have you seen Halloween go wrong at work?

by Alison Green on October 10, 2024

I’m writing a column for later this month about the ways Halloween at work can go wrong and want to hear your stories.

Did your coworker get fired for refusing to remove his unicorn mask to get through security? Did your office put up decorations so grisly that they were traumatizing people? Did a coworker show up in a racist or otherwise offensive costume, or have to deliver bad news to a patient while dressed as a sexy Bridezilla? Did a colleague get fired for treat-or-treating in an important meeting?

Please share in the comment section!

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{ 672 comments… read them below }

  1. ChurchOfDietCoke*

    There is, as far as I am aware, still a (presumably gradually fading) bright orange stain on a rather nice conference table in the office of Old!Job, caused by someone who brought in cupcakes for a Halloween cake sale. Said cupcakes contained rather more orange food colouring than the recipe may have suggested, and it leached out of the cakes, through the paper cases, and onto the table.

    I didn’t eat one. I’m not sure anything that can stain wood that badly and quickly would be good for my digestive tract…

    1. Watry*

      There is likely still a red stain on my former supervisor’s office window, in the shape of some silly haunted house decorations. They were sticky gel, and I guess the dye transferred.

      1. i am a human*

        One of my children once took a gel decoration from the window at my parents’ house and laid it on their brand new Amish-made oak dining room table. The dye definitely transferred. I was mortified. I can’t remember how they got it out, but they did!

        1. Crooked Bird*

          This is a different wood-stain issue, but when the finish on a piece of furniture gets one of those white water stains, the cure is to rub the spot with MAYO. I got this inches-wide, years-old water stain out with it. I couldn’t believe it!

          Just thought people might like to know.

          4. The Prettiest Curse*

            Equal quantities of olive oil and distilled white vinegar also works. Mix them together throughly and apply with a soft cloth. You don’t need much and it works really well!

              1. The Prettiest Curse*

                Ha, just don’t try it with any other type of vinegar unless you want to create a salad dressing that creates new furniture stains!

          6. Princess Sparklepony*

            It needs to be full fat mayo to really do the job right. I had a water spill stain and was trying to fix it with what I had on hand – low fat mayo. It worked eventually, but it took longer. It’s one of the reasons I switch to full fat mayo, just in case.

          8. Marion Ravenwood*

            I have some water marks on my wooden dining table. I might give this a go at lunchtime. Will report back!

          10. Tana*

            This thread is cracking me up. You could also just buy some Old English, y’know the wood polish that your grandparents probably had? It’s the fat/oils that does it. Bonus: it smells like lemon, not mayo.

        2. Artemesia*

          We repainted the wall of a vacation rental when our kids put those dang things on the wall — they were not misbehaving — they and we were under the impression the things were safe to play with. I couldn’t get it clean, so I bought a quart of paint and repainted the wall.

      2. Funko Pops Day*

        I put up sticky gel red hand prints on a wall for a party, and the dye transferred. No problem, I have magic erasers…nope. At least I have touch up paint? Nope, now I just have ‘bloody’ hand prints seeping through the paint… Finally figured out that I needed an oil-based primer (like what you need for water stains) before repainting, and that did the trick.

          1. Rainbow Reports*

            Thanks for the tip! Our pantry has what appears to be a stain from a spilled food coloring bottle. I painted over it a dozen times and it kept coming through. I’ll have to try the oil based primer. That actually sounds like it would work.

            1. Cardboard Marmalade*

              A pantry sounds like a place without much ventilation, so make sure you set up a strong fan or something before you start. Anything that will really cover up stains like that is also going to have the kind of fumes that, best case scenario, make you feel quite ill.

      3. LadyVet*

        I spilled a drink containing red food coloring near the elevator of my campus library (thankfully I didn’t get any books) during a work-study shift. I know the stain was mostly covered when I was back in town a few years after graduating, but I’m not sure now.

    2. DrSalty*

      We had a very vibrantly colored Halloween cake once at work that turned everyone’s pee a lurid shade of yellow. I don’t know how the topic came up, but I walked into the break room the next day and a group of coworkers were sitting around laughing about it. They asked me about my experience, and I told them I thought I was just really dehydrated!

    3. Zombeyonce*

      I’m just imagining all the orange teeth people must have had after eating those cupcakes. An office full of beavers!

    4. Reluctant Mezzo*

      I still have a stain on my kitchen table from an Easter-related food coloring malfunction…

      3. learnedthehardway*

        The only problem with the employer was the issue of live bats in the office. That’s a health and safety situation.

        1. T.N.H*

          I thought LW might be an unreliable narrator on that one and assumed the bats were on the land but not necessarily anywhere near actual humans. Especially in a rural area, office buildings often sit next to areas suitable to wildlife.

    2. Carole from Accounts*

      Halloween gone wrong but gone right?

      A company I worked for went all in for Halloween, each department picked a theme to decorate their desks and wore costumes. There was a competition with prizes. Most of us in accounts were Type A ladies who shared a brainwave and completed each other’s sentences, etc. We decided to decorate our department like Candyland and dress up as M&M’s. The Candyland deskscape was magnificent and all of us showed up on October 31st with either a store bought M&M costume or a colourful sweatshirt with an M on it… except for our one new colleague. He showed up dressed up as Eminem. The look on our faces and his face as it dawned on all of us that we had verbally communicated all of the ideas, and he hadn’t put the candy+candyland theme together and literally thought we were all dressing up as Marshall Mathers!

      So we decided for our contest presentation of the theme he would rap along to “Lose Yourself” while throwing out Candyland cards like money and we would all dance like his backup act while walking through the board game we’d built in our department. It was so amazing and we won the contest. People were laughing about it so much, and still talked about it years later.

      3. Anne of Green Gables*

        This is absolutely amazing. I cannot overemphasize how much I love this, and the amazing images it has brought to my head. I love that you all went with it.

      4. It's me, hi, I'm the comments, it's me*

        Not just *actually* laughing out loud, but also laughing so hard that I’m crying. This story just gets better and better.

  3. CityMouse*

    I will say most places I worked maybe someone brought donuts and someone maybe had a witch hat or Jedi robes but elaborate costumes or involved decorations weren’t really a thing. I was sort of under the impression the big elaborate costumes at work were just a TV thing.

    1. Generic Username*

      I would also say the elaborate costumes at work are mostly a TV thing and the problems happen when someone doesn’t know their office’s holiday norms and takes inspiration from television show tropes. I think a lot of workplace weirdness comes from people thinking real-world office life is just like their favorite television shows…

      1. Lana Kane*

        I think this is true. I worked in an office where most of the staff really loved Halloween so we had team costumes and contests, but there was no pressure to participate. I’m not a Halloween person but I participated in these because everyone was genuinely excited and very chill about those who wanted to sit it out.

        My team was comprised of several women and one guy so we dressed up as the Bachelor cast one year. Somewhere I have a picture of all of us with the bachelor holding a rose, and I was wearing a cheesy cheap dress I got on clearance at Ross lol That was about 20 years ago, I’m sure the Bachelor theme won’t fly nowadays! But to the original point – this was an office where it was part of the culture and management was cool with it.

        1. ICodeForFood*

          Yeah, I have worked in more than one place (and they were corporate, too, rather than small businesses) where they had a costume contest as a way of team building and encouraging engagement. Never had any spectacular weirdness, though… Can’t wait to see what appears in these comments!

        2. AnotherOne*

          working retail, we’d do costumes. being in an office, now it’s pretty much just subtle halloween touches. (think spider hair clips)

        3. I Have RBF*

          One place I worked had a costume contest every year. The year I won is when I, AFAB, dressed as a lumberjack, complete with homemade binder and false beard. People didn’t know who I was until I spoke. The other winner was a guy who dressed up as a cheerleader, with short skirt and pompoms, along with his beard. It was a lot of fun.

          1. FlyingAce*

            I dressed up as a killer lumberjack once! It was very last-minute – a plaid shirt, jeans and boots (all things I already owned) and an axe made out of a stick, cardboard and aluminum foil. Add fake blood stains and all set :D

        4. William Murdoch's Homburg*

          My workplace used to have a pumpkin carving contest. Different departments participated and then folks voted on the best one and the winning department got a pizza lunch. I have fond memories of the year our department won; the most artistic one of us carved a pumpkin to look like Cinderella’s carriage and set it up complete with thread-spool wheels stuck on with toothpicks. The noble steed was a small rubber pig that someone randomly found hiding in a drawer, harnessed with tack that a coworker and I MacGyvered out of masking tape and spare shelf brackets.

        5. Trans-lational*

          Mine doesn’t pull out all the stops, but roughly 2/3 of my coworkers are super nerds. They love the chance to pull out their Comic-Con outfits.

      3. anotherfan*

        Yeah, while the ad staff can dress up to their heart’s content, we in the news side just didn’t because we were apt to run out to a fatal fire and you don’t want to be dressed up for something like that.

      4. My Costume Is...Myself*

        Everywhere I have worked, 90% of people don’t care and just act totally normal on Halloween. 9% do something lowkey but festive, like a sweater or ghost earrings or something.
        The 1% is the person who comes fully decked out in an inappropriate costume, who then looks like a weirdo in all their meetings.

        The most notable examples in my memory are:
        – Temp employee who showed up in full on Rick costume (from Rick and Morty), during the time where Rick and Morty was mildly controversial and really… said something about the kind of person he was. He had worked at the company for at least 6 months at that point and really should have been able to figure out that no one else would be dressed up.
        – Top exec who had an extremely detailed costume of the clown from It, complete with face makeup and balloon. It was so creepy that everyone joined in meetings virtually from their desks to avoid being in the same room with him. Again, NO ONE ELSE was dressed up. Incredibly cringe (and now after this person’s departure from the company, we can look back and laugh).

        1. Goldenrod*

          “It was so creepy that everyone joined in meetings virtually from their desks to avoid being in the same room with him. Again, NO ONE ELSE was dressed up.”

          Sounds terrifying…But I have to admit, I admire the big swing!

      5. goddessoftransitory*

        I think so as well. The main problem being is that most work cannot be done easily wearing an elaborate costume. It’s one thing to don it for pictures or a contest, quite another to wear during an eight hour day.

        A few years ago Husband and I dressed up as Dracula and Mina Harker and I bought a lovely Victorian-style long nightgown to wear for it (along with knee length stocking/socks and other accoutrements.) What I didn’t really get until I put that tent on is that one thing that era’s sleepwear was designed for was RETAINING BODY HEAT. Ten minutes in that thing and I was dying–if I hadn’t changed right after we had our picture taken I would have collapsed across my keyboard in short order. And that wasn’t wearing a mask or wig or anything else elaborate.

        1. Reluctant Mezzo*

          One year our winner was a Victorian Ghost Bride. Since she was small and child-like looking in real life, the effect was super creepy. Miss Havisham would have run away in terror.

      6. Ace in the Hole*

        I would also guess a lot depends on the type of work you do.

        For example, no one at my current job would dress in costume because it would be a safety hazard and also get covered in grime within the first hour. I have trouble imagining anyone even trying… but if they did they’d be sent home.

        When I worked at a sandwich shop we were encouraged to wear costumes within certain guidelines – nothing that would cause a food safety issue, no masks, nothing too revealing or scary. But swapping your uniform cap for a witch’s hat or wearing a purple suit and some clown makeup would be fine.

        And when I worked at a university tutoring center, we could go all out with elaborate costumes. Our supervisor showed up dressed as a pumpkin one year, the department head complimented my light-up jellyfish costume, etc.

    2. Lana Kane*

      A coworker showed up one year in a full on Marie Antoinette costume. It certainly was something in a medical billing office.

            3. Rain, Disappointing Australian (formerly Lucien Nova)*

              If you two could see the face I just made, you’d be laughing for days. :D

            1. Kendall^2*

              Worth checking out the tabletop game Guillotine, with the tag line “Where you win by getting ahead!”

            1. AFac*

              Didn’t the Paris Olympics Opening Ceremony have a bit with ‘decapitated’ singers holding their own heads?

              2. Global Cat Herder*

                That part of the Olympics Opening Ceremony, we referred to as “we did it before and we’ll do it again”. It was so bonkers that it could have won Eurovision.

            2. Sleepy Holloween*

              A post-decapitation Marie Antoinette would make a perfect partner for the Headless Horseman!

              1. Rain, Disappointing Australian (formerly Lucien Nova)*

                If this doesn’t actually exist as a fanfic somewhere, it should.

              2. The Prettiest Curse*

                Anne Boleyn goes one better. I was just reading that, every year on the anniversary of her execution, the ghost of Anne Boleyn supposedly appears at Blickling Hall, the house where she was born. She appears at midnight in a carriage driven by a headless horseman (probably not THE Headless Horseman, but this is ghost lore so anything’s possible) and pulled by four headless horses. She then exits the carriage and wanders through every room in the house till the sun comes up.

                1. Dawn*

                  For the record, a Dullahan is the generic term (species name?) for a non-specific headless horseman, it’s drawn from Irish mythology.

                  THE headless horseman is, I believe, an American myth.

    3. Karo*

      It fully depends on the office. I worked at a business-casual office pre-pandemic (so, not super stuffy but not particularly informal either) and every Halloween there was a catered lunch party with costume contests. My more recent jobs (both more casual) have nothing of the sort, and you’d probably get looked at askance if you wore anything more festive than fun earrings.

    4. Bast*

      I worked for a company where Halloween was a thing. Like, a giant thing. It was an overall toxic and miserable place, and this was one of the few good days of the year. For half a day, the office was essentially shut down, we had a HUGE costume contest (and some people were very original with homemade costumes, full make up, etc) and lunch. This has not been the case anywhere else that I worked, but some offices really do it up. It was a younger office though –the vast majority of folks were under 40.

