Halloween

Mischief Night

The night before Halloween is a night of mischief & destruction (in a select few cities).

For most people, the night before Halloween (which itself is the night before All Saint’s Day), is unremarkable – there’s nothing special about October 30th. For a select few areas however the night of October 30th is a night for pranks & vandalism. October 30th is Mischief Night.

English origins

Many cultures have recognized, if not fully sanctioned, annual traditions for mischief. The Alpine tradition of Krampus for example brings some chaos and mischief to the Christmas season. Since at least the 18th century England, and in particular the northern areas of Yorkshire and Lancashire, have had Mischief Night. Traditionally this was a night for young teens to engage in low-grade pranks on the night of April 30th before May 1st (the first day of summer). A particularly popular prank was to remove the gates from farms, releasing animals from their pens and creating havoc as the animals wandered about farms and town.

Over the centuries that mischief moved from the Spring to the Fall ending up on November 4th, the night before Guy Fawkes Night. As Ireland’s Halloween and England’s Guy Fawkes Night emigrated to America, Mischief Night went along for the ride.

Philly & Detroit

In 2013 the New York Times released a dialect quiz which was a survey of questions about what people from around the United States call things and how they pronounce them. One question was “What do you call the night before Halloween?” With a few small exceptions, overwhelmingly most of the country replied with “I have no word for this”, except for two areas: Philadelphia and Detroit.

Most of America thinks nothing of October 30th, but the Philadelphia and Detroit areas carry on the old English tradition for mischief.

The Philadelphia area, extending into New Jersey, calls October 30th Mischief Night. The Detroit area calls this night Devil’s Night. Just like their English predecessor these nights are times for pranks & vandalism. From the mild to the wild the mischief can include ringing doorbells, taking things from porches, egging houses, smashing pumpkins, throwing toilet paper into trees, and more. In Detroit this night has been known particularly for arson. In the 1980s as the city contracted in size people would set fire to abandoned homes. In 1984 there were more than 800 fires reported across the city, the most of any Devil’s Night. Arson has also sometimes been a feature of Mischief Night, such as 1991 in Camden, NJ when 133 fires were reported.

One of the curious things is how localized these traditions are. Mischief Night and Devil’s Night exist in their geographic areas and have never spread much further despite existing since at least the mid 19th century. One theory for Mischief Night’s limited reach is the provincial nature of the Philadelphia area. Other major American cities have more of an even mix of new vs born-and-raised residents, which means customs spread. Most people in the Philadelphia area however were born around Philly and have never moved away – 68% of Philadelphians were born in Pennsylvania. As such the cultural traditions, food, sports loyalties, accent, and other jawn stay near the city and never leave the Philadelphia area. In this way, the mischief of Mischief Night has remained contained to the region – to the relief of people everywhere.

Added info: Philadelphia is at the center of another divisive Halloween tradition: candy corn. As the story goes, candy corn was invented by George Renninger at the Wunderle Candy Company in Philadelphia around 1898. The authenticity of these exact details however are questionable and are considered “oral history.” The tri-colored candy is tasty to some but to others the honey vanilla flavor and waxy texture is off-putting.

The National Confectioners Association has created a “National Candy Corn Day”, the date of which is October 30th, Mischief Night.

Victorian Haunted Houses

We think of Victorian houses as haunted and creepy because of changing cultural values as well as evolving design trends.

Following the American Civil War affluent families (especially in the North) built new homes in the style of the time. The style in the second half of the 19th century was Victorian architecture complete with deep porches, mansard roofs, ornate decorative trim, turrets, heavy drapes, wallpaper, etc. Victorian architecture tended to give each room a specific purpose with an overall closed floorpan.

By the early 20th century however this style was out of fashion. Design was turning towards Modernism and architecture was no different. Architects everywhere were embracing the simpler, cleaner, more open design approach of Modernism – Frank Lloyd Wright was becoming celebrated for his use of the modernist “Prairie style”. Design was moving into the future with forward-thinking ideas of progress (technological, industrial, social, etc.). In this environment Victorian homes looked increasingly behind the times both culturally and stylistically. Architects were outright rejecting what Victorian design looked-like and symbolized. Big Victorian houses, once seen as signs of prosperity were now seen as symbols of corruption – the rich getting richer, the wealth gap, and the prosperity that was unobtainable by the common person.

