Whether displayed on darkened windows, ceilings or bathroom doors, or even guarding the ATM machine, club proprietors hope that all patrons will hail the monsters of All Hallows Eve, as their staffs decorate with the creatures to get ready for one of their hottest nights.
Here are examples of what you already can see at various venues:
— Halloween goes classic Hollywood at Dick’s Bar and Grill, with a nearly lifesize plastic figure of Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz plastered on a window, among other caricatures and spider webs. Meanwhile, at the Green Mill, a skull draped up high over a spider web looked much like The Great and Powerful Oz himself. He probably will have dominion over any badly behaving patrons.
— Also seen around area nightclubs are vintage tin-type photos like those from a previous century, which as you pass-by and change the angle of viewing have eyes that roll back and produce a zombie — in one case positioned just a few feet away from a specially designated “zombie crossing zone,” which is just another few feet from a particular kind of fine-boned skeleton — not too tall or too small. Dozens of the latter hang from the ceiling at Dick’s, and they can be seen in smaller numbers elsewhere. The skeletons are in exactly the same style I’ve put on my gently sloped Halloween roof for years.
— On one area bathroom door, there is a sexy vampire ready to suck the life out of you. On another venue’s bathroom door, there is the other end of the hottie spectrum, an old hag ready to, literally, suck the life out of you in a less enjoyable way. (Interestingly, on the bathroom door opposite that first vampire is a mummy which is, obviously, dead),
— All around town are moss-like thicknesses of spider webs, with plastic spiders attached. At the Village Inn in North Hudson, the webs are atop the ATM machine, with the arachnids placed just to the side, in case a cash crunch bites you.
— Also at The Village, a ghost hanging from high over the far-end bar rail is in position to drag its “feet” on your head as you order. Across the way are all kinds of “dead end” signs wrapped around a thick pillar … well, I guess you might end up dead if you run into it hard. Back at Dick’s, there was a similar cautionary police line that sported striking snakes and … mice? Is that vermin actually verbatim?
— On consecutive days and nights, you could see a cashier witch sporting a pointed black hat — with plenty of orange and black feathers. For as it says on the marquee outside Historic Casanova Liquors, “We don’t have cashiers, we have spirit guides.”
— And then there’s the foot-wide orange spider at Dick’s that started living out the season’s activity by crawling downward on a door. Then it gave up the ghost, resting in peace instead. As seen hanging from the ceiling, the joint is crawling with such creatures.
— Is it simply a typo or, to reference a band that befits the coming holiday, an ode to Type O Negative? While you won’t exactly drink blood, signs seen at Dick’s list Schell Oktoberfest as the beer of the month, but say the hard-to-beat special is only “vaild” through 10 p.m. One sign added the beer is spelled Shell — like some of the popular fish they serve. Pardon an additional European reference, but with Halloween fast approaching, that first typo reminds one of Val the Impaler.
Adding to this, a band named Roughhouse that has played a lot locally, especially at the Willow River Saloon in Burkhardt, boasts a member who was with a hard-core metal outfit called Impaler a couple of decades back. Alas, they will not play The Willow on Halloween weekend, although they were there earlier in October, but acts that will perform amongst the cowboy silhouette decor include the Country Outlaws on Friday evening and, much in the same vein, Strangers on Saturday.
— Talk about going from bad to worse, in the style of an old Iron Maiden song, The Number of the Beast, written about a fateful and horrific encounter with the Devil while on an evening stroll. Not to say that a traffic stop is quite that bad, but it can seem like, say, hell on wheels compared to more pleasant trips. There was, one October, an unlucky motorist stopped by the cops on the Lake Mallalieu bridge, and bearing a license number recalling that song that started with 666. Damn the luck! Hope your’s is better when you check out the sights on or before All Hallows Eve.