Whether you really love feeling terrified on Halloween or you secretly believe you're a vampire and just need the right environment to live the life you've always dreamed of, Airbnb has you covered this Halloween. That's because they're giving you the chance to sleep in Dracula's castle on Halloween night, and you won't be left sleeping in some bedroom like a tourist -instead you'll get to sleep in velvet-lined caskets within the crypt itself. As if that wasn't enough to really set the mood, your host for the evening will be Dacre Stoker, Bram Stoker’s great grandnephew.

All you have to do to enter is answer the deceptively simple question, "What would you say to the Count if you were to come face-to-fang with him in his own castle?" So put away your garlic, silver and crosses and start writing!

Via Associated Press

If you’ve ever purchased a costume fashioned after a pop culture character, the odds are good that it came from Ruble’s. The company started selling costumes at a small shop in Queens in the 1950s and now has licenses to produce costumes of characters from Mattel, Marvel, DC Comics, Playboy, Nickelodeon, Star Trek, and Star Wars, among others. Howard Beige, who runs Ruble’s with his siblings, tells us how they prepare for Halloween by anticipating what costumes and masks will be popular a year ahead of time, so customers can get exactly what they want.  

But figuring out what that mask should be, and how many to make, isn’t easy. More people are dressing up for Halloween, but they’re doing it differently, picking costumes in early October based on news events, movies, or internet memes that went viral only a few weeks or months before. Rubie’s tries to anticipate Halloween trends a year in advance, but it’s constantly adjusting its plans as expected blockbusters flop (The Legend of Tarzan), beloved actors die (Gene Wilder’s Willy Wonka costume will be popular this year), or millions of people get swept up in the Pokémon Go craze and Beige finds himself mass-manufacturing last-minute Pikachu costumes to fill thousands of back orders. Pokémon will break into Rubie’s 10 best-selling costumes this year, which didn’t happen when it was popular the first time around. “Thank God we already had the license and the designs for that one,” he says. “Otherwise, it would’ve been a disaster.”

Read about the history of Ruble’s Costumes, and how they operate today, at Bloomberg Businessweek. -via Digg

(Image credit: Emiliano Granado for Bloomberg Businessweek)

Clint Case was ready with a video camera when his young son tried out his Halloween costume yesterday. He will be trick-or-treating as Luke Skywalker riding his Tauntaun. This adorable costume is completely handmade.  

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“Is your Tauntaun drunk?” Oh, he has two weeks to get used to walking in that thing before Halloween. Sure, you can buy a Tauntaun costume, but it’s not going to hold a candle to one you make yourself. -via Tastefully Offensive

You hear dozens of scary stories every year around Halloween, but it's sometimes hard to tell whether the stories you hear are true or false. Sometimes that can actually be part of the fun -guessing whether the story is an urban legend or a true terror tale. That's why this TopTenz article featuring ten horrifying Halloween stories is so delightful -some of the stories are just urban legends and some are entirely real. Can you guess which is which?

Be prepared -a lot of the tales truly are nightmarish.

Party time! Excellent! This Wayne and Garth is actually former Miss Delaware Kate Banaszak with her Irish Wolfhound Kellan. That’s a big dog! Commenters were speculating about the breed when WhiteheadJ suggested:

Could've been a Great Dana Carvey.

Party on, Wayne. Party on, Garth. -via reddit

 

It's been almost 100 years since the famously disturbed Sarah Winchester died, but we're still discovering new surprising things about her legendary Mystery House in San Jose. After Sarah was accidentally trapped in an attic room during a 1906 earthquake, she had the room boarded up because she feared that spirits caused the earthquake. Inside the room, the preservation team uncovered items that had been sitting in storage for over 100 years, including a pump organ, a Victorian couch and more. It's a perfect surprise just in time for Halloween.

These adorable little mummy faces will be the hit of your Halloween party! And they are filled with yummy no-bake pumpkin cheesecake. The recipe is genius: crushed gingersnaps and graham crackers added to pumpkin and cream cheese, plus more spices. The decorating part requires a little dexterity, but the results are cute as can be. Get complete instructions at Creme de la Crumb. This was part of a list of Halloween party treats at Buzzfeed.

"Maybe I am a mess. Maybe I'm crazy. Maybe I'm out of my mind! But, God help me, I will keep these lights up until the day I die if I think there's a chance that Will's still out there!" #strangerthings #dragoncon2016 #strangerthingscosplay

A photo posted by Ingrid Tjahyadi (@happyingli) on Sep 4, 2016 at 9:20am PDT

The most topical costumes for Halloween 2016 include the presidential election, Harambe, Suicide Squad, and Stranger Things. The Netflix show has several characters you could portray but the most iconic image from the series is the wall of lights. The costume above was spotted at Dragon Con. It’s the most elaborate of the many Stranger Things wall costumes in a list at Buzzfeed. The others would be much easier to pull off.