      1. Mouse named Anon*

        Everywhere I have worked has been toxic and had a great Halloween party LOL. One place even had an after hours (optional) Halloween party for kids. They also had a fantastic Breakfast with Santa for kids too. Terrible place to work, but they loved to throw a themed party.

    5. Pay no attention...*

      Halloween costumes are a big thing where I work, but I’m in higher ed and we have a full costume contest on campus for students, faculty, staff, even pets. People are very creative. I think last year a CVS Receipt won. I have no idea if they wear them all day or just change for the competition — probably a little of both. People even organize group costumes. So far, no giant mishaps that I’m aware of.

      1. Zephy*

        My work (also higher ed) has had a costume contest the last few years. I won one year for a “spider” costume – I wore a dark gray wool dress with a removable belt, to which I attached some “legs” made out of socks stuffed with plastic bags, strung those up on fishing line that I attached to my hands so they would move with me. I just took the belt off while actually working and then put it on for the contest. Got two free tickets to a reimagined version of The Nutcracker done as modern dance instead of ballet (still to the Tchaikovsky score).

      2. goddessoftransitory*

        I used to live in Ashland Oregon back when the town would throw a big Halloween walkaround downtown–it was basically a pub/restaurant crawl where people would walk all over the main drag in incredibly elaborate and detailed costumes–the best one I remember was a guy dressed as the Marquis de Sade who had like, six or seven women in full period rig on leashes. (This town is the home of the Shakespeare Festival so there’s tons of super talented and creative types living there who could pull that off.)

        Unfortunately things became a little too rowdy, the cops cracked down, and the whole thing kind of faded away.

    6. On Fire*

      I’ve worked at a couple of places where some people went all-out. One job, one of the C-suite folks loved Halloween and showed up as the Wicked Witch of the West, complete with green face. (Last year I went to the DMV on Halloween, and the four-person staff had turned into Dorothy’s troupe — the Tin Man was especially impressive.)

      1. Edwina*

        They’re not getting their photos taken, but imagine if you came in to renew your license in a costume!

      2. JustaTech*

        Twice I’ve worked with people who were above and beyond with their costumes (like, won city-wide costume contests). The guy mostly did giant structured costumes, like a Lego minifig, but the gal did amazing makeup. One year she was Elphaba (the green witch in Wicked), one year she did an amazing sugar skull makeup, and one year she was the puppet from the Saw movies, complete with tricycle and dance. That was terrifying.
        And she put on all that makeup in the office bathroom!

    7. Strive to Excel*

      I worked at one place where we had a Halloween party during the afternoon/evening and we were encouraged to bring elaborate costumes if we were comfortable with it. One of the senior partners dressed up in a full clown costume. Big shoes, wig, squeaky nose, the lot.

      It was purely optional, and the partners were very good about making sure no one got pressured one way or the other, so it doesn’t really fit into horror stories.

    8. mreasy*

      My old company had an insanely elaborate and competitive costume contest every year. They didn’t do anything like that for other holidays!

      1. Charlotte Lucas*

        I worked at a place where people loved to dress up for Halloween. It was one specific division, though. Unfortunately, I do remember seeing a couple offensive costumes. We had a lot of older workers from communities that weren’t as aware. Not an excuse, just an explanation (I definitely was shocked to see it).

        One was an older white woman who wore a kimono and did the stereotypical bowing, etc. (Not like a cosplay character, like a racist portrayal of a Japanese woman.) The other was someone who dressed like a very offensive stereotype of some of our clients, based on the region they lived in (basically like a hillbilly – one of the regions we served included Texas and Louisiana).

        As far as I know, neither ever got into trouble for their costumes.

        1. WondHRland*

          worked at one place we had a halloween potluck and costume contest. One year the admin staff dressed up as the spice girls (not the band, but nutmeg, ginger, paprika – you get the idea), and our corporate attorney was “old spice” (he was 70 :)

          2. Zinnia*

            We had a group do that last year. I voted for them.

            They, however, lost miserably to our group, in full Super Mario regalia.

          3. Cats Ate My Croissant*

            A uni thing rather than work thing, but there was a group of us that regularly went for pun / not-what-you-thought related costumes like this. One year, we were the four housemaids of the apocalypse. Another, my friend went as a boa constructor, with hard hat, tools, butt-crack trousers, and a feather boa.

    9. run mad; don't faint*

      I think in many cases they are. My husband worked for a Big Manufacturing Firm for years, and they Did Not dress up for Halloween. But for a couple of years, his 15 person team was stationed in a small building adjacent to the plant, not in it directly, and they enjoyed a more relaxed atmosphere as a result. Many of them did choose to costume for Halloween. But even then, I noticed that in the photos the costumes were over regular clothes and were items that could be easily put aside if necessary.

    10. Nightengale*

      Big elaborate costumes have definitely been a thing in some places I have worked. . . as a pediatrician.

      Only some places. I was assigned to pediatrics on Halloween during medical school and no one dressed up at all except some pumpkin scrubs or earrings. I dress up extra now as an antidote. The challenge is to find a costume that is both kid appropriate in theme and work appropriate in ability to move and get work done.

      1. Seeking Second Childhood*

        “Disney bounding” works for this– color combos from classic Snow White is instantly recognized by many kids, for example.

        1. Nightengale*

          So my actual entire criteria list is

          1) appropriate for and recognizable by kids
          2) physically able to do my work while wearing
          3) use my cane and still be in character
          4) wears a skirt/dress – I hate wearing pants and the first thing everyone always suggests with “cane” is “Charlie Chaplin

          What I have found that works so far

          Glinda the Good Witch (with cane decorated as wand)
          Little Bo Peep (with cane decorated as shepherdess staff)
          Mary Poppins (with cane turned into umbrella)
          Minerva McGonnagall (who used a walking stick in I think Book 5. She’s no longer in the rota due to not wanting to support Rowling)

          1. Buttons*

            I forget which actor it is but could do a femme take on the infamous singing in the rain scene. he has his umbrella for it.

          2. Dahlia*

            I would add “quick to take off into normal clothes” because I don’t think anyone wants to hear their kid has cancer from Little Bo Peep.

            1. Nightengale*

              without the staff and hat it’s basically a blue dress

              and I’m a specialist in a field where I don’t give that kind of news.

    11. Nannerdoodle*

      It really depends on the environment and how much higher ups like halloween.

      In my department at Old Job, there was a costume contest for Halloween. No pressure to participate, but people did go all out with the costumes. At a startup job, people also went all out with the costumes, but that’s to be expected in that environment. When I worked at a university, no one wore costumes.

    12. Emily of New Moon*

      They’re not. Several years ago, I had to go to the unemployment office on October 31, and all the staff were in costumes, which I thought was awesome.

    13. Irish Teacher.*

      I work in a school, so it’s a bit different, but on our last day before the mid-term break, we are having a big dress up/no uniform for the students day. I’d say about 2/3s of the staff dress up and it runs the full spectrum from stuff like just skeleton earrings or something to people in full costume. I wear a long black skirt and a black top with studs on it and wear a witch’s hat. I honestly don’t know how some of the people in elaborate costumes teach all day in them.

    15. Pokemon Go To The Polls*

      Some people did really elaborate costumes for Halloween (and other events) when I worked at Barnes & Noble. There is sizable overlap between those who enjoy working in a bookstore and those who enjoy cosplay.
      It was fun but I also felt like I also had to dress up and I am not a costume person. I would do my best with what I owned – one year I was a rose, wearing all red, green tights+shoes, and a red flower headband, all of which I already owned and was work-appropriate and comfy.

      1. Edwina*

        This reminds me of one from college: About eight of us dressed up as a box of crayons. Each person picked a color (I was purple) and wore a t-shirt, leggings or sweats and socks in their color. And then we walked around together. It was fun! I was having a hard time finding friends and fitting in, so it was really nice that I was able to do a group costume with people.

        1. Edwina*

          I forgot the most important part! We made construction paper cones in the proper colors to wear on our heads that were the crayon tips. Otherwise we’re just people in monochrome outfits.

    16. Runcible Wintergreen*

      Everywhere I have worked, 90% of people don’t care and just act totally normal on Halloween. 9% do something lowkey but festive, like a sweater or ghost earrings or something.
      The 1% is the person who comes fully decked out in an inappropriate costume, who then looks like a weirdo in all their meetings.

      The most notable examples in my memory are:
      – Temp employee who showed up in full on Rick costume (from Rick and Morty), during the time where Rick and Morty was mildly controversial and really… said something about the kind of person he was. He had worked at the company for at least 6 months at that point and really should have been able to figure out that no one else would be dressed up.
      – Top exec who had an extremely detailed costume of the clown from It, complete with face makeup and balloon. It was so creepy that everyone joined in meetings virtually from their desks to avoid being in the same room with him. Again, NO ONE ELSE was dressed up. Incredibly cringe (and now after this person’s departure from the company, we can look back and laugh).

    17. BW*

      Oh no, they’re not just a TV thing. Elaborate costumes at work were definitely a thing at the big corporations I worked for. Prizes and everything.

      Plus prizes for best decorations. My team was very good at decorations.

      One year we dressed up a cubicle as the shower scene from Psycho, complete with Bates Motel bathroom hanging from the jacket hook outside the cubicle. A shower head was attached to the top of the cubicle, with silver tinsel on the shower head and a small clip on fan to the side making the tinsel blow around. It looked just like a real shower. We put black construction paper on the floor in the shape of a puddle of blood.

      Then there was the year that Siegfried & Roy had the tiger that attacked Roy. We had a whole life-size tableau of “Ziegfeld & Toy” with a stuffed body on the ground with a toy tiger attached to his neck. Various Las Vegas decor surrounded them to look like a stage, and a sign on a tripod said “Ziegfeld & Toy” with a “CANCELLED” banner across the showtimes. Other employees were donating fake severed limbs to our tableau. Everyone said we’d win. The managers came by, gave us a look, and never announced any winners. EVER AGAIN. We killed the Halloween contest.

        1. Lucy Van Pelt*

          severed limbs?
          I live in a literal war zone right now and the idea of being in a place where severed limbs are funny seems surreal.

          1. BW*

            Yeah, you can buy plastic severed limbs for Halloween for decorations, along with skeletons, and all sorts of gory looking stuff. I don’t think the people who bought the things were funny, as much as they thought of them as just gory Halloween decorations. I’m really sorry that you are located in a war zone right now. I understand why you would find it surreal.

            1. Chirpy*

              Honestly, I am not in a war zone, and I still find it surreal that people think severed limbs are appropriate decorations, especially for work.

          1. Dara*

            I think it was probably because it was parodying a near-tragedy in general less than a month after it happened (I’m guessing “Then there was the year that Siegfried & Roy had the tiger that attacked Roy” to mean they did it that same year, and the attack happened Oct 3rd, 2003) , but nobody died. The tiger (Mantacore) lived 11 more years after the attack, and Roy died of COVID in 2020.

    18. Anon Again... Naturally*

      I worked in call centers for nearly ten years before making my escape to the relatively sane world of higher ed. Halloween was always a huge thing for them- call centers love their dress up days as a way to distract from how horrible the customers can be. One center always hosted trick or treat for employees’ kids, with the managers handing out candy. In higher ed there are always some people/departments who take it seriously and some who just ignore the whole thing.

    19. AnneC*

      It does really depend on the office. Both my post-college jobs have done Halloween costume contests (and personally I love it; I am an introverted cosplayer so I really relish the opportunity to create an elaborate outfit and wear it to work, rather than a crowded convention!). We’ve done cubicle/office decorating a few times, but not every year. The day of, we usually do a potluck and a lunchtime trivia contest. It’s all super low key and there’s absolutely no pressure; typically about 70% of people participate. I am glad it’s something we do but also glad it’s not super cutthroat or anything!

    21. Azure Jane Lunatic*

      When I worked in a Silicon Valley job, Halloween day didn’t have all that much in the way of costumes (people did or didn’t, no pressure) but starting about 4 pm there was a whole-family Halloween party that went all out. Candy, sugar-fueled kids racing around, very good food, decorations, musical guests — one year they had Pitbull. The best costume I saw there was someone’s kid, who was wearing a large and elaborate probably cardboard-framed book costume, in a very specific color blue, with their face poking out of the book’s cover. The F logo confirmed it, but it was very obviously Facebook. I think that was the year I wore an extremely scary costume — a hand-drawn shirt naming one of the internally used products, the universally loathed previous version, saying “Guess what’s coming back!”

    22. Cassandra*

      My husband’s old office used to go big with both costumes and decorations on Halloween. At least half the people there would dress up in full costumes, and there were decorations everywhere. They also invited everyone’s kids to trick-or-treat throughout the office for the last couple hours of the workday. My kids went several times; it was awesome!

    23. Marion Ravenwood*

      Yeah. Like if I’m in the office on Halloween, I’ll make nods to it in what I wear, but keep it subtle and/or cute. For example, I have a shirt that has a print of cats and dogs dressed up as witches/vampires, sitting in cauldrons etc that I’d wear under a black dress. I’ve also made an orange and black checked skirt with pockets that have a print of black cats, so you can just see the cats’ faces looking out of the pockets. But the super Halloweeny stuff (like my retro horror film print dress) would get saved for a party or a night out, because it’s just a little bit too much when you don’t know what people’s tolerance level is.

      Caveat is I’m in the UK and, whilst Halloween is definitely becoming more of a big deal here, it’s nowhere near the same level as the US. So YMMV depending on location as well.

  4. CoffeeCoffeeCoffee*

    I had a professional industry conference that coincided with Halloween in 2017. It was a Tuesday, at a very upscale hotel and in a pretty straight-laced industry; most people either didn’t dress up or at most wore cat ears or similar.

    One guy came fully dressed in a very real-looking Hazmat suit with an empty chemical sprayer and told everyone he was “viral marketing.” (We don’t work in marketing.) He sat through one or two sessions and then was either so uncomfortable or his coworkers were so abashed that he changed at lunch and came back as “Steve.”

