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Your Next Halloween Playlist - House of Spirits
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items Forget “Ghostbusters” and “Spooky.” Here you'll discover the true haunting ballads and Ecto-rock bangers that you won't hear on any other Halloween Party track stack. Get the Dead Man's Party started.
Sections
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Oh, Whistle and I'll Come to You
Worse Things Waiting
Oh, Whistle and I'll Come to You
The best and mostly true urban legends behind these disembodied voices
True story. Lead singer Johnette Napolitano had the hots for an icy phantom in her shower at the haunted Driskill Hotel, Austin's version of the Overlook.
Ghost of a Texas Ladies' Man by Concrete Blonde
Expand your list of Super- groups (Supergrass, Supersonic, Super Furry bin Animals, it never ends) for this band from the Research Triangle in NC. The song was inspired by (sort of) living through the pandemic.
City of the Dead by Superchunk
Metaphorical? Allegorical? Anything is possible with Art Alexakis. This story is real though. After his girlfriend crossed over, he filled his pockets with sand and headed for the piers at Santa Monica.
Santa Monica by Everclear
Tell everyone this is told from the viewpoint of the Vanishing Hitchhiker, told in "Laurie (Strange Things Happen) sung by Dickie Lee and based on the (true?) ghost story by 15 year old Cathie Harmon. Iggy said it was inspired by David Bowie and Jim ...
The Passenger by Iggy Pop
Writer Larry Roquemore said this was a nod to the uban legend in Dallas/Fort Worth about the hook hand lurker, who also inspired the movie “Scream.”
Night Of The Phantom by Larry & The ...
Yeah, no. Spoilers don't apply after 41 years. Bernard Sumner (no relation to Sting) said he wanted to write a “redneck song” and came up with this mixture of "The Phantom Regiment" urban legend and an Appalachian Hant.
Love Vigilantes by New Order
C'mon now. You have to call this the best Nigerian Civil War song you've ever heard, co-written by a mercenary who was there, fighting for cash in Africa, with Jackson Browne in the choir. No doubt the restless spirit of Washington Irving with his “L...
Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner by Warren Zevon
The party was starting to fade away, so shock it back to life. Maybe you remember Leonardo DiCaprio playing Jim Carroll in the biopic “The Basketball Diaries.” This list of his posthumous friends is his version of a poem of the same name by Ted Berri...
People Who Died by The Jim Carroll Band
Mark Everett, aka E, wrote this after losing his entire family. First his father, renowned physicist Hugh Everett who originated the Many Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, sometimes referred to as the Multiverse. Then his mother and, during...
Last Stop: This Town by Eels
True story. A mysterious woman in a long, dark veil, Princess Orvella, really did visit the grave of Rudolf Valentino once a night every year for three decades. Hitmaker Marijohn Wilkin wrote this with her helper Danny Dill, combining the story of th...
Long Black Veil by The Chieftains featuring Mick Jagger
Breaking my own rules here with a double shot of Jagger, but we only live twice. Keith Richards and Mick were only mucking about with country twangs, but the story goes that a fan really did send him dead flowers and he had to puzzle out what that me...
Dead Flowers by The Rolling Stones
If “Disturbing Behavior” brought you here, you're in the right spot. The song was inspired by bar pickup fails, but the film correctly identified the sound of creepy disembodied spirits inhabiting its chorus of howls.
Got You (Where I Want You) by The Flys
Musically, I'm going way outside my comfort zone on this one but it does, briefly, rock, and a man passes his own shadow by the back stage door. Also, there's the Twilight Zone-ish suggestion that he is condemned to forever enact this ritual because ...
Juke Box Hero by Foreigner
As this list nears its inevitable demise, we need to get our blood pumping again if we want to return to the land of the living. The death of Buddy Holly brought this song to life, written by Crickets lead guitar and post-Holly vocalist Sonny Curtis....
I Fought the Law by The Clash
So many ways this could end. So many ghost songs that deserve to be put to their eternal rest. Let's let the dead bury the dead and march on, head high, with an anthem to life, by the man who danced too long, too perilously on the precipice between o...
Disappear by INXS
Worse Things Waiting
Witches vs. phantoms
Need All The Help I Can Get by Primitives