Mission to Tryxx (and Treatss)

Speaker 1 Hey everybody, uh, happy Halloween times. What a haunting introduction from Alden Ford!

Speaker 1 The spookiest episode of Vision Disease. Is it safe for me to open my eyes? Gentle listener, did you feel your hair the back of your neck pre-tingle?

Speaker 1 Has your hair turned white? Has your skin gone bloodless?

Speaker 1 Every bin brick of your skin terrifying you to your core?

Speaker 1 Casual friendliness is the most terrifying mode anyone can. Sure, sure.
Thanks for tuning in to this month's One Shot Mission to Zix podcast. The first and last episode of a very spooky show.

Speaker 1 That's right. It's Mission to Tricks and Treats.
The Halloween Zix Spooktacular. Huh? Halloween is not really my holiday.
I've never really gotten it.

Speaker 1 So I thought what better you shouldn't be introing this.

Speaker 1 What better way to get into the spirit and really get to the bottom of what makes Halloween Halloween? Good thing we've got Master of Terror Alden Ford here in this issue. The Crypt Keeper himself.

Speaker 1 Do you not like Halloween because you're fearless or fearful? Oh, I'm incredibly fearful. So every day is Halloween.
Yes, yes.

Speaker 1 Like April Fool's Day, which I a holiday I also don't like because I make stupid jokes all the time. I'm scared most of the time, so I don't need to dedicate a single day to it.

Speaker 1 Just a scared guy pranking people every day of the year. Scared guy gooping off.
Scare and more of like the spooky, like the kind of

Speaker 1 dance macabre. Yeah, veil between hell and earth is as thin as possible.
Wow, okay, cool. Justin, maybe you should host this.
Justin, do you want to take a whack at the intro just real quick?

Speaker 1 Just to see. Just to see.

Speaker 1 Hey, what's up, guys? So we're almost saved. It's alright.
Not so easy.

Speaker 1 I'm sorry. What did I do?

Speaker 1 Oh, see, it's my greatest fear to do that. To tank it, right? One of my big shocks.
Oh, no.

Speaker 1 Well, we have a great show tonight for you where we talk about some classic Halloween tricks and treats. I'm talking best costume,

Speaker 1 Halloween parties, and of course, ghost and or other paranormal, spooky tales for your enjoyment. It's cold.

Speaker 1 Tales of fright. Take care that you don't scare yourself to death listening to this episode.
Instant Price. What? It's me.

Speaker 1 We booked him? Why didn't we say that we booked him at the...

Speaker 1 You've booked me from beyond the grave. Get ready to lay down and wet your pants.
Is that part of being? That's part of it. That sounds like a

Speaker 1 classic Halloween.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Put on your diapers and prepare to shit yourself clean.

Speaker 1 Shit yourself clean.

Speaker 1 Well,

Speaker 1 let's go around and introduce ourselves.

Speaker 1 Because I would like to know if you guys were writers for The Simpsons and doing A Tree Has of Terror, how would you credit yourself, as we all know, with a Halloween pun portmanteau of your name?

Speaker 1 I think I have but one option,

Speaker 1 which is Scarame Bent. Oh, very good.
Scarame Bent. Welcome to the show.

Speaker 1 I'm Alden, light as a feather, stiff as a Ford.

Speaker 1 Checking in.

Speaker 1 That's a two-liner. That would take two liners.
Yeah, that takes extra. Wow.
Real vanity card in this guy. Hold the Ford card for an extra two seconds.
We got a big one in the middle for that boy.

Speaker 1 I guess guess mine is Wynn Headstone No Hell. Oh, wow.

Speaker 1 Got a double. A double.

Speaker 1 Wow. Okay.

Speaker 1 I have Dustbin Tyler.

Speaker 1 Oh, just relegated.

Speaker 1 Yeah, exactly. Relegated to the Dustbin.
It's not really a pun, but I just want to be Deathwind.

Speaker 1 Oh, wow.

Speaker 1 Cool.

Speaker 1 That name works for so many things. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Wow. What a cool group of guys.
I feel like Deathwind would be like heavy metal that's all flutes.

Speaker 1 So like a more aggressive Jethro Tull. Yeah.
Death Rotull. Listener, if you're missing a feminine presence on this podcast.
Yeah. So

Speaker 1 the scariest thing of all this Halloween is that the women are not here.

Speaker 1 Too scared. Too scared.

