I was 7 months pregnant and my custom was a blue and white belly dancer

So many people chuckled, waved and came to me.

it took a full week to get all the snarls out. It was so teased that the length of my hair went from my waist to my shoulders. It was traumatizing.

She wanted to paint my nose red with lipstick but I wouldn't let her, because I was afraid it wouldn't come off and I'd be stuck with a red nose. She tried to point out that she used lipstick every day and it comes right off, but it was obvious to me that her lips were much pinker than the rest of her face, so I figured they were probably permanently stained from lipstick!

bell in it with the writing above it "ring bell for message", I had a small flashlight inside and wrote what I thought were funny notes to other kids...This was sixth grade (still grade school at the time)...

I made that costume.
Cardboard box, ruler and a sign.
It was great till it started raining.

Last edited Sun Oct 12, 2025, 05:47 PM - Edit history (1)

My dad made the costume for me from cardboard and an old bedspread. I was in a Halloween parade and won First Place in the costume contest. I even got to be on the front page of the local newspaper.

My mom made it put of craft cardboard.
I worse black dress pants & a black turtleneck under it. My dad found an old gentleman's cane in my grandpa's stuff, painted it glossy black and used gold model paint for the knob at the top.
I think I was 10 or 11 years old then.
Another one was my mom made a shiek costume for me out of a sheet, dyed red. Had the headpiece, and then wore this stretchy rhinestone thing to hold it on. Same time frame.
The Mr. Peanut won me first place in the costume contest at the Knights of Columbus.

He gave me a hotdog wiener outfit. I like it at first but when people answered the door ..they laughed.
I was about 6 years old. When I turned 12-13, it dawned on me that I was walking around looking like
a penis. Great..Just great. (With my warped sense of humor, I should have said Dick or Treat.)

... and even after she was kicked out of their Kingdom Hall she wasn't a big enthusiast of Halloween.

Her compromise with my dad was that she wouldn't turn out the lights and chase away any trick-or-treaters who bravely came to the door. My dad bought good candy and handed it out while my mom retreated to the back room with her typewriter. Me and my siblings watched the trick-or-treaters from the window.

By the time I was a teen my mom had relaxed a bit and me and my siblings were allowed to go out trick-or-treating. But it always felt awkward to me.

One of my brothers rebelled after running away from home at sixteen and still throws the most epic Halloween parties ever.

In one of my own college Halloween celebrations I was picked up by the police and driven home for arguing in public with a big old ugly o'possum who had frightened some Swedish exchange students. The o'possum was unharmed. I may have been bleeding. It wasn't uncommon for me to be bleeding any time the police got involved.

I won't say what costume I was wearing because I take my privacy seriously and it's probably in the police report. It was a good one.

My mom was a great seamstress and I didn't appreciate it at the time.

When I was 11, Trick or Treating was outlawed in our state over concerns about bad people putting drugs or poisons in candy. So my memories of trick or treating are small. I kind of remember one year I wore a box covered with foil; I was a robot.

The year before, it had been C-3PO. It was a cheap, store-bought costume that I hated. The next year, my costume was almost entirely homemade.

I wore a pair of tan jeans (I found out years later that Luke’s farm boy costume included tan jeans.) My sister’s large white sweater did for Luke’s work tunic. I had a pair of light brown carpet slippers that wore along with white cotton bandages wrapped around my calves for Luke’s boots.

I had already grown my hair out the year before in imitation of Luke’s disco shag haircut. And I wielded a toy stormtrooper blaster to complete the look.

Best Halloween costume ever.

I wanted to get a full length skeleton cutout. The kind that you usually hang on the wall. I wanted it for my costume. She was confused, but she did it.

That Halloween, I put on all black shirt and pants, as well as my black sneakers, and then put on some old black 'dress' gloves that my mother had and then grabbed an old black shirt to wrap around my face and head. I then used rubber bands to hold the skeleton in place on my body. It worked great. I had people who said it looked as if a real skeleton was walking along the sidewalk. (In the dark, of course. The skeleton had the ability to glow, so I would stand in front of my parents car headlights to 'charge' the stuff, and then walk up to the house for trick or treat.

Of course, the material was thin cardboard and my idea worked, except that I was sweating my ass off (October in SE Virginia, y'all!) and the skeleton got wet. It made it through the night, but was literally coming apart as I was trying to remove it.

I will never forget that because it was the first time I had a direct hand in creating my Halloween costume and it was not exactly 'store bought' in that sense. Two years later, I retired from going trick or treating and started handling the decorations and handing out candy at our house.

That was even more fun and got me started on my 'Haunted House' career.



(This was my character in one such attraction. This is 'Jarvis the Jailer'!)