    1. Ontariariario*

      I got a onesie PJs of a dark green dragon that I often wear. I put it over work clothes and take the top half off when I sit down to work because it’s too hot. So it’s not very subtle, and is relatively silly, yet I can take it off in seconds and look normal in a crowd. I am attending a conference that week and plan to bring the costume on Thursday, but I know most people there and probably won’t wear it during my presentation (although it’s tempting).

    3. MsM*

      My mom was traveling for work, and stayed at a hotel that was hosting a bunch of Japanese businesspeople. She was at the bar, which was all decked out for the holiday with the staff in costumes, when a group of them came down and stared in confusion and mild alarm at the goings-on. Finally, one of them had a sudden realization, turned to the others, and said “Halloween.” The collective relieved “ohhh” has stuck with her for decades.

      1. Lisa*

        I was a manager at a non-profit in the DC area. I had to come into the office on my work-from-home day, which happened to fall on Halloween. We had typically done Halloween dress-up in years past, so I decided to come as a “telecommuter” by coming in my PJs and a robe. I got a few strange looks until I explained the concept. Didn’t think much of it until we had an unexpected drop-by of one of our grantees, and I had to go meet him. I decided after that that Halloween dress-up was probably not for me anymore.

      2. Zelda*

        Lol! Possibly not the first time they thought the Americans had lost their d4mn minds, but at least this time there was an explanation!

      3. one of the annas*

        Haha, I actually had the reverse experience way back when: a group of friends and I went to a bar after a midnight showing of Rocky Horror Picture Show on or around Halloween, and the bar had a bunch of business people in full suits, and everyone was like, what are they doing here?!

      4. Bookworm*

        This made me laugh. When I was in college (late 80s), I worked at a big drug store/discount store combo. All the Easter stuff was out. Several Japanese men were in town on business and asked about the “stuffed rabbits.” They did the same sort of “ooohh” once I explained. When they were leaving, I said “domo arigato” (sp?) – thank you very much with a bow. They were shocked an American college student knew even a small bit of Japanese. I had to explain I knew it from a song (Styx’s Mr Roboto)!

      5. Resident Catholicville, U.S.A.*

        Last year, my friend and I went out to a Lebanese restaurant for dinner Halloween evening so that she wouldn’t have to pass out candy at her house. Neither of us were in costume but the place was pretty empty. The poor owner, a recent immigrant to the country, had no idea why he suddenly had no customers and people in costumes were walking around outside.

      6. learnedthehardway*

        The visual impression of this has me in stitches – cultural context is everything, lol.

      7. Insufficient Sausage Explainer*

        When I lived in Japan, a friend of mine dressed up as Santa for a Halloween party at a local bar, and we went out for a wander round town mid-party. The confused faces were a treat!

      8. Kit Kendrick*

        Not Halloween, but I have a similar story from an Anime convention I attended. The convention wound up at an airport hotel because it was still small and that was cheapest. A shuttle full of an Air Japan flight crew pulled up and the exhausted group of attendants, still in uniform, walked into a hotel lobby full of cosplayers. They slowly realized what they were seeing, perked right up, and went around getting pictures with everybody. This was before cosplay was well known in the USA, so the convention attendees were equally delighted to be recognized. I suspect that flight crew still tells the story, too.

        1. It's Marie - Not Maria*

          Reenactor Fest several years ago (think Comic Con, but for Historical Reenactors/Interpreters): Someone thought it would be amusing to pull the fire alarm in the Hotel Ballroom where the Fest was holding the annual Saturday Night Dance. This Dance is where the Attendees pull out all the stops and wear their very best Historical Finery from Roman Times to Vietnam Era. I was standing with the overall event organizer (wearing 1920s) when a bunch of Firefighters came piling in the Ballroom. At first, we were all “Cool Firefighter Costumes!” Then came the realization those were real Firefighters. The Event Organizer immediately grabbed an Attendee who was a Firefighter himself (who was wearing a German Army Uniform) and went to speak to the Firefighters. You can only imagine what they thought walking in on what can best be described as “Night at the Musuem” come to life, but on a much larger scale!

    4. RPOhno*

      Having worn a full hazmat suit, they are horrendously uncomfortable and he was probably tired of drowning in sweat within an hour. The fact he made it to lunchtime in an industry where he presumably isn’t used to wearing a hazmat suit is some serious commitment to the gag.

      1. KaciHall*

        Or he just wasn’t in clothes he could change into underneath and didn’t have time to go back to his hotel room until then.

    6. gandalf the nude*

      I think I’ve told this here before but years ago I worked somewhere where a lot of people went all out for Halloween. It was usually fine but occasionally someone would show up in a costume that really wasn’t well suited for the work they had to do that day. The worst I remember is a manager in my department who had to meet with a long-term contractor to give him the bad news that his contract wasn’t being renewed…while wearing a very high-quality banana costume. There was an opening for her face and her feet and everything else was banana. I felt so bad for that guy and always wondered why that manager did not wait a day before delivering that news.

      3. Wolf*

        Good grief, and I thought my ex-boss made a poor timing decision when she told me the bad news half an hour before the Christmas party.

  5. my team is definitely going to read this and know who I am*

    My office has a Halloween party every year, which I am generally not into because I am kind of a scaredy cat! The theme changes every year though (last year was Oktoberfest, which was great!). A few years ago, the theme was “creepy carnival.” There were giant standees of scary clowns placed all over the office, and the large screen in our cafeteria area was programmed to have a scary clown jump out at random times. You may have guessed from me calling myself a scaredy cat, but clowns are, in fact, one of the things I’m afraid of. As a result, I did not attend the party at all. My teammates were great though; they warned me about the standees and the screen so I could avoid the scary stuff, and my manager brought food from the party up to my desk!

    1. Candypants*

      I’ve never quite understood companies that lean in to the scary/gory side of Halloween! It’s the big holiday at my office (like, in lieu of a December holiday celebration) and the company celebrates by putting together a big outing to a high-end haunted house. This is SO not my thing, but it’s really entrenched in the culture. At least it’s “voluntary” but it’s still annoying this is always the celebration. Give me a pumpkin patch or a hayride any day :)

      1. goddessoftransitory*

        Yeah: unless you run a haunted house as your job, I would think leaning towards “funny pumpkins and cutouts of kittens in witch hats” is the safer way to go in general.

        1. Reluctant Mezzo*

          I have a great picture of a kitten dressed up in a witch’s hat and a Gryffindor scarf labeled ‘McGonagall as a child’.

        2. Kyrielle*

          I think the scariest thing I did in celebrations of Halloween at work was put out styrofoam tombstones out in the lab. But that was more…snarky…since I put them in front of the computers that had stopped working and, because of budget, not been replaced. They were just sitting there dead.

  6. Baela Targaryen - Valyrian Mobile*

    I would go full “that one guy’s wife in the BBC interview where his children came into the room” if I were Tianna the trick or treater’s manager.

  7. Judge Judy and Executioner*

    At an organization I used to work at, pre-COVID parents were able to bring their kids in costumes around the office to trick-or-treat. I loved it, and had my own tame costume (unicorn horn headband) and candy. And then my boss scheduled a meeting in a room with glass walls during the event, and I just took my candy in and got up every time the kids came, because I thought that was more important than the meeting. My boss was not pleased with me, but the kids loved it!

    2. Pam Adams*

      My campus children’s center does this. Also, the day camps this summer had junior entrepreneurs creating potential products, and I was one of the people they would pitch too. The device to pick up worms off the sidewalk after rain was particularly charming.

    3. Charlotte Lucas*

      I was so sad at my old job when they stopped having the local preschool kids come in to trick or treat. (They were so cute and often lived in an area where it wasn’t as safe or easy for them to go door to door.)

  8. Sheworkshardforthemoney*

    I worked at a university during the height of “sexy” any profession costumes. Seeing so much exposed skin first thing in the morning and then all day long was really…interesting. Some kids took it to mean as skimpy as humanly possible. It was also a cold windy day for the end of October so you had to admire their dedication.

    1. Slow Gin Lizz*

      I live in MA and I’m always amazed at how little clothing some young people wear *in the winter* when they go clubbing. I get cold just looking at their bare legs and midriffs. Even when I *was* a college student I was amazed at this. I don’t like being cold.

      2. Ally McBeal*

        When I was in college we called it the “drunk jacket.” You don’t feel as cold when you’re drinking. I think it’s also a function of youth, because while I’m not getting drunk-drunk these days, I don’t feel warmer after a couple whiskeys anymore.

        1. Azure Jane Lunatic*

          Alcohol is a vasodilator, and causes increased blood flow in the extremities! This has the effect of making you feel less cold in the limbs, but since it’s reversing the “wow, too cold, gotta conserve core heat” reaction, it will make you colder in the long run if you’re outside.

          When I had a chemical heart challenge to make sure everything was good after a scare, the chemical made me feel slightly drunk. Not any cognitive effects, just I could feel the vasodilation in my thighs the same way.

        2. Quinalla*

          Yes, the good ol’ “beer coat”.

          Now I have the perimenopause situation if I get the slightest bit hot then I am REALLY hot. I’m so glad it finally cooled down this week, I haven’t felt consistently cool since March/April.

      4. Chocoholic*

        This was me during college. I never wore a coat when I went out because it was super hot inside bars, and at that time (early 1990’s), smoking was pretty common in bars and I always came out smelling like cigarette smoke – washing my coat was a pain (or at least I perceived that it would be a pain) and so I elected to leave it at home. I went to college in northern Illinois and it was COLD in the winter time.

      5. goddessoftransitory*

        Once you’re actually inside a crowded venue and dancing, though, it’s roasting. So I can see making a “cold now vs. not dying of heat exhaustion later” choice if I was going out (and young and not as world weary as I am now.)

      6. Marion Ravenwood*

        I grew up in the north of England, and when I was at university so many young women would go out in freezing cold temperatures wearing tiny skirts/skimpy tops/high heels etc. I always stuck out like a sore thumb in my sensible jeans and jacket!

    2. Guilty*

      I worked in the cafeteria in college and we had to wear these god-awful, scratchy, industrial black polos for our uniform. They weren’t assigned, so every shift you’d just grab a clean one and then give it back at the end. I am a five-foot-tall woman and the smallest size available was usually a unisex large. The “short” sleeves were down to my elbows.

      So for Halloween that year I snuck an XXL out of the kitchen, threw on a belt, fishnets, stilettoes, and my regulation baseball hat and went as a Sexy Cafeteria Worker. Ironically, I wasn’t actually showing that much skin. The polo was most of the way to my knees!

      1. one of the annas*

        as someone else who worked in the cafeteria in college, I viscerally remember those polos and I love this costume!

    3. Medium Sized Manager*

      Does this mean The Youths are not “Sexy _____” anymore? I assumed it was a time honored tradition for all college students.

      1. NobodyHasTimeForThis*

        Around here the HS students are more prone to do “Sexy___” than the college students. College students go for comfort. But that is partially a regional thing. We don’t have a lot of the whatever the current equivalent of preppy is. PNW grunge is more the scene.

      2. Ally McBeal*

        I wonder if the Billie Eilish effect is changing the norms for the younger generations. She typically wears very baggy clothing to obscure her body because of how gross men were being about her body – this was especially the case before she turned 18 – and fashion trends overall are currently leaning baggy/shapeless. It’s kind of like it was in the 90s, except baggy is now unisex, vs baggy for men and skintight for women back then.

        1. Emily of New Moon*

          Baggy for women was also in style in the 1990’s. I was in high school then and I remember that all my female friends and I wore baggy flannel plaid shirts. Maybe the trend started because flannel shirts were traditionally men’s clothing before the 1990’s, so women who wanted to go for the “grunge” look had to wear men’s flannel shirts that were too big for them. Then clothing companies started making flannel shirts for women, many of which were still oversized and baggy!

          1. Charlotte Lucas*

            I definitely had flannel shirts made for women in the 80s, which was also the era of the Big Shirt. (Thank you, Boy George!)

            I look at teens and young women today and am nostalgic for my baggy jeans. (Don’t forget the Skechers!)

            The tight clothes for women in the 90s was only worn by some women, often when clubbing.

          2. Dek*

            iirc, the style for women in the 90s was baggy, but showing midriff.

            No lie, though, I wish JNCOs would come back. Wide leg pants are so comfortable in the horrible summers we have.

      3. Pescadero*

        As someone who works at a University in a northern state with lots of snowfall… the skimpy costumes that look like guaranteed hypothermia are still wildly common.

  10. Bookworm*

    This isn’t too bad. We had a desk decorating contest at a previous job. One guy brought in a huge light up ghost and pumpkin (two separate things) that used to be his lawn decorations. We shut off the lights so we could take good photos.

    But another coworker the same year was trying to build a haunted house out of cardboard around her desk. It was shut down because she was spending so much time on it, plus it was in the way and a fire hazard.

    The same company, different year – very toxic manager was trying to push everyone to come to work on Halloween in costume. She kept pushing one woman from Asia who refused to do it due to religious reasons. Manager kept pushing. The woman ended up going to HR who shut it down. Manager seems to truly believe that it was fun and people had no valid reasons for objecting. I didn’t do it because I was there to get my work done and being in costume all day wasn’t comfortable. I just wore all black.

    1. Slow Gin Lizz*

      Ooof. I hope that manager was not there very long. Someone at my mom’s old company one year brought in Halloween candy with little stuffed witches on them and someone else refused hers for religious reason. I don’t know if the person who brought in the candy was offended, but it did mean that I got two stuffed witches that year (I was a kid, so I was happy about it).

      1. Bookworm*

        That manager stayed there past when I was laid off due to covid. That layoff was a very good thing as she was extremely toxic. She left before they could fire her about 2021 or so. I forgot to include that toxic manager was NOT the manager of the woman who was objecting to costuming for religious reasons. Toxic manager was MY manager and also sort of an office manager, as well.

