Halloween 2025 – with Bonus Skeleton Warriors

As explained in this post, Halloween is still a fairly newish thing in Germany, only becoming popular in the past twenty years or so.

When I was a kid, Halloween was completely unknown in Germany, even though All Hallows’ Day is a public holiday in Catholic parts of Germany. There also were and still are native trick or treating traditions on St. Nicholas Day (December 6), St. Martin’s Day a.k.a. Martinsmas (November 11), Epiphany Day (January 6) or during Carnival, depending on the region. In my part of Germany, we do our trick or treating on St. Nicholas Day.

However, when I was five, we spent ten months in Biloxi, Mississippi, because my Dad was supervising the building of three oil platform supply vessels in nearby Moss Point (see this article and this website of the former operator, which also has the names of all three ships, since I remembered only one). And so I got to experience a real American Halloween. We did crafts in kindergarten and had a Halloween party. My Mom whipped up a homemade witch costume for me, which was something of a sensation at my kindergarten, since the other kids all had storebought costumes. Storebought costumes weren’t a thing in Germany in the 1970s and 1980s – you bought a few accessories like a hat or a tail and made your own. And my Mom had already made several carnival costumes for me following the same principle, so a witch costume was no problem. I remember that she cut out bats and other spooky shapes from black felt and loosely stitched them to a white sweater and then cut two large devil’s faces from red felt and stitched them to my pants. I also had a pointy witch hat, storebought, and a wand, also storebought.

Of course, we also went trick or treating at the mall – Edgewater Mall in Biloxi, which still exists, something that’s sadly not common in these days of dead malls. Now I knew St. Nicholas Day trick or treating from home, so I understood the basic concept. However, St. Nicholas Day trick or treating requires you to sing a seasonal song or recite a poem before you get your treat. And this was a dilemma for me, because I didn’t know any songs or poems appropriate for Halloween. I briefly considered simply singing the standard St. Nicholas Day song – after all, it was in German, so it’s not as if Americans could understand it. However, I thought it would be more polite to sing an American song or recite an American poem, so the people could understand it. In the first store, a jewelery shop, I recited the only American poem I knew. I called it “the flag poem” back then, though you probably know it better as the Pledge of Allegiance – complete with “under God”, since this was Mississippi in the late 1970s. I have no idea what the shopkeeper thought, though he must have liked it, because he gave me something really nice – a sparkling costume jewelery ring which I had for a long time. And yes, I can still recite the Pledge of Allegiance by heart. At the next shop – it might have been a hairdresser, but I’m not sure – I decided to try singing “Old McDonald had a farm” – after all, pumpkins grow on farms – which again got me some weird looks and candy. At the third shop, some other kid tool pity on me and told me that I had to say “Trick or treat.” “Just trick or treat?” I asked, “No song, no poem?” The other kid assured that “Trick or treat” was all I needed to say, which I mentally chalked up under “Americans are weird”.

I did try to tell my friends and classmates in Germany about Halloween and the wonders of Disney World and all the other great things I had experienced. However, this was considered “bragging” and I was officially banned from talking about Disney World – and yes, I want to plop that teacher down in front of a computer and make them watch that three hour Disney Star Wars hotel documentary that was a Hugo finalist this year. So you think I talk too much about Disney World? Here’s three hours of someone talking about a single hotel in Disney World.

And yes, the whole thing sounds incredibly silly now, but unfortunately I internalised that talking about my experiences outside Germany was not welcome, so I just stopped. Many years later, after university, when I started applying for jobs, I didn’t even mention any of my times abroad in my CV, even though international experience was prized among employers at the time.

However, Halloween gradually became known in Germany via American movies and TV shows – It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown was on TV all the time, when I was a kid, and The Simpsons have been providing Halloween episodes for more than thirty years – and also via people who’d spent time in the US as exchange students or tourists as well as via the US soldiers stationed in many parts of Germany. By the 1990s, my university had an annual Halloween Party. There also were private Halloween parties. I hosted a few for my friends. Decorations and costumes were still homemade, because you couldn’t buy anything suitable. In 1994, I brought back some cheap Halloween decorations  and candy I’d bought at a dollar store in the US and it was a sensation. Now you can buy stuff like that in every German supermarket.

Around the turn of the Millennium, Halloween trickled down from Americaphile twentysomethings into the teen and child demographic, spurred on by the candy, costume and novelty industry who saw a chance to make some extra bucks. Trick or treating first took hold in regions, which did not have native trick or treating traditions, and then spread across the country. In our neighbourhood, we got the first trick or treaters in the early 2000s. The first time it happened, we didn’t even have any candy, but I had to dig into my personal chocolate stash to supply the kids.