Speaker 1 Or just they have good judgment. Yeah.

Speaker 1 So it's just us dudes, you know, five white guys on a podcast. First time ever? Keep that dial tuned.
Well, we're the first ones to do something about nostalgia. Yeah.
Sure.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Yeah.
You know, my favorite part of Halloween every year was coming up with and designing and ultimately being disappointed by my failure to properly execute a costume.

Speaker 1 So.

Speaker 1 This roller coaster only goes down.

Speaker 1 So do you have any costume stories, good or bad, that you'd like to share with the world?

Speaker 1 I had two really good costume years. They were back-to-back.

Speaker 1 You call them my costume years, right? They were

Speaker 1 my costume years. You might have seen...
It's like a micro memory.

Speaker 1 It's a zine. Yeah, there was a VH1 documentary that played between commercials.
Yeah, 30 for 30 seconds. Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 1 I was in my 20s living in Brooklyn, and the first of these two years, I was a monster carrying a baby.

Speaker 1 I bought like really huge pajamas that kind of looked like scrubs. And I built kind of like shoulders and head that went above my head and was held on with a backpack.

Speaker 1 So I became probably like about a seven-foot person.

Speaker 1 And then I bought a snowsuit for maybe like a two-year-old and sliced a big, like a big slice in the back and popped my head through the chest of the shirt and then through the back of the snowsuit into the head of the snowsuit and then i put one of my arms into the snowsuit and my other arm into like the lower part of one of the big arms and then stuffed the other big arm as a dummy arm sort of holding the baby to the chest of this and so and the the head of the monster was like this stocking cap with a skull on it that i sewed onto it I had this idea for it.

Speaker 1 I had sketched it out. I was kind of like pissed off building it, being like, this isn't working.
I don't know what I'm doing. I don't really have like supplies.

Speaker 1 And then I finished it and looked in the mirror and I was like,

Speaker 1 because it was very,

Speaker 1 very scared yourself. Well, it was just like, it was way more convincing than it should be, partly because, like, I had a functional hand in each character.

Speaker 1 So it's like, it felt like,

Speaker 1 oh, you shouldn't be able to do both. So,

Speaker 1 do you have a picture of this? Do you have a picture of this? I do. Yeah, I have.

Speaker 1 I don't have a great picture of this, but I just put a picture into the chat. That's a good picture.
It's pretty good. It's pretty scary.
It's pretty scary. Oh, my God.

Speaker 1 We're putting in the show notes, gang, so you'll also be able to see that.

Speaker 1 One thing I remembered I developed over the course of the night was that the baby would be sleeping, and this was like the monster like saying shh.

Speaker 1 And so, like, I, and, um, and the

Speaker 1 backstory. The monster arm would be like giving beer to the baby, which the baby was my head with, you know,

Speaker 1 like I said. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 I'm describing to the audience. There's no actual baby being given beer other than what was me.

Speaker 1 Well, you know,

Speaker 1 a classic example of me failing to execute is one time, right when I had moved to the city. This is now a really hack idea for a costume, but I think at the time I thought it was pretty cool.

Speaker 1 It would have been 2005.

Speaker 1 I was invited to a Halloween party. I was like, I really want to do a fun costume, funny costume.
And I had the idea, I'm going to go as Dr.

Speaker 1 Zismore, the famous dermatologist who was in all of the subway ads. You have to describe this for the people who are not going to be able to do that.

Speaker 1 Anyone who wasn't living in New York 15, 20 years ago, Dr. Zismore was one of those,

Speaker 1 he was like a plastic surgeon, I think. Or he was a dermatologist.

Speaker 1 He was like a dermatologist who was famous for every single subway car in the city.

Speaker 1 The most famous derm. True, yes.
Almost impossible.

Speaker 1 Between 2000 and 2012, the two people everybody knew about in New York were Dan Smith, who will teach you guitar, and Dr. Zizmore.

Speaker 1 They were

Speaker 1 folk heroes. Folk heroes, yes.

Speaker 1 So I thought it would be fun to go as Dr. Zizmore.
And of course, Dr. Zizmore is sort of a normal-looking dude, but all of the posters featured him standing in front of a rainbow.

Speaker 1 So I was going to get a rainbow that would just extend, you know, six feet out to the left. And so I needed, like, scrubs and a lab coat.

