Because who doesn’t enjoy looking at classic Halloween pin-up photos and beautiful women? The majority of these are from the 1940s and ’50s, but some are from earlier. Happy hubba hubba Halloween!
Penny Edward and Barbara Bates
Dusty Anderson
Nancy Carroll
The internet is full of pictures featuring vintage Halloween costumes, so do we really need another gallery? Yes, yes we do.
Four contestants of the Halloween Slick Chick beauty contest in Anaheim, Calif., 1947.
Annual Eagles’ Minstrel Show at Turner Hall, 1911.
Can’t sleep, dull clowns will eat me!
Children’s Halloween costume party – 1941
Vintage Kiss Halloween costumes – Ace Frehley and Gene Simmons
OK, so maybe this last one stretches the definition of vintage a bit. But hey, it’s Kiss and that’s good enough for me. I only wish there were existing photos of me when I dressed like Gene as a kid — with actual face paint no less!
What, you thought I shared all the classic Beistle Halloween decorations I had last year? For shame! There are of course more, so let’s get into some spooky, decorative fun. Boo!
Centerpiece 1
Centerpiece 2
Witch
Jack-O-Lantern Action Dancer
Black Cat w/ Accordion
Devil Bat
Scratching Black Cat
Jack-O-Lantern
Singing Moon
Angry Owl
Dancing Skeleton
Jack-O-Lantern and Ghost
Owl
You probably have never heard of the Beistle Company, but chances are you’ve seen their Halloween decorations. The company was founded in 1900 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania by Martin Luther Beistle and is still a major party products manufacturer.
(For a more thorough company history, check out this page.)
While Beistle still produces a wide range of year-round party goods, their classic Halloween decorations are how most of us know them. This gallery offers but a sampling of Beistle’s paper Halloween decorations that have been ubiquitous in American households for generations.
Black cat with jack-o-lantern and moon
Moon and black cat
Cat with green eyes
Black cat with monocle and top hat
Haunted house with witch
Honeycomb spider
Classic jack-o-lantern
Jack-o-lantern with pipe and bowler derby
Jack-o-lantern with straw hat
Creepy owl
Movable skeleton
Skull with jaunty cap
Witch on a broomstick in front of the moon
Witch with big wart on nose
Having only read one other Anne Rice novel (you guessed it, Interview With the Vampire), I learned some interesting things about her from reading her beefy 1990 tome, The Witching Hour. I learned that she can make a book interesting even if there are actually no vampires in it. I learned that New Orleans, in addition to being a magical place indeed, has some really beautiful flowers. And I learned that Anne Rice sure knows a lot of different ways to describe human genitalia.
So yes, the book is interesting and even engrossing in parts and starts off with real promise. In the bar of a New York hotel a doctor remembers a most disturbing assignment – administering tranquilizing drugs to a young, catatonic woman named Deirdre. But rather than living as a patient in a mental hospital, Deirdre sits, stupefied, in a rocking chair on the porch of her decaying antebellum home in New Orleans’ Garden District and is tended to by her elderly aunts.
Rice drops a lot of hints in these early pages that will take on greater significance later (the emerald Deirdre wears and the name Lasher for starters), but oddly enough the doctor is not one of them. He’s really more of a human MacGuffin than anything else. But here and throughout most of the book, Rice takes a long damn time to describe things and often does so multiple times with the same things. I could probably pass a college course in botany for all I read about the beauty and delicacy of New Orleans flora.
The rest of the first part introduces us to the main characters. First there’s Michael Curry, a contractor and home restoration expert living in San Francisco and suffering from the aftermath of a near drowning. That aftermath, namely, is his newfound ability to touch people or objects and receive a flood of images concerning their past. His new power is exciting at first but quickly becomes a curse, and so Curry locks himself away and takes up alcoholism in his spare time.
