Things In The Basement: A History of Halloween Horrors - Introduction

Things In The Basement

This article is an excerpt of GolfBlogger’s book: Things In The Basement: A History of Halloween Horrors, available on Amazon at the link.

For as long as I can remember, I have been an afficionado of all things Halloween and horror. I was born in the darkness between Halloween and All Saint’s Day at a hospital that was called a “sanitorium,” so I suppose it was fate.

My father was a fan of science fiction and fantasy going back to the days of the pulp magazines such as Weird Tales, Amazon Stories and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, which he subscribed to until his death. Dad introduced me to Ray Bradbury (his favorite), Edgar Allen Poe, and dozens of other science fiction, fantasy and horror writers.

The first year I started teaching middle school history in the 1990s, I spent some time on Halloween day giving a brief history of the holiday. Afterwards, some of the kids had questions about other Halloween related things, to which I either knew the answer or promised to look up. The next year, I added those questions into my Halloween lecture. Those kids had more questions, which I added to the next year’s talk.

As the list of questions grew, the day of Halloween history became two, then three and four. It ended only when I transferred to the high school, where I have spent the last twenty years teaching government, economics and psychology.

These articles (and the book) are the prose versions of the lectures I gave those many years ago to my middle school students.

The winged pumpkin logo is a more professional version of the doodle I used to draw instead of happy faces on really good Halloween themed classroom assignments.