt. Ha! This was a lot of fun, and at that moment I understood: This is a cool kind of show--a scary show!

It was not too long before I had procured some Halloween decorations at home (what I couldn't buy I would attempt to make, thus honing my building/illustration skills)...I had been transformed into, and remain still, a modest haunter, having loads of fun with cardboard, tape, a record player and a rubber mask here and there.

Like many of you, my Halloween hobby started the same way....cheesy yet simple decorations.

We had cardboard gravestones, or cardboard diecuts for the door. We had a full size green and white skeleton, a cat, a witch with a moon. We started VERY, very minimal and simple.

One year we got the first pumkin masters carving kit that hit the market (then they also sold pumpkin dunkn at the grocery store). We carved the famous stencil of the face on the first kit. We had lots of TOTs and played scary music out the window. After that one memory, I was pretty much hooked.

We had a neighbor across the street, 2 houses down that went CRAZY for Halloween every year. That also fuled the fire, but I remember being slightly scared of it (as I was a young kid). It was pretty tame by todays standards. They had moving arms, hands, rats, a mad scientist lab, strobe lights etc. That stuff didn't seem easy to find in stores at that time, or at least I don't ever remember seeing anything like it.

Years went by and I loved to play the scary cassette tape we used on a regular basis. The cassette tape was "A Night in a Graveyard/Night in a Haunted House" (no longer in print - and available on my site for free). I would color in Halloween color books. Then I started collection props each year, for my birthday or my mom would just randomly buy them. We started watching scary movies and Halloween seemed less scary because I was controlling the setup.

Cheesy, grocery store bought items turned to items from Spirit, tombstones from online and just grew as I got older. One pumpkin turned to two, to four, to eight and so on.

So glad to have our wonderful Halloween community, I am smiling right now!

I always loved Halloween but never had the "spark" to be creative.
Then one summer afternoon I happened upon a website that showed how to make tombstones from foam sheets from Home Depot for around 10 bucks.
BOOM!
Then once I bought a glue gun and learned about cheap pvc piping it was all over for me, I was hooked.