    2. 3-Foot Tall Inflatable Rainbow Unicorn*

      I always wear all black. It’s suitably goth and also suitably professional. I do miss my fangs though – I once had custom dental extensions for my canine teeth for that extra bit of creepiness.

  11. Keymaster of Gozer (she/her)*

    The guy who rocked up to work one year in a rather large arachnid costume and walked into the IT department.

    Not great for the extremely arachnophobic IT manager. I’m reliably assured my screams were heard from the control room a building away.

    (Hid in the server room, the guy left rather abashed and never wore a costume again)

          2. JustaTech*

            I’ve seen it! It’s in a museum at uh, either Harvard or MIT, where they have a lot of historic scientific equipment. I think it’s MIT, I saw it back in like ’99 for school.

        1. Dawn*

          Could have been, I didn’t even consider that it might have been that long ago that that would have been relevant, but you’re right.

    2. Ally McBeal*

      Not Halloween, but one day a cockroach (dead, not that I realized it right away) dropped from the ceiling about a foot away from my hand. I screamed and the CEO came running out of his office. I was embarrassed but very grateful that he scooped it off my desk and disposed of it elsewhere.

      1. Charlotte Lucas*

        I was a superhero the day a bunch of arachnophobic managers saw me take some paper, scoop up a spider, and take it out to the back stairwell. (I try not to kill them, because they’re useful, and I’m not a killer.)

        1. TM*

          Just for consistency, I too would scream at the cockroach (startling to all on the rare occasions it’s been witnessed; I look pretty butch), and I would absolutely embark on the spider rescue mission.

          It’s weird that many bugs bug me and spiders do not (ok, I wouldn’t particularly want a big hairy one on my face, but there would be no screaming), but life is a tapestry and all that.

          1. amoeba*

            I mean, I’m generally not afraid of any bugs, but the “dropping down from the ceiling” part would probably still make me scream!

          2. Quill*

            One of the most common phrases during early spring at my job is “spiders are an OUTSIDE animal!” Followed by someone marching a cup and a piece of paper to the door.

  12. Homeburger*

    We set off the fire alarm with a smoke machine in the conference room haunted house. 10 story building had to evacuate – 8 floors full of very serious and very annoyed professionals and us in all of our halloween costumes waiting for fire department in the parking lot across the street.

      1. Ally McBeal*

        It’s giving The Office, and frankly I’m surprised that WASN’T an episode of The Office. The only other neighbor in that building that we knew of was Vance Refrigeration, which was on the same floor as Dunder Mifflin, but the building had what, 5-6 stories? Would’ve loved an episode (or multi-episode arc) where we learn exactly how exasperated the other tenants were with Michael.

        1. ND*

          Michael Scott, Dunder Mifflin Scranton
          Bob Vance, Vance Refrigeration
          Paul Faust, Disaster Kits Ltd.
          W.B. Jones, W.B. Jones Heating & Air
          Bill Cress, Cress Tool & Die

          The “5 Families” of the Scranton Business Park

          Only seen/mentioned in one episode I think!

  13. Dawn*

    One time, in a horribly dysfunctional office that took Halloween way too far as it was, I had a coworker sent home because her costume was a little… uh, a lot too sexy.

      1. Dawn*

        Oh goodness, it’s been over a decade and I was studiously not paying all that much attention.

        Suffice to say that entirely too much flesh was showing, even for our office, which was saying something.

    2. NMitford*

      I’ve posted before about a former coworker who was a dedicated Renaissance Fair devotee and wore her very authentic tavern wench costume to work for Halloween. She was, shall we say, well endowed to begin with and the costume only accentuated her assets. It was all a bit too boobalicious for the office.

  14. Bird Lady*

    It was Halloween season, the time of year were people have parties, but it’s not the specific date of October 31st. A local radio station asked my non-profit to go on air to talk about our Halloween community activities, which included haunted boat rides. I was booked up the night the radio show wanted us to go on air, so I asked my colleague who was overseeing our efforts to do the radio interview instead. He seemed to be a much better fit since he was the one actually leading the efforts, and I thought it was a nice way to recognize his leadership over a big project.

    The interview was scheduled right before he was supposed to go to a party, so he showed up in costume. He was dressed as himself from high school, and wore his high school basketball uniform. All the social media photos are of him dressed up, with the radio personalities in smart jeans and sweaters. Some wore sweaters with cute ghosts or pumpkins on them. But here he was in a basketball uniform and a mullet.

    He thought that, since he wasn’t going on tv, it was okay to show up in his costume for the party. After being reminded that this was a professional opportunity and to treat it so! My ED was furious at both of us.

    1. Expelliarmus*

      Why was your ED mad at you? You were booked up; you couldn’t go instead! Was it because they somehow expected you to know that he was going to pull this stunt?

      1. Bird Lady*

        Exactly – somehow I was supposed to know that a grown adult person with an master’s degree was going to dress in an unprofessional way after I had explained that this was a professional work event.

    2. Zombeyonce*

      I don’t get why the Ed was mad at him dressing up to talk about Halloween events. What a stick in the mud.

    3. TM*

      This wasn’t Halloween as such, but in the 80s, I went to the “Lesbian Ball” in my city, fully attired in formal school uniform, complete with regulation gym slip, blazer, enamel badges on the lapels, the works. It was only a year or so after graduating high school, so assembling the outfit was easy enough – it was more “correct” than any time I was at school.

      Anyway, after having a couple of drinks, I was feeling quite merry, and was *delighted* to see my former head mistress walk in with her (female) partner. So I immediately made my way over and blared, “Nice to see you, miss!” I cringe now at their faces frozen in horror at my appearance – her being an out lesbian headmistress at a prominent girls’ school was controversial to some, so it undoubtedly was not a great look for a tipsy former student – in full school regalia – to accost her at such an event. Remember that in those days, queer events were seen as not much more respectable than a BDSM club.

      Thankfully, I wasn’t so drunk so as to not notice her awkwardness as she gritted out a polite greeting, with zero commentary on my costume. So I beat a hasty retreat and spent the rest of the evening assiduously avoiding being in her and her poor partner’s direct eyeline in the moderately-sized venue. Thank goodness there was no media and this was before the days of the social kind!

  15. Juicebox Hero*

    Back when I worked retail, one woman in the cosmetics department wore a belly dancer costume that was both stunning and minuscule. Management said she either had to go home and change, buy clothes and change, or keep her coat on all day. I still wonder what her customers thought of her headdress, elaborate hair and makeup, tons of jingling bracelets and necklaces, gold sandals, and black leather coat buttoned up to her chin.

    1. Juicebox Hero*

      I was wearing a skirt, sweater, and black pantyhose with black cats embroidered on the ankles. The cats had little green rhinestone eyes. My mother had been telling ME all morning that I was going to get sent home because MY PANTYHOSE were too racy!

      1. Generic Name*

        Your mom sounds like my mom. My mom thinks that wearing hoop earrings larger than a certain diameter makes someone “a slut”.

          1. Juicebox Hero*

            She said mine made me look like a “gypsy” so definitely racist. It was just really satisfying to tell her about the belly dancer costume after she’d raised a stink about pantyhose with black cats on them.

        2. Blarg*

          Mine wouldn’t let me wear red nail polish, especially not dark red, because it was “slutty.” She did let me dye my hair purple or blue or whatever with Manic Panic and Kool-Aid.

          1. CommanderBanana*

            One of these days parents will need to explain the hills on which they choose to die re: clothing, etc., because it’s often super confusing and contradictory.

            1. Panicked*

              I’ve asked my parents several times why we weren’t allowed to have any breakfast cereal over 5 grams of sugar but our lunches consisted of peanut butter and marshmallow fluff sandwiches, a little debbie, fruit snacks, and a Hi-C to drink. They have no response. It’s just as confusing now as it was then!

            2. A perfectly normal-size space bird*

              For my grandmother, it was red lipstick. I notice my mom always made a point to wear red lipstick whenever she dressed up.

            3. Wolf*

              At least my mom had a consistent rule: only temporary things were allowed. Odd haircuts or hair colours were okay, piercings were not. She’s still convinced that my belly button piercing will be a terrible risk in pregnancy. Also, she thinks any and all tattoos are ugly and will be regretted for a lifetime, and she keeps telling me that, despite me being mid-30s and not having any tattoos.

          2. epicdemiologist*

            My mother (born in the nineteen-teens) never got over her horror that, when her mother died, the funeral director painted the deceased’s nails red. The family made them remove the polish before the funeral.

    2. Having a Scrummy Week*

      Oh no…she could have just worn a neutral tank top under everything, probably? I feel bad that she put in all that effort.

  16. Alexis Carrington Colby*

    I would say it went wrong, but about 10 years ago (in my mid-20s) I worked at a small company that was awful. Lots of favoritism, late hours and very, very low pay. They went ALL out for Halloween, and each team did a theme for costumes. We were expected to go all out, buying these elaborate costumes and props, on a tiny shitty salary. Still pisses me off years later lol

  17. MsTeacher*

    My first year teaching in an elementary school, one of my colleagues dressed up as the Hulk. Sounds innocent enough, let me explain- He wore cut off jeans and painted his body green. That was the whole costume. Bare chested, barefooted, short shorts, green paint.

    He did not work for the district the following year.

  18. The Karen*

    I wouldn’t call it Halloween “gone wrong” but one year at the Halloween luncheon a woman in another department dressed up as “a Karen.” Which was her usual work clothes but with a bad “Karen haircut” wig, a large “Karen” name tag, and multiple speech bubble signs with “I demand to speak to the manager!” type phrases.

    Before this I didn’t even think it was possible for a name to be a Halloween costume.

  19. Clearance Issues*

    After last year Halloween costumes got banned: all costumes/flair must be business casual-formal.
    This rule came to be after some skin tight jump suits, a fursuit (with full fur mask) and actual kink attire came to the office on multiple new hires… when we have clients came to the office.
    I usually love dressing up for Halloween and have a good time being a little weird, but I saw… way too much of my coworkers.

    1. Dawn*

      I mean, full marks to the coworker who had the guts (and the stamina) to come to work in a full fursuit.

      1. Clearance Issues*

        oh seriously, and it was a fantastic fursuit. but management said he had to keep his head uncovered the whole time so security could confirm it was him.
        I was more bothered by the skin tight jumpsuits and the in-character dom (that particular coworker is no longer with us)

        1. Dawn*

          Related, did you ever see the letter on this site about the woman who insisted that her coworkers refer to her boyfriend as her “master”?

      2. BlackCatFursuiter*

        I did that once, but only for the after-work Halloween party at a workplace that had no dresscode. Another coworker made an elaborate skeleton horse costume from cardboard.

        The winner of the party: Two coworkers who dressed as each other. A dude who loved heavy metal, and a hippie girl – the both had lovely long hair already, so they decided to just trade outfits. It was hilarious.

  20. Hilary*

    Many years ago, I worked at a marketing agency where Halloween was a VERY BIG DEAL. Elaborate costumes, department decorating contests, spooky music, the works. One year, the accounting department took over the kitchen/break room as their decorating space. There was a black cardboard tunnel you had to duck through, a smoke machine, spider webs, and a full size motion-activated evil witch who would cackle at you as you moved around the room trying to make coffee or heat up your lunch.

    It was completely over the top and disruptive to traffic in the break room. I personally hated the witch the most, as I’m sensitive to jump scares. Apparently someone else felt the same way. One morning, the witch was found at the bottom of the 10-story spiral staircase, evidently having been tossed from the top floor. Her electronic parts were destroyed, and the accounting team was furious.

    The witch yeeter was never caught, though I’m not sure the incident was investigated very thoroughly.

    1. Dawn*

      Yeah, I’d have been cheering them on the whole way. It’s a shame they didn’t manage to get her any higher.

    4. New Jack Karyn*

      “I’m faaaalllllling . . . ”

      (to the beat of ‘I’m melting’!” in The Wizard of Oz)

  21. Bitsy*

    I once started a new job on Halloween. The office kindly put together a bagel breakfast, everyone came by to introduce themselves, to chat. But this was in an area where people are VERY into Halloween, and most folks were in serious costumes! Full drag. Dramatic makeup. Wigs.

    They were all nice and friendly, but it took me weeks to actually figure out who was who! “Ah, Betsy! Yes! Were the viking princess? Or was that Harriet?” “Howard! With the red cocktail dress, right?”

    As office problems go, it was pretty low stakes, but real!

    2. Lana Kane*

      I feel like that might have been a great ice breaker for you and the team, having fun with identifying your new coworkers as their costumes! I’d be delighted if you called me Viking Princess lol

  22. Paint N Drip*

    Biggest Halloween drama – a princess costume!
    I once had a colleague who was a temp to hire, she wasn’t fitting in great but she could do the basic work so she was there. This was a pretty buttoned up place (the dress code started allowing women to wear pants in the 90s) and she was a pretty not-buttoned up person who would do better in a more casual job. She came into work on Halloween, in a full ball gown with train, gloves, and a tiara! It was a HUGE dress that I don’t think fit into her desk chair. Her position usually included stocking, doing mail rounds, and other fairly physical tasks that took her all around the building including near clients and our c-suite folks. My boss was NOT happy, just simmering all day (LOL) and I’d guess boss got some ~feedback~ from the c-suite… that colleague was gone before Thanksgiving.

    It’s always struck me as funny that something as innocuous as a princess costume on Halloween would be SUCH a thing, but I guess it goes to show how much ‘knowing your audience’ is required at work.

      1. goddessoftransitory*

        I agree–both because it was conservative and she couldn’t do her job in that rig.

        I think there’s two kinds of “inappropriate” for office costumes: there’s the I Suddenly Know You Too Well kind (“You may not wear your assless chaps to the office”) and the not suggestive but rendering you unable to perform your duties kind (“Thank you for changing out of the assless chaps; however, the giant foam cowboy hat and full-size hobbyhorse are keeping you from sitting at your computer and entering data.”)