Out with the old, in with the new

As time marched on many older houses were torn down and replaced with new homes in the latest styles. Those who kept their Victorian homes did so because they either truly liked them or because they no longer had the money to do anything else. It’s this second group of people who let their homes go (sometimes abandoning them altogether), who were no longer able to handle the upkeep.

On the outside the elaborate wood trim would fade or chip exposing the wood to rot & crumble. On the inside the ornate trim would accumulate dust & spider webs. As the houses aged they would settle creating creaking floorboards and doors that might not stay shut, opening by themselves. If gas pipes broke and leaked they could release carbon monoxide, leading people to see visions and feel a sense of unexplained fear. All-in-all the world was moving on but these old, overgrown, decrepit, dusty, creaking Victorian homes sat in decay, stirring up emotions of failure, fear, & unease. Then pop culture put the final nail in the coffin.

From *The Addams Family* to *Stranger Things*, Victorian houses have become the go-to architectural style of spooky haunted houses.

In 1938 The Addams Family made their first appearance as a comic in The New Yorker. The creepy, kookie, macabre Addams family lived in an old haunted Victorian mansion (which has been revisited most recently in the 2022 spin-off Wednesday). In 1960 Alfred Hitchcock gave us Psycho in which Norman Bates lives with his mother (sort of) in a spooky Victorian house up on a hill. In 1964 we got The Munsters who, like the Addams Family, were a funny family of creepy misfits living in a Victorian mansion.

Today, regardless of whether they are well-kept or not, it’s hard not to not see Victorian houses as being slightly creepy thanks to shifting design trends and pop culture monsters.

The Mummy’s Curse

The idea that Egyptian tombs are cursed as a means of protection is largely a 20th century creation.

Egyptians began mummifying their dead around 3500 BCE. In all the years of archaeological explorations of Egyptian tombs very few written or inscribed “curses” have ever been found. Those that have however could be thought of as early security systems – trying to protect the contents of the tomb from grave robbers (both amateur and archaeological). Unfortunately, given centuries of rampant looting of Egyptian graves it’s safe to say the curses didn’t work. Despite so few curses having ever been found our modern pop culture is firmly gripped by the undead idea of cursed tombs with mummified Egyptians exacting their revenge from beyond the grave.

The primary reason we think of cursed Egyptian tombs is the 1922 excavation of the tomb of Tutankhamun. George Herbert, 5th Earl of Carnarvon, had financed the search for King Tut’s tomb which was run by archaeologist Howard Carter. As Tutankhamun’s tomb was discovered, and the magnitude of the discovery was realized, the Egyptian government ensured that all artifacts would stay in Egypt. Without being able to sell any of the treasures (to cover his costs … or to make a profit) Lord Carnavon sold the exclusive rights to the excavation story to the London Times for £5,000 up front as well as 75% of the Times’ profits from sales of the story to other papers. This left every other news outlet high & dry for a story. Enter: the mummy’s curse.

Howard Carter's discovery of King Tut's tomb changed how we think of Egyptian mummies — Howard Carter’s 1922 discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb changed the world (and how we think of Egyptian mummies).

From Beyond

Without access to the largest archaeological find of the age, all other news organizations were left scrambling for another angle. Less than six months after the discovery, on April 5th 1923 Lord Carnarvon died and the press had their angle. The media began to report on a supposed Egyptian curse that had killed Carnarvon for opening King Tut’s tomb (despite no such curse being written anywhere in the tomb).

Paranormal “experts” crawled out of the woodwork to substantiate the idea of a curse. Archaeologists (especially the ones who were excluded from the tomb) where willing to discuss potential curses, which allowed them to profit from the find. Rumors and claims spread & grew like wildfire. Even Howard Carter let the reports of a curse continue, never publicly denying them, because (like a Scooby-Doo episode) it had the effect of scaring people away from the tomb, allowing him to continue working on the excavation for the next decade in relative peace.

