Katie Pumpkinhead’s Pumpkin Patch

  One of the strangest things about autumn is how you can watch it deteriorate. It comes in so bright and beautiful, so alive, despite it all. Everything is so colorful. The world seems to be bursting at the seams in anticipation of a celebration; posing for a picture of a moment in time that will gone all too soon. Each time the wind blows it feels like a pleasant hello, the leaves waving.  The world feels full of potential. And acceptance. So much acceptance.  Halloween comes, and then it goes. And suddenly everything goes strangely silent. From magical to mournful. It's like being at an amusement park after it closes. Everything is still there, it's just so quiet and hollow now. Eerie, almost. Desolate in a way that doesn't quite make sense. It looks almost the same...shouldn't it feel the same? The last leaves flutter to the ground, and I can't tell if they're sad to go or desperate to catch up to their brethren. Afraid to be left behind.  Then suddenly they...

 I watched a movie yesterday on a whim that wound up making quite an impression on me, and I wanted to share a quick review of it, in the hopes that maybe this will find the right people in the next few days, and become a fun little part of someone else's Thanksgiving celebration. While browsing movies on Tubi after a particularly trying holiday-season morning at my retail job, I ran across a movie called The Last Thanksgiving. It seemed to be in a similar vein to a lot of the independent Halloween-set horror movies that I love so much, and also on par with how my day was already going, so I decided to give it a watch. At just over an hour and ten minutes in length, it seemed like the perfect little bite-size distraction, in the spirit of the gloomier, heavier side of autumn. The Last Thanksgiving tells the story of a "dysfunctional family" type group of restaurant workers, grappling with the fact that their manager has chosen to open the restaurant on Thanksgiving Day. T...

  They tell me the season hasn't changed. That it's still autumn. And yet, everything feels different. Painfully so.  On the mornings I have a little extra time, I drink my coffee outside, just as I did in October. And I look up at the trees, up at the sky that once seemed to radiate anticipation and excitement, and listen to the wind that once seemed to whisper the secrets of a thousand ghosts; carry the voices of hundreds of pumpkins from miles around as their candles illuminated their mouths, and I see nothing but death and desolation. I watch the leaves fall, brown and brittle. They remind me of dry, cracked skin in winter, ready to split open and bleed...bleed out the last of autumn, only their blood is invisible. Colorless, like November itself. I watch a sad group of leaves scatter about, scurrying like the family members that stayed too long at the party and now politely being shooed away. I notice one of them hitting newly every branch on the way down, as if trying to...

  Post-Halloween depression is something I've dealt with for my most of my life.  Even when I was much younger and didn't have the language to describe how I was feeling, I remember the agonizing feeling of knowing I would have to wait another year upon returning home for the evening on October 31st. There were many Halloween nights where I would cry that it was over, or go to bed wishing the Halloween night I'd just experienced was a dream, so that I could wake up and do it all over again for real. There was the year I tried to extend it with  Halloweek , and the year when I was  fourteen , when I think I really started to figure out how to express it, and recognize the longing that I felt all year round. I even once started writing a story about a little girl discovering she was actually a witch, after grappling with post-Halloween depression for several years in a row.  This has always been who I am.  But recently I saw something that bothered me a bit, ...

  I went on a drive today. The sky was grey and gloomy, and yellow leaves on almost-bare branches painted it, a little more staggered now than they'd been a two weeks ago.  The wind made them dance, along with the already-brown leaves on the ground, occasionally swirling up and around, as if wondering where to go from here.  Pumpkins smiled at me from some doorsteps; perhaps more than I was expecting in this pre-Christmas world we've entered. Their smiles were different now, though. Less enthusiastic, more melancholy, more knowing.  I could almost hear their thoughts, contemplating the season's end, just so happy to be noticed. It is still autumn, after all.  Decorations lingered on some houses. Hanging ghouls plastered to trees by the on-and-off rain. Twelve-foot skeletons left standing alone, as their more easily packed up brethren have been gone since November 1st morn. Orange lights now shining like a beacon to no one at all.  It's hard to believe these...