Speaker 1 And this was before, like, getting something on short notice from the internet was not really a thing at the time

Speaker 1 so I tracked down like a medical supply place I was like I'll just buy some scrubs and a lab coat that's pretty straightforward this is probably October 29th and I went in I was like do you guys have scrubs and

Speaker 1 the lady behind the desk was like this is for a Halloween costume and

Speaker 1 I froze because I was like

Speaker 1 she she said it like what are you doing this is but they're this this is for this is for doctors this is not for idiots who want to get drunk and fall asleep on the train.

Speaker 1 She's like, Yeah, we don't carry those. You have to order them.
And I was like, okay.

Speaker 1 But afterwards, for some reason, it was stuck in my head that I was like, I should have just said I was a doctor. What if I had been like, how damn you?

Speaker 1 No way.

Speaker 1 Well, also, this was 2000. I was 22.

Speaker 1 I looked 15. There was no possible answer.

Speaker 1 The New York Presbyterian's finest spinal surgeon.

Speaker 1 Do you know who I am?

Speaker 1 So it didn't work out. That's probably my best costume, and it never happened.
And it wasn't that good to begin with. I feel like most of my costumes were like

Speaker 1 things that I was into, and nobody else was. So it was always just very like, huh?

Speaker 1 So, like, in fourth grade, I was like obsessed with Happy Days. The show Happy Days.
I was obsessed with. All right.
I don't know why. I was a little late for it.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 Absolutely.

Speaker 1 Well, it was on in the afternoon, I feel like. Yeah, I think it was on the afternoon.
For those of you who were not in the U.S., this was a show, a sitcom from the 1970s, about the 1950s.

Speaker 1 That I was watching in the 1990s. I was so many layers removed.
And the famous character is the Fawns, Henry Winkley. Very cool.
Very cool. Leather jacket, white t-shirt, like...
A 50s greaser.

Speaker 1 Iconic. Not the costume I chose.

Speaker 1 The character I chose to portray was Ron Howard's character, Richie Cunningham.

Speaker 1 And I wore like a letter jacket, and that was it. He was the squeaky, clean.
Yeah,

Speaker 1 he was the audience surrogate. He was like goodie two-shoes, and the Fons was the cool one.
And I was like, no, thank you. My turtle is Leonardo, and my happy days character is Richie Cunningham.

Speaker 1 Keep in mind, the bad boy on this show is the Fons, whose whole thing was he hit his elbow into the jukebox and would play a song, and that's how bad he was. Yeah.

Speaker 1 He drove a motorcycle. He seemed to, they hinted at him having sex a lot.
Okay. Hinted.
Cool.

Speaker 1 I feel like

Speaker 1 I'm a misc for a lot of my Halloween costumes.

Speaker 1 And very much in line with what Winston's saying, I went as Lowell from the TV show Wings when I was a kid.

Speaker 1 So amazing.

Speaker 1 Wings, a TV show, not for kids, but Lowell was like the Ty was played by Thomas Hayden Church, Sandman in

Speaker 1 Spider-Man movies. Sideways.
Sideways. He was just the dumb mechanic who was very funny.
And everyone was like, who are you? And I was like, Lowell from Wings. They were like, who from what?

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 so please Google all of that stuff.

Speaker 1 I waited tables one year when I was living in Brooklyn and I went as a leather jacket clad Speedo-wearing lifeguard with the name of the restaurant written in Sharpie on my chest.

Speaker 1 What was the name of the restaurant? It was Fuck Puppy. No,

Speaker 1 it was Jolie.

Speaker 1 And it was all French restaurant, and all the owner and his buddies were like, This guy's weird.

Speaker 1 And it's true. This was for a shift, waiting tables.
You were

Speaker 1 waiting tables

Speaker 1 in lifeguard uniform with a very old leather jacket. But the recent one is is my family and I decided to go as

Speaker 1 the family from Bluey. This is like four or five years ago.
And so my wife ordered the costumes. She was like, you got to try this on.
I was like, I'll get to it. I'll get to it.

Speaker 1 So then we got our costumes on. And my wife decided to change her costumes.
So it was, I was bandit, the kids were Bluey and Bingo. And my wife went as mayor of East Town.

Speaker 1 What?

Speaker 1 So it was me and the kids, and then she was wearing like a car heart and had a vape and an empty bottle of rolling rock as we walked around Brooklyn trick-or-treating.

Speaker 1 But the twist was that I, because I didn't try the costume on, it was too tight to the point where it was a problem. Wow.
It was.

