The Harvest Figure

Fall officially arrived this past Sunday, and though summer heat continues to linger, leaves have begun to carpet our lawn. I'll still be mowing into November, though not as often, and mainly to mulch the leaves. Sometimes, when mowing along the shady, wooded side of our front lawn, I find myself longing for cool October evenings and the rattle of dry leaves on the wind.

When I was young, my parents spent fall evenings in the yard, raking leaves into huge piles, often for us to jump into. As Halloween neared, some of those leaf piles were put to more creative use. Out came a pair of Dad's overalls, one of his worn flannel shirts, a pair old work shoes, and garden gloves. In went handfuls of those crunchy leaves to pad and shape the clothing into a reasonably convincing body. Mom sacrificed a worn pillowcase, which she stuffed with leaves and then drew a jack-o-lantern-style face on the outside. After assembling the upper and lower torso, the hands, feet and head, and positioning the body in a comfortable pose on the back step, the finishing touch was added: one of Dad's ball caps.

A photo from 1981 captures this jolly harvest figure—wearing what appears to be an eye patch—as though he's in the middle of telling a good yarn:

If my memory serves me, that was the last time that we had a harvest figure. At least for a while. The reason? We moved the following year from the Southeast to the West Coast, to a milder climate, and to a house with a smaller yard where relatively few leaves fell in autumn. Of course, you can stuff a harvest figure with other materials, but having a large supply of free leaves sure helps. 

In later years, we made other harvest figures, following a similar pattern. We sometimes used newspaper or old t-shirts for stuffing, though I remember that rolled-up towels were good for filling pant legs and shirt sleeves, because they left fewer lumps than wads of newspaper did. Here is our figure from 1998, pre-staged in our living room:

My siblings and I got older and took the job over from our parents, and our displays eventually got a little more elaborate. Instead of just propping the figure up on the front porch, we set him up behind our parents' bedroom window, which looked out on the walkway up to the front door. I had a plaster cast of my face that I had made in a college class, and we put that in a basket and used it as the "head" of our headless figure. 

With the addition of a black light and a Halloween sounds CD, the finished display was quite effective, shown in this 2004 photo:

One year, I put on some spooky makeup and hid just inside the front door, spying through the peephole to see when trick-or-treaters arrived. An older kid—probably middle-school age—walked up by himself, noticed the headless figure in the window, and approached the door. Before he could knock, I suddenly swung the door open and said, "Boo!" or something like that. The startled kid responded with an expletive. I chuckled, and offered a lighthearted apology along with some candy. But the kid, deflated, walked away without taking a single piece. I toned it down after that.

About 15 years ago, I moved back to the Southeast, to the region of my birth. I'm now a father of two boys. For the past two Halloweens, I have made harvest figures the way my parents used to—raking the yard and then stuffing handfuls of leaves into old clothes. Here's how our figure looked in 2022:

Last year, about a week before Halloween, I stuffed the clothes and head and then stored them in plastic tubs until October 31. Unfortunately, I completely forgot about the harvest figure until my wife, sons, and I were heading out the door that evening to trick-or-treat. At that point, I had to say "Oh well." I left all of the figure's parts in those plastic tubs for most of a year. And there they'll remain over the next month, until we assemble them on Halloween!

David Copperfield and the Psycho Shower Scene (1985)

Magic may not immediately come to mind when one thinks of Halloween, but it's not much of a stretch. Consider that during the spiritualism fad of the early 1900s, magicians' tricks were usually behind the ghostly manifestations that awed seance participants. The Search for Houdini, a TV special that aired on October 31, 1987, made the connection to Halloween obvious, though the seance staged that night was a dud.

There have been other magic-related Halloween shows, including multiple editions of Magical, Musical Halloween that aired in the early 80s.

In a previous post I commented that, as a child, I associated Toys 'R Us with magic tricks. The store had a significant selection of both individual tricks and complete magic sets. I received a few from there, including Hat Full of Magic, the Magic World of Blackstone Beginners Magic Set, and my first set—Fisher Price Magic Show.

(On my old Fisher Price set, pictured below, notice that I added a skull Halloween sticker along with labels reading "Houdini" and "David Copperfield.")

My interest in magic spanned most of my elementary school years and even into junior high. And much of that interest came from watching David Copperfield's TV specials that aired each spring. One in particular stands out.

Aired in March 1985, the seventh edition of The Magic of David Copperfield included a tribute to Alfred Hitchcock's 1960 classic Psycho. Featuring guest star Angie Dickinson, the vignette recreated the "shower scene" from that famous film, but included a disappearance as well as a surprise ending.

As if to put you in a Halloween mood, this segment begins with an excerpt from Michael Jackson's hit song "Thriller." Enjoy!

October 2023 Update

Greetings, Halloween enthusiasts.