The association of mummies with curses proliferated across pop culture after the discovery of King Tut’s tomb.

I want my mummy

The western fascination with Egypt, and the orientalized ideas that it was an exotic land of magic, has existed since at least the Middle Ages. Using ground up mummies as medicine, or turning them into paint pigment, had long been practiced by Europeans. The 19th century Egyptomania craze popularized Egypt as a setting for fantastical stories of mummies and tombs. The first story featuring a reanimated mummy (a trope most later mummy stories would follow) was 1827’s The Mummy! A Tale of the Twenty-Second Century by Jane Webb. Bram Stoker’s 1903 horror novel The Jewel of Seven Stars also features Egyptian magic and resurrection. However the discover of King Tut’s tomb did more to popularize the idea of a mummy’s curse than anything else.

In 1932, not long after the 1922 discovery of King Tut’s tomb, the film The Mummy was released featuring Boris Karloff as an ancient mummy resurrected. This was the beginning of many, many mummy movies (including 1944’s The Mummy’s Curse and 1957’s Pharaoh’s Curse, both of which have a curse right in the title). Each telling of a mummy story wanted to be better or more fantastical than the previous so the idea of a mummy’s curse grew. Today the idea of resurrected mummies & curses is a standard part of the horror genre.

Added info: As for any idea that Lord Carnarvon’s death might be attributed to some kind of curse, there is no evidence to support this. While a few people associated with the excavation of the tomb of Tutankhamun died not long after its discovery, nobody died at an unusually young age. An epidemiological study of the people who entered the tomb found that these individuals died on average around 70 years old, which was normal for the early 20th century.

Also, Lord Carnarvon’s home was Highclere Castle, which today is the setting of Downton Abbey.

New England Vampires and Tuberculosis

The effects of tuberculosis led some 19th century New Englanders to believe that vampires were preying on the living.

In the late 18th and much of the 19th century there was a vampire panic in New England. People across New England feared that vampire-like creatures, using some kind of sympathetic magic, were slowly killing their friends & family from inside the grave (as opposed to traditional vampires who rise from the grave to attack). People would exhume their family members, look for the one who might be a vampire, and take various precautions to stop them. New Englanders might remove & burn the heart of a suspected vampire, they may turn the skeleton over facedown, decapitate the head, put a brick in their mouth, or use a wooden stake to pin their relative to the ground among other methods.

This panic was more than just a few isolated incidents. Henry David Thoreau mentions attending an exhumation in his journal on September 26, 1859. In February of 1793 over 500 people attended the ceremonial burning of the heart, liver, and lungs of supposed vampire Rachel Harris in Manchester, Vermont. After Nancy Young died in 1827 Rhode Island, her father thought that she might be preying on her still alive little sister Almira. The family exhumed Nancy’s coffin, burned it on a pyre, and stood in the smoke to breath in the vapors thinking it would free/cure them of this affliction – it did not work and Almira and two more of her siblings later died. Digesting the cremated remains of a suspected vampire, or breathing in the smoke of the cremation pyre, were not uncommon last resort treatments after traditional medicine had failed.

The 1892 exhuming of suspected vampire Mercy Brown in Exeter, Rhode Island became an international story – Bram Stoker based part of the Lucy character in Dracula on Mercy Brown. With 18 confirmed vampire cases, Rhode Island even become known as the “Vampire Capital of America.” The reason all of this happened was twofold: tuberculosis and decomposition.

The story of Mercy Brown influenced Bram Stoker’s *Dracula*.

Wasting away

Tuberculosis is an airborne disease that attacks the lungs (among other areas). Active tuberculosis kills about half of those infected and in 2018 it was the ninth leading cause of death worldwide (killing more people than Malaria or HIV/AIDS). In 19th century New England tuberculosis was the leading cause of death, killing an estimated 25% of the population.

