Zombie Nurseries, Spooky Poetry, and a Giveaway!

Every Day is Halloween #93: The Official Newsletter of Lisa Morton

Oct 01, 2024

Hi All!

Well, September turned into my usual whirlwind of interviews and appearances. All good, but tiring and not exactly conducive to getting a lot of other stuff done! Most of these interviews - which range from Halloween podcasts to a PBS webseries to a New York Times print interview - will appear this month, so I’ll probably send out a special mid-October mini-newsletter with links (trust me when I tell you that some of these are FUN!).

I’m also getting closer to offering a paid newsletter. Don’t worry - this free one won’t change! But a paid newsletter would: 1) come out twice a month; 2) offer longer, heavily-researched new articles on a range of paranormal and Halloween topics; 3) include a monthly podcast adapted from one of the long articles (for those who prefer to listen); and 4) include the occasional fiction reprint (preferably a story that relates to something I’m discussing in one of the articles). Here are examples of what the articles would be like:

“The Devil’s Birthday”: How Halloween Got Its Bad Rep
Did the Serial Killer Behind the Villisca Axe Murders Leave Behind Other Haunted Locations?
B340: How the Queen Mary (and Disney) Created a (Real) Haunting
“Mr. Heaphey’s Ghost”: How a Beloved 19^th-Century Real Ghost Story Evolved With Each Reprinting
No, It’s Not From the Druids: The Real History of Trick or Treat
History’s First Great Séance: When Odysseus Called Up the Spirits
Griffith Park’s Haunted Picnic Table: Hoax, Reality…or Both?

Is there something else you’d pay (a very small charge!) to see from me in a paid Substack? Let me know!

NEW STUFF I LIKE

I just acquired two older Halloween books that I love…

Ken Werner’s Halloween is a photography book I saw once decades ago but didn’t buy. Over the years, I forgot the author’s name and never saw the book again…until it was recently re-issued. It’s a remarkable piece of Halloween history preserved forever in incredible images that show a holiday in transition from a children’s celebration to an adult LGBTQ+ festival. I’m so glad to finally own a copy of this one.

The other is a total contrast: a children’s book on the legend behind the jack-o’-lantern. Author Edna Barth also wrote a very good children’s history of Halloween, Witches, Pumpkins, and Grinning Ghosts: The Story of the Halloween Symbols; in Jack-o’-Lantern, she retells the classic folktale of Stingy Jack (calling him “Mean Jack”). It’s a delightful book and can be found for cheap on the used book market.

THE HALLOWEEN SPIRIT

I love the idea of repurposing everyday, throughout-the-year objects for Halloween.

This year, for example, we had a huge pen we bought during the spring to house a litter of feral cats that had appeared in our backyard. With the cats now all re-homed (well, sort of - we’re keeping two), the pen offered intriguing possibilities for a Halloween decoration.

We decided to fill it with zombie babies, add a hidden bluetooth speaker playing baby screams, and make it part of this year’s yard haunt. After Halloween we’ll donate the pen to a local rescue organization, but in the meantime…it’s a zombie nursery!

STRANGE DOINGS

As we dive headlong into the best time of year for telling ghost stories, I want to look at a woman who was incredibly important in the history of ghost stories, a woman named Catherine Crowe. If you’ve never heard of Mrs. Crowe, there’s a good chance you’ve heard of her book The Night-Side of Nature. First published in 1848, this astonishing collection of true ghost stories from around Great Britain paved the way for both Spiritualism and the popularity of haunted tales in the 19^th-century.

So, who was Mrs. Crowe? She was born in 1790 and started her writing career in 1838 with a series of plays and well-received novels, and she also translated other works into English. Her greatest success, though, came in 1848 with The Night-Side of Nature; or, Ghosts and Ghost Seers. First published in two volumes, it’s difficult to overestimate the importance of The Night Side of Nature; even professional debunkers of fraudulent mediums like the magician John Nevil Maskelyne acknowledged the book’s influence. She also wrote a book on Christmas ghost stories and several books for children.

In 1854 she was the subject of controversy when she was found wandering the streets of Edinburgh in a state of undress, and newspapers said that her spiritualist leanings had driven her mad. She responded by saying that she had spent five or six days ill from a gastric inflammation, but was most certainly not “mad about spirits or anything.”

Catherine Crowe may not have been mad over spiritualism, but she seems to have seen its approach with near-prophetic abilities when she wrote, near the beginning of The Night-Side of Nature, “The contemptuous scepticism of the last age is yielding to a more humble spirit of inquiry; and there is a large class of persons among the most enlightened of the present, who are beginning to believe that much which they had been taught to reject as fable, has been, in reality, ill-understood truth.” She wrote that in 1848; that same year, America would give birth to both spiritualism and the modern séance when teenagers Kate and Maggie Fox talked to spirits in a New York farmhouse.