Speaker 1 And then the kids changed it. They had a second costume.
They put on princess dresses. So I was just like a vaguely pornographic dog walking around with kids on Halloween.
Wow. Bandits.

Speaker 1 bandit getting loose huh yeah bandits letting it all hang low right mayor of east town is arresting bandit for indecent experience exactly it was a setup it was all set up and i blew it in every i never didn't have a second costume and yeah you blewy did i blew it

Speaker 1 i was uh showing pain i don't like to dress up for halloween because it's a struggle for me to find regular human clothes that fit and not special clothes that i'm gonna wear one day a year um

Speaker 1 Ever since becoming the size I am now, which was like 15 years old, I've always found Halloween pretty frustrating.

Speaker 1 That said, I'm going to throw in the chat a photo of what's probably my favorite costume I've ever done.

Speaker 1 Are you Michael McDonald? Michael McDonald? Yeah. Nothing.

Speaker 1 The two times at any party I went to where someone would be like, Are you Michael McDonald? I'd be like, Oh, no, you won't be.

Speaker 1 That's really funny.

Speaker 1 I love that.

Speaker 1 Oh, man, solid costume. It was very fun.

Speaker 1 Also, pretty comfortable costume as well. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 Low investment, high reward.

Speaker 1 I will say, my love for Halloween costumes was never very high, but it has sort of been reinvigorated by having kids. Yeah.

Speaker 1 But this year, my second kid now is five, and he's one of those kids who is so prolific with his imagination that it was really tough for us to nail down what he wanted to be because he kept changing his mind.

Speaker 1 He wanted to be Bigfoot for a while, then he wanted to be a bear. And finally, my wife sat him down and said, Look, you know, we only have a couple weeks to Halloween.

Speaker 1 If I'm going to make you a costume, you got to decide what it is. So I want you to decide right now.
And for the first time, he hadn't mentioned this before. He's like, I want to be Big Fat Fly.

Speaker 1 And she was like, You want to be a fly? And he's like, Yeah, Big Fat Fly. Big Fat, Ugly Fly.

Speaker 1 Okay. All right.
And she's like, Okay, here we go. So we've been, for two weeks now, been making him this elaborate fly costume.
And it is so funny. It is ugly and really hilarious.

Speaker 1 I cannot wait for you guys to see it. That's so great.
Big Fat Fly, you're like, let's get creative because we're not going to find that anywhere.

Speaker 1 We have to make it.

Speaker 1 So, yeah, it's going to be

Speaker 1 some some Chinese costume manufacturers seeing all these searches for big fat fly and they're like oh we missed some sort of trend how did we

Speaker 1 yeah Americans are out to something again yeah

Speaker 1 I always whenever I go to Halloween adventures they would always have like the really elaborate costumes in the front displays you know like and they would theme them and I'm like I'm like wow

Speaker 1 yeah I'm like wow and I always had this image of like

Speaker 1 that costume's going to to some great costume party.

Speaker 1 You know, like I had this like, there was like that image of like, somewhere in this city is the greatest costume party and all the like top, because you go into Halloween Adventures and there are some like big

Speaker 1 $900 gorillas. Yeah, exactly.
And it's like some rich asshole is doing that. And like, God bless him.
I don't know. I would always be like so kind of starstruck, but I don't know.

Speaker 1 I was just always like, wow, these that's really funny. Well, really, the people who go in there and just drop like a grand are people that like wear it for 30 minutes and then take it on

Speaker 1 and throw it away right after the business. Got to do that on work.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 Okay. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Visual puns, least favorite costume.

Speaker 1 So you wouldn't have liked my teenage costume of serial killer where I had taped a bunch of tiny cereal boxes to the inside of a trench coat and had a plastic knife and would stab them from time to time.

Speaker 1 I don't think I would have. Really? I'm surprised you don't like a visual pun, Alden.
I I don't know. I just think

Speaker 1 they're often not very.

Speaker 1 I've been, I've dressed this thing before. I get it.
I just don't think they're usually very.

Speaker 1 Because then what? Then you see it, and then what? Then you're just hanging out with that person?

Speaker 1 It's got to be supposed to not be supposed to not party. Yeah, for their

Speaker 1 what they are is doing Halloween parties. You're in character the entire fucking time.

Speaker 1 All the world's stage.

Speaker 1 I don't think so, buddy.