 One year when I was much younger, around middle school age, I think, I was out trick-or-treating and stumbled upon a house whose front porch was adorned with orange lights. It sounds so commonplace now, but back then, in the late 90s or early 2000s, whichever it was, huge Halloween displays with bright lights and things like that, weren't really a thing yet. I remember walking up the stairs to that doorway, and feeling so enchanted. Like I was in the middle of a jack o'lantern, or some other realm entirely.  No one answered the door there; I assume they were probably out trick-or-treating with their own children, but I couldn't help but linger. I remember my aunt, down in the driveway, trying to wave me back, telling me I wasn't going to get any candy there.  And I knew that. I just didn't want to leave. Somehow it just felt right for me to be standing within those lights. I felt like my truest self there, somehow, like I was right where I was supposed to be.  It w...

I woke up this morning still a trick-or-treater looking for a brightly lit porch.  My heart and soul are always searching for the glowing pumpkins, the skeletons, the spiderwebs... It can't really be over, can it?  How can something be seasonal when it feels so much like home? How can the version of the world without the pumpkins and skeletons and spiderwebs, be considered the real one? How can October only be 31 days? How can last night feel so long ago and like seconds ago at the same time? I walk through the neighborhood and I hear the leaves fluttering behind me. They sound like urgent footsteps, running and running as if begging October not to forget them. If I chase after them, can I go to? To wherever it is October goes when it's gone? The word November has always hit me like a ton of bricks. It sounds like a door closing, the end of a chapter in a book where a beloved character dies.  A solemn reminder that it's all over. Halloween, October...all just a memory now...

I am on a walk. Likely the last walk I will take in my neighborhood before Halloween has passed.  Also likely the last where so many leaves will still be on the trees. We're expecting storms tomorrow, a gloomy day before Halloween. As I walk, I can't help but wish to find myself entrapped in some kind of time loop.  It doesn't seem fair that the next time I walk these streets, so many of the decorations will be gone. The feeling in the air will have evaporated, gone for a whole year yet again. I look at the road in front of me and I see the stress of the holiday season. I see springtime allergies. I see the inevitable battle with summer and the depression it brings me. To think I will have to endure several months of neverending blinding daylight and stifling heat again before this all returns is almost too much to bear, even though it's only the 29th of October.  I'm just not ready for it to be over yet. I look around and try to see if I can find the portal. The po...

 I went for another walk tonight. The sky was so gray and gloomy, it was absolutely perfect. These are the moments I live for, the moments I have to soak up before they're all gone. As I walked, I felt fully immersed in the October atmosphere. Once again as if I were in a movie or Halloween special. It's one of those evenings where you can just feel it.  But there is such a strange melancholy to this, the final countdown to Halloween.  October, for me, is life in its truest form. The time everyone and everything stops hiding. Decorations and costumes are more like windows to the soul. What you dress up as, how you decorate...it all feels like a reflection of what's just beyond the surface. The parts of us we hide, but wish we didn't have to.  It's strange how fleeting it is. I walk tonight, and it feels like a celebration, but also a painful goodbye.  I look around at all of the decorations I see, and know they won't be here soon. Some of them will disappear imm...

  When I was little, I often dreamed of witches. I blamed it on the abundance of witch decor I saw as a child. The nearby farm with the witch attached to the wooden orange moon. The house I trick-or-treated at every single year, that fashioned an old lamppost into a witch flying across the moon. It was all so deeply ingrained into my Halloween experience. When I got a little older, I started to believe that there was a witch out there watching over me. That she would come to me, maybe on my sixteenth birthday, like Sabrina on my favorite TV series, and whisk me away into my real life. I didn't see Halloweentown until my thirteenth Halloween had already passed, but I definitely had my suspicions after the fact that perhaps my parents had just let my powers grow dormant, or something. Clearly I was meant to be on the bus back to that town.  The older I've gotten, I've stopped searching the skies for Santa Claus, stopped imagining faeries in colorful gardens, all of that. But ...

