Happy Halloween from the WVRHC!
Posted by Jane Metters LaBarbara.October 28th, 2019
Blog post by Jane Metters LaBarbara, Assistant Curator, WVRHC.
Still looking for costume ideas? In addition to the many historical outfits you can find examples of in our West Virginia History OnView database of photos, we also have examples of costumes people have worn in the past.
With basic papier-mâché skills and some rather large clothes, you could make your very own Very Tall Person costume:
If you have an artistic bent, like Grace Martin Taylor, you could create your own take on a famous artwork (I’ll admit, I don’t get the joke on the newspaper, but I feel it must be important to the overall costume).
Maybe you don’t consider yourself artistic but you have great skill with cardboard? Why not customize a robot costume? I’m 99% sure there is a person inside this one:
A staff favorite, this picture shows someone in a stork costume.
Finally, you could choose the mountaineer look, which is always a classic choice in Morgantown:
1976/10/09
If you are instead looking for scary stories to share with friends, we have a few recommendations. (I have not vetted any of these because I want to get uninterrupted sleep tonight)
- Brake, Sherri. Fireside Folklore of West Virginia: [Ghosts, Spirits, Legends & Dark History]. CreateSpace Independent Publishing, 2012. https://libwvu.on.worldcat.org/oclc/826900708
- Guiley, Rosemary. The Big Book of West Virginia Ghost Stories. First ed., Stackpole Books, 2014. https://libwvu.on.worldcat.org/oclc/869458188
- Urban, Tony. West Virginia’s Dark Tourism. Schiffer Publishing, 2016. https://libwvu.on.worldcat.org/oclc/960057376
- Dudding, George. Beyond Haunted Spencer State Hospital. GSD Publications, 2016. https://libwvu.on.worldcat.org/oclc/1050448981 (the final in a series of three books)
For even older ghost stories, you can check out one of our archives and manuscript collections on the subject, such as A&M 2335, Milspaw Folklore Collection, Typescripts, Tapes, and Films, https://archives.lib.wvu.edu/repositories/2/resources/292, which has student papers on things like ghost stories, dating from the early 1970s, or A&M 0883, John Harrington Cox, Collector, Papers Regarding West Virginia Folklore, https://archives.lib.wvu.edu/repositories/2/resources/3668, showing folk song and story material he collected from 1915 to 1936.