It being that time of year when night starts coming earlier and earlier, ghoulies and ghosties start showing up in the stores, and Texas finally starts to receive cooler temperatures, I thought it would be fun to look at some of Robert E. Howard’s favorite supernatural and horror tales that he was told or learned about. Not horror fiction, but the “real” ghost tales and weird stuff that folks tell around a campfire. The old “a friend of a friend heard this” stuff. Of course, during Howard’s life, Halloween had not yet begun to develop its modern traditions of kids dressing up and going door to door begging for treats, or adults having parties. He never really wrote or told something as a “Halloween” story as it was just a day of the week to him. However, as most Howard fans know, he did write of “things that go bump in the night” in his correspondence with H.P. Lovecraft, trading tales and legends with each other in an unofficial “can-you-top-this” way. Most of us know that Howard’s “Pigeons From Hell” and “Black Canaan” yarns came from spooky stories he had been told as a child from relatives and family friends, but there are several other tales he talks about with Lovecraft that you may not know of, and which fit in perfectly in getting you ready for Halloween. Continue reading
A Happy Howardian Halloween: A Guest Post by John Bullard
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