Speaker 1 Moving on.

Speaker 1 Speaking of Halloween parties,

Speaker 1 can I just say it's hilarious to have a podcast hosted by somebody who actively hates the subject matter?

Speaker 1 It's like

Speaker 1 fantastic. Well, that's great, I guess.
So,

Speaker 1 well,

Speaker 1 you know, speaking of cool Halloween parties,

Speaker 1 anybody have any great Halloween party stories? Or embarrassing ones? Or scary ones? I've got one. This one's pretty embarrassing.

Speaker 1 This was the second year of my

Speaker 1 two-year run of costumes I was proud of.

Speaker 1 I love the

Speaker 1 continued narrative with costume years. This was one year after Monster Carrying a Basketball.
Jeff, can I guess? Is this Lennon Lennon? Yes, this was Lennon, half John, half Vladimir. So I.

Speaker 1 Very a thinking man's costume. Yeah, exactly.
Which, as we all know, Halloween is the thinking man's holiday.

Speaker 1 It is. It is.
It is. A lot of nodding quietly,

Speaker 1 reverently. Interesting.
What is the meaning of death? Aren't we all in masks when it comes down to it? Yes.

Speaker 1 You know, we are who we pretend to be.

Speaker 1 Yes.

Speaker 1 Flesh is the ultimate disguise. And isn't life a trick or a treat? Depending on what you ask for.
I cut a brown suit in half and like sewed it onto the over the top of the John Lennon side of.

Speaker 1 So I had the New York City shirt sleeveless and I

Speaker 1 shaved so that I had half of a goatee on the Lennon side and I was already bald so I didn't need to shave my head but I did wear half of a wig by like affixing it to a headband that I wore like front to back and bought like the glasses and wore half of the John Lennon glasses and had some some sort of like Russian paraphernalia.

Speaker 1 I think I handmade a

Speaker 1 Dust copy towel or something. Hey, hey copy towel? It says that.

Speaker 1 Yeah. right.

Speaker 1 Revolution number 1917. Yeah, good.
Das money. That's what I want in parentheses.

Speaker 1 Twist and proletariat.

Speaker 1 The will of the proletariat will twist and revolt.

Speaker 1 Good.

Speaker 1 The backstory was that my girlfriend at the time decided that she was going to move to Siberia for six months.

Speaker 1 Wow. And I was

Speaker 1 still together? Oh, okay.

Speaker 1 Sad about that. That does sound like a lie, you tell.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah, that sounds like a friends episode of my life.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Yeah, truly, like, if I say anywhere closer than Siberia, he'll be like, I'll come with you.

Speaker 1 He'll show up. He'll show up.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 In any case, I was sad. So I was at this party alone,

Speaker 1 friends party in Astoria Queens.

Speaker 1 And I feel like Halloween can be like a fun holiday when you're single. There's obviously a layer of like sexiness and possible romance that is somehow associated with Halloween.

Speaker 1 So I think if I and I got to this party and it was like it was one of those things where like people really loved the costume and so I was getting like a lot of attention in life.

Speaker 1 Not not maybe the life of the party, Seth Lynde, but Lennon Lennon was kind of a hit. Death.
And I felt like if I were single, this would be like a magical evening.

Speaker 1 But instead, I was in a relationship with someone who was in Siberia. And I just grabbed a full bottle of gin and walked out of the party without saying bye to anyone.
And I, wow.

Speaker 1 Haunting choice. I was just like, I was like so sad and mad and lonely and lustful and all these things.
And I just like. Both Lennon's got together and magic.
Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 pretty

Speaker 1 in character is what you're saying you were possessed by the costumes alcohol is the opiate of people i believe technically

Speaker 1 and i walked out and i saw like if i went to the right i would go to the train that would take me home and i just walked to the left with my bottle of gin and um It was very dark.

Speaker 1 I was kind of in an area near the elevated train, but I couldn't exactly see where I was going.

Speaker 1 And I just remember kind of angrily tearing off the Vladimir Lenin half of the costume, which I feel like the narrative I put on it is it's like this anti-Russian, like, I hate Siberia.

Speaker 1 Like, I tear you away, Vladimir. And then some unknown number of hours later, I woke up.

Speaker 1 I had like stumbled down a kind of rocky hillside and just decided to sleep for however long I was passed out there. And then I managed to somehow hail a cab.