        1. epicdemiologist*

          This instantly made me think of Shiadanni’s “Welcome to the Glam Kitchen” videos, where she’s always wearing a hat too big to allow her to get things out of the fridge.

    2. j*

      I know someone who was at a very buttoned up, very stereotypical DC trade association. She wore a panda onesie to work on Halloween, and wore only leggings and a t-shirt underneath, so taking it off wasn’t really an option. To make it worse, she ran around the office showing it off to everyone and insisted on taking selfies with everyone that morning. She has a history of not super-great judgement, and I think this was the final straw in her getting termed.

      1. Jamie Starr*

        Halloween is at the end of October and Thanksgiving (in the US) is in November so it wouldn’t have been more than a month.

      2. Hlao-roo*

        I’m assuming US Thanksgiving, which falls between November 22 – 28 (depending on the year) so the employee worked for less than 4 weeks post-Halloween costume.

        (Are you assuming Canadian Thanksgiving, which takes place in early October? That would be a long time to keep on an employee the C-Suite isn’t happy with.)

      4. Lenora Rose*

        Are you in Canada? Our thanksgiving is this Monday upcoming, but the US Thanksgiving is in November.

  23. H.Regalis*

    Halloween-adjacent:

    For a work group I was in, we all had to do a skit—totally pointless activity that had nothing to do with our work, but I had a lot of fun with it. My group decided to film ours instead of acting it out. It became a short silent film where I drew a pentagram on the floor of someone’s lab with fake blood and had the actors pretend to summon a demon to get help applying for a grant. The skit went off really well, but it is really, really hard to get fake blood off of a scuffed tiled floor that has all of the finish gone, so there was still the shade of a pentagram in the middle of the lab floor.

    1. HugeTractsofLand*

      This is delightful all around, although it must have been difficult to explain the bloody pentagram to any new coworkers…

      1. goddessoftransitory*

        “That’s all that’s left of the LAST newbie who didn’t make fresh coffee every morning!”

        (Be sure to laugh heartily and assure them you’re kidding)

    6. oops*

      Not for Halloween, but working in theatre, I had a project that used duct tape to make a pentagram on the floor, as part of the set.
      Well, when I was helping take everything down when the show ended, we discovered that the duct tape was ripping off the finish of the very-beat-up wood floor….did I mention the show was in the gym of a church?
      While not the cause of the duct-tape-fiasco, I felt obligated to help, so we used some new duct tape to add more points to the pentagram, so it was just a misshapen star. We maybe also added a few random lines around so it was less clear that it had been in a circle?

      1. Dasein9 (he/him)*

        Similar experience with the floor of a black-box theatre in college where the floor design was the design of a nuclear bomb. In a military area.

        It showed through a bit for a few rounds of painting, but we did get it gone in the end.

    7. Wired Wolf*

      It’s fairly well known that the building I work in is haunted…now I’m tempted to draw a summoning circle in the creepy section of the basement and see how long it takes for someone to notice. (or for Something to appear?)

      *starts looking for the sidewalk chalk*

    8. Steve for Work Purposes*

      Honestly I could see someone making a deal with a demon to get grant money – that almost sounds like the plot of a Helluva Boss short or something. I love that as a film idea, and that certainly makes a fun story to explain the markings on the floor. You made my day, best story in this thread :D

  24. KaciHall*

    In high school, I worked at an ice cream shop, which had mostly high school girls for employees. (Literally, they would hire one or two high school guys a year to do the heavy lifting and outside cleaning. We were also specifically required to wear makeup ‘because the lights were so bright’.)

    The store manager treated us all like little kids while doing no work himself. No one liked him. One of the girls decided to dress up as him for Halloween. She borrowed a guy’s uniform shirt and hat, and proceeded to stand in the managers normal spot (which blocked the way between the stream table and the drive thru window) and did nothing all evening. While he was there.

    I’m still impressed she wasn’t fired, though apparently the owner found it absolutely hilarious.

    1. Paint N Drip*

      That’s so ballsy and funny to me, and I’m baffled the boss like it! She sounds like a force of nature, what’s she up to now?

      1. Dawn*

        It sounds like it was the owner and not the manager who got a kick out of it, and small-business food service is often… just like that. Particularly with men, there’s a culture of mockery – friendly or otherwise. It sounds like the owner got a huge kick out of the manager being mocked by one of the employees, which would track with that environment.

      1. New Jack Karyn*

        I think the owner DID pick it up, and laughed at the mockery of the manager. Why the owner didn’t fix the problem of the jerk manager is a question for another day.

  25. Generic Name*

    Not the most dramatic costume fail, especially since the issue was likely apparent to only me, but last year I wore a black dress and spiderweb tights and boots. Super cute, and I got a lot of compliments. Throughout the day, the elastic got looser and looser on the tights, and the texture really started to bother my feet. In short, a sensory nightmare. My dress was just above the knee, and I didn’t feel comfortable going bare-legged with that length of dress in the office, so I just gritted my teeth and powered through the rest of the day. The instant I got home, I ripped my tights off and threw them in the trash.

    1. Ama*

      I have had that happen — it’s the worst!

      I have some old spandex briefs that are made out of leotard material (I acquired them in my dance recital days to go under a costume that was see-through) and I will sometimes throw those on over tights to help prevent inching down. Also works with bike shorts if your skirt is long enough.

        1. Edwina*

          I had to do a search for sock glue. I think I could use that with some of my socks that like to fall down as I walk.

  26. Juicebox Hero*

    Back in high school one (white) girl came in dressed as what she claimed was Aunt Jemima, but was in fact every “mammy” stereotype in one including blackface. she was made to wash off the makeup but was allowed to keep the rest of the costume because then she was “only” a fat housewife.

      1. Juicebox Hero*

        Early 90s. To be honest, I’m a little surprised that she even got in trouble for the blackface. This is not a very progressive area.

    2. Strive to Excel*

      This unlocked a college memory for me. We were having a dorm halloween party and I’d offered to do facepainting for anyone who wanted it. Between students I decided to work on my own facepaint. I had cat ears, a black shirt, and black pants. I figured I’d paint my face in a half-mask with whiskers to look like a black cat.

      Well, the black facepaint was of particularly bad quality, and was smearing *everywhere*. It got to the point where one of the others helping work the party came over and gave me a horrified look. I asked her what was up, and she asked what I was doing. I said “trying to paint a cat, but it’s not working well is it” and she shook her head very vigorously. At the time, I thought that it just meant that the design was continuing to flop, and gave up and wiped my face off.

      Only two years down the road did I realize she must have thought I was attempting blackface. That couldn’t have been further from my intentions. I still cringe.

      1. nonbeenary*

        Oooh, a friend had something similar happen in college. Dressed as Elphaba with green face paint, but unfortunately the house party we’d gone to was using colored lightbulbs…the red lights made the green face paint look brown

      2. Anon for this*

        Yikes! I had something similar. I was dressed as a ninja, complete with facemask, but the mask was a little wonky. My friend saw only my top half and thought I was wearing a niqab as a costume, and was rightly horrified.

  27. Homeburger*

    I think I’ve told this one before and its more funny than disastrous. Our CFO tried to get a new staff member thrown out of the building because he came in a costume that made him unrecognizable – especially since it was his like 3rd day with our company and its very likely not everyone had even met him yet! The guy was a preppy looking dude with professional wardrobe, glasses, conservatively cut blonde hair etc. He showed up on halloween as I guess a 90s rocker with a longish black wig, piercings, fake tattoo sleeves, dressed all in black. It was so convincing that it didn’t even read as a costume! The CFO was almost physically blocking him from our office areas and the poor guy had to be like No really! I’m Adam! The new marking director!

    2. Meow*

      That reminds me of when I went to a friend’s Halloween party in high school dressed as Ozzie Osborne. (This was at the height of that reality show). It was just a cheap mall costume, but not even my friends recognized me, it was actually pretty fun.

  28. Constance Lloyd*

    A receptionist at Old Job wore a vampire costume that was equal parts sexy and horrifying. Her corset, booty shorts, fishnets, and thigh high platform boots seemed to be at war with Hollywood grade blood spattered all over her face and throat, dripping and congealing in hyper realistic fashion. She had white out contacts that completely hid her irises and reduced her pupils to tiny pinpricks. Her teeth interfered with her ability to enunciate, leading to confusion when she answered the phone and she asked to be accused from mail duty, since all of the reaching and twisting associated with that task placed her at risk for a wardrobe malfunctions.

    She went home at lunch.

    1. Dawn*

      I can’t tell whether “she asked to be accused” is an error, or if that’s what she actually said because of the teeth!

      1. Constance Lloyd*

        Ha! Definitely a typo- she asked to be EXCUSED! I swear, between this spotty new autocorrect and my attempts to stealthily type at my desk, it’s a wonder I churn out anything remotely legible.

  29. LadyAmalthea*

    My coworker just decorated our office and included a poster of a scary clown on the door. The problem is, his head is the same height as the head of someone entering the office, so we have just spend the last few hours looking up quickly because we think someone is coming in.

    1. JB (not in Houston)*

      I have had that problem before with halloween decals on my office window. I gave up and moved them after it became clear I would not acclimate to them

  30. Name*

    One year we had an entire team (that was housed onsite in our biggest client’s corporate office) dress as The Purge for our costume contest – schoolgirl outfits, fake weapons, fake blood everywhere. They all got sent home mid-day, once their Director saw their contest photos and dropped everything to go to the worksite.

    To be fair, they looked really good – just not workplace appropriate!

  31. desk platypus*

    I haven’t participated in office Halloween dress ups since the year my white coworker suggested we all do Mulan (Disney style). She asked me about it and I mentally gathered myself to be the Fun Police. I started off by calmly saying I wouldn’t be comfortable with the whole office in Chinese style robes since I, or anyone else at our job for that matter, weren’t from that culture. I opened my mouth to talk about how it could look like cultural appropriation when coworker laughed and said, “Oh, are you a ‘this a culture and not a costume’ person?” I was stunned, because now I knew she wasn’t just unaware of the optics she just deliberately disagreed already. I ended up stammering a “yeah?”, she said okay, and left. So I decided to just never join in again.

    1. sushi lover*

      For the record, wearing traditional clothing from another culture isn’t inherently cultural appropriation; more often that not it’s cultural sharing, no different from a white person attending a Japanese festival or eating Korean barbecue. It varies, because some clothing is sacred and symbolic or otherwise holds deep cultural meaning, like war bonnets, which Native American cultural representatives have specifically expressed offense about white people wearing.
      But as far as I know, it’s fine to wear hanfu if you’re white, as long as you’re not using it to mock Chinese culture. It’s just clothes! Also, I think there’s a difference between dressing up as Chinese stereotypes for Halloween, and dressing up as Mulan for Halloween. The costume isn’t the culture, it’s the Disney character.
      That said, her response to you WAS wildly out of pocket.

      1. Dawn*

        I’m not sure I’d agree with your take on this, just for the record.

        Of course, I’m white, and for me it would definitely be out of my lane to declare that it’s fine.

        1. Charlotte Lucas*

          As a woman, I see a difference between straight white guys dressing as women to mock them and drag queens. (I so appreciate a good drag queen!)

          But if there is any chance that someone could misinterpret, then just don’t do it.

      2. desk platypus*

        Given past behaviors from this person I went ahead and assumed it wouldn’t even be a directly Disney costume. I wouldn’t be surprised in the slightest if she just went with the cheapest option you could get by searching “Chinese costume” on Amazon, especially since it wasn’t Mulan the character specifically. Her vision was we’d do the scene with the soldiers dressed as concubines which would involve painted faces too.

      3. Zelda*

        An acquaintance of mine who is Japanese has experienced really horrible behavior directed at her *elementary-school aged daughter* when the daughter wore traditional Japanese clothing. My acquaintance has a lot to say about white people wearing kimonos as costumes when the people whose actual heritage it is can’t safely wear them.

        1. Ellis Bell*

          The mind boggles at what “horrible” things someone could say to a young child who’s wearing her own family’s cultural dress…

          1. Zelda*

            The acquaintance understandably did not relive all of the experiences for the benefit of her listeners, but I gather it started with “go home” and got more disgusting from there, nor was it just one person who felt a need to say hideous things to a six-year-old. It reliably happened every time the daughter dressed that way, to the point where Acquaintance felt she just couldn’t risk exposing her daughter to it anymore.

            That’s what makes it cultural appropriation and not “cultural sharing”: These things have been effectively *taken away from* the people whose birthright they are, because the ambient level of racism is high enough that they have to weigh the risks before engaging in their own culture.

            1. Ellis Bell*

              Oh my god, I thought possibly overly patronising, or dismissive/ diminishing of the culture… “go home” is sickening.

      4. Fir Forest*

        There is a very significant different between wearing hanfu as clothing, for example as a formal outfit to an event, and wearing it specifically for Halloween when it is definitely a costume. This colleague does not sound like someone who’d comfortably wear cultural dress in other situations to me.

        1. hello*

          Yep. This reminds me of a story from years ago where a white high school girl posted about wanting to wear a qipao as a prom dress. All the terminally online white people were screaming “no you can’t do that because cultural appropriation” whereas all of us Chinese (both Chinese-American and actual Chinese) were more like “that’s awesome, go for it”. However, as a Halloween costume, that’s not really okay, since the whole point is that you’re pretending to be what you’re dressed as. That’s where the insensitivity comes in – it’s the purpose, not the clothes.

      5. Meow*

        I don’t disagree with you, and I don’t think think there is anything inherently wrong with a white person dressing up as Mulan for Halloween. But I also think that having *everyone* dress up makes it a little uncomfortable, especially for an ordinary-looking character like Mulan – To someone who didn’t know what was going on, it would just look like everyone decided to wear Chinese clothes for Halloween for some reason, which might send a weird message.

