Halloween This Year

 

I love Halloween, every year.  I look forward to it, and I kinda start my Halloween season sometime in July.

Actually, I enjoy ghost stories, spooky movies, and folk legends all year long.  It just kind of amps up the months leading to the end of October.

I enjoy going in to stores and seeing the displays (see photos).  If you are like me and grew up...  well, decades ago....  you probably remember older displays.  I remember a lot more witches and werewolves in years past.  I really miss seeing all of the old cheap masks that had the rubber bands in the back.  When I was a kid, they had those everywhere.  Hundreds at K-Mart and grocery stores.

I did notice, at a Wal Mart this year, that they had a few masks like that.  Not the huge selection from 30+ years ago, but a few.  

I wanted to make a point to really soak in all of Halloween that I could this year.  I wanted to make sure every weekend and week night was full of seasonal festivities.

Unfortunately, I had some flu/cold stuff going on that knocked me down for a couple of weeks.  Still, we did a lot!

In fact, we squeezed in a couple of things that I really enjoyed, and hope to make a tradition.

In Chillicothe Ohio, we got to see a great production of a play involving the Frankenstein Monster.

The play was great, and a haunted trail was put on after the performance that was brilliant.  It was put on by the same people that do "Tecumseh!" which we also saw for the first time earlier this year.  We loved that production too.

At the end of October, we went to Adams Tennessee for the Bell Witch Fall Festival.  We have been to Adams many times, but this was our first time there in October for this event.

Adams is ground zero when it comes to the legend of the Bell Witch.  The town has a cave, a cemetery, and other sites to see relating to the ghost that, according to legend, tortured a family in the late 1810s and later.

AND, they have a festival leading up to Halloween.  The first night of the festival is devoted to story telling.  The next few weekends, they have a musical "Smoke" about the tobacco wars in the area, and the famous Night Riders.  The next weekends are devoted to showing the play "Spirit" which covers the Bell Witch legend.

A repeated theme/line from the play is "at this place, on this ground."  They also have signs up with the phrase.  The line really adds to the authentic spook factor, as the play and festival are performed on land once owned by John Bell.  The old home, cemetery and cave are all really just short walks away from the outdoor theater where the play is shown.

I hope to make it back to Chillicothe next year for whatever spooky production they do, and I want to get back to Adams for their Bell Witch Fall Festival.