Halloween is here.
Um, hello?
Is anyone here?
Boo!
Hi, Pam.
Nice try.
Not nice enough, though.
That didn't scare you?
I've been hiding in that closet for almost an hour.
They say it takes 10000 hours to become an expert in something, so maybe in another 9999 hours you'll be able to scare me.
Or maybe that was just a distraction to make you think that was the big Halloween scare.
Wait, what?
By the way, cool cowgirl costume, but it's not scary.
Nice bald cap and suit.
Who are you, Jeff Bezos?
Lex Luthor, actually, but good guess.
There's a lot of Supermans and Supergirls this year, so I had to change it up.
It'll be tough to scare an evil genius, but I'll do my best because I'm Pamela Kirkland.
And I'm Ryan Willard.
It's finally Friday, October 31st.
This is the 10 News Halloween Deep Dive.
Nine.
Eight.
Seven.
Six.
Five.
Four.
Three.
Two.
One.
So, Ry, what exactly do you love about Halloween?
Dressing up, scaring people, and being spooky, and obviously trick-or-treating.
Do you know how it all began?
Why people dress up and go door-to-door asking neighbors for candy?
Because you get free candy. by dressing up, right?
All right, I think we need to look into this.
Let's go to our correspondent, Ryan Nurse, to break down the origins of this spooktacular holiday.
When you think of Halloween, you probably think of costumes, candy, and decorations.
And you're not wrong.
But there's a rich history behind why we get dressed up.
In fact, Halloween is one of the world's oldest holidays.
So if you'll travel with me now to way back when, many moons ago, in times of yore, you'll find that Halloween had much weirder, darker and spookier beginnings.
Okay, it's the year 1200 BC, the Iron Age.
We're in the land of the Celts, a tribe that ruled parts of Ireland and the United Kingdom.
The Celts separated the year into two parts, light and dark.
Every year, as summer turned toward the darkness of winter, the Celts celebrated a three-day pagan festival called Samhain.
The Celts thought that during Samhain, the gods actually became visible to humans.
Ghosts of the dead and spirits of the underworld would spring to life and walk among us.
So the Celts wore disguises like animal skins and animal heads, in hopes that the gods might mistake them for spirits.
Hiding behind these costumes.
The villagers played pranks on each other and, of course, blamed it on the spirits.
These animal skin disguises were the original Halloween costumes, and those mischievous Celtic pranks are what put the trick in trick-or-treat.
Many centuries later, Pope Gregory changed the date of the Christian holiday, All Saints Day or All Hallows Day, to November 1st.
The day before was All Hallows Eve, which eventually became Halloween.
But it remained a work in progress for centuries.
In the 1700s, as the first waves of Irish immigrants arrived in the United States, their Halloween traditions came with them.
For two centuries, American Halloween costumes stuck to their Celtic roots.
The most common costumes were ghosts and goblins.
The point was to be frightening and to make your costume from whatever you found sitting around the house.
But in the 1930s costume companies started licensing fictional characters like Mickey Mouse and Little Orphan Annie.
These pop culture costumes, along with other disguises like Pirates and Gypsies, helped change the vibe of Halloween from scary to just plain fun.
The concept of trick-or-treating had only been around since the 1940s.
And in the early days, when you knocked on your neighbor's door, you'd be more likely to get fruit, money or toys than candy.
No way!
Candy's dominance over Halloween didn't take hold until the 1960s, thanks to you guessed it?
Advertising.
Brock's, the world's biggest manufacturer of candy corn, ran ads boasting that they were goblin approved.
These days, Halloween is celebrated by millions, and it's become big business.
This year, Americans will spend over $10 billion on Halloween supplies.
And despite the pandemic, 65% of Americans plan to celebrate Halloween.
And 20% of those are going to force the family pet to wear a costume.
Of course, not every country celebrates Halloween.
But many cultures have their own amazing end-of-summer holiday.
Mexico has the staggeringly beautiful Day of the Dead.
Hong Kong has the Hungry Ghost Festival.
India has Pitrupaksha. and the Philippines has the tongue-twisting holiday known as Panganggalulua.
So, whether you're celebrating Halloween or Panganggalulua, you should know that this holiday isn't just about buying costumes and getting candy.