      6. WS*

        There’s a strong difference in opinion on this from Asian people living in their home culture, and from Asian people living in the diaspora. I’m white and I have attended Japanese events in Japan in kimono, but I wouldn’t do so here in Australia unless specifically invited to do so.

        1. londonedit*

          Yeah, that’s the thing – here in the UK, if you’re invited to an Indian wedding, the expectation is that you’ll wear traditional Indian wedding clothes, even if you’re white. It’s perfectly fine. But there’s a difference between that and ‘dressing up as’ a Bollywood actor for Halloween. For the wedding, you’re being invited to participate in a cultural event.

          1. amoeba*

            Yeah – I mean, my hometown has the biggest Japanese community in Europe, and they have a big Japanese festival, including “try on a kimono” stands (run by Japanese people, obviously!), etc. I do think that’s fine, as basically the people *decide* to share their culture with you, and you have a genuine interest in learning about it! It feels quite different when you do this without any participation of any people from the actual culture…

  32. Library Anoshe*

    At my workplace, people are encouraged to dress up in costume if they like on Halloween day. But lots don’t dress up in costume as well, and that’s fine. About 40% of people dress up each year. One year, we had a new manager, Kay. She’d only joined the team a few weeks before Halloween and she was full of eager energy. We also have on this team a guy I’ll call Gem. Gem has a… unique sense of style. Every day he’ll wear oversize pants and experiments with colors. Think a skater from the 90s. Gem does not EVER dress up for Halloween. But Kay did not know that. So on Halloween, she’s excited to see some of the staff dressed up in costume and wants to round up all the staff who are wearing costumes for a photo. Y’all… she insisted that Gem be in the photo. Gem was not in costume. Gem was just wearing the kinds of clothes he wears all the time. He good naturedly did stand for the photo, and all of us who were there that day still laugh about it when Halloween comes around!

    1. goddessoftransitory*

      I am picturing Gem from the Holograms, honestly! Glad he was a good sport about it, though.

    2. BlackCatFursuiter*

      Reminds me of all the people who won “ugly Christmas sweater” contests in sweaters they didn’t intend as ugly.

  33. Baunilha*

    I’ve always wanted to tell this story!
    So: I first joined my current company during the pandemic, and we were all remote. So for the first company party they threw after the plague (Halloween ’22), they went all in. The venue was a medieval castle. There was plenty of food, an open bar, and a costume contest with a cash prize.
    It was midnight when the winner of the contest was announced, and people were already, um, a little out of sorts. For some reason, HR chose that moment (remember, past midnight during a costume party with an open bar) to announce that our health insurance was being updated and is now completely paid for by the company, with the most extensive coverage available and no costs for the employees.
    Readers, everything went wild. People cheered, toasted and celebrated like we’ve won the lottery. Someone snatched a bottle of vodka from the bar and showered us with it like a F1 winner with champagne. Another person tackled our poor HR rep (a 4ft11″ woman) to the ground, and several others piled up on top of them. In a matter of seconds, everyone was lying on the floor, drenched in vodka. There were a few bruises and nosebleeds, and some costumes got torn, stained, or both.
    The cherry on top: HR also decided to give us our insurance member cards at the party, after the announcement. It should go without saying that several people lost theirs, some never even got them, and the company had to re-issue most of the cards. Apparently, the cleaning crew found a bunch of damaged insurance cards at the venue the next day.
    Best company party I’ve ever been to.

    1. Phony Genius*

      I wonder how many attendees had to take advantage of their new benefit due to injuries from reactions to the announcement.

      1. goddessoftransitory*

        Can you imagine limping up to the Urgent Care admitting nurse, pulling a Champagne-stained and tattered insurance card out of your pocket, and attempting to explain how you just got it yesterday but there was this hog pile on the HR lady and…

        1. BlackCatFursuiter*

          Remember the golden rule: No matter how awkward the source of your injury, you tell the nurse/EMT the truth, because they 100% have heard crazier things than whatever you did.

    2. Lana Kane*

      I can imagine the cleaning crew the next day holding up a bunch of tattered insurance cards and going “I don’t even want to know”.

  34. she can certainly do it*

    Not sure if this qualifies as very wrong or very right. Several years ago I had a medical procedure scheduled on Halloween. The procedure was… let’s say a sensitive one, involving a camera being placed where cameras ought not go. One of the doctors performing said procedure on me was dressed as Rosie the Riveter.
    It remains to this day one of the funniest things that has ever happened to me. It’s so hard to find social situations in which it is appropriate to tell people.

    2. Sharp-dressed Boston Terrier*

      Was it the one during which a patient can simultaneously confirm that their cranium is not already firmly lodged therein?

    3. Industry Behemoth*

      I heard of a hospital radiologist who worked on Halloween dressed as a werewolf. Furry mask, furry paws and lab coat.

      A woman and her young son saw him in the hallway. The boy asked his mother, “Mom, did that man have too much radiation?”

  35. Brain the Brian*

    I shared this once already, but I think it’s relevant for today’s discussion:

    We had a long-running inter-departmental Halloween decorating contest that got so out of hand in the years preceding the pandemic that HR had to pre-emptively put a stop to it in 2019 (and it hasn’t returned since we went back to the office post-pandemic). The fake gravestones and skeletons were becoming large and numerous enough to be trip hazards, and I seem to recall people had taken to stretching fake spider webs from the sprinklers (I’m still not sure how they managed not to set off the fire alarm system when hanging the stuff). The “prize” every year was just bragging rights — nothing even worth all this effort! I wish I could remember more of the details, but it’s been nearly six years (how is that possible?!) since the last instance…

      1. Brain the Brian*

        Bragging rights in what is otherwise truly the world’s lamest office are not worth the effort, lol.

  36. Stella70*

    I wanted to decorate the office for Halloween, but all the curmudgeons said ‘no’. I couldn’t resist, however, when I saw black construction-paper mice at the dollar store. If I remember correctly, there were about 300 mice per $1 package, so you can assume the quality level. They were literally silhouettes of mice cut from paper, but the manufacturer (a kindergarten class somewhere?), also threw in cheese wedges, as well as tunnel shapes (seen in cartoons to indicate a mouse has burrowed into the wall). These were also made from black paper.
    When I was alone in the office (my team was at an off-site conference), I stuck the mice/cheese/tunnels on the walls of the cubicles, near the floor.
    I took a few pics and texted them to our building’s Facility Director, with the note, “I think we should reconsider our pest control contract!”
    No response.
    I assumed I was the only one who thought it was funny (hindsight: that was correct) and went back to work.
    An hour later, the Orkin pest control technician arrived at the office, which was weird because it wasn’t his usual day. He said the Facility Director called their offices, raised holy hell, and demanded an immediate visit for a “rampant mouse problem”.
    I would have considered laughing if my stomach hadn’t immediately twisted itself into the human equivalent of a hairball, which was terribly distracting. Emergency call-outs were expensive!
    I showed the technician the construction paper mice, with their accompanying wedges of black cheese (moldy?) and black fake tunnels.
    He was absolutely dumbfounded, so I quickly explained the joke text. He thought maybe they looked real in photos? We checked. Nope, still one-dimensional, flat-as-a-pancake mice.
    It was most alarming to realize we were on the 4th floor, and all of the mice/cheese/tunnels were attached to fabric cubicle walls (so the “tunnels” would have just gone into the next cubicle), and with no kitchen or breakroom, someone would have had to store cheese in their desk. (I did, but no one knew that.)
    No human has ever begged another human for anything, like I did that day. I believe I promised the technician my first born child if he did not to charge us. He agreed. (And turned down the child.)
    I collected all the mice and piled them on top of the Director’s desk, hoping she would feel so dumb to be fooled by them, she wouldn’t make an issue of it. She never said a word.

    2. Quill*

      Good god Stella, it’s not just the car sales places with you, it’s Everywhere you have ever worked. Great job!

    4. Azure Jane Lunatic*

      And I thought my “there’s a leak in the roof of the big blue room” Facilities ticket was bad!

      (I filed a ticket with that phrasing, trying to be funny enough to get instantly reviewed and dismissed while we waited for bug tracker ticket 1,000,000 to arrive and hoped it would contain something cool. Of course, the geek-land “big blue room” is of course that huge area with the blue ceiling, dirt floors, and a single big very bright light … aka the “outside”. It had been raining. Facilities are not often composed of computer geeks and leaks are serious business, so they came practically running and I had to explain the joke. They were not impressed.)

  37. Joyce to the World*

    Worst thing I can think of is two cousins working in the same department. They were both dressed as serving wenches complete with really low cut drawstring blouses. Saw way more than I was comfortable with.

  38. notscarlettohara*

    Oh man. The sexy bridezilla one. I’m a veterinarian, and did in fact once have to euthanize a patient while dressed as Minnie Mouse. Maybe not as bad, but…it did not feel great.

    1. Cat Lady*

      I can see why that would feel weird! Speaking as someone who recently had their family pet euthanized, I wouldn’t have minded the vet wearing a fun costume if it was on Halloween. If anything, it would’ve been a nice distraction from all the sadness.

  39. juliebulie*

    A popular coworker with short blond hair donned a wig of long red hair. That was her “costume.” I decided to take her around the office and introduce her as a new employee. I was surprised that so few people recognized her; I thought I was the only person who over-relied on hair to recognize people.

    1. Juicebox Hero*

      I have short blonde hair. One year for Halloween I put on a long hair extensions in the same color. It was super funny to watch people sort of do a “who the hell are you” double take before they realized it was me, then we’d have a good laugh.

    2. H.Regalis*

      I got eyelash extensions and had a few coworkers not recognize me. Literally nothing else changed, just my lashes.

  40. NCA*

    One of my coworkers did medieval reenactment stuff, and wore a full set of their gear to Halloween one year. Was told that ‘didn’t count’ to be part of the costume contest, since it was stuff they wore on the weekends anyway. The prize wasn’t much of anything fancy, just a basket of candy, but everyone agreed that the ‘sexy cheerleader’ outfit that won it didn’t have as good of a costume as our coworker. Including the sexy cheerleader!

    2. Liane*

      That always happened to me at Infamous Retailer’s costume contests. I’d wear my screen accurate Jedi costume (I have worn it for official Disney/Lucasfilm events). The winner was either a (1) Borderline NSFW, for sexy or other reasons or (2) Random costume straight from our Halloween aisles.

  41. WeirdChemist*

    When I was in grad school, one of our undergrad’s decided that our lab needed some “Halloween cheer”. So she brought a carved pumpkin and a real candle. That she tried to light. In a lab full of very flammable chemicals. She did not understand why she was not invited back the next semester.

    1. Junior Assistant Peon*

      As a former chemistry grad student myself, I’m surprised anyone was concerned about safety in an academic lab! An open flam in the lab would have raised eyebrows in my corporate workplaces, but definitely not in grad school.

      1. WeirdChemist*

        My PI was actually *very* safety conscious! Always willing to pause or slow down experiments if we had any safety concerns. It was the only aspect of him that was a good boss, he sucked in pretty much every other way possible lmao

      2. amoeba*

        Eh, in my PhD lab, they were *very* fire-safety cautious! Otherwise, so-so, definitely not as strict as in industry, but open flame? Never.

        However, in my postdoc labs, we did regularly use actual propane torches to dry our glassware (it was necessary for the super sensitive stuff though! And as far as I know, nothing ever caught fire…)

  42. Ama*

    This is minor in the scheme of things, but at my last job my busy season culminated in a Very Important and Logistically Complicated Meeting that was usually the first week of November. So I was always very busy with last minute prep and unable to participate in my office’s Halloween activities (which were minor, we had a very optional costume contest and usually snacks) other than zipping by the snack table to grab something and returning to my desk. Meanwhile every other department’s busy season had wrapped up by mid-October so they were free to hang out and chat, spend time putting fun costumes together, etc.

    No one ever pressured me about not participating, but it was part of a larger pattern in that office where my department’s busy times seemed to always be the opposite of everyone else’s so the fun stuff always got scheduled when my team was really busy and stressed. (I actually thought I was exaggerating it in my head because of the stress until one day one of my direct reports made the same observation.) It kind of sucked and, while I left that job for other reasons, I wish just once senior leadership had thought to ask my team about scheduling a party at a time that actually worked for us. (Not Halloween, obviously, but any of the other activities that didn’t need to be on a specific date.)

  43. Former Retail Lifer*

    I was in a brand-new job as the Guest Services Manager at a mall. I did not have a direct supervisor (the Marketing Director role was vacant) at the time. Having just about no event planning experience, I was put in charge of the mall’s annual Halloween event and had just one person (a new admin with little event experience) assigned to help me plan. There were other team members in the mall office, but no one offered to help us except for one person, who was told she COULDN’T (because of overtime). I was told there would be trick-or-treating around the mall but we needed additional entertainment for the kids. I hired a magician, bought 50 pumpkins for a decorating contest, and found some vendors (face painters, etc.) to sit at tables at the event and offer candy and services to kids passing by. We were also sent about 100 goodie bags from our corporate office to hand out (there some cheap but cute Halloween-themed toys and stickers inside) that I added candy to.

    Unbeknownst to me, this event was, by far, the biggest and most popular event that the mall put on. At the start time, I watched in horror SO MANY PEOPLE started pouring in. The goodie bags were gone in under 10 minutes. HUNDREDS of kids wanted to enter the pumpkin contest but I only had 50. Anything the vendors were giving away was also gone in minutes. The magician put on a great show but it was so crowded it was hard to see him. Our social media lit up with angry parents complaining about us running out of giveaway items and not being able to see the entertainment.

    The only saving grace was the mall stores who were giving out candy. Most of them knew what to expect and had purchased enough to give out, so the trick-or-treat portion of the event went well. The rest, though, was a certified disaster.

    1. ento*

      That sounds like my worst nightmare! But its on them for not telling you what sort of numbers to expect!

