Katie Pumpkinhead’s Pumpkin Patch

 If you know me well enough, you probably know how attached I am to the village of Sleepy Hollow.  I visited for the first time three years ago and it instantly felt like home to me.  I make every effort to visit whenever I can, and when I am there, my most favorite place to spend time is Sleepy Hollow Cemetery. It’s a magical place to me, filled with so much history and so many stories and hidden gems among the graves.  And, over by the Old Dutch Church, you can find many headstones that bear the names that inspired many of the characters in The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. It’s beautiful and truly feels like stepping back into another time. If you look long and hard enough, I promise you, you will start to see reflections of the Legend itself, and those who lived during the time in which it was written. Sadly, though, it seems not everyone has the same kind of respect for the deceased, as, last weekend, a terribly distressing crime happened at this beautiful place. (Pi...

 If you’re a fan of spooky things, and follow lots of spooky social media pages, you’ve probably seen those occasional posts that go around about creepy things that kids say. Some of them can be explained away, but many are truly unsettling and do really make you wonder.  It wasn’t until tonight, when I saw something in a random, suggested post on Instagram, that I remembered I once had a “creepy kid” moment of my own. As I used to be a relatively avid toy collector, many of my post suggestions on Instagram are still from toy collecting accounts. The particular post that caught my eye this evening was someone’s vintage toy thrift haul. Smack in the middle of their cart was a toy I recognized immediately: The Playskool Musical Lullabye Bird. While most sites show the production year of this guy to be 1983, I’m absolutely positive that a later version (I believe the one pictured here) was re-released some time in the late 80s or early 90s, probably right around the time I made t...

 This week, there has been much buzz in the Halloween community regarding the upcoming, arguably long overdue, Hocus Pocus sequel. I, personally, always tend to be at least a little apprehensive about sequels, especially when this much time has gone by. Unless a movie is intended to be part of a series, I really don’t see the need for a sequel to suddenly be tacked on several years later. The odds of being able to capture the same mood and magic seem to lessen as time goes on with these things. But, the case of Hocus Pocus is a bit of a strange one. I truly had no idea what a flop my lifelong favorite movie had been when it was first released until fairly recently. I was seven when I first saw the movie, and it made such an enormous impact on me that I suppose I just assumed it did for everyone else, too. As a kid, I think, in my mind, anything Disney released just had to be popular. And also, being just about the only true family Halloween film at the time, I just assumed it was a...

 Since yesterday was National Paranormal Day, I started thinking about paranormal experiences I’ve had, and if any of them might be worth talking about. Sadly, most of them are pretty basic. I really don’t think stories of seeing the ghosts of my cats running around the house are worth a whole post. However, there was one very strange thing that happened to me when I was younger, that may or may not have actually been paranormal, but I think it makes a pretty interesting story regardless.  When I was little, my paternal grandparents owned a house in upstate New York, in the literal middle of nowhere. My mother referred to the area as “the boonies”, and always seemed a bit creeped out by it. Rightfully so, at least in my childhood mind. The house was very big, very old, and very spooky. It gave the impression that it was from an entirely different time period. Even though it was a house that had apparently been in my family for years, it was hard to imagine its past without con...

 My life has been a perpetual countdown to Halloween for as long as I can remember. The Hallmark store in town used to give out free pocket sized book calendars every year, and I always kept one in my purse, and doodled in it all of the spooky things I was afraid to share with the world. The flowery little books were full of drawings of pumpkins and ghosts and eyeballs, with random sentences or poems or spooky phrases. (I distinctly remember writing “I SCARE YOU” in big, bold letters on the front of one of them.) In my teen years, as post-Halloween depression seemed to get worse and worse every year, I started to count down the days whenever I felt my saddest. I would flip through my calendar and count off each box, and, though Halloween never felt close enough until September hit, it was some kind of comfort. One year I marked the entire month of August off as “The Official Opening of the Halloween Season”, as I’d started to realize that that was when some stores starting putting ...