You can find Mrs. Crowe’s work available to read free at multiple places online like Project Gutenberg.

BEHIND THE SCREAMS

“The Mask Behind the Face” from The Horror Zine October 2024

Every year I try to get at least one new work of Halloween fiction out into the world. As you probably know, I’ve written a LOT of Halloween fiction - including one entire collection - so the challenge is always to craft a story I haven’t told before.

I usually start by thinking about Halloween tropes, rolling them over in my head, trying to find one I either haven’t touched upon at all, or haven’t already written extensively about.

This year, masks popped into my head (mainly because I had just written a non-Halloween mask story for an upcoming volume of Weird Fiction Quarterly). Although I’ve written a lot of stories dealing with Halloween costumes, the actual use of masks was a topic I haven’t really delved into.

What is it about masks that we love, especially at Halloween? How do they empower us, or change our identity? Using that as my springboard, I came up with “The Mask Behind the Face.” Fortunately The Horror Zine editor Jeani Rector enjoyed the story and chose it for her October issue, where you can now read it for free.

Read "The Face Behind the Mask"

THE WRITE STUFF

For decades, I thought I couldn’t write poetry. As in, at all. I’m blessed/cursed to have friends who are extraordinarily gifted poets, and I thought I couldn’t begin to compete with them.

But at some point, I realized that I could use poetry as a way to tell a story too short to work as fiction. Once that revelation hit me, I realized that, although I’ll never be able to compete with my poet friends, I’m still a storyteller and could use poetry as just one more form.

Here, for example, is one in which I wanted to explore the idea that Norma Desmond, the crazed star at the heart of Sunset Boulevard (one of my favorite movies), might not have left her decaying mansion even after death.

“The House of Small Pictures”

The house, a century old,

gutted and re-birthed again and again,

serpentine vines retrained

moldering wood replaced

nesting spiders rehomed,

but the darkness at the heart of the house

has never been lit.

Its last owner,

a man who spoke money,

didn’t understand when he heard it

and he fled, like the others before him.

Young people brushed aside tearing thorns

to enter a house that once belonged

to a killing star.

One of them, a sensitive, heard a name,

whispered in tones that fray primal nerves.

Norma, said the jangling nothing, and

Remember me.

The trespassers ran; the one who heard

took too many pills and died a week later.

Now the madness waits,

perched like a grand gargoyle,

in the decaying house on Sunset Boulevard.

Don’t ever be afraid to try something new! Sometimes you’ll find you want to dive all the way in after sampling that water with a toe.

NEWS & WORKS IN PROGRESS

I’m working on a new interview for the January issue of Nightmare Magazine, this time interviewing one of my favorite screenwriters/directors/producers/actresses, Toby Poser of the Adams Family!

My poem “Beneath the Garden” will be in HWA Poetry Showcase Vol. XI.

My short-short “The Destination” appears in the “Road Trip” issue of Weird Fiction Quarterly.

I’m very happy to have a story in the new William Hope Hodgson tribute anthology Where the Silent Ones Watch, edited by James Chambers.

UPCOMING APPEARANCES

(NOTE: The previously announced October 6 signing at Dark Delicacies for Videotapes From Hell has been postponed)

October 14th, 21st, and 28th - I’ll be live online teaching my Halloween history course for Atlas Obscura
October 27 at 7 am - I’ll be returning to chat live on Dave Nemo Weekends (channel 146 on SiriusXM)
October 29 at 8 pm - I’ll be going live on KSCO’s “The Night Hawk” to talk Halloween and paranormal
November 17 at 3 pm - I’ll be at Dark Delicacies with editor Jonathan Maberry and contributors Leslie S. Klinger, Lisa Kastner, Del Howison, Ray Porter, Duane Swierczynski, Scott Brick, John Palisano, Simon Vance, and Amber Benson signing Shadows & Verse: Classic Dark Poems with Celebrity Commentary
June 12-15, 2025 - I’ll be in Stamford, CT for StokerCon

WHERE YOU CAN BUY MY BOOKS

GIVEAWAY

This month’s giveaway is a 2-fer pack: one lucky winner will receive both an authentic 1911 vintage Halloween postcard (by artist Ellen Clapsaddle), and a modern “Every Day is Halloween” pin from Spooky Shake Studios! Enter by leaving a comment; I’ll randomly choose a winner by October 15th so the swag will arrive by Halloween. Good luck!

Every Day is Halloween