For me, the best Holiday of the year is Halloween. The holiday may only last a single night, but the entire month of October can be used to surround yourself in all the guilty pleasure horror stuff that will put you in the right Halloween mindset.

4) Watch the terrible movies now.

Halloween the time where we love to watch the great horror films. Things like Halloween, The Conjuring, and Insidious. But there’s enjoyment to be had in the terrible movies. I like to save the really good stuff for late October, but to ease into the month, I watch terrible stuff first. I don’t have any particular recommendations, but the truly bottom-of-the-barrel horror movies are usually on Netflix. Just grab some friends and watch some garbage.

3) Read a horror-story collection

Novels and short stories don’t always have that Halloween vibe we’re looking for, but they can still be genuinely creepy. Very long and suspenseful horror novels are great, but what I like to do is have little bite-sized stories before Halloween. There is no shortage of horror story collections. Anybody can walk into any bookstore and find dozens of them. I personally recommend Everything’s Eventual by Stephen King, but there are various collections that contain works by multiple authors if you want a little more variety.

2) Research Urban Legends

Urban legends are fascinating, and extremely popular on the internet. I like to find local urban legends and read up on them. Sure, ninety-nine percent of the time they’re completely fabricated stories, but interesting nonetheless. Here in West Virginia, the most popular urban legend is ‘The Mothman,’ but there are various other legends to look out for all over the world. If you can’t find local urban legends, just look anything you can get your hands on. The ‘Slenderman’ pictures were popular for a while, but has since become a cliché. However, this might be a good place to start if you want to find some really weird stuff.

1) Talk to your extremely superstitious friend about ghosts

We all probably know at least one person who is absolutely fascinated by ghosts and paranormal investigations. You might believe that their stories are either exaggerated, or that the things they’ve seen can be easily explained somehow. But talk to them anyway, and hear what they have to say. Even if you don’t even slightly believe in ghosts, if you talk to this person about ghosts long enough, their stories will leave you paranoid. You won’t be able to help but think, ‘what if they’re right?’