Tuberculosis can develop over months or even years, slowly eating away at someone. A person with active TB develops a chronic cough as their lung tissue breaks down, their mucus starts to contain blood, they develop fevers, night sweats, and lose weight. Because of the weight loss the disease has been historically known as “consumption.” As the infected person wastes away they also develop ashen skin, giving them an overall sickly drained appearance.

Vampires, or, a lack of scientific understanding

The effect of tuberculosis (the slow draining of life) combined with some of the infected saying their deceased relatives were visiting them (as Almira Young claimed), was enough for some New Englanders to suspect there were vampires at work. Bodies of suspected vampires were exhumed to looks for signs of vampirism. Some of the corpses seemed have grown longer finger nails and longer hair, some were bloated, some had blood in their organs, while others seemed to have not decayed at all. These were surefire signs of a vampire … or were just normal aspects of body decomposition.

As bodies decay they become dehydrated causing the skin to recede and shrink. This gives the illusion of longer fingernails & hair as the base of the nails and hair that was once under the skin is now exposed. The bodies that seemed to have not decayed at all were the ones of people who died in the cold winters of New England (as was Mercy Brown’s case who had died in January) where the cold slows the decomposition process. These unremarkable signs of decomposition were mistaken as proof of life after death to the untrained eyes of 19th century New England.

The dawn of a new era

The Mercy Brown story brought unwanted attention to New England. It was embarrassing that, while the light bulb was being invented and Henry Ford was building his first car, people were worried about folklorish undead monsters. The vampire panic rose and fell with the tuberculosis endemic of New England. Over time with advancements in science, and the dissemination of knowledge, belief in vampires faded away.

Added info: porphyria is another disease whose symptoms can be similar to vampire activity. It’s a liver disease that, for some, can cause sensitivity to sunlight (leading some to only come out at night) as well as sensitivity to garlic.

“Ask a Mortician” goes through the history of the New England vampire panic and the realities of tuberculosis in 19th century New England.

A crash course on tuberculosis.

Waterphone

The haunting crying instrument that you’ve heard in thriller / horror movies.

Invented around 1968 by Richard Waters, the waterphone is an atonal musical instrument which has vertical metal rods of different lengths attached to a metal resonator pan/bowl. Inside the resonator is a bit of water, similar to a water drum, so when the vertical rods are played (with a mallet or more frequently with a bow) the resonator can echo and bend the sounds. The effect ranges from spacey to creepy.

Given its haunting sound the waterphone has been used to create tension and uneasiness in a variety of TV shows, theatrical productions, and movies. You can hear it in ALIENS, Poltergeist, Star Trek: The Motion Picture, etc. It’s used for jump scares such as in The Matrix when Neo’s new cellphone rings. It’s been used in multiple productions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Mickey Hart of the Grateful Dead has used the waterphone, Tom Waits has used the waterphone, as well as a host of contemporary classical composers.

Waterphones aren’t all scary though. Composer and activist Jim Nollman used the waterphone on Playing Music With Animals, where he played a waterphone to orcas.

A demonstration of the waterphone.

Egyptian Mummies: From Medicine to Paint

For hundreds of years Europeans used ground up Egyptian mummies as medicine and paint pigment.

The Arabic word mūmiyā (which later became “mummia”) was the name for the black sticky asphalt material that came out of the ground used as a sealant, an adhesive, and as medicine around the ancient world. Pliny the Elder and others wrote about the medicinal uses for mummia which became a bit of a cure-all for a range of ailments.

Unfortunately mummia the petroleum product looked like another black substance that was a byproduct of the Egyptian embalming process. As such the word “mummia” came to mean both the petroleum product AND the byproduct of Egyptian mummification, which was then even further confused as meaning an entire mummified body. This is how we got the word “mummy”. Unfortunately this series of mistakes also led to hundreds of years of cannibalism.

Cannibal Medicine

Since the petroleum based mummia was used both externally as a salve as well as ingested internally, the Egyptian mummy version of mummia became used in the same ways. The 11th century physician Constantinus Africanus even described mummia as a “spice” found in the sepulchers of the dead. Soon the human version replaced the petroleum version and people began to crumble & grind human corpses for medicine.

