A True Halloween Legend

Welcome readers, one and all! I am your host, Combover Vlad, here to guide you through a rather eerie (but quite true, I assure you!) Halloween tale.

But first, a few words about me: Don’t let my uniquely unusual appearance unnerve you. After several thousands of years being undead, you’d have to expect my hairline to recede just a little. But despite the growing forehead, I must admit to a vestige of vampire vanity, hence the tux with waistcoat under a serrated cape. (I think black is really my go-to color, don’t you?)

Nearly two centuries ago, I decided a Romanian comb-over looked better than a cheap Transylvanian toupée. Or a huge gnarly cascade of twisted Draclocks. But I sense by your cowering in the closet that there’s still something about my gypsy nose, bracketed as it is by saber canines and a pair of outsize swirling bloodshot hypno-eyes, that sets your heart a-thumping. Fear not, my friends. My role here is merely that of interlocutor of the interred, ready — with a dramatic sweep of my caped arm — to explain and expound upon this unfolding fall legend.

It all began a long, long time ago in a land far, far away . . .

Cleveland, Ohio of all places, back before I can even remember.

There was this dude, a real polymath. (No, I don’t mean that he stitched numerals of synthetic fabric.) I mean the dude had lots of varied skills and interests. Like calculus and touch football and science fiction and painting and stamp collecting and tree-climbing and architecture and spearmint leaves and jigsaw puzzles and reading and bad jokes and trivia and cartooning and Sudoku and correct spelling (of all things!).

Well, you can imagine what might happen if you were to cram all of that weird stuff inside an average-sized cranium and let it stew for half a century or more! You’d get lots of new neurons, ganglia ganging up on each other, synapses snapping away, and a rebellin’ cerebellum. It didn’t take long before the dude was spitting out more weird thoughts than Amazon does cardboard boxes!

So, of course he created me. And my two cousins, Draculaus and Kringlestein. And Zombie Nick. And Claustrodamus. And Happy Ghost Donut. And Phil Spectre.

But then he really wigged out and went on a careening cartooning tear, creating the Butt Ox, the World’s First Earthscraper, the Whopper Spaniel, and Aging Stripper Tonya Torpedos, to name just a few.

And that’s not all: the dude also started lecturing on the North Pole, Architecture, Building Codes, How to Be Pope, Sustainability, Green Roofs, Complete Jerks, and How to Talk to Women and Live to Tell!

I tell ya, we gotta stop this guy! There’s no telling what he’ll conjure up this October 31^st! Beware!