Happy Halloween to all from Highbury Cemetery! May the Candy Corn gods look down upon you in favor on this day and grant you the opportunities to celebrate the high holiday in the manner you see fit.
Another year's worth of planning, building, and most importantly celebrating the season comes down to this. So go forth and revel in All Hallows Eve. Our High Holiday. Carry on the traditions that make the season so great, for we are the anointed that keep the spirits alive, nurture them, and pass them on to future generations. We are Halloween...
Happy Halloween to all from Highbury Cemetery! May the Candy Corn gods look down upon you in favor on this day and grant you the opportunities to celebrate the high holiday in the manner you see fit.
Another year's worth of planning, building, and most importantly celebrating, the season comes down to this. So go forth and revel in All Hallows Eve. Our Holiday. Carry on the traditions that make the season so great, for we are the anointed that keep the spirits alive, nurture them, and pass them on to future generations. We are Halloween.
Happy Halloween to all from Highbury Cemetery! May the Candy Corn gods look down upon you in favor on this day and grant you the opportunities to celebrate the high holiday in the manner you see fit.
Another year's worth of planning, building, and most importantly celebrating, the season comes down to this. So go forth and revel in All Hallows Eve. Our Holiday. Carry on the traditions that make the season so great, for we are the anointed that keep the spirits alive, nurture them, and pass them on to future generations. We are Halloween.
Happy Halloween from Highbury Cemetery!! This is it! The day we all look forward to. THE DAY WE LIVE FOR!!
If you have already done your trick-or-treat haunting, I hope you had an absolutely incredible one. If you're doing your thing tonight, I hope you have the most amazing year yet! Either way, get out and CELEBRATE. Keep the Halloween spirit alive. Because this is OUR holiday...
Happy Halloween from everyone here at Highbury Cemetery!! It's the day we have looked forward to since last October 31st, and with the way things have gone in 2020, I wasn't always so sure that we would even have Halloween this year. So make the most of it!!
If you have already done your trick-or-treat and display for this year, I hope to was an especially good one. And to those of us looking forward to tonight's festivities, may the Candy Corn Gods look upon us all favorably with perfect fall weather and grant us tons of trick-or-treaters!!
This is the only post for me today, because it's off to the yard to put the finishing touches on Highbury Cemetery, 2020 before the big show. The weather is looking pretty perfect tonight and there should be hordes of trick-or-treaters making their way to see our display. The props are set, the lighting is finished, and the undead make their cemetery arrival tonight.
The energy is electric orange. May it coarse through you and drive you to do what you do on this night. Our night. Embrace it.
The big day is finally here. Our high holiday, Halloween! It's hard to believe that we have already made it through another October, but here we are, basking in the fiery orange glow of All Hallows Eve.
Looking back, it has been a hell of a ride. But it still seems so strange to me in that I won't be getting up like a bolt of lightning, ready to recreate the ghastly magic of Highbury Cemetery tonight. Instead, I'll simply be going to work on Halloween, the first time in over 15 years...
But honestly, I'm okay with it. I wasn't sure that I would be, but having our new neighborhood's trick-or-treat last Sunday night has given me an unexpected week of calm enjoyment. And today I can just relax and really reflect on the season and enjoy myself.
We were very lucky to have great weather and a great turnout for our trick-or-treat, and it looks like Highbury Cemetery has started a haunting newchapter. There's a calm satisfaction and a small spark of excitement for next year's display already smoldering inside me.
But for today, I'm just going to take it easy. Halloween music cranking all day today, the last of my pumpkin beers and Halloween movies tonight. And I'm super excited for it.
I wanted to take a second and thank each and every one of you who stopped by this month and hung out at the Cemetery. I truly love sharing all my random Halloween thoughts and goodies, and interacting with my fellow haunters and Halloween enthusiasts really keeps me going. I actually still have quite a bit to post, so let's keep this Halloween party going well into November, shall we??
I also want to extend the happiest of Halloweens to all of you, especially my fellow haunters who are battling the elements in order to spread some frightful cheer and fear tonight. It seems that a large number of us across the country will be battling wind, rain, snow, and even fire to try and do what we do. Do what you can do to the best of your abilities, but more importantly please stay safe. There's always next year and we'll need all of you to keep this wonderful tradition alive and kicking. And screaming.
And finally, don't forget to have fun! This is our night! It's what we have literally spent the last 364 days planning for, so go out and scare the hell out of 'em!!
Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot complete,
The focus to complete the things I can,
And the craftiness to camouflage the bare spots so nobody will know the difference.
The family that carves together...
I was going to post a quick update last night, but it looked like Blogger went a bit crazy. A perfect metaphor for Halloween, 2018... Yesterday's weather was mostly sunny with a high of 62 degrees. Today's forecast is rain all day. Missed it by that much... But we are still pressing on with setup and our trick-or-treat tonight from 6 - 8 pm. And don't forget to bring canned food items for our Halloween Canned Food Drive. Each donation that is dropped into our collection coffin will get an extra goodie bag filled with Halloween fun! If you're in the area, come visit us on Malvern Road in West Akron. We're off of Palisades and Merriman, close to King School. To find us, simply follow the screams!! I wanted to extend the Happiest of Halloweens to everyone and good luck to all of my fellow home haunters who are gearing up to do their thing tonight. The offerings have been made to the Candy Corn Gods and some will have favorable weather and some will not. Such is life. Make the most of it, and don't forget to have fun! The jack-o-lanterns are carved, the props are done, the foggers are full, the costumes are set, and the lights and extension cords are waiting. This is what it's all about. This is our big night. Go out and spread some fright and fun... HAPPY HALLOWEEN!!!