 I keep seeing these social media posts, saying things like "This October isn't October-ing the way previous Octobers Octobered", or something along those lines. (This picture was found on a random Instagram account so I'm unsure of the artist.) To be fair, I feel like these kinds of posts pop up for every occasion. Every month, every holiday...there always has to be some mass complaint that it doesn't feel like years past. (Don't even get me started on how every single New Year's Eve post is always about how much the previous year sucked.) I understand it, sometimes...I think, in general, we are all always chasing the feelings we got from certain holidays and moments in time as children. I don't know that Christmas has felt Christmas-y to me since I turned eighteen-ish. It's hard not to feel like something is broken, when you're reaching for something that is no longer there, ripped away by the inevitable phenomenon of growing older.  However,...

 I went for a walk tonight. I don't often take walks in the dark, as the streets in my neighborhood are not really built for pedestrians casually strolling after the sun goes down. Sidewalks are minimal, brush is overgrown, there are bumps in the road... But, the October air was simply too delicious this evening to not take advantage of it. And so I set off, on a very small, deliberate journey. I find that Halloween-time hasn't changed a bit since my childhood. There are always the houses that are dark and seem almost sealed shut. My street is a strange array of the bright and the dark. A few houses from home, my path is lit nicely. Then I descend into darkness.  But then, as I pass the little bridge, actually part of a driveway, that reminds me so very much of the bridge in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, I am suddenly greeted by a burst of light. A voice, a memory, in the back of my head, says, triumphantly: Once you cross that bridge, my friend, the ghost is through; his power ends...

I have really been wanting to write a review of the movie Good Boy, since seeing on opening day.  This was honestly my most anticipated horror movie of 2025, although I admit the bar this year is extremely low. After being gravely disappointed by Weapons, I go into everything with low expectations.  But, as a dog lover and also a lover of experimental horror, Good Boy was a must see. I have to admit, though, I was also scared for this one. As a child, I absolutely refused to watch any movie where I thought the dog might die. I'm not sure if any of my fellow 90s kids recall a movie called Fluke, but I watched that as a child and it left me positively traumatized. (Looking back, it was extremely dark subject matter for a movie aimed at children and families...dog death aside, even. I don't think my eight or nine year old self was ready to learn so much about death in general.) My mother used to offer to rent me movies about dogs, one specific one that sticks out is My Dog Skip, ...

 I wound up watching a brand new movie for Halloween season 2025 last night: V/H/S/Halloween.  I'm going to start this off by saying I have not yet seen any of the other V/H/S movies, but I definitely want to. I just have never gotten around to it. Nothing I say in this review is meant to be a statement on the franchise as a whole as I have nothing yet to compare it to in that way. I just saw a new movie set on Halloween and came running, as I do every year. Now, I tend to have very mixed feelings about these Halloween horror anthology films. Trick 'r Treat is one of my most favorite movies of all time. I have an insane love/hate relationship with Tales Of Halloween, where I can never decide if I like it or despise it. (I should do a deep dive on that one one day.) I couldn't get past the first installment of the 10/31 movies. All Hallows Eve might actually be my favorite entry into the Terrifier franchise, if it wasn't for that alien bit in the middle. So yeah, I had n...

 I have said, since my childhood, that Halloween ends the most abruptly of all the holidays.  I can't really decide if it's gotten better or worse as I've gotten older.  It's great that a year-round Halloween community exists, of course, but October and Halloween-time are truly so fleeting. Perhaps the most fleeting things I can think of. The morning of November 1st comes, and decorations are being packed away, hidden again, as if no one can dare know, beyond the 31 days of October itself, that strange and spooky things are of interest to anyone; that "scary" doesn't always have to be a bad thing. And for that reason, for how fleeting it truly is, every moment of October truly feels precious. Every moment of October not spent somehow acknowledging or being immersed in it, seems wasted, criminal.  Sometimes, during the month of October, I feel like a person who's been told I only have a limited amount of time left to live. And perhaps I do...I've al...