  44. Viki*

    We had a co-op student, who wanted to do a team costume. And she wanted to be Beetlejuice. Honestly, she was young, enthusiastic and all I had to do was to wear a black dress to be Lydia.

    We were/are a cat ears/witch hat sort of company so the fact that the co-op managed to convince ten people-including a director at the time to all wear costumes was amazing. We won the non existent costume constant, and my (male) boss was amazing as Catherine O’Hara, blasting the Dayo song from portable speakers as he walked around the office in 2017.

  45. Hawk*

    The worst work night for my college RAs, dorm coordinator (I don’t remember the specific title, but this was a paid position in charge of each of the dorms and usually someone fresh out of college), and student life was definitely Halloween in 2007, when two students in my building ended up setting off the fire-suppressing sprinklers by hanging a Halloween costume on one of them. The costume got caught on the closet door, which then set off the sprinkler. They never told anyone and left for a party in another part of the state(!). We lived in a 95 year old building, the water started on the top floor, and half of us had to live in a hotel for part of or the rest of the semester. The staff had to not only coralle approximately 200 students and find us a place to sleep (in the campus center, on sleeping bags on mattresses, like in the third Harry Potter book), but then work with the fire department and make sure the building was safe. It was millions of dollars in damage in what was thankfully only a 4 floor building. This all happened around 11pm, and I think everyone was situated for the first night at around 4am.

  46. Belle of the Midwest*

    Higher education/student affairs division, late 1990s. We did not have a rigid dress code back then but most people dressed more formally or at least business casual Monday through Thursday and on Fridays, we wore jeans with polo shirts or nice tops. Nothing written down, that was just what evolved. Registration for spring semester started in late October so it was a pretty busy time for our staff academic advisors. Halloween fell right in the middle of this period. Most of us were pretty tame and/or funny–for example, two women dressed up in M and M’s costumes that went to their knees and then they had on white tights; one of our senior staff members had a long black cape and a witch’s hat that she could remove easily if she needed to go to a high-level meeting.
    That was the year we had an award-winning anthropology professor working with us as part of some kind of faculty exchange program or fellowship. He had done field work in some cultures where the dress codes were very different from what they are in the US. So on Halloween, he shows up in a loincloth, Birkenstocks–and NOTHING ELSE. All day long, he saw students and walked our halls with every little left to the imagination. After seeing him walk the halls a couple of times, I just stopped paying attention, but I can only guess what went through the heads of the students who had to sit in his office for advising. (thankfully, we have an “office doors stay open” policy) I am not sure why our director didn’t send him home to change. There were rumblings about formalizing a dress code afterward, but nothing ever really came of it. He was gone by the next Halloween. Either the funding for his job ran out, or maybe the director chose not to renew it. I have no idea where the dude is now.

    1. Belle of the Midwest*

      After posting this, I remembered his name and looked him up. He is a dean at a dental school somewhere between Maine and Florida. I am assuming he doesn’t wear a loincloth to fundraising events…

      2. earlthesachem*

        …. How does an anthropologist end up as the dean of a dental school?

        Academia truly does work in mysterious ways.

  47. V2*

    Nothing crazy, but we did have to evacuate the building one year because sparklers set off the smoke detector. It was made up for another year when a coworker brought in their pony and got it up on the second floor using the freight elevator. It was so soft.

      2. Insufficient Sausage Explainer*

        We organised a non-Halloween dinner & disco event at one of the colleges at uni and my friend in charge of the disco managed to source a smoke machine. Smoke machine set the smoke detectors off (d’oh! clue’s in the name), resulting in evacuation of the college and a fire brigade callout. all of us involved in organising the event had to go and apologise to the college principal and someone from the fire brigade the next day. Not our finest moment.

  48. Awesome Sauce*

    Halloween 2014, I’m working in the oil and gas industry, the day before our office Halloween party, some coworkers are chatting about what they will dress up as. Some people, including me, do not have costumes planned. One of the higher-ups said, lightly, “well just come as the scariest thing you can think of.”

    The global price of oil had started dropping dramatically that summer and wasn’t showing any signs of slowing down, so “the scariest thing I could think of” was $20/barrel oil.

    My spouse went to IKEA and bought one of those small, round laundry baskets with long handles. I cut the bottom out of it and it was exactly the right size and shape to look like I was wearing a barrel. We covered it with blue fleece (you know, the colour of those plastic oil barrels!) and I printed off the Dangerous Goods label for oil and made a big comedy price tag (Price is Right style) that said $20.

    Hilarious, yes? I definitely got a reaction.

    That winter, West Texas Intermediate dropped to $26/barrel and everyone in the office blamed me.

    The next Halloween I dressed as a cheerful unicorn…

      1. Awesome Sauce*

        LOL! Oh yes. I thought $20 was low enough that it would be obviously farcical.

        Needless to say all my costumes since have been very bland.

        1. BlackCatFursuiter*

          You could try if your magic works in positive predictions, too. Dress up as an affordable house, or something.

    2. N C Kiddle*

      My Halloween costume in 2016 consisted of a suit and tie, orange face paint, and a cardboard sign reading “Trump/Pence”. After the election, I wondered if I was in some way to blame.

  49. Stuart Foote*

    I once worked for a very, very conservative financial services company. Men wore suits and ties every day, women were required to wear pantyhose, that kind of conservative. One of the Assistant VPs was the epitome of a buttoned up conservative white guy…except for some reason his Halloween costume of choice was drag, or a Buddy the Elf costume with extremely tight green tights, or similarly unusual attire for a man in his fifties. You might be thinking it’s odd that this stuffy company let people dress up for Halloween; they didn’t, he was the only one.

    A former C suite executive with the company decided to close out his career by working on my low-level team. When the VP came prancing out in his Buddy costume he shook his head and muttered to himself “This is why Bob is never going to be a VP.” He did eventually get promoted, but it took him well over a decade (and as far as I can tell he is still a lower level type of VP).

  50. HolidayHumbug*

    I work in a highly religious neighborhood in customer service related work. Every holiday we cannot decorate or wear costumes because the elderly church ladies come in and claim it is “The Devil’s” work some go as far as to preach in our office and pass out flyers. Funny enough the same people are more then happy to set up illegal booths outside selling decorations and asking for donations to the church halloween event. The church halloween event is just passing out candy in the parking lot with hay bales and undecorated pumpkins.

    I’ve tried to put up minor decorations at my desk but it just made me a target of complaints that I am not properly dressed or was extra rude on customer surveys.

      1. Wolf*

        In Germany, many churches do a thanksgiving service with decorations of hay, pumpkins, apples and similar harvest-related autumn things.

    2. Ellis Bell*

      I’ll always remember working a local newsdesk and taking a call from a local church who wanted to advertise their “light night” on October 31st. Stupidly, I said “that’s Halloween isn’t it?” because it was not unheard of for local churches to have non Christian event themes sometimes, and as Emily of New Moon rightfully points out, pumpkin decorations are really only venerating autumn vegetables. So she says she’s terribly glad I asked because she specifically wants to appeal to people who were planning to celebrate Halloween and plead with them to attend a wholesome alternative instead. She said she gets so worried for all the people out there who are being tempted by pagan devil worship (She couldn’t have known, but I am pagan myself; you would think that she would have been a bit more aware that the devil is Christian theology). So, I asked her what it was about Samhain celebrations that she objected to, or found devilish, and she’d never heard of Samhain. I tried again and asked whether there were any insensitive Halloween celebrations going on near the church (You never now, someone might have been doing something dodgy with a cross, or targeting the churchyard itself and being curious is what gets you stories) and she said no. So I asked her what was wrong with people choosing to celebrate Halloween if they wanted to (it was a very quiet village, so it was typically just kid’s parties and apple bobbing and cat costumes) and she said “I don’t know too much about it, but it seems too dark to be healthy”. I did get some info on what a “light night” would involve, but it was so boring that I’ve totally forgotten.

      1. goddessoftransitory*

        I love the idea of someone not knowing a thing about Halloween trying to organize a protest type event and it just being soooo boring.

    3. H.Regalis*

      Ugh, I had an Uber driver like that in October a couple of years ago. I got in the car and saw the religious pamphlets in the seat pockets so at least I was forewarned. Conversation went from him asking me about my day and then took a hard left turn into, “By the way, did you know demons are real and celebrating Halloween opens a portal for them to enter the material world?”

      I think that was one of the only times I never tipped a driver. I do not like being in a confined space I can’t leave and having to nod and smile while a stranger evangelizes at me.

  52. CubeFarmer*

    I don’t think I’ve ever worked at a place that celebrated Halloween. Although this might make me a spoilsport, I am 100 percent okay with that!

  53. Mermaid of the Lunacy*

    I was in a major U.S. city for some training over Halloween one year. I talked to my coworkers who were with me and I thought we had all agreed to dress up, go out to dinner, then go out on the town. How often do you get a chance to be in a big, exciting city on Halloween? Well….I meet them in the lobby dressed up as a famous rock star and….no one else was dressed up. Apparently they had all chickened out or something. I sat, humiliated, through dinner looking out of place. (It was a fancy place and no one else was dressed up even outside of my group.) After dinner I tried to salvage the evening by asking if anyone wanted to get a drink somewhere, but they all just wanted to go back to the hotel. It was a total womp-womp and I still haven’t totally forgiven them. Haha!

    1. Filthy Vulgar Mercenary*

      This reminds me of the guy who dressed up as a giant 6 foot tall lobster because he misunderstood the instructions (Elizabeth Gilbert tells this story) and everyone else was dressed super fancy with those little mysterious and elegant masks covering their eyes. He could have slunk away in shame but instead owned his lobsterhood (and thankfully everyone in attendance was kind and welcomed him) and I try to channel this story whenever I find myself in a situation like this. I hope you can look back on yourself and give yourself a thumbs up or a supportive wink.

      1. A perfectly normal-size space bird*

        Long ago among a group of friends/acquaintances, one (Mary) was gushing excitedly and showing off her costume for that night’s Halloween party she had been invited to by her boyfriend. It was an elaborately done costume of one of the X-Men (from the comics, this was before the movies). It was very amazing, like winning-cosplay-contest levels of amazing, complete with a very expensive and realistic wig. Apparently she’d been planning for years to wear this costume but never had a chance to due to always working on Halloween

        After Mary had left, another group member (Stella) said that the boyfriend’s invitation was not a Halloween party, it was a masquerade ball that was a high society annual fundraising event held at the local OldMoneyFamily’s mansion. Dress code was “20s elegance.” Boyfriend was a nephew or something in OldMoneyFamily and invited Mary as his plus one without explaining any of this to her. Stella worked at the company that catered the event and had been trying to convince Mary for the past two weeks not to wear the X-Men costume but Mary refused to listen.

        Though I don’t know if Mary made it to the ball as a superhero, I assume things went badly, given that Mary was single again very soon after.

    2. Goldenrod*

      I want to know which famous rock star you were dressed as? (Your co-workers were wet blankets!)

  54. Rosyglasses*

    We had a decorating contest at work — and being the fun loving team (seriously, we LOVED a good party, owners included) that we are, I decided it would be a good idea to bring in a smoke machine to add to the spookiness of our team’s corner.

    Under the fire alarm.

    In a corporate building.

    Yes, you guessed it, the 10 minutes of having the machine on for judging turned into the fire department showing up, and all of us having to evacuate.

    We shared cupcakes and candy with the other tenants who actually thought it was hilarious and enjoyed having a short break – but I was mortified and thankful that it wasn’t a bigger issue than it turned out to be!

    1. JustaTech*

      I’m amazed that there are two of us with this experience!
      At least we were the only tenets of the building!

      1. MigraineMonth*

        I’m starting to wonder if the Fire Department hates Halloween almost as much as it hates Thanksgiving.

        2. Quill*

          Yes. When I used to work high school theater’s Haunted House every year, the fire Marshall was quick to put the fear of… well, the fire marshall… into us because believe it or not, we were better at electronics and fire safety than the average pop up haunted house.

        3. Azure Jane Lunatic*

          I just saw Halloween themed minor fireworks (those little bundles of rock and gunpowder you throw on the sidewalk called “poppers” where I’m from, and confetti cannons) in the grocery store. I’ve never seen those before. I do not think Halloween, being a common drinking holiday, needs more fire…

  55. Nannerdoodle*

    At Old Job, the position that I and the majority of the department held was rather soul sucking. The supervisors all banded together to create a Halloween themed party throughout the day that people could join when they had a free moment. They played kids Halloween movies on the projector in the conference room, and they created an escape room where you had to find the key to unlock the door and get out with the fastest time (was supposed to take ~10 minutes). You could play as a group or alone. I only mention these two activities because together with them and a department policy that no one could have their phones on them, they created a problem.

    The supervisors in the room watching the movies became so engrossed in these films that they hadn’t watched in 10+ years that they stopped doing any work. They also entirely forgot about who was in the escape room. The person who made the room was a puzzle enthusiast and went off the deep end for the escape room. I did it with 3 other people, and it took us 9 minutes (we all like the puzzle stuff). It was taking most people ~15-20 minutes. One person, the department problem, went in alone. Everyone forgot he was in the escape room. The supervisors were watching the movie and didn’t hear his pleas to be let out. He couldn’t message anyone to be let out either. After 2 hours, someone finally noticed that the timer was still running and opened the door to a totally destroyed escape room and the problem employee laying on the floor in defeat.

    We weren’t allowed to have escape rooms after that.

    1. MigraineMonth*

      There’s an episode of “Game Changer” on Dropout (formerly College Humor) where they spring a surprise Escape Room on the contestants. Something about the surprise triggered something primal, because for reasons they cannot later explain, all of the contestants flip out and start destroying the room (including the walls!) completely ignoring all the detailed backstory/storytelling elements, in a desperate effort to escape.

      1. Chauncy Gardener*

        Well, yeah! That would trigger my cPTSD like you f–ng read about. I would do many things to get out of that room!