By now, Halloween is mainstream in Germany, though not nearly as huge as it is in the US. You can buy decorations and costumes and special candy and kids ringing your doorbell on October 31 is to be expected. However, Halloween is still controversial, because there are people who view it as some newfangled American import and an overly commercialised holiday without meaning. The two big Christian churches also don’t like Halloween. Not because of some kind of Satanic panic, but because they feel it encroaches on their holidays – All Hallow’s Day for the Catholics and Reformation Day for the Lutherans. Never mind that Halloween predates Reformation Day by centuries. October 31 is actually a public holiday in my part of Germany, but that’s because of Reformation Day not Halloween.

On Thursday, October 30, I was out and about and chanced to hear our local radio station asking its listeners whether they preferred Halloween or Reformation Day – which is a stupid question anyway, because October 31 is both. And the people who called in – mostly older – mostly bitterly complained about Halloween. “We have St. Nicholas Day, we don’t need this newfangled American import.” – “Children don’t even know what Reformation Day is anymore” [which is a failure of school and parents, not Halloween] – “There’s only one reason why we have a public holiday tomorrow and that’s not Halloween.” On the website of the radio station, they even announced “Our program for Reformation Day”, which is just sad. But if they had acknowledged Halloween, they’d probably have been torn to shreds by the “But it’s Reformation Day” crowd.

Since my parents encountered Halloween in the US, they never minded it and so we of course had candy for the neighbourhood kids for both Halloween and St. Nicholas Day. However, we never really had any decorations, because my Dad didn’t particularly care about decorations for any holiday and Mom wasn’t really in the mood anymore.

Two years ago in early October, a few days after Dad died, I happened to be at the mall to have passport photos taken and to buy the sweater I wore for his and later Mom’s funeral. One store had Halloween decorations for sale, including decorated plaster skulls. On impulse, I bought a skull and took him home, because I decided to wanted to decorate the house for Halloween, at least a little bit. And besides, Dad would have wanted me to hand out candy to the neighbour kids, even if he never much cared for decorations. A bit later, I also bought a large ceramic Jack-o-Lantern at a garden center, so I was all set for Halloween.

This is what my front window looked like in 2023 with Poor Yorick, the skull, and a Jack-o-Lantern

Jack-o-Lantern all lit up

The following year, I added two smaller ceramic pumpkins to the window display. Then this year, I decided to upgrade my window display and add the spookiest action figures from my collection. After all, I have these large picture windows which were fashionable when the house was built in 1971, so I might as well do something with them.

This year’s window display featuring my spookiest action figures.

Here are some closer looks at the individual figures.

Here we have a couple of Masters of the Universe figures, namely Hordak, ruthless leader of the Evil Horde, Webstor, the spidery Evil Warrior, and Wrap Trap, the mummy warrior of the Evil Horde, as well as a Schleich Eldrador fire scorpion, half hidden behind the blooming orchid, and my Ruhrpott mug, which I got at the Zollverein mine museum.

Of course, the spookiest of all Masters of the Universe characters and one of the most popular is Scare Glow. Scare Glow was released towards the end of the original toyline in late 1986/early 1987. As a result, he had very few media appearances and didn’t appear in any of the cartoons until Masters of the Universe Revelation/Revolution, but he’s one of these figures everybody remembers loving as a kid. Because Scare Glow is an evil ghostly skeleton that glows in the dark, so how could you not love him?

Originally, Scare Glow was billed as the “Evil Ghost of Skeletor” on the packaging, which confused a lot of people, because does this mean that Scare Glow is an evil ghost who serves Skeletor (which is also what happens in the included mini-comic “The Search for Keldor”, where Skeletor summons Scare Glow to harass the Heroic Warriors to prevent them from finding out what happened to Keldor) or is he the actual ghost of Skeletor, i.e. what Skeletor becomes after he dies.

The Masters of the Universe Classics toyline decided to clarify this long-standing issue and not only billed Scare Glow as an “Evil Ghost Serving Skeletor”, but the included bio also explains that in life Scare Glow was a bounty hunter and criminal called Karak Nul, who tried to break into Castle Grayskull countless times. After he died, he was cursed and became a glowing ghost and also had a reliquary with the key of Castle Grayskull chained to his wrist as a reminder of his crimes. One of the Masters of the Universe comics from the 2012 DC Comics run, which came out around the same time as the Classics toyline, also features some children being chased by multiple Scare Glows, because in this versions of the story, evil Eternians who die get turned into glowing ghosts.