It's about adding some magic to your day-to-day life, getting in touch with your ancestors and celebrating the beauty of rebirth by transforming yourself and your surroundings into something new.
All right.
That was awesome, Ryan Nurse.
Also, I think you have a great name.
All right, Ray.
Are you ready to get scared?
You're not going to scare me if I know what's coming.
All right.
We'll take a quick break and then we'll see.
And we've got more costumes from our tenors.
Hey, Pam.
I'm excited to jump in today to share this one.
This came in from a tenor named Saruna.
She said, my name is Saruna and I'm 10 years old.
I love the podcast and I listen to it all the time.
This Halloween, I'm going to be your forager from the anime spy family.
She's a city hall worker by day, but also an assassin at night.
I think she is so cool and I'm excited for Halloween.
Thanks for writing in Serena.
And thanks to all the tenors who have been sending us notes and leaving us podcast reviews.
Keep them coming.
We love hearing from you.
Happy Halloween.
All right, we're back.
And Rye, I've got a little ghost story for you.
Did you know that almost all Broadway theaters share a common tradition of leaving a single light on at night when the theater is empty?
It's known as the ghost light and superstitious theater folk debate, whether its purpose is to ward off, distract or light the way, for you guessed it g-g-g-g-g-g-ghosts.
There are all kinds of stories and rumors about haunted theaters in New York City.
The most notable is the New Amsterdam, which is said to be haunted by the ghost of Olive Thomas, a former show girl from Ziegfeld Follies, a series production that ran throughout the early 1900s.
What?
Olive is such a big part of the theater's culture that there are pictures of her hanging near the exits and entrances, where the cast and crew traditionally blow her a kiss at night on their way out to keep her happy.
The ghost light does actually have a more practical purpose.
According to stage managers, because the edge of the stage hovers right above that drop into the orchestra pit, the light helps make sure that anyone on the stage after hours won't accidentally fall off the edge because they can't see it.
Okay, that was pretty good, but I'm still not scared.
I got something spookier than that.
Let's go back to the other coolest Ryan I know, Ryan Nurse, who's going to give us a look at the most haunted places in America.
Mwahahahaha!
Question, do you believe in ghosts?
Me too.
And we're not alone.
Nearly half of Americans believe in ghosts, which may be why America is chock full of not just haunted houses, but haunted pretty much everything.
So for all you ghost story lovers out there, here's a spooky little history of America's most haunted places.
In the year of our Lord 1909, FO and Flora Stanley opened a super creepy hotel nestled way out in the mountainous wilderness of Colorado.
They loved their weird hotel so much, they decided to never, ever leave.
What?
After the couple died.
According to the totally freaked out staff of the Stanley Hotel, Mrs Stanley's ghost would play her piano late at night.
And Mr. Stanley kept showing up in the background of people's photos.
Guests complained about bags being unpacked, lights blinking on and off and children's laughter echoing through hallways.
Which begs the question, why would you ever book a room at the Stanley Hotel?
Well, if you're the world's most famous horror novelist, that's an easy question.
When Stephen King stayed there with his wife and son for one night in 1974, they were the only guests.
That night, King had a nightmare that his three-year-old son was being chased through the hallways by a fire hose.
He woke up drenched in sweat and frantically jotted down the idea for his best-selling novel turned horror film, The Shining which, I gotta admit, pretty much scarred me for life.
Well, if you want permanent psychological damage, you can not only still stay at the hotel, but also watch the movie over and, over and over.
That's because guest bedrooms have a channel where The Shining plays on a 24-hour loop.
Uh, help?
Sounds like torture, right?
But if you want actual torture, look no further than the Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia.
When this terrifying castle-like prison was built in 1829, it took solitary confinement to a whole new level.
Prisoners lived alone, ate alone, and exercised alone.
When an inmate left his cell, they always covered his head with a hood so he couldn't see or be seen.
But the inmates' ghosts got their revenge, turning the prison into a haunted compound of horrors.
Former guards and visitors have reported disembodied laughter, shadowy figures lurking around the cell blocks and the pacing footsteps of ghostly guards.
Airports can kind of feel like prisons, what with all the flight delays, but there's one airport that can be particularly traumatizing.