Speaker 1 So at that point, I was no longer really in anything resembling a costume. I just had half of a goatee and non-matching shoes and

Speaker 1 had a lot of blood on me. That was just actual blood from falling on this rocky hill.

Speaker 1 And then the cab driver, the whole time while I was in the car, was just saying, Don't puke in my car, don't puke in my car, don't puke in my car. And you're like, imagine all the people.

Speaker 1 And he said, okay, you're home, and let me out. And I looked around, and I was nowhere near my home.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 I got to say, we made fun of the costumiers earlier, but this is a good, this is really good.

Speaker 1 This is haunted. I was able to hail another cab eventually and did get home.
But when I woke up the next morning, I obviously was extremely hungover and kind of not remembering a lot.

Speaker 1 And I looked in the mirror. And I got to say, it's very startling when you forget you have half of a goatee

Speaker 1 to look in the mirror and see that. It was a humbling experience.
Wow. Sounds like a great night.
But it was a good costume before I actively destroyed it in a self-loathing rage.

Speaker 1 Do you have a picture of that one?

Speaker 1 Oh my god, Seth, this is an amazing costume.

Speaker 1 Thank you. Holy shit.
That's so good. It was, you know, good while it lasted.
The only one I could find is one where I was Clark Kent, which isn't, you know, I just had a suit on with a Superman.

Speaker 1 God damn it, Winston.

Speaker 1 Well, I had to be the guy in a suit.

Speaker 1 The guy in a suit?

Speaker 1 No, I couldn't pull a superman.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 All right. Sorry, are you in costume right now? I'm going to be Peter Parker.
Peter Parker without a camera. I actually have, I went to a Halloween party once that was great, and

Speaker 1 one of the guys there came in in like, you know, with a camera and like a hoodie and like a button down or something. And everyone's like, who are who are, you know? He's like, I'm Peter Parker.

Speaker 1 I'm Peter Parker. And then like halfway through the party, he leaves and Spider-Man walks in.
Oh, that's. And he's like, never.

Speaker 1 That's really cool. Yeah.
I was like, okay, that's pretty great. That's playing a lot of cameras.

Speaker 1 Wow. Yeah.

Speaker 1 So. As I mentioned earlier, I don't like dressing up for Halloween.
So like, I'm never like seeking out Halloween parties.

Speaker 1 But when I was a teenager in high school, it's like, well, you don't want to do nothing. But my best friend Jason.

Speaker 1 My best friend Jason Bordies. We killed that night, teenager.
Yes. We had no candy and no costumes.
Our thirst for blood was unquenchable.

Speaker 1 His dad was an engineer and owned like a machine shop with his uncles. And so he was like one of those kids, like as a teenager, like he he built his own go-kart, you know,

Speaker 1 and he was really into like model rocketry. He like he is an engineer now.
And you're like, cool, you're really good at that. You should do that.
Right.

Speaker 1 But when Halloween rolled around, he lived in like the really walkable suburban area in my hometown. His house got a ton of trick-or-treaters.

Speaker 1 And so he started doing like, I'm going to put together all this stuff to like scare kids at the house. Do you want to help me run it? And I was like,

Speaker 1 yeah, that sounds great.

Speaker 1 and so he built all this stuff when you got to the door he had a he had bought a human a styrofoam human head from a movie prop company that just was like a terrified like wide-eyed head and he had mounted it on a swivel and so you would be under one of you would be underneath the table swiveling the head to follow the kids as they walked up to the door.

Speaker 1 And then if they stepped close, the other person had monster gloves on and would like swipe out at their feet and kids would just scream. It was great.
It was so fun.

Speaker 1 Wow. I love it.
One Halloween I spent after college, I traveled for a year on a grant studying street theater.

Speaker 1 And I was in Scotland. And they don't celebrate Halloween anywhere else in the world, basically.

Speaker 1 So I was on a tour of the highlands with a bunch of other people, random people. And we were staying in what was described as a haunted castle.
The hostel was a haunted castle.

Speaker 1 And it had all these like secret passageways and like ethereal glowing statues in different areas. And it was generally freaky.
So

Speaker 1 the leader of the trip was like, I mean,

Speaker 1 what no one will do is walk the grounds. No one will walk the grounds.
Like, you can't go outside. It's too scary.
So a bunch of us decided to do that. And

Speaker 1 naturally, and we

Speaker 1 manipulated yes the the chumps the suckers uh

Speaker 1 i

Speaker 1 ran ahead of everyone a little bit and got a long uh stick and when they would go past i would brush the stick down their back whoa and scare the out of everybody fantastic it was great but everyone was mad at me after that

Speaker 1 Worth it. Wow.
It was. Yeah, that seems worth it.
In a horror movie, you would have been doing that and then like, ha ha ha ha.