The Masters of the Universe Revelation cartoon not only finally put Scare Glow on screen, but also reimagines him yet again. In this version of the story, Scare Glow (voiced by Tony Todd in one of his final roles) is the ruler of Subternia, the Eternian underworld. He collects relics and captures doomed souls and makes the characters face their deepest, darkest fears, because fear sustains him. As for the old question, “Is he the ghost of Skeletor or just a ghost serving Skeletor?”, when Teela asks Scare Glow if he is Skeletor, he replies that he remembers the name and that he is “the shadow of a ruler, now ruler of shadows”, so make of that what you will.

However, one thing about Scare Glow is true in any version of the story. He’s awesome, because he is a skeleton ghost who glows in the dark.

That said, for a long time, the latter was something of an issue for me. Because in high school physics class, our teacher brought in a wrist watch with a glow-in-the-dark clockface and the mantle from a camping gas light, held a Geiger counter to both objects and let it tick. Particularly the gas mantle eliciting some frantic ticking. Once I learned that glow-in-the-dark objects were radioactive, I promptly banished all of them from my environment (including a bunch of glow-in-the-dark toys), irritating my parents who were not going to dump their alarm clocks, because I suddenly decided to be – quote – “irrationally scared” of glow-in-the-dark objects.

However, I stuck to this for a long time and did not want any glow-in-the-dark objects in my home, which unfortunately also included some really cool toys. Eventually, however, I realised that this was kind of silly. For starters, that physics teacher demonstrated his Geiger counter on an old wrist watch, which likely still had radium paint or tritium paint. And those gas mantles have been known to be problematic for a long time now and I’ve never even seen one outside that one physics class. In short, the teacher used objects he knew would generate radioactivity for the Geiger counter to detect. He did not use a Scare Glow or some other glow-in-the-dark toy, even though there were a lot of those in the 1980s. Because glow-in-the-dark toys would not have the same effect.

Now the safety regulations for toys are extremely strict and the dangers of radium paint have been widely known since the Radium Girls of the late 1920s. So it makes zero sense that toys, which little kids stick in their mouth, would be still made from radioactive glow-in-the-dark materials in the 1980s, let alone today. Even lead paint, which is harmful, but not as harmful as radioactivity, was mostly banned from toys by the early 1970s. Most likely, the tiles in my bathroom (dark red, a colour that was fashionable in the 1970s and is also associated with uranium oxide) are more radioactive than a modern glow-in-the-dark toy. So I purchased the Masterverse Scare Glow and later the Classics Scare Glow and set them up in my window display for Halloween.

So let’s take a look:

The Temple of the Great Pumpkin

The Temple of the Great Pumpkin is guarded by two Scare Glows (because there can be more than one) as well as a Schleich Eldrador shadow bat and shadow wolf, who is Scare Glow’s pet. The Schleich Eldrador creatures go great with Masters of the Universe and other similar toylines and so many of the Masters of the Universe figures now have pets. The little skulls are offerings to the Great Pumpkin. On the right, we have Hagnon, the cursed ghost skeleton from the Mythic Legions toyline.

Mythic Legions is a fantasy toyline created by a company called Four Horseman Toy Design. The titular Four Horseman are freelance toy designers who have worked McFarlane Toys, Mattel and many other companies. For Mattel, they designed both the Masters of the Universe 200X and Classics toylines among other things. They also have their own toylines, most notably Mythic Legions and its SF cousin Cosmic Legions. The Mythic Legions figures go quite well with Masters of the Universe and some of them are quite obviously inspired by Masters of the Universe, so I have a few in my collection.  Mythic Legions also makes a lot of skeletons – in fact there is one faction of villains which basically consists of lots of different skeleton warriors. Last year, they also offered a set of four basic skeletons with some weapons and other accessories called Graveyard Skeletons. I pre-ordered that set, because you always need some generic skeletons for your heroes to fight or stumble upon in ancient crypts, though the Graveyard Skeletons were not delivered until spring this year, i.e. not exactly in time for Halloween.

I was happy enough with my Graveyard Skeletons as the Scare Glow’s army of Subternia. But then, approx. a week before Halloween, a German collectibles store had a sale of Mythic Legions, including many of the skeletons. And I might have gone a bit crazy on those skeletons, though I also bought a knight (not pictured, because I was in full spooky skeleton mode).

So behold the Boneyard:

The Boneyard

We have the four Graveyard Skeletons lined up in the back, led by Clavius (the red skeleton warrior) and Tibius (the skeleton warrior with the face paint), captains of Scare Glow’s army. There’s also Hagnon, the cursed ghost skeleton, and Turpiculus, the horned bone monster from your nightmares.

The new skeleton warriors only arrived the day before Halloween, but I still took the time to take some pictures before setting them up.

