En Route to Terror

"Captain, it's November Standard. Isn't it time to take that jack-o'-lantern out of the exercise room?"
"What jack-o'-lantern?"
"The one you bought at port, stored away all this time, and put there for Halloween. It was a nice gesture though."
The captain frowned. "I didn't buy anything of the sort."
A chill gripped the crew of the Calvary, three months out from Sofia on its five-month journey . . . through the depths of space!
Finis




Boo!
Actual Finis

It's Almost Halloween

Did you remember to make out your wills? I advise against it. Do you know many people are murdered because they changed their wills so somebody kills them and destroys or hides the new will? About a third of all murder victims based on the literature.

Frightening Thought of the Day

A tree stump is just a zombie when you think about it.

The Principles of Horror

"Any sufficiently scary moment is indistinguishable from a jump scare." - Artur E. Parte
"A fright is a jump scare with a legion of defenders." - Max Spinestrike
"I scare, you spook, he indulges in jump scares." - Bootrand Rustling

Proper Halloween Titles

Sure you want to have skeleton kings and vampire kings, but is king a scary title? How about kaiser, doge, pharaoh, or potentate? Really it's just kaiser, but I wanted to see how the others look in print. Very plain. My goosebumps are gooseflat.

Halloween Roundup

Is anyone still trying to pretend clowns are scary? I think that died out, and for good reason.

Halloween Sorting

Let's examing the categories of how people celebrate Halloween in particular and October generally.

Halloween Horror Type: These people watch well-reviewed horror movies and play Alien: Isolation.
Halloween Irony Type: These people watch Friday the 13th movies after the first one and play Unity asset flips.
Halloween Spooky Type: These people carve jack o'lanterns, put skeletons in their yard, and play Castlevania and Disgaea.

There is a group which does nothing at all, but it's better not to say anything about that. The important thing is to find your faction and coordinate to win the Splatoon Splatfest which will have this as its theme any day now. Spooky Type is clearly the most popular, but Irony Type probably has better players.

Proposal: Halloween 2

Halloween is fine for autumn-type horror, but what about the spring-summer type? Voracious sharks, rainstorms which force you to take refuge in a spooky house, and being shipwrecked on a remote island on which people hunt you for sport? April, May, and June don't have a whole lot going on.

Peril of the AI Ghosts

The chief engineer reported. "Our AI is better every day. We project that to continue for at least 2,500 years and no more than 5,750 years."
The board acknowledged the report and moved on to other business. The public was not so blasé when it saw the camera phone pictures of the presentation which a leaker posted. Internet analysts followed every implication to its most unreasonable but logical conclusion, and one such could not be endured.
"Better AI means worse AI ghosts!" That was the cry on message boards, imageboards, news aggregators, and livestreams. Nor did those responsible have a satisfactory answer.
"This will increase productivity."
"It's October!"
"The economy will boom."
"It's halfway over!"
"You'll see results by Christmas."
"It's Halloween soon!"
The largest Halloween demonstration of all time began, and as the vampires, witches, and horsemen holding their heads lay about with their axes in the AI development facilities, economists cried but the community-minded who bore a love for the human experience far greater and deeper than number-lust cheered.
Finis

New Ghost Era

The mood in the room was weighty, still, an elephant grown past easy handling. "Ladies. Gentlemen." The chairman did not try to relieve the seriousness. Doing so would have been futile. "The matter before us today is serious. Do we get rid of human ghosts?" The next person along the table nodded. "AI ghosts are much spookier."
The one after agreed. "Their utterances are impossible to follow but give the impression you can if you listen harder. Very spooky."
"They have the wrong number of everything. The more you stare, the worse they look."
"They don't rely on stale techniques like dripping blood or detaching their heads."
"People have started to feel bad for real ghosts instead of themselves."
All the way down the table and all the way back up, the opinion was unanimous. The decision was handed down, and soon all spirits trapped in this world were at last released from their torment to be replaced by AI ghosts. Thus shall it be forevermore.
Finis

Addender

It's tough to explain curseships because they're uninterested in communication, but an unnamed space pirate can handle it.

Addendum

The space curseship is a gigantic jack-o'-lantern. I figured it out.

Astronomy Chat

I'm not telling anyone how to name things, but blood moons should be in October, idiots. Morons. Dummies.

November Is the Cruelest Month

Denying us genre-related discussion material. Let's turn November into October II so we can talk about zombies and dullahans.

The True Horror

Now that Halloween is over, Halloween itself is now a spooky ghost. Yikes!

Through Certain Half-Deserted Stars

The last transport scheduled for the day slid away from Outpost 72351. The small human crew relaxed, ready to tell scary stories around the single orange light in the break room. Even minor stations far from any planets had their amenities in the modern era.
They had their surprises as well. A ship appeared, according to some sensors and not others, and the ones that did report it reached no sure conclusion as to its properties. Its hull was curved overall except where it did not exist, or was it a cone that turned about its axle at different speeds for every inch of it? The operate could be confident only that the structure out-massed and out-volumed Outpost 72351 a dozen times over.
A check of the filed itineraries for the next week gave no relevant results of course, or a search through every known ship design, and it responded not at all to decreasingly calm messages from the outpost. It approached, and every crew member knew both that first contact had been made and that they would not survive it.
The unidentifiable vessel stopped. No obvious means of propulsion activated, but it stopped, less than an arm away from the outpost's hull. The crew members cried, wishing the station had windows or glad it did not. A light blinked on in the command center, one caused by nothing visible, that grew larger and larger until it spelled words that were read the same no matter the viewer's angle. "Boo! Trick or Treat!"
The ranking officer ordered all the candy they had to be ejected in the direction of the object. That was done. The light contracted before it swelled again to spell out, "Thank you!" The vessel vanished, and never did anyone in known space see it again. Not for one year, that is.

Happy Halloween!
Finis

October Surprise

Boo!

Let's Take the Temperature

Cold: Elemental
Hot: Skelemental

Addendum

Or is that only true for me? I hope not.

Time Travel Plot

It may not be October where you are, but I came to warn you: Don't dress up as a mummy! That's a fetish thing now!