Halloween Crazy

Dateline: 10/20/97 - Weekly feature from your Guide To Personal Web Pages

Halloween has been elevated to serious holiday status, manically commercialized, hyped far beyond its civic or religious importance, if you believe it has any that is.

No surprise, then, that it's now a major Web event as well.

Holidays in general possess all the necessary elements for Web overkill. They're dependably seasonal, affect almost everyone (whether you observe them or not), and thus provide regular content -- and most importantly promotional -- fodder for a wide swath of homepages. These include sites for and by kids/families/teachers, arts-n-crafties, clipartist afficionados, collectors, etc., etc.

Halloween in particular can add one very large Web constituency to that list, namely wiccans, pagans, goths, and all those sites with angels on them. As any experienced surfer knows, this is not a group to be trifled with.

I still like Halloween, its strangeness, its imagery, its evocation of childhood fears and freedom. But even as I watch Halloween homepages being posted at a frightening rate (animated pumpkin gif, anyone?), I wonder: Are there any sites out there that are reflective or personally expressive about what this holiday means, its history, its impact on individual lives, its role as a rite of passage?

OK, I'm taking this a bit too seriously. I'll settle for a little honest humor, a drop of emotion, a touch of profundity.

I've found a few such sites, though I'm still looking for more. I've exhausted all my usual haunts, if you'll excuse the pun. Following my all-too-brief annotated list you'll see a form to submit other Halloween sites you believe fit my criteria. Help me out on this one, friends. I'll be updating this page through Halloween and for a week or so after. So check back in, won't you?

Halloween '97
An anthology page listing Halloween-related entries in online diaries. If you hadn't guessed, I'm a big fan of Web journals,

Writ In Water
Brian Callahan's beautiful site, laden with photographs of cemeteries and gravestones, is not directly tied to Halloween, but it will certainly instill the proper mood for marking the day.

Trolloween
Follow along with online diarist Luke McGuff as he prepares for a local Halloween celebration. What I like here is the glimpse of a community life brought to the fore by a common holiday.

GhostWatcher
Finally, a practical use for a webcam: June Houston has set up cameras at strategic spots in her house -- like under her bed -- where she hears strange noises. Will you be the one to spot a spook?

Why I Love Halloween
This personal essay isn't polished, but it contains an occasional turn of phrase that gets at the heart of Halloween's attraction to the young.

Halloween: Myths, Monsters, and Devils
W.J. Bethancourt III's spirited defense of Halloween, including an intellectual history. In a similar vein, check out Neopagan Isaac Bonewit's The Real Origins Of Halloween.

Halloween Costume
A poem, by one Dennis Noson, that I like very much. (It's good, I mean it.)

Why Bother To Save Halloween?
Richard Seltzer provides a strong and keenly felt argument for continuing the trick-or-treat tradition.

Catty's Halloween Madness
If you don't like Halloween, don't take it out on the 6-year-old at your door.

And you knew this was coming...

Halloween Haikus
Haikus exist on every other topic on the Web, why not Halloween? By kids.