Clavius and Tibius, the skeleton warriors and captains of Scare Glow’s army. According to Mythic Legions lore, the reason Clavius is red is because he was resurrected by blood magic. No reason was given for Tibius’ face paint.

Hagnon, the cursed ghost skeleton. According to Mythic Legions lore, Hagnon was once a noble knight fighting the forces of evil, until he was captured, imprisoned, tortured and killed and then resurrected to fight on the side of the bad guys. In short, he is a tragic character.

Hagnon, looking very spectral and extra spooky. He is supposed to glow in the dark, but the glow is very faint. I took this picture by putting a flashlight behind him.

The Turpiculus a.k.a. Mr. Ugly, the multi-limbed horned bone monster from your nightmares.

Turpiculus from another angle, showing off his bony tail and his weapons.

According to Mythic Legions lore, the Turpiculi were an army of bone monsters conjured up by the Necronomicus, the God of Death. This creature came with four arms, two bone wings, two legs a tail and two different heads, one horned and one not horned, as well as a bunch of weapons. Mythic Legions parts are all interchangeable, so you can create all sorts of weird bone nightmares. Honestly, Turpiculus is an amazing figure. If you like bony horrors, consider getting one.

So I now had the spookiest window display in town – though I do want to add a Playmobil Martin Luther figure next year for the “But it’s Reformation Day” crowd.

ETA: Amazon Germany had the Playmobil Martin Luther in stock, so I ordered him and he can join the spooky window display and remind everybody that it’s Reformation Day, until I redecorate the window for Christmas in late November.

Meanwhile, on Halloween itself, I swept the steps leading up to the front door and also cleaned away the cobwebs the always form here in autumn. In the past two years, I took my Jack-o-Lantern and Poor Yorick, the skull, outside on Halloween and set them up next to the door. However, I didn’t want to mess up my window display. Besides, the canopy of my front door is leaking, dripping brownish water onto everything below, and I don’t want the Jack-o-Lantern and Poor Yorrick to acquire ugly brown stains. So the only decoration I put outside was a string of lights in the form of little ghosts. I picked it up for cheap, but it’s cute enough and signals “Yes, trick or treating is available here.”

I was just about to hang up the light string, when I saw a little boy in a ghost costume with his Dad lingering outside my house. I said, “Well, the light string isn’t up yet and I haven’t yet changed into my Halloween outfit (not a full costume, but a t-shirt with a print of Medusa accidentally turning some poor trick or treaters into stone), but I do have candy, so come on up.”

A selection of candy and chocolate for trick or treaters as well as a list I’m keeping of how many kids I get.

So this little boy became my first trick or treater at shortly before five PM, just before the sun was about to set.

The next trick or treaters arrived just after sunset (and once I had changed into my Halloween shirt), but while it was still light outside. This was a bunch of kids I knew, namely Zoe and Louis from next door as well as their cousin Linus and another kid I didn’t recognise, probably another cousin, as well as their parents. They all got their candy and happily trundled onwards.

Over the next hour – five to six PM – I had a steady trickle of trick or treaters. That’s standard, because normally the pace only picks up after six PM. I also realised that my doorbell is broken. The actual downstairs doorbell has been broken for a while and even Dad didn’t manage to fix it, which means that no one else will be able to. However, we also have a mechanical dog in the basement, basically just a loudspeaker that barks whenever someone rings the doorbell. Dad installed it and he really loved it and the mechnical dog is louder than the actual doorbell. However, turns out the mechanical dog has gone silent as well. Which means I have to get someone to fix the doorbell or install a new system if the old one turns out not to be fiaxable. I still have the radio doorbell, which my Dad rigged up, so Mom could call for assistance, so maybe that one can be repurposed.

However, after six PM the number of trick or treaters remained at a steady trickle. Last year, I could barely sit down and enjoy coffee and cookies before I had to get up again to open the door. Not so this year.  The number of trick or treaters did increase again after seven PM and while I ended the evening with a good number of trick or treaters – 37 altogether – it’s considerably less than last year and in 2023, when I had 52 and 47 respectively.

As for why I got fewer trick or treaters this year, it’s not the weather, because it was dry, not overly windy and not overly cold. I suspect part of the reason might be that Halloween was on a Friday this year and since Reformation Day is a public holiday in my part of Germany, this means we have a long holiday weekend, which means that a lot of family might have taken the opportunity for a short holiday and thus weren’t at home. Furthermore, I’m pretty sure that the local sports club was hosting a Halloween party. I can see their building from my house and it was lit up. So many kids might have simply gone to that party and other parties around town rather than going trick or treating. It’s certainly safer, especially since I saw a lot of cars going through my street well over the 30 kilometers per hour speed limit, even though there were kids out and about. This also explains why the number of trick or treaters suddenly went up after seven PM, which is most likely when the party would have ended.