Speaker 1 And then you would have felt something something on your back and then i would have died yeah then you would have died yeah you would have been one of the first to go sir all right justin of clan scooby yeah

Speaker 1 clan do

Speaker 1 this talk uh this talk about halloween parties and uh haunted houses is a perfect segue to tricks and treats our next totally different and very distinct section of this podcast and very haunted and very spooky

Speaker 1 Here's a question for you guys. You guys seem to have your finger on the non-pulse of the Halloween zombie.
Yeah, it's men over 40. I think we definitely have to do that.

Speaker 1 Yeah, you said that in a way, like, I've been asking questions with so many other people, but here's one for you guys, the other people on the podcast.

Speaker 1 How many podcasts are you doing? Yeah, how many are you having?

Speaker 1 I've been seeing commercials for a marshmallow Butterfinger.

Speaker 1 What's the fucking story there? I gotta talk about Butterfinger for a second. Yeah.

Speaker 1 They changed the formula for Butterfinger a few years ago, and it is notably worse. It's not as good as it used to be.
It's not gonna get better.

Speaker 1 Well, I know, but I feel like this is their way of being like, hey, guess what?

Speaker 1 In a year, we're gonna replace Butterfinger with marshmallow butterfinger, and then you'll never see a butterfinger ever again. And it's probably like, you know what?

Speaker 1 It's probably like, it's actually so much cheaper to produce the marshmallow butterfinger. The actual butterfinger, the process of making the brittle or whatever it is.

Speaker 1 You need peanuts for the butterfinger part. All you need for the marshmallow part is hooves.
Yeah. Chemicals.
Yeah. Take that Halloween.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Put away your joint birds. Yeah.
Yeah. The headless horseman on the hoofless horse.
Yes. Everyone talks about the headless horseman.
What about the horseless headman?

Speaker 1 That's my Halloween costume this year. Yeah.

Speaker 1 That's just anyone who runs a company and doesn't have a horse. Oh, I thought it was, I was thinking headman is in like somebody who ran a head shop.
Like

Speaker 1 hey man

Speaker 1 see my horse where's my horse man dude where's my horse

Speaker 1 I got horsed last night

Speaker 1 so fucked up I lost my horse you know that word horse you know yeah you know when you get horsed and you know losing your horse obviously uh the scariest thing that can happen which is a great segue nothing spookier to our next segment actually scary stories this is the one I've been dreading so let's let's get into it Yes.

Speaker 1 Well, when I was a kid, the scary story that messed me up was, have you guys ever heard Cowbell?

Speaker 1 The sketch from SNL? Yeah, it was like how he wouldn't stop. It's crazy.
I'm seeing that. He's still playing that cowbell today.
Yeah, exactly. Nobody's been seen here with a cowbell.

Speaker 1 No, but the cowbell, it's like there's a variation of this, but it's like, you know, a kid hears on the radio or on the television that like someone's escaped from the lunatic asylum, you know,

Speaker 1 sane asylum again this is different time we weren't you know mental health was different uh but uh how did wins get cancelled oh he told this weird story he said lunatic asylum on a podcast no but everyone's very mad the madhouse somebody escaped from bedlam um no but uh he so they're like the person's wearing white sneakers white pants a white shirt And then the

Speaker 1 power goes out and, you know, the kid can hear like a cowbell in the distance and kind of looks outside and there's nothing, you know, everything's okay.

Speaker 1 And then he, again, I was hearing this when I was like

Speaker 1 young. And he wakes up the next morning, he hears the cowbell and he goes into his parents' room and his parents are like killed.

Speaker 1 And there's like at the foot of the bed is like a man in like white shoes, white. pants, white shirt, and a cowbell around his neck with like a knife and like lunges at him.

Speaker 1 And that's the end of the story. And it just terrified me.

Speaker 1 I was so scared.

Speaker 1 I have two, one recent, one from a while ago.

Speaker 1 I was doing a show. I do Characters Welcome.
I was up in Maine. We would do it virtually.
And I was like, oh, Maine, haha. And someone was like, well, you know about the Maine Sleep Watcher, right?