Honolulu International Airport has its own resident ghost known as the Lady in Waiting.
She's a blonde spirit in a white dress who shows up in the off limits areas of the airport.
The story goes that the lady-in-waiting fell in love with a man who promised to marry her, but he abandoned her at the gate and she's been waiting for him ever since.
Beyond the sight of her floating through the back corridors, the lady-in-waiting also haunts the bathrooms.
Travelers have reported paper rolls that unravel on their own and toilets that flush by themselves.
But American ghosts don't just sit around flushing toilets.
In Chicago, they've taken over the zoo.
Are you kidding me?
Lions and tigers and ghosts, oh my!
As it turns out, where Lincoln Park Zoo now stands used to be the city's cemetery.
But in the mid-1800s, most of the cemetery was moved.
Notice, I said most.
That's because historians have proven that after the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, thousands of bodies were still buried there.
And, as we've learned from horror movies, messing with burial grounds is pretty much the easiest way to get haunted.
So now, along with the honks of seals, people have reported the moans of ghosts around the lake and parks too.
But why do we even believe in ghosts?
Some experts say it's actually not some dark impulse.
Psychologist Christopher French says many people see ghosts as proof that the soul can survive the body's death.
And sociologist Margie Kerr says that feeling terror when we know we're safe can give us a special kind of euphoria and even confidence.
That's incredible.
So go ahead.
Walk boldly into your creepy basement.
Go to that haunted house.
It's Halloween, tenors.
So get out there and scare the bejesus out of yourself.
Until you scream so hard, it makes you totally crack up.
I don't know what's spookier.
These haunted places or the fact that there are so many Ryans here today?
Well, to balance out the Ryans, let's go to our trivia master, Owen.
What is going on here?
Trivia of the Ten.
Thanks, Ryan.
Candy is everywhere on Halloween.
But one type of candy is more controversial than all the rest.
And I'm not talking about raisins.
Those are nature's candy.
I'm talking about candy corn.
Candy corn is a personal favorite of mine.
But do you know what candy corn was originally called?
Was it A, turkey teeth, B, sugar boogers, C, tasty triangles, or D, chicken feed?
All right, tenors.
Did you guess it?
The answer is... D. Chicken Feed.
A man named George Renninger invented candy corn in the 1880s when he worked at the Wunderla Candy Company in Philadelphia.
The Geolitz Confectionery Company, now called Jelly Belly Candy, has been making candy corn longer than anyone else.
When they first produced it it was called Chicken Feed and the boxes had a rooster logo and a slogan that said it was.
Something worth crowing for.
So, I hope you all enjoy your chicken feed this Halloween.
Alright, one full Halloween episode and you still couldn't scare me.
I am unscareable.
Yes, you really are.
I give up.
Oh, by the way, Everett's coming by and wanted to show you his costume.
Ooh, I love his costumes.
Last year he was Batman.
I wonder if he's going to be Luffy from One Piece.
There he is.
Hey, Everett.
Hey, Pam.
Hey, Rye.
Look how colorful I am.
Wait, wait, wait, wait.
Is that, uh... Cool butterfly costume.
Butterfly costume, Everett.
No!
Rye, come back.
I just want to give you a butterfly hug.
I'm gonna go check up on Ryan, and while I do, here's a quick note for the grown-ups.
And two extra notes for the grown-ups.
You can now get ad-free versions of our episodes when you join the Tenors Club on our website.
And if you want to help support The Ten News, you can make a tax-deductible donation at the link in our show notes.
The whole team thanks you for your support.
The Ten News is a co-production of Small But Mighty Media and Next Chapter Podcasts and part of the Airwave Podcast Network.
The Ten News creative team is trading their Halloween candy and includes Tracy Notta Crooks, Adam the Great Bambino Bernard, Brian Not Ryan Douglas, Earl I Don't Know His Last Name, and Carson Not So Harry Potter.
Big thanks to Owen not slowing down for anybody.
Our production director is Jeremiah Tittle and our executive producers are Donald Albright Albright, Albright and show creator Tracy Takes the Leads Kaplan.
I'm Pamela Kirkland.
And I'm Ryan Willard.
Thanks for listening to The 10 News.