In an effort to keep this blog useful, I have checked my old posts for any video links that went inactive during the past year. Although I couldn't find new links for all of the missing videos, I was able to update most of them. When a full TV episode wasn't available, I tried to find at least an excerpt of the program.

In the past I've been pretty unresponsive to posted comments. I will try to do better at that, just as I've made recent efforts to post new content each October after a long hiatus. I should add that this blog isn't monetized.

Thank you so much for visiting The Ghosts of Halloweens Past. I hope the blog continues to enhance your holiday enjoyment!

The Halloween Aisle

We didn't have a Spirit Halloween store near us when I was a kid.

At Halloween time, we had a few other options. We didn't have Walmart, but we had K-Mart. Then there was our local mall. There the Hallmark store usually had, in addition to its holiday greeting cards, a section of Halloween costumes and items close to the front of the store. I vaguely remember picking up a free Halloween costume catalog from Sears in the mid-1980s, though I don't recall ever buying anything Halloween-related there. Another mall staple, Spencer's Gifts, sold Halloween masks years before the company bought out the Spirit Halloween chain in 1999.

Although I remember Toys 'R Us primarily for its selection of magic tricks and kits—such as the Magic World of Blackstone Beginner's Magic Set—the store carried enough Halloween merchandise to publish its own annual costume catalog. And because I watched reruns of That's Incredible during the 80s, I also associated the store with the haunted Toys 'R Us in Sunnyvale, California.

For costumes, candy, decorations, and other Halloween paraphernalia, I mainly depended on the holiday aisle of our nearest drugstore, Sav-on Drugs. The selection was limited, though I didn't think so at the time. It was where I went when I needed a pot of green makeup, a cassette tape of sound effects, or a bag of candy corn.

One cassette tape that I'm pretty sure I bought at Sav-on was titled "Horror Sounds of the Night." I used the tape as the soundtrack for numerous homemade radio shows and videos over the years, including my own "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" movie. My tape copy was defective, as much of it had a screechy sound that was obviously not intentional. Here is someone else's good transfer of the tape on YouTube:

Another fun find from the mid-1980s was the Create-A-Face Complete Makeup Kit, which included six colors of makeup paint, a tube of vampire blood, glow-in-the-dark monster fangs, "icky teeth," an eyepatch, face adhesive, various "special effect pieces" like bullet holes and a stitched wound, and a waxy "blend" that supposedly helped hide the edge of the effect pieces (it didn't). Though the kit looks pretty underwhelming in hindsight, it seemed like the stuff of professionals when I was a kid.

There are no more Sav-on Drug stores as I remember them (most became CVS Pharmacies). So yesterday I stopped by the Halloween aisle at my local Walgreens to buy some candy to give out (in one week!) and to see what other things they had on the pegboard racks.

The costume selection was a bit sad. Space was severely limited by the Christmas merchandise, already taking up half the aisle. And there were no audio offerings. Unfortunately, the days of sound effects albums and cheesy cover versions of "Monster Mash" on CDs are long gone.

There were, however, glow sticks, several packages of grease and cream makeup, fake fangs, and tubes of vampire blood—all similar to the kinds sold when I was a kid. These would do just fine for any kid planning a homemade monster movie.

At the very least, there was a decent selection of candy. And this store had some pretty good discounts. (After all the markdowns I came away with several bags for $15.) For some things, you can still depend on the Halloween aisle.

Halloween 1989

Halloween, 1989. The holiday was on a Tuesday that year, as it is this year. It was surely one of my most awkward Halloweens.

I was in eighth grade. Tim Burton's first Batman movie was the biggest blockbuster that summer, and was still my favorite movie when autumn rolled around. By October, I had decided to be the Joker for Halloween. Around the middle of the month, I dressed as the character for a youth group costume party at church.

Although I don't remember where I bought the face makeup, it was probably at the local Sav-on Drugs. It was pretty cheap stuff as I recall, because the white paint dried out quickly and was thoroughly cracked by the end of the night. Of course, I painted my mouth into a wide red grin a la Jack Nicholson, and sprayed my head with green hairspray. (Using hairspray was nothing out of the ordinary for me back then!) For the costume, I wore black jeans along with a button-up shirt that had a small checked or plaid pattern colored with purple and/or green—the closest thing in my closet to a Jokeresque outfit.

That night, my younger sister went out trick-or-treating with her friends. My older brother was at home, hoping to watch Night of the Living Dead on television—probably on the popular show Night Flight—but Mom didn't approve of the subject matter. After a long workday, Dad was probably resting on the couch between trips to the front door to hand out treat bags.

We had put up several cardboard decorations inside and out, from the "HAPPY HALLOWEEN" sign on a closet door to the smiling paper pumpkin hung outside the front door. We had a carved pumpkin lit up on the front porch outside, but also a pumpkin inside the foyer on which my brother drew the face of Mad Magazine mascot Alfred E. Neuman.