With the Crusades, Europeans learned of mummia and its medicinal possibilities. This significantly increased European demand for Egyptian mummies and by the 15th-16th centuries there was a thriving trade in mummies. Thousands of bodies were being exhumed and shipped to Europe to be turned into medicines. In 1586 English merchant John Sanderson shipped 600 pounds of mummies to London to sell at various apothecaries. This was fueled in part by orientalism, that Egyptian mummies had some sort of exotic ancient knowledge or power.

Europeans would consume portions of Egyptian corpses for help with general pain, ulcers, inflammation, epilepsy, cough, difficult labor, etc. – none of which worked, or if they worked it wasn’t the mummy that was the active ingredient. The practice was so common Shakespeare included mummy as an ingredient in the witches’ potion in Macbeth. Demand was so high that by the 17th century some mummy dealers were producing counterfeit mummies. Newly deceased people, animals, or prisoners who had been purposefully starved & executed, were put through a process to simulate ancient Egyptian mummies.

After a few hundred years of medicinal cannibalism Europeans began to express doubt as to the practice’s efficacy (and ethicality). The 16th century herbalist Leonhard Fuchs felt foreign mummies were acceptable but local ones were wrong. While doubts arose during the Renaissance in the 16th century it took until the 18th century age of Enlightenment for the practice to fall out of fashion. As consuming mummies slowly ended Egyptian mummies took on a new role: paint pigment.

Mummy Brown

Around the end of the 16th century artists began using ground up Egyptian mummies (mixed with other materials) to produce mummy brown, a shade of brown pigment. Apothecaries that were grinding up mummies for medicine began to grind them up for paint as well. As a paint it was good for shadows, flesh tones, and glazing. Artists Benjamin West, Martin Drolling, Lawrence Alma-Tadema, Edward Burne-Jones, Eugène Delacroix, and others all painted with mummy brown.

It wasn’t until the 19th century that mummy brown began to fall out of favor. That said as recently as 1926 C Roberson & Co. still sold mummy brown made with ground up Egyptian corpses. As mummy brown died out so too did hundreds of years of large-scale desecration of deceased Egyptians, using human beings for medicines and paints.

Added info: in another example of “what’s old is new again”, in 2024 some Sierra Leoneans were digging up dead bodies for their bones to make the highly addictive street drug kush.

Zombies: Sadder Than You Think

The concept of Haitian zombies was used as a threat to keep slaves working.

Before Haiti was an independent country it was the French colony of Saint-Domingue where they produced sugar, coffee, cotton, and other goods. The French brought more than a million West African people to the colony as slaves, more than any other colony in the Caribbean. Slavery in Saint-Domingue was particularly brutal – most people were poorly fed, they worked 12 hour days, pregnant slaves frequently didn’t live long enough to have babies, torture was common. Life expectancy was about 3-6 years with about half of the enslaved people of Saint-Domingue dying within the first few years of arriving.

The brutal conditions of Saint-Domingue left the enslaved people hoping that, in death, their souls would return home to West Africa.

Haitian Vodou & Zombies

The Code Noir was a 1685 decree that outlined how slavery was to be conducted in the French empire. Among other things it stated that slaves were prohibited from practicing African religions and instead were forcibly baptized into Catholicism. What resulted was Haitian Vodou, a religious blend of West African beliefs (practiced in secret) given a veneer of Catholicism.

Part of this belief system was the idea that, upon dying, you would return to lan guinée (ie. Guinea, or West Africa). Their idea of heaven was to escape the slavery of Saint-Domingue and to simply go home. Feeling the allure of going home some people decided to escape slavery on their own terms. As such suicide was very common Saint-Domingue.

Initially suicide was seen as a viable way of getting to lan guinée but at some point there was a change. At some point (oral tradition is murky on when/how) suicide was prohibited and the punishment for committing suicide was that you’d be a slave forever – you’d become a zombie. The zombies of Haitian Vodou are not the Western pop culture shambling brain-eating zombies. The Haitian zombie was someone whose soul had been captured, denied entry to lan guinée, and was turned into an undead field hand with no chance of escape. Plantation slave-drivers used this to their advantage threatening slaves that if they killed themselves they would be turned into zombies to work forever under the control of a bokor/sorcerer. Unlike today what was feared was the threat of becoming a zombie, not the actual zombies themselves.