Speaker 1 And I was like, oh, no. And this is in the chat.
And they're like,

Speaker 1 back, because I was like, in a town, I think near where you're staying, this guy would break into people's homes, not steal anything, and he would just watch them sleep.

Speaker 1 And if you look up Google Main Sleep Watcher,

Speaker 1 the picture of this guy's face, they never caught him.

Speaker 1 The police drawing of this guy's face is fucking terrifying. Yeah.

Speaker 1 And he still stalks, watching people gently drift off. So think about that when you're going to sleep tonight.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 The lips are too thin, you know? Oh, yikes.

Speaker 1 The very thin lips. The thin lips is what probably drives him to watch people as they sleep.

Speaker 1 Dad, dad?

Speaker 1 My dad's been missing in Maine for decades. He's looking for you.
He's living his best life.

Speaker 1 He's having a great time. The other story is a true story that happened to one of my wife's friends when she was working in, I think, Vermont.
She was working in a restaurant, living in Vermont.

Speaker 1 And she was staying in a house with other people who worked at the restaurant they were all working she got the night off so she goes home and goes in the house and no one else is in the house she goes into her bedroom starts the shower and as she's like looking in the mirror she sees the

Speaker 1 bed ruffle just sort of like

Speaker 1 just sort of flutter a little bit

Speaker 1 in the mirror behind her. And she's like, oh, that's weird.
And so she closes the door,

Speaker 1 sort of of like screws around

Speaker 1 with the shower a little bit to make some noise. Then she climbs out the window, jumps off of the second floor onto the lawn,

Speaker 1 runs like a mile and a half to the farmhouse down the street, calls the cops. The cops come.
They go into the house, and there's a man waiting under the bed

Speaker 1 to

Speaker 1 nobody knows what he was going to do.

Speaker 1 And here's the truly scary part: he only got charged with like just breaking into a house. He didn't.

Speaker 1 He was just like, hey, don't do that again. You can't go into other people's homes.
He's like, yeah, no, totally. Just happened to walk.
The judge was like, you knucklehead. Get out of here.

Speaker 1 Get out from under that bed. The justice system is truly scary.

Speaker 1 Oh, my God. A system to send a shiver down your spine.

Speaker 1 She was like, well,

Speaker 1 that

Speaker 1 bed ruffle fluttering is enough for me to be like, I need to go. And

Speaker 1 potentially saved her life being a little paranoid about that. Whoa.
Correctly paranoid.

Speaker 1 Okay, well,

Speaker 1 I will probably double lock, you know, like check the Deadbolt a couple of times tonight. Well, you got two flavors.
You have the main sleepwatcher who just wants to hang for a little bit. Yeah.

Speaker 1 And then the under-the-bed guy from Vermont who's out to kill it. Anyway, stay out of New England, I guess.

Speaker 1 Yeah, right. Something in the water.
I would love to see a comedy sketch about the main sleepwatcher where it's like very sinister the whole time.

Speaker 1 And then the guy wakes up and sees the sleepwatcher and is like,

Speaker 1 the sleepwatcher's like, what you doing, sleeping?

Speaker 1 You are really out.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Tide's low.

Speaker 1 I was sitting here thinking, when's this guy going to wake up?

Speaker 1 Sleep clean till morning.

Speaker 1 So, Alden,

Speaker 1 have we changed your mind? Do you love Halloween now? I guess so. With the story about the guy under the bed, man, I really get why you guys love it so much.

Speaker 1 I get why you just love everything about being spooked and scared and potentially murdered. It's really good stuff.
I get it. That didn't happen on Halloween.

Speaker 1 Yeah, that was just a regular day in the summer. Yeah, right.
You You can't hold that against Halloween.

Speaker 1 So, Alden, you're not scared.

Speaker 1 The guy behind the curtain, behind Alden, are you scared? Can he hear us all? No.

Speaker 1 It's a big fat fly.

Speaker 1 But suddenly, his gaze turned to the ceiling, revealing the creature that had been there the whole time.

Speaker 1 A big

Speaker 1 fat fly

Speaker 1 Thanks so much for joining us on this very spooky evening. I'm going to go keep working on this big fat fly costume and stay safe out there.

Speaker 1 Watch out for all those razor blades and your Hershey's kisses or whatever. Thanks, folks.
Happy Halloween. Go to sleep.
We'll be watching you.