From the Editors: Oct. 2026

IMDb

What’s your horror origin story? Was it a scary movie (like Lady In White, pictured here, was for our editor)? Or a spooky tale you couldn’t shake? Or was it a real life horror story, like the storm that hit Erie’s northern neighborhoods last month?

The Halloween issue of the Reader is always one of our most celebrated and anticipated – everyone looks forward to embracing those eerie parts of our city, learning some spooky lore, while simultaneously enjoying a killer cover by the infamous "Monster" Mark Kosobucki – and this issue is no exception.

This month, much of our content hovers around those things that give us a chill – horror movies, graveyards, the macabre, and the like. In Jonathan Burdick's story this month ("Fright at First Sight: Why We Are Drawn to Fear for Fun" on page 16) he corresponded with three locals who have, in one way or another, made horror a regular part of their daily lives. Among discussions of their favorite horror genres, films, and books, he also talked about their horror origin stories. Everyone has one – it is a universal American childhood requirement to watch or read something that sticks with you, in some dark recess of your brain, for the rest of your life. Not everyone will turn that into a lifestyle, of course – but there is always that one memory. It might be the movie you watched at a sleepover that kept you from falling asleep that night (and maybe many subsequent nights) or that spooky story someone read to you with a flashlight at their chin. Even vintage episodes of Unsolved Mysteries or The X Files could be enough to cause childhood nightmares for weeks.

For me it was the movie Lady in White, released in 1988. I remember very little of the plot, actually, but there was one particular scene of this skeletal old lady, clad in white rags, eerily floating on a creepy-ass staircase. My childhood bedroom was in a loft-like space at the top of our staircase. You can probably already see how this went – little me would lie awake at night STARING at the top of those steps, convinced this raggedy lady was going to come floating up there at any moment. When art can get into your head like that, whether you're a horror fan or not, that's something special.

This month, I wrote a story about Erie's forgotten graveyards ("The Bones Beneath Our Feet: Erie's City of the Dead" on page 20) – and there are A LOT of them. Really, at any given time or place in Erie, you could be standing on a grave – given the number of people who lived, trod, and died on the land upon which Erie is built, throughout human history. I was talking to a friend of mine who grew up on Merline Avenue and distinctly remembers being freaked out as a kid by the abandoned cemetery a block away from her house, tucked into a little copse of woods directly next to a neighbor's house in an otherwise normal, residential area. This kind of space is primed for childhood terror – and local historian Mark Steg shares his own childhood story of getting scared out of his wits at this resting place – quite possibly his origin story – which eventually turned into a lifelong fascination with forgotten cemeteries.

I sometimes wonder what the horror origin stories of my own children will be. My teenage daughter has definitely gone through the slumber-party horror-movie fright initiation, but my 8-year-old son? He's not quite there yet. If you asked him about one of the scariest nights of his life, he might tell you about a storm that hit our neighborhood the night of Sept. 2, 2026: How the power went out in the middle of the night and stayed out for two more days, how he heard intense, howling winds, pummeling hail, cracking tree limbs, how he eventually woke up to a neighborhood in peril – and spent the better part of the next day hearing the grown-ups around him talking to neighbors, family, and friends about the destruction. About seeing a tree that crushed a house he knows, on the corner of our block, someone's bedroom, and how that person narrowly missed that oak tree's deadly 150-year-old destructive weight because they happened to be in the next room over. I also think about how many more destructive storms he'll have to endure throughout his lifetime – how many more ancient trees he'll see felled as a result of the changing climate and how little those in power seem to care about his future on this planet.

While I hope what he ultimately takes away from his storm experience are memories of neighbors helping neighbors, and a city coming together to get everyone back up and running and to safety as quickly as possible – I can't help but worry. I worry that every time the power goes out – or inevitably when another storm strikes – he'll remember that day in 2026 and the fear he felt. What keeps me up at night these days isn't that lady in white from my childhood – it's that the future, his future, so often feels scarier than a horror movie.