White Zombie

Over time the zombie concept evolved and changed. The sensationalistic 1929 William Seabrook travel book The Magic Island introduced voodoo and zombies to mainstream Western culture. This inspired the 1932 film White Zombie, which was the first zombie movie. White Zombie stars Bela Lugosi as the villainous Murder Legendre (a bit on the nose) who’s a bokor enslaving people as zombies to be his henchmen and to work in his sugarcane mill. White Zombie used Haitian Vodou ideas but with a lot of artistic license. Later zombie stories dropped the Saint-Domingue threat of eternal slavery, then they dropped the bokor master commanding the zombies. Aside from being mindless undead creatures, the zombies of today have little resemblance to their sadder more terrifying origins.

Added info: following the Haitian revolution of 1791–1804, the 1883 Haitian Criminal Code outlawed the practice of turning someone into a zombie.

The Necronomicon

The most famous magical book of occult knowledge that sounds real, but isn’t.

Possibly the most famous book that doesn’t exist, the Necronomicon is a fictional book of dark magic invented by weird fiction / horror author H.P. Lovecraft. First mentioned in 1924’s The Hound, the Necronomicon is part of Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos, a dark collection of cosmic horror, ghouls, inter dimensional monsters, and unspeakable evil all set in an uncaring indifferent universe. The best interpretation of the name “necronomicon” is “book considering (or classifying) the dead”. Supposedly written in 738 CE by Abdul Alhazred (who was later eaten alive by an invisible monster in broad daylight), the Necronomicon is a dark book of forbidden knowledge and most Lovecraft characters who read it come to horrible ends.

Lovecraft felt to produce terror a story had to be “… devised with the care and verisimilitude of an actual hoax.” As such the Necronomicon is very much treated as if it were a real book. Lovecraft enjoyed making his fictional world seem believable. For example, in a list of real books he would throw in a few real-sounding fake ones (such as the Necronomicon) – blurring the line between reality and fiction. Similarly he wrote that there were copies of the Necronomicon held by 5 world institutions: the British Museum, Harvard, Bibliothèque nationale de France, University of Buenos Aires, as well as Miskatonic University … which is a fictional school set in the equally fictional city of Arkham, Massachusetts. Again, including a fictional creation in a list of real places making something fake seem real.

H.P. Lovecraft’s Necronomicon can be found in a host of movies, books, comics, and more.

Crawling Chaos

Part of the appeal of the Necronomicon (beyond the spooky name) is that, like all good suspenseful horror, Lovecraft gives the reader just enough details to understand the idea of the Necronomicon but the exact contents (or even a good physical description of the book) are left open to your imagination. This vagueness also kept the door open for future expansion of ideas. Soon other authors began to include the Necronomicon in their work, and so it spread.

Today the Necronomicon has gone beyond the works of Lovecraft & his friends and has appeared in countless other projects. It’s in books, movies, cartoons, comics, video games, music, etc, each with their own take on exactly what the Necronomicon is, but it’s always a book of dark magic. It’s in the The Evil Dead series, it’s in an episode of The Real Ghostbusters, Mr. Burns mentions it at a meeting of republicans in The Simpsons, it’s the name of a German thrash metal band, it’s the name of H.R. Giger’s first collection of artwork, Michael Crichton and Stephen King have both referenced it, etc. The book of the dead lives on, spreading its tentacles across dark fiction. Cthulhu fhtagn.

Added info: The fictional Arkham Asylum in the DC Universe, where many of Batman’s foes are frequently locked away, was named after the fictional Lovecraft town of Arkham, Massachusetts.

Mr. Burns has Bob Dole read from the Necronomicon.

In a cleverly titled episode The Collect Call of Cathulhu, the Ghostbusters discuss that the Necronomicon will be on display at the New York City Public Library.

