Dave's Fiction Warehouse

T oo soon for Halloween? No way! Not when Costco and Walmart are already jam-packed with Christmas crap on October 1. I wanted to mention a podcast I’ve been enjoying in the run-up to All Hallow’s Eve: “ Spooked .” Every Thursday, the podcast features regular people talking about eerie stuff that has happened to them. You know, spectral visitors and phantom hitchhikers and an assortment of unexplained phenomena. Some of it is obvious bullshit, sure, but I do not discriminate. The best part of the show is host Glynn Washington setting the stage with strange occurences from his own childhood. I love this kind of thing. Yes, I’ll admit that a number of episodes seem suspiciously similar to well-known works of horror fiction. But somehow, hearing the stories narrated by ordinary people makes them more compelling. The episodes remind me of when I was a kid, sitting around listening to the adults in my family talk about eerie occurrences. I had an uncle who subscribed to Fate magazine . He k...

B efore I forget, Happy Halloween. I’ll be happy when it’s over. We have about a bushel of candy ready to go, and I guarantee you it will be gone before the kids quit coming. Something about this Springfield neighborhood, the big porches and the wide sidewalks. A holiday like this, maybe it is a little too pedestrian friendly. Still, the wife gets a kick out of it and the weather here is always mild enough to sit in a rocking chair in one’s shorts. I drink a little wine and ponder the Halloweens of my youth, when all the costumes were homemade. Not that it mattered. Usually nobody saw the costume anyway because you had to wear a parka and mittens to ply the streets of Somers, Mont., at that time of year. Anyway, if you like that photo above, here are a few more from back in the day. They’re referred to as “creepy” and “disturbing,” but really, they capture the old-time essence of Halloween, before every kid could afford a store-bought costume based on a movie character or a video game....