Halloween Hijinks, Irish Fairies, Manderley Press, Salem Witches & More: Endnotes 30 October

Every Friday, we celebrate the weekend — and all the reading and relaxing and daydreaming time ahead — with Melissa's favorite book- and travel-related links of the week. Why work when you can read fun stuff?!

This post is part of our Endnotes series.

You ready for the big day tomorrow? I’m assuming you’ve got your goodie bag prepared — or have at least stocked up on your favorite candy for your own personal use. Technically, Spooky Season ends on November 1 (or November 2 if you include All Souls’ Day), which means you’ve got four more days to slam some spooky reads into your brain, and delicious Halloween treats into your mouth. We’ve got ideas for you! Here are 7 Eerie Audiobooks to Fill Your Ears with Spooky Halloween Fun, 7 Dark Academia Novels for a Perfectly Eerie Halloween, and 43 Spooky & Sublime Gothic Novels with a Strong Sense of Place. You might cleanse your palate between books with a beautifully eerie poem about a haunted house or a gleeful ghost. Whichever you choose, you’ll need something sweet (Pumpkin Cake Roll with Cream Cheese Filling inspired by The Legend of Sleepy Hollow) and something salty (Pumpkin-Spiced Roasted Pumpkin Seeds inspired by the novel Small Spaces). Happy Halloween!

• The veil will be thin tomorrow night! On the History of the Aes Sidhe, Ireland’s Seductively Dangerous Fairies. The author, Sarah Clegg, wrote the book I LOVED and recommended in our Christmas episode last year: The Dead of Winter: Beware the Krampus and Other Wicked Christmas Creatures. I will 100% read what she has to say about Irish fairies.

• A Field-Guide to the Brontës’ Literary Universe. Amy M. King explores the landscapes and botany that shaped the sisters’ novels.

• Atlas Obscura has a peek into how Bram Stoker wrote Dracula. Spoiler: He wrote in his library books! ‘…books transported Stoker to the region in the Carpathian Mountains, and he brushed up on geography, cuisine, and superstitions. He also apparently left his mark on some of the library’s volumes.’

• The cutest Halloween comics, courtesy of cartoonist Gemma Correll:

• How Disney’s ‘The Skeleton Dance’ Became a Masterpiece of the Macabre. ‘These skeletons don’t merely dance. They do the Charleston. They do the grapevine. They join hands and caper around in a circle, like something out of a children’s game (or folk horror ritual). A pair take turns using each other as pogo sticks. One saucy skeleton wiggles his hip bones and slaps them vigorously. They pop apart their limbs and reassemble. They undulate like they have no bones, even though they are bones. The music riles them to the point that they can’t help but participate in it, with one playing a cat’s tail like a violin while another grabs a couple of his friend’s femurs and proceeds to play his ribs like a xylophone. It’s a frenzied melding of merriment and the macabre until a cock crows, signaling dawn, and they all fall to pieces.’

• Surely you want to see 30 Color Snapshots That Show What Halloween Looked Like in the 1960s and 1970s. So many disturbing masks!

• This book from Manderley Press looks like an excellent read: The Haunting of Lamb House by Joan Aiken, ‘a ghostly story for adult readers, set in Lamb House, Rye in Sussex.’ The story of how the new edition of the book came to be is really neat.

• Grab a friend, light a candle, and read aloud one of these 20 spooky short stories (free online).

• Three delightful words: Edinburgh Witch Map. ‘The Edinburgh Witch Map illuminates both Edinburgh’s dark history of persecution and its vibrant modern community of witches, pagans, and occult practitioners.’

• Related: The Salem Witch Trials Documentary Archive. Digital scans of originals and transcripts of documents, plus maps, articles, and more. Thanks for friend-of-SSoP Ronda for this treasure!

• Eighty-eight years ago today, ‘War of the Worlds’ — directed and narrated by Orson Welles — was broadcast live from the Mercury Theatre on CBS Radio, and people kinda lost their minds. Listen to the show here.

• Don’t tell me the perfect Little Free Library doesn’t exist.

If you’ve got it, haunt it.

Top image courtesy of Nika Benedictova/Unsplash.