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Halloween is relatively young as far as holidays are concerned, but by the mid-20th century it was so popular with adults and kids alike that everyone agreed they couldn't live without a night of costumed trick-or-treating.

But over the decades Halloween has become virtually unrecognizable, and much more terrifying...

In the beginning Halloween costumes were simple and homemade, but as the holiday became more popular so did the idea of buying a licensed costume off the rack, and then some adults started buying off the wrong rack.

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Soon the madness spread to other Halloween traditions, as simple and smile inducing gave way to complex depravity, and the world was exposed to the horror of a jack-o'-lantern giving birth.

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But despite the changes Halloween is still pretty much the same as it ever was, only these days people tend to show a lot more skin.

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See 12 Comparisons of Halloween Then And Now here

In the past, you may have known Trumpkin as a character in The Chronicles of Narnia. It’s lately come to be a term for Trump supporters. But this is Halloween season, so get ready to see plenty of Trumpkins, meaning pumpkins carved to resemble Donald Trump. Yan from Geeks Are Sexy saw the Trumpkin above at the Montreal Botanical Garden yesterday. Here’s another view of it from Redheadwithoutacause.

It’s not the only one. Redditor xMeta4x posted this one.

The idea is not all that new.

You rarely ever see chocolate chip cookies decorated, but Halloween is the perfect time to experiment. These cookies were made by Jennifer Wold of Clever Wren Cakes & Sweets. They helped her illustrate a tutorial at Instructables that shows you how to make your own. Wold has a recipe, but says you can use your own. The fun comes from the decorating, with sugar pearls, almond slivers, and food coloring gel. These cookies look as if they will eat you up, but instead, you eat them up!  -via Laughing Squid

We’ve been exposed to the old bait-and-switch on TV a few times now, particularly in the genre of reality TV, so that many viewers don’t believe a thing they see. TV audiences as a whole were more trusting 24 years ago. On Halloween night in 1992, the BBC aired an early version of what we’ve now come to know as the “mockumentary.” Ghostwatch was billed as a drama in the TV listings, but it came across more as a live news report, particularly due to the presence of popular BBC presenters Sarah Greene and Craig Charles right on the scene as a poltergeist tormented the Early family. But Ghostwatch had been completely recorded earlier, using actors.

The finale laid it on a little thick, but not everyone made it that far in. By the time Ghostwatch signed off, a not-insignificant portion of the show’s 11 million viewers were either convinced ghosts were real, extremely upset at the BBC for traumatizing their children, or both.  

The broadcaster had just five operators standing by its phones [PDF] once the show went off air, a number that was quickly overcome by the thousands of calls that flooded in. One woman reportedly went into labor due to the stress caused by watching the program; another reported her husband had soiled himself. Within hours, the BBC aired a brief segment that reminded viewers the show was fictional. It was a little too late.

Those who watched were either terrified or else angry at the BBC for causing such terror. Ghostwatch was blamed for several cases of PTSD and at least one suicide. Read the story of Ghostwatch and its fallout at mental_floss.

(Image credit: BFI)

If you haven’t checked in with Liz Climo lately, you’ve missed out on comics that will give you a smile just when you need it, and all of October will be Halloween-themed. The punchline under this spooky comic is “I ain’t afraid of no goat.”  

This is nice: a “year you were born” timeline that actually goes that far back. Look at how Halloween was celebrated from 1916 to 2016, with an image and a blurb about each year. There are costumes, customs, decorations, games, movies, world events, and more. The magazine shown here is from 1924, when Halloween parties kept children from mischief, before the rise of trick-or-treating as we know it. Check out a century of Halloween at Flipboard. -via Everlasting Blort

Halloween is a great time to show off your artsy side, and crafty folks know the place to go when they want some cheap stuff to upcycle/repurpose- the Dollar Store.

Stuff that costs around a buck can be made to look like a million bucks with a little paint, some embellishment and crafty vision, like these Dollar Store pumpkins Hip2Save's Collin Morgan turned into eye-catching centerpieces.

Dollar Stores are full of crappy looking Halloween decorations dying for a makeover and your crafty hands can give them a second life, a better life as a colorful Day Of The Dead inspired sugar skull.

Or you could simply spray paint a Dollar Store skull white and cut the top off, turning it into a bare bones but cool looking skull vase.

And if you're lucky enough to have a fancy Dollar Store near you that carries those cute little Christmas houses they can be quite craftily turned into a spooky Halloween village you'll want to leave out all year long!

See 12 Easy Dollar Store Halloween Decorations here and Halloween Dollar Store Craft - Halloween Pumpkin Centerpiece here