THE HISTORY OF LAURA'S HOUSE OF HALLOWEEN

Laura's House of Halloween has had its ups and downs over the years. I started this website in 1998 via AOL, then moved to I believe Tripod, where it ended up getting deleted. I wish the timeline wasn't so fuzzy in my mind, but I believe it was around 2004 when I reopened my site on Earthlink. Come September and October I would quickly run out of bandwidth, and the website would go down during the busiest time of the year. It was frustrating to say the least, but at the time I couldn't afford better hosting. It wasn't until 2014 that I finally got a proper domain and good hosting, and I'd like to think the site has been thriving ever since!

I've made the conscious decision to keep the site looking as it did when it first launched. It's a relic of its time, and I realized just how much it is when recently I went searching for old Halloween sites I remembered and none of them exist anymore. In fact, even trying to find new Halloween fansites similar to mine came up with next to no results. It was then it hit me how much the internet has changed in the past twenty-five years. These kinds of fansites, personal webpages, and the like dominated the internet in the 90s. Search engines weren't very powerful back then. It was difficult to find what you were looking for. Exchanging links and using webrings (anyone remember those?) was the best way of getting the word out about your site. This was before social media, and yet this kind of "word of mouth" advertising was the most successful in my experience.

2023 marks the 25th anniversary of when my site launched. Sure, it had some downtime here and there but that's a long time for a website to exist. New pages have been added and it's ever expanding, but I love how it has remained "retro" in a lot of ways. For example, just through my general observations lately, sites don't use animated gifs in the same way anymore. Sure, there are animated gifs that are memes and mostly take from movies or shows or viral videos, but the clipart type animated gif is not nearly as prevalent as it once was. They were EVERYWHERE when folks first started making their own webpages in the 90s. In fact, it was so prevalent, the Simpsons even parodied it:

This clip is from 2000, the episode "The Computer Wore Menace Shoes". I'd like to hope my website isn't that obnoxious ;)

I always loved Halloween as a kid, but it was mostly a one-day event. My sister and I would hang up the old die-cut spooky pictures (man I miss those!) and we might watch a few scary movies, but it wasn't a month-long (or longer) event like Christmas was. It was a very "contained" holiday. But horror was something I loved year-round. I especially loved horror stories/books and would often read the series Scary Stories To Tell In Dark as well as anything by Daniel Cohen. I also used to write horror short stories as a kid, even as young as five years-old. Horror was in my blood from when I was very young--maybe even since birth! I liked the excitement of being scared. I liked questioning the what-ifs surrounding ghosts and strange happenings. When you're a kid anything is possible and not even the sky is the limit. Halloween reminds me of that childhood wonder and mysticism, and nothing triggers my nostalgia senses more than Halloween. 

However, I didn't start reeeeeally celebrating it until I was 14, and it really took off when I was 15. I'd go all out with decorations. I spent all of October watching scary movies, shows, and Halloween specials--literally anything I could get my hands on I would consume! Back then, I would stock up on blank VHS tapes and record anything and everything Halloween-related off of TV. These tapes served as my traditions for years to come, committing to watching every tape every year. I also would write scary stories and novels during October, as well as doing tons of craft projects (I swear, it feels like you have so much more time when you're young!). I began making mixed tapes, then CD's of all my favorite spooky songs. In 1997, one of our local radio stations played a marathon of "Halloween songs" on Halloween, I taped them all, and that served as a basis for my Halloween soundtrack the following year, and to this day I listen to those same songs in the same order they were played on the radio that year. Weird to think about!

As part of my new obsession with Halloween, in 1998 I made Laura's House of Halloween. The name simply came from my desire to have a Halloween house party where everyone who loves Halloween was invited! I wanted a site that reminded me of childhood, when scares were safe and cozy and exciting. As someone who started really suffering from anxiety around the age of 11 and onward, I've longed for that comfy-cozy feeling throughout my life, and Halloween consistently gives that to me :') It's like a feeling of coming home, so the title of my site is all the more apt!

Thank you to all who have visited over the years! You're always welcome here :)