Vampires & Arithmomania

According to folklore, vampires have an obsessive compulsion to count.

The idea of an undead creature murdering and/or consuming the living is found in a host of cultures around the world. Some of these monsters are cleverly cunning while others are mindless killing machines, but the general vampiric themes are shared. Our modern idea of vampires is largely based on the 1897 Bram Stoker novel Dracula, which in turn took ideas from Romanian folklore.

The Final Countdown

One curious component of vampiric folklore in Slavic down through Greek cultures is the vampire’s obsessive compulsive need to count things. Vampires were said to have arithmomania and needed to count things and actions. People took advantage of this by scattering seeds, salt, grains of rice, or whatever else they had in tiny sizes & large numbers, on the floor of their houses. An intruding vampire would then have to count each seed/grain giving the homeowner time to escape or, if it took the vampire long enough, the sun would rise and vanquish the undead intruder. Similarly it was believed that vampires would count all of the holes in a fishing net leading some individuals to hang nets by the entrances of their homes. It was also tradition to spread seeds/grain in a cemetery on the grave of a possible vampire so, upon rising from the grave, they would be kept busy through the night counting and staying away from the living.

Strangely this obsession with counting wasn’t always limited to vampires. In parts of Italy it was believe that witches had a similar affliction. On the Eve of St. John’s Day you could defend yourself from a witch by giving her a red carnation because she would have to count the petals giving you time to escape. In America some believed witches had to count the holes in sieves, leading some to hang them by their doors.

I Love to Count

Ultimately this compulsion to count things is the joke behind Count von Count on Sesame Street. He’s a vampire who loves to count and teaches children numbers. Like the Slavic vampires of folklore he is driven to count anything he sees. It’s a joke hidden in plain site.

In the X-Files episode “Bad Blood” a drugged Mulder defends himself against a vampire by throwing a bag of sunflower seeds on the floor.

“Pumpkin” Spice

The autumnal flavor designed to resemble the spices in freshly baked pumpkin pie (but doesn’t contain any actual pumpkin).

Pumpkin spice does not contain pumpkin. It’s a blend of cinnamon, ginger, allspice, nutmeg, and clove used as an ingredient to spice up pumpkin pies. This spice mix (or variations of it) goes back as far as colonial America. Unlike the spice blend you buy in the store however, the pumpkin spice used in most commercially produced products doesn’t contain these spices. Commercial pumpkin spice flavor uses chemicals to simulate these spices which replicates the taste of a freshly baked pumpkin pie.

One reason a synthetic flavor is used, in lattes for example, is that using the actual spices makes it taste a bit more like Indian masala tea (chai tea) instead of pumpkin pie. Synthesized pumpkin spice flavoring has been engineered to taste like the spices after they have been transformed by the pie baking process. Other reasons for using a synthetic flavor are reliability (the flavor is the same every time) and cost (synthetic flavoring is a lot cheaper than using actual spices).

He who controls the spice controls the universe

The craze for all things pumpkin spice began in 2003 with the limited release of Starbucks’ latest specialty seasonal drink, the Pumpkin Spice Latte (PSL). With the success of their winter themed Peppermint Mocha and Eggnog Latte, Starbucks wanted an autumnal offering. Inspired by the flavors of freshly baked pumpkin pie the marketing team chose the name Pumpkin Spice Latte.

From big brands to small, just a few of the pumpkin spice products available for your autumnal seasonal needs.

In 2004 the drink was offered nationwide and became the most popular seasonal Starbucks beverage, generating an estimated $1.4 billion in sales as of 2017. It also started the flavor trend of all things getting a limited edition pumpkin spice variety. You can find candles, lip balm, cereal, soap, SPAM, chocolate candy, air fresheners, beer, and more all with pumpkin spice flavors.

Added info: Starting in 2015 the Starbucks PSL now contains some amount of pumpkin, but the flavor of the drink is still created using a pumpkin spice flavoring. Also, despite the autumnal seasonality of the drink, the PSL is on the Starbucks Secret Menu and you can buy it all year round.