Another October is coming to a close, but the big show is yet to begin! I wanted to take a quick second to thank everyone who stopped by, hung out and dropped comments into my stream of Countdown to Halloween posts all month long. This really is the best time of the year and I'm so stoked to be able to share it with you all! This will be my final post for October, as I have a TON of work to do today to get the display up and ready to go for tonight's trick-or-treat. For anyone curious about what it is we do and would like to check it out in person, we're located at 536 Malvern Road in Akron. We're around the corner from King School. But be sure to stop by between 6 and 8 pm, because once the show is over, everything disappears in a flash. And don't forget to bring some canned food for our first annual canned food drive for the Akron-Canton Regional Foodbank! Drop a donation into the "Coffin for a Cause" and receive an extra special treat! Time to go put up an entire yard haunt display. Everyone have an absolutely amazing Halloween night!! Especially you east coast haunters. Hopefully you guys can all recover from the wind and storm damage and have a killer show! Check back in a day or two and I'll have tons of photos from the big night! Happy Halloween, everyone!!
"Haaaaaapy Halloweeeeeeen!" Just stop. Stop it. Quit it! How many times are you going to say that!?!?
Time for another Freebie Friday, and this one is actually another absolute winner. But before we begin, let's take a step back in time...
When I first started doing a small, crude yard haunt in the early, early 2000s, I used a classic novelty cassette for my haunt soundtrack. It was just something that I had laying around. A throwback cassette that reminded me of my youth and the classic old Halloween soundtracks from when I used to go out trick-or-treating (late 70s through the late 80s, for anyone keeping score). It was a cassette that I had picked up somewhere during the early to mid-1990s. And that cassette was Chamber of Horrors.
Classic screams, moans, howls, thunder and synthesizer notes made for a perfectly spooky soundtrack to my little display. Fast forward ten years when, by chance, I rediscovered that cassette in an old tape deck, half buried in my garage. I was so excited when I had found it again! I immediately took it inside, ensured that it still played, and recorded it to mp3 format (little did I know that this cassette and the nostalgic feelings that it evoked would be the start of my Freebie Fridays segments!).
Upon researching my cassette, I quickly noticed something strange. Lots of photos and YouTube clips of a Chamber of Horrors cassette that looked and sounded NOTHING like mine. This fascination triggered my complete freefall down the rabbit hole of vintage novelty Halloween records and cassettes...
Fast forward to 2017 and it looks like I have now gone full circle. I finally picked up a copy of that OTHER Chamber of Horrors cassette. The one that I had seen and heard everywhere all those years ago.
THIS Chamber of Horrors cassette is actually the original version, released in 1988 by Tony U.S.A. And while it's still available everywhere, I still wanted to add it to my ever-growing collection, and give it a quick review.
This cassette is so odd. It seems like there were two separate tracks slapped together - a "Halloween sounds" track smashed over a random music track. I actually had to double-check that songs weren't playing from somewhere else on my system while I was recording it. The two really didn't fit together at all. And to top it all off, the segments just kept repeating and repeating and repeating. This is the only way the cassette made it to 23 minutes in length.
It starts off with the now-infamous, "Haaaaaaaapy Halloweeeeeeeen!" vocal clip immediately followed by a cheap instrumental version of Thriller. I'm guessing Michael Jackson had no knowledge of this?
But things get even stranger from there. Thunder claps, the standard generic witch cackle, a police siren and a few other overused "Halloween" sounds are interspersed with another six or seven "Haaaaaaaapy Halloweeeeeeen" clips. And then the music changes. It goes into some weird beatnik flute-and-trumpet jazz segment. It actually sounds like something lifted from the Manos: The Hands of Fate film soundtrack. Completely out of place in its surroundings.
And then the whole segment repeats. And then repeats again. And then again. And then again.
In fact, this cassette would probably be best served as background noise at a late night Halloween party. Definitely not usable in any sort of haunt setting.
But even with all that, I have to admit that I LOVE this cassette. That chilled out flute and trumpet audio is so cool, especially juxtaposed with monster roars, deep gurgling and howling clips placed over it. This is another classic example of a quickly and cheaply executed cassette release that flooded retail stores in the 80s and 90s and has now gone on to achieve cult-like status with collectors and enthusiasts like myself.
Like the second version of this cassette released some 2 or 3 years later, this Chamber of Horrors is a fun slice of novelty Halloween history that everyone needs to hear. And enjoy.
The big day is finally here! Months of prepping and prop building all comes down to tonight. A glorious, dizzying whir of children, costumes, candy and screaming set to an ominous backdrop of zombies, tombstones, lights and fright.
No time for a long post today, as I've got some serious set-up to do, but I wanted to wish everyone a Happy Halloween! If you're here, it's probably your favorite holiday, too!
And every year, I get asked, "Where is Highbury Cemetery?" So if you're in the Akron area come visit us tonight, from 6-8 pm. Anytime after 8, and you're bound to miss it! We're located on Malvern Road in West Akron, near King School and Merriman Road. Just follow the screams...
Brown leafed vertigo Where skeletal life is known I remember Halloween
A cold, weathered hand pierces the rust-laden earth of a late autumn night. Reanimated decay becomes the evening's guide. Masked faces bask in the fiery glow of a jack-o-lantern's illumination. A lifeless finger points the direction toward the next porch-lit house. For this is the night of ghouls and goblins and tricks and treats. This is the night of Hallowe'en...