Just outside our side door into the garage, I set up a large ghost figure I'd constructed a couple weeks earlier. The head was a basketball covered in black electrical tape and fitted with a long blond wig. The body was a simple wooden contraption covered with a white sheet. I vaguely recall it having at least one moveable arm. I somehow thought that this figure would be visible to trick-or-treaters on the sidewalk near our house. But since only the head was visible from outside the fence, I doubt anyone saw it but me.

Mom drove me around the neighborhood in our Dodge Caravan so that I could trick-or-treat. Wanting to document the trip, I took along our large camcorder and made a few shots out the passenger window. Street lamps and objects in the car's headlights occasionally light up the shadowy video, though it remains pretty dark throughout. However, I captured a fairly good shot of the front of one neighborhood home, with its warm jack-o-lantern faces, yellow porch light, and softly glowing windows.

By the time we returned home, an episode of Matlock ("The Star," which pays tribute to horror films of old) was playing on TV. My sister had come home as well, and we sat by the fireplace in the living room, examining our bags of sweet Halloween loot.

As an eighth grader, it was one of the last times I trick-or-treated for myself. I enjoyed the holiday in my own introverted way, though it was a far cry from the excitement of earlier times, such as Halloween 1982 when I dressed as the Incredible Hulk. But now I experience the excitement of Halloween in a different way—as a father. As the leaves pile up and the nights grow chilly, I anticipate walking my sons along the streets of our neighborhood and up to those warmly-lit front porches. 

(Updated Sept. 24, 2024)

Leftover Candy

Halloween 2023 swiftly approaches. Yet at our house, evidence of last year's candy collection remains.

As my eldest son grows older and his trick-or-treating stamina increases, he inevitably brings home a fuller bucket of candy every year. While he enjoys sweets, it doesn't take much candy to satisfy his craving for it. Like his dear old dad did as a child, he prefers "making it last" instead of gobbling it all up in the weeks before Thanksgiving. For him, making it last means occasionally taking out a piece or two at dessert time, unless there's something better in the house—like ice cream or Mom's delicious cookies.

The result is that his bucket never goes empty. Whatever candy he gets on Christmas and Easter gets piled on top of the Halloween loot. So there in the corner of the pantry, the Halloween bucket sits for most of the year with the leftover candy zipped into baggies to discourage ants.

This means that for the next two weeks I can have all of it I want, since it will otherwise be thrown out before Halloween night. I doubt my son will protest against me eating one of his year-old Fun Size Snickers.

School Costume Parade and Halloween Party (1989)

Halloween festivities, as I remember them, were never quite as joyous when the holiday fell on a school night.

Friday night was the best night for trick-or-treating, of course, because you got the holiday plus a full weekend afterward. Saturday night ran a close second. I remember being in sixth grade and talking with a friend on the school playground a day or two before Halloween, which in 1987 was on a Saturday. I joked to my friend that I might eat so much candy on Halloween night that I'd be too sick to go to church the next morning. We both laughed about it, but when the time came I didn't end up gorging myself on candy.

This year Halloween is on Monday. While the rest of the week will undoubtedly be a letdown, most young students will be thrilled that much of the schoolwork they'd normally be doing that day will get pushed to Tuesday. Instead of students trudging into school wearing the glum expressions typical of Monday mornings, a host of superheroes, ghouls, cowboys, princesses, and unidentifiable creatures will light up the hallways with exuberance. Teachers will line them up for costume parades, and treat them to cookies, candies, and other sugary delights.

My sister shared with me a fabulous video from Video Dotti's YouTube channel. It's a home movie shot at Sandburg Elementary School in Centennial, Colorado, on October 31, 1989. I've rarely seen such a glorious parade of costumes.

Most of the 1980s favorites are there, often multiple times: The Noid, Freddy Krueger (or sometimes just a Freddy glove randomly included on another character), the Karate Kid, Jason from Friday the 13th, Pee-Wee Herman, Ghostbusters, Batman, and more. My favorite may be the floppy E.T. costume seen a couple minutes into the video.

It doesn't take long to notice how much looser the times were, considering the types of costumes and accessories that were acceptable then. The camouflage-clad, rifle-toting Frankenstein wouldn't fly nowadays. Nor would the disfigured, scythe-wielding ghoul.

I'm guessing at least half of the costumes shown in the video would now be prohibited due to weapons, gore, full-face masks, and costumes that restrict movement. From a quick search online for school Halloween costume guidelines, I learned that some schools now even limit the amount of face paint that students can apply. 

Another thing evident in the video is the teachers back then knew how to make the holidays fun. Check out this classic classroom decor, particularly its Halloween-themed bulletin board.

Teachers also knew how to party, especially if "party" meant supplying plenty of sugar in the form of candy apples, cookies for decorating, gummy worms, other individually-wrapped candies, and a smoking cauldron of Halloween punch. Oh, to be a school kid at Halloween!