At any rate, I did not run out of chocolate, though I did run low towards the end and got a bag of individually wrapped marzipan pieces from the basement, just in case I needed it. Shortly before eight PM, a little boy of maybe seven or eight rang the doorbell and I gave him the last three pieces of chocolate (normally kids get one mini-chocolate bar and one eyeball), since I thought he would be the last kid of the night. However, I still left the lights on, while I made myself dinner.

And then, at a quarter to nine, the doorbell rang again. I opened the door and saw two teenagers – a boy and a girl of about sixteen, most likely boyfriend and girlfriend – and a little boy of maybe ten who was most likely the girl’s little brother. They were all in costume, both the teenagers and the kid. I suspect they’d come home later from a party. I said, “Well, you’re lucky, cause I was just about to close up shop.” Then I opened my bag of marzipan and gave everybody two pieces. They were very grateful. Most likely they’d gotten an earful elsewhere about daring to trick or treat this late.

Agewise, my 37 trick or treaters ranged from Louis, the two-year-old neigbour kid, to teenagers of fifteen or sixteen. Some of the teenagers were accompanying younger siblings, though they often were in costume as well. In some cases, especially with some of the teen girls in elaborate costumes with little siblings in tow, I suspect that the little siblings were actually an excuse to go trick or treating. At any rate, teenage chaperones also got treats, though the parents, who accompanied some of the younger kids, didn’t. You could also usually tell the difference, because the parents hung back on the street or the driveway, whereas teenage chaperones came up to the door with their younger siblings.

Regarding costumes, most kids and teenagers made an afford and even some of the adults had a mask or a funny hat or a spooky shirt. Costumes were mostly still assembled the way my own childhood carnival and Halloween costumes were – some storebought parts like hats or masks or headbands combined with homemade costume parts. Full storebought costumes are still extremely rare. I had the usual gaggle of witches, vampires, skeletons and Ghostface from Scream, who’s become an integral part of Halloween culture, even though he’s only 29-years- old. A lot of the older teen girls were dressed in various gothicky, vaguely witchy outfits, which is also what I did when I hosted Halloween parties at home in the 1990s. I also got three Wednesday Addams. One was a redhead and one Middle Eastern girl, because kids from immigrant families go trick or treating, too. There also were two girls dressed up as an angel and a devil as well as a blood-splattered bride.

However, the costumes that most stand out were Art the Clown from the Terrifier movies and Elphaba from Wicked. Art the Clown was a boy of about fifteen who had to take off his mask, because he couldn’t see very well. “Oh, Art the Clown from Terrifier”, I said, because I made an attempt to admire every costume. “Art” was obviously pleased that an old lady like me recognised his costume and promptly showed me a toy gun. “Look, I’ve got a plastic gun, too.” “Very scary”, I said. Of course, this is Germany, so chances of him getting shot for brandishing a toy gun are extremely low. Note that on the day before Halloween, two German citizens from my region were shot at a plant of their company in Cleveland, Tennessee, by a disgruntled former coworker.  However, many years ago, some schoolmates of mine wanted to shoot a crime movie and so they ran around with toy guns outside of the local bank, which was closed for the weekend. Busybody neighbours called the police, who arrested them and gave them a warning about shooting films without permits.

Elphaba showed up at my door with their brother, who was dressed as a vampire, complete with elaborate facial make-up including little trickles of blood. The vampire was maybe eight or nine, Elphaba was about five or six and I think a boy, though it’s sometimes hard to tell with kids, especially in costume. At any rate, Elphaba was very proud of their costume and facial make-up. After Elphaba had realised that I recognised their costume, they insisted on showing off the glittery spiders on their pointy witch hat – which was not that different from the witch hat I wore in Biloxi 47 years ago, though mine didn’t have glittering spiders. And then Elphaba decided to curse me and turn me into a cow. So I mooed a couple of times to the delight of Elphaba, their vampire brother and their Dad.

In fact, the best thing about Halloween is the sheer joy of the kids at getting to dress up and collect candy. It was obvious how much they enjoyed it when I complimented them on their costumes. And whenever I opened the door – remember that my doorbell is broken, so I opened the door when I heard sounds outside – you could hear the laughter of kids all over the place. And if you have a problem with that, because you think Halloween is a commercialised import from the US and doesn’t fit into our culture and anyway, it’s Reformation day, then you’re the arsehole. Because honestly, who has problems with kids having fun?