The most hopeful thing I saw this October wasn't a ghost. It was people trying on masks.
Kids, adults, teenagers, grandmothers showing up as a coven of witches. People looking for a scare, an outfit, or a little encouragement before committing to being someone else for the night. In the Spirit Halloween stores where I worked security, I watched personalities come out along with the costumes. Compliments got thrown around. Friends offered feedback. Someone's favorite movie character became a reason to talk.
For a little while, being unusual was the point. Nobody needed a business case for it.
Almost all work, a little play
October has always been my favorite: fall foliage, birthday memories, haunted places and the stories that come with them. This year, I managed to turn a lot of that leisure into work. Scare Week for Apres Leisure kept me busy, and I started security consulting work that brought a few unexpected October experiences of its own.
Almost all work, no play. Or, at least, trying to make work feel like play. Apparently I needed my own reminder.
Spirit was a good place to get one. I liked watching younger people come out of their shells, finding that the alternative style or odd character they loved was welcome there. No changing rooms, no chairs, but plenty of masks and plenty of opinions from friends. A temporary store full of temporary identities somehow made room for people to be a little more themselves.
Then came the contrast. I watched people wait in a line that stretched across the store, give a few dollars at checkout, and walk out looking at their phones, missing the exit signs with me standing right there. Present for a moment, gone the next. I could recognize the pull. There's always another message, another task, another place your head is supposed to be.
We make a sprint out of the fun, too. Find the costume. Get to the night. Make the memory. Then the season disappears, the store goes quiet, and it's back to everything else.
I don't think the part worth keeping has to disappear with it.
The other kind of spirit
My grandfather's ghost story around a campfire in England helped start my fascination with the paranormal. I've gone on the tours, heard the stories, watched the movies and done a little amateur hunting. I like hearing where people draw the line between being open to something and needing an experience of their own.
This October supplied a place to test my curiosity: an old Elks Lodge on a security assignment. A colleague warned me to avoid it. Other guards had stories about voices, figures and strange experiences. Those were their accounts, not things I could verify.
My own visit was less cinematic. I got a daytime tour through upper floors that felt like office space left behind in the '80s or '90s. An elk head on the wall added to the atmosphere. Afterward, I had an unusual headache and felt light-headed for the rest of the day. On another visit, I tripped outside, dropped my keys, phone and radio, and couldn't find the keys despite help searching.
A haunting? I can't tell you that. An unsettling building and a set of experiences I still wonder about? Yes.
When management tried to pull me into a graveyard shift there, curiosity and common sense had something to discuss.
But the question I came away with wasn't only whether something follows us through an old building. It was what we carry back into ordinary life.
A little permission to be human
The real world has enough fear and division without an animatronic adding to it. I'm not pretending a costume fixes any of that. But I don't want to dismiss what I watched in those stores, either: people making room for one another's weirdness, giving a compliment, asking an opinion, sharing a laugh.
Small stuff. Real stuff.
That's where I find some hope. Not in a grand declaration that humanity is going to be fine, but in the ways people still reach for one another when there's a little room to play.
Halloween gives us an excuse. You can be the strange one, the funny one, the character you've loved for years. You get to bring something out that the workday doesn't usually ask for. Maybe the costume isn't always about becoming someone else. Sometimes it's a way to show people something they've been missing about you.
That's the idea I want Apres Leisure to make room for year-round.
Your best leisure self
Work asks us to be useful. It doesn’t always leave much room to be unusual. I think we lose something when those become opposites. The people around us bring more than the role we happen to know them in.
That’s part of what I’m exploring with Apres Leisure: a little permission to carry that off-the-clock self into the rest of life. An Apres Avatar should feel like recognition, not another perfect version of yourself to keep up with. Your nickname, your favorite pet, a place that matters, the personal legend your people already understand.
That is what I want to keep from October: the curiosity, the permission to play, the small moments when strangers stop being strangers. The spirit, without needing to leave the rest of ourselves behind.
If you could carry one part of your Halloween self into the rest of the year, what would it be?
Explore the Apres Leisure shop.
For a playful place to start, take the Apres Leisure legend quiz. Six questions, a lore match, and no email needed to see your result. It’s a bit of play, not a personality test or a custom Avatar generator.