    3. Wolf*

      I’ve only been to one escape room place, but I remember each room had a big Panic button that would automatically unlock all doors in case anyone ever needed to get out quickly.

      1. Nannerdoodle*

        When it’s a pop up escape room made by people who have only entered escape rooms rather than by people who have worked in escape rooms, there are no quick release buttons.

  56. Mefois*

    Last year our department had a Halloween costume/decorating contest and my team got very into the decorating part including a couple hundred paper bats, fake spider web on everything, personalized grave stones for everyone, and lots of stuff hung from the ceiling. It looked great, but unfortunately we were informed by building security that hanging things from the ceiling is a fire hazard and we had to take that part down. This year the contest organizers included a reminder not to hang anything from the ceiling.

  57. Teaching during Halloween*

    I was getting my teaching license and as part of it, I had to film myself teaching a class. You can’t edit or crop the video in any way, it has to show the students and you teaching. This gets sent to the state licensing board to review. Also, the lesson has to meet a certain requirement, so you can’t film a random day, it has to be planned. The day I had scheduled to film there were technical difficulties, so the next possible one fell on Halloween. I dressed in business attire. However, my students love Halloween, so they came in costume. That’s how I got a video of me teaching about the Industrial Revolution to a class full of pirates, anime characters, princesses, and one student wearing a very large blowup Hulk Hogan suit. At one point, a fellow teacher enters the classroom dressed as Dr. Seuss’ Thing One. I made sure when submitting the video to include a note it was Halloween. I got my license, so I guess the state board was understanding.

      1. VFD*

        Seriously, Halloween costume/party day at school is a tough day to have a traditional lesson! You were on the highest difficulty level for that licensing requirement. Congrats!

    2. Edwina*

      I had to make a video like this for a training certification, but I had to find 15 minutes out of a much longer video of me teaching. Also couldn’t be edited. It took me a while to find a solid 15 minutes that showed me following all of the guidelines. The very last frames showed me turning back to the front of the room with my braid flying out behind me, but I couldn’t cut it because I was talking at the time, and I needed to include what I was saying in the video. I did earn the certification, thank goodness. But I’ve never liked recording training that I couldn’t edit.

  58. Little Grey Cells*

    I was fairly fresh out of college and working in the office of a school (4th – 12th grade). I helped with study hall in our common room some periods. One Halloween, the principal was out and the older students asked if they could make a giant pentagram on the floor of the common room with masking tape. I said yes, thinking of it only as Halloween decor. An hour later, a teacher came to the office asking if I knew what the students had done and that some younger students had been in tears to her. We had it removed in minutes and I never lived it down as long as I worked there. Now, I can’t imagine what I was thinking when I said yes.

  59. Count von tshirt's phone*

    We had a pumpkin carving contest between departments, which went off nicely enough. Except we forgot how much the office cat loved pumpkin. And I mean LOVED pumpkin. Everyone’s jack o lanterns had chomp marks within hours. At the end of the day, all teams were supposed to either take theirs home or put it outside in the garden to compost. One team forgot. The cat ate 3/4 of it over night. We gave them litter box duty as penance.

    1. Strive to Excel*

      That’s *amazing*.

      And for those not familiar – canned pumpkin is a common add to cat or dog food when you need to up the fiber content. Some pets tolerate the taste more than others…

  60. Lab Rat*

    I worked at a horrific, abusive job once.

    The first year I was there, my boss came to me and said “Are you wearing a costume tomorrow? We all do it every year!”

    I came in the next day as a vampire, with a cape and everything.

    Nobody else had a costume.

    My manager HOWLED in laughter and said he couldn’t believe I actually believed him.

    I am neurodivergent. I take things at face value. And I felt so upset after that and cried in my cubicle.

      1. Lab Rat*

        He was a jerk in SO MANY WAYS.

        Once he asked if anyone wanted a hockey ticket, loudly, in the middle of the office and then pointed at me and yelled “NOT YOU”

    2. Czech Mate*

      Um that’s not “could be misinterpreted by someone who is neurodivergent” territory. That’s straight up deliberately misleading someone in order to embarrass them.

      I’m sure your costume looked great, though!

      1. Lab Rat*

        Oh, I looked FANTASTIC. I am now out of that field and in another one and apparently the toxic workplace there can’t keep employees (I wonder why)

      1. Lab Rat*

        Oh, so much better now! I have a great job and I don’t dress up much for Halloween, but I may wear my horns this year.

    4. CommanderBanana*

      I hope that manager stubs his toe and every time it starts to feel better he stubs it again, over and over, until he dies of a weird toe-related problem.

    5. Ellis Bell*

      My absolute pet peeve is when people tell really plausible lies and then try to pretend it was a “joke” or they somehow revealed your gullibility by getting you to believe something very believable. If he’d sent you out to buy stripy paint, he may have had a point because there’s a chance of spotting the logic fail there. But saying “Are you wearing a costume tomorrow? We all do it every year!” contains absolutely no clue for anyone, neurodivergent or otherwise to figure out that one. You have to take it at face value, because it doesn’t have any other kind. It wasn’t a common expression, or a metaphor or joke, it was just a dumb guy who thinks lying is funny because it’s the only way he has of feeling clever.

      1. Lab Rat*

        Yep. And fhank you (and others) for telling me neurotypical people would also take this at face value because I am never sure if I am not peopling or just reacting normally to somethint crappy.

      2. MigraineMonth*

        Yeah, the “gullible” thing always annoyed me, in part because that meant that people stopped believing me when I told them something cool (like they had a spider on their shirt or someone had actually written “gullible” on a piece of masking tape and stuck it to the classroom ceiling).

        There’s also just nowhere to go in a conversation after the person you’re talking to says you’re lying. Um, no, that actually is my sister. Why would I claim her if I didn’t have to?

      3. Lazuli*

        Exactly! Something like this happened to me once in college. A guy introduced himself to me by some super old-fashioned name – I don’t remember precisely what, but it was something like Eustace or Dewey, nothing obviously funny/embarrassing/jokey – and I said, LIKE A NORMAL, POLITE PERSON WOULD, “Nice to meet you, [Hiram, or whatever].” He and his buddy absolutely dissolved into laughter. (His real name turned out to be something very usual for our age.) Like… idk, I’m not going to… disbelievingly scoff at a person when they introduce themselves to me? Maybe you’re named after your great-grandfather or it’s still a common name in the country your parents are from or your mom is a historical fiction author or whatever tf. This was almost 20 years ago and I’m still baffled.

        Anyway, I would have dressed up for that Halloween, too, Lab Rat!

    6. one of the annas*

      Jokes that rely on the punchline being “why did you think you could trust me?” are always so bad, but especially from a manager!

    8. Perihelion*

      I had a manager like that. They have to laugh really loud at their own “jokes” to cover that no one else is.

    10. Gamer Girl*

      What?! No, he’s just outright mean, especially with that hockey ticket example you mentioned further downthread. What a jerk!

      As a fellow ND, I sympathize with you thinking that you somehow got it wrong, but that was deliberate on his part!

  62. Full time reader, part time commenter*

    Back when we went in to the office, our Halloween was a very bid deal, lots of pressure to dress up. I hate costumes, in an effort to participate, I borrowed my son’s very realistic light saber, it’s quite fancy. The whole day, young men came up to my desk to ask if they could hold it. Then they danced around like eleven years olds when it lit up and made “the noise.”

  63. ento*

    This is more a story of halloween gone right-
    The Entomology department of a big university had a yearly costume competition where everyone dressed up as different insects. One year, an employee of the neighboring and sometimes rival Ecology department showed up with an absolutely massive homemade fly swatter.

    1. RLC*

      I absolutely love this! Also getting serious The Far Side vibes about these departments, science humor at its best.

  64. Tara*

    One Halloween when I was a kid, my otherwise not very emotive school bus driver decided to dress up as a cow for Halloween. She had this cow onesie with a giant pink rubber udder on the front.

    I lived in a rural area on a winding country road. As the bus was stopped in front of a driveway picking up kids, a car came speeding around the corner way too fast and the driver of the car lost control as she attempted to brake/swerve to avoid the school bus. The car flipped over and landed in the brush by the side of the road.

    The woman who was driving the car was clearly in shock (but seemed physically fine). She emerged from the car screaming “I ripped my pantyhose! I ripped my pantyhose!”, a phrase she did not stop repeating until well after the police arrived. My bus driver had to emerge from the bus wearing her cow costume with the pink udder flopping all over to talk to the police. To make matters worse, she had a very severe speech impediment which made it so she couldn’t communicate very well verbally, and so she had to mostly use hand gestures to describe what happened to the police. Her plus the woman running around screaming about her pantyhose made quite the scene.

  65. SunnyShine*

    for context, I work in a very conservative area in manufacturing on night shift. A supervisor assistant (they cover when the supervisor isn’t here) wore red demonic eye contacts. They were very realistic looking. She told people that they were waking the demon inside of her. Us lower salary folks found it hilarious, but she got called in by the area manager the next morning. Apparently some did not find it funny. She didn’t get a write up, but she was coached on “appropriateness”.

    1. anon24*

      This is my favorite. As a night shift EMT, I wish it wasnt completely unprofessional and I inappropriate to do this, because I can relate…

  66. ragazza*

    Not really “gone wrong,” but my old company got really into Halloween with competitions for which department had the best costumes, etc. (One year our department’s theme was Mad Men and I brought in a manual typewriter.) But it got really elaborate with requiring us to make videos and all this stuff (we had three separate offices across the country), plus our VP was super-competitive. My coworker complained because she was the one who had to make the video, so the day wasn’t super-fun for her, and finally they scaled stuff down.

  67. SquarePizza*

    Old nonprofit journalism job was BIG on Halloween. Every department would compete for a pizza party and get into decorating their area. Except the managing editor. She didn’t want to participate (which was fine) but she did want to come to the planning meetings and talk about what a waste of time it was and how she didn’t like Halloween. She would work herself up to near tears. And then, come Halloween, instead of working from home (allowed! Even back then!) she would huff into her office and shut the door and make a point of ignoring everything/everyone all day long. This happened for years, but she eventually just noped out, WHICH SHE SHOULD HAVE BEEN DOING IN THE FIRST PLACE.

  68. Forrest Rhodes*

    Many years ago (make that many decades ago) I lived in a small mountain town in the northern Rockies. This was well before Halloween became the Very Large Deal that it is today, but my little town definitely took the holiday to heart.

    If Oct. 31 happened to fall on a weekday, a large percentage of the local merchants would come to work in costume. In that case, if you said, “Oh, darn, I have to go talk to that clown at the bank,” that’s exactly what you did: You sat across the desk from a full-on Bozo, complete with the hair. At the bank.

    The night of Oct. 31, of course—regardless of day of the week—was absolutely raucous in the local saloons, but it was usually more PG- than R-rated. Despite the overall consumption of way too many Tequila Sunrises, the whole holiday had a touch of innocence and was, in some ways, a lot more fun than I think it is now.

    Also, it often happened that we got our first snowfall before Oct. 31; we always enjoyed watching fully costumed Playboy bunnies, complete with silk, color-coordinated high heels, trying to wade through the snowbanks to get to the barroom doors.

    Different days, different times—and really fun to remember.

    1. Forrest Rhodes*

      Addition: The costumes, though, were incredible. One friend went out on the town costumed as a full-body-sized Swiss Army knife, complete with movable blades and corkscrew. (Much tinfoil died in bringing us that costume.)

      He’d left an opening at the side of the costume, through which we kept passing him beers as requested. Once we saw that the costume was listing more than about 30 degrees to starboard, we said, “Okay, [name], you’re timed out,” and made sure that he got home and escaped from the costume.

      Probably sounds totally boring by today’s standards … but it was great at the time.

  69. Eeyore is my spirit animal*

    A friend’s office had a Halloween Pet costume contest. You could bring in the pet for the afternoon or just provide a picture. Extra points were given for a matching theme between the human’s and the pet’s costume.
    One year his kids decided to dress up one of their chickens, a very fluffy designer breed of chicken. They dressed the chicken as a pirate to match his usual costume. At their insistence, he took it into the office for the party and kept it in an old playpen thing for the afternoon. Kids were annoyed they lost to a dog in a hat.
    I was appalled but the chicken didn’t seem to mind it much. it did look spectacular. After asking, he admitted that the kids dress up the chicken on a regular basis.

    1. CommanderBanana*

      My friend dressed up her fluffy little Shih Tzu as a lobster, except the dog was very, very put out about the costume and refused to stand up while wearing it, so we got lots of pictures of the Saddest Lobster to Ever Sad lying on her side in various places in the house.

  70. noncommittally anonymous*

    I once had to give a scientific lecture at a well-known and extremely stodgy University department on Halloween. Unbeknownst to me, this particular department went all-out on Halloween. So, I’m there, trying to present research on, say, engineering microfluidics (not the actual topic, but similar) to an audience of about 75 faculty and grad students, all of whom were in fantastic costumes, while I’m wearing a cute jacket and skirt with high heels. It didn’t help that the field is still mostly male, so 90% of the costume-wearing audience was male, and I’m female. I made a quick joke that I was dressed up as a boring engineer and then went on with the talk.

  71. Prudence and Wakeen Snooter Theatre for the Performing Oats*

    I had recently started work at a laboratory when Halloween rolled around. Unbeknownst to me, the other employees were dedicated to dressing up- when I came to work without a costume, I received gentle yet persistent nagging that I should dress up. To make it stop, I put some leg and arm holes in a biohazard bag and filled it up with some packing material for a toxic waste costume.

    It was hideously hot, and not being used to the padding around my middle, I accidentally dragged a slide off the counter with the belly of my costume and it fell to the floor and shattered. This was a slide that had been sent to us from another lab for analysis- fortunately they had sent us enough slides from that sample that the doctor had what they needed, but no one ever hassled me about dressing up for Halloween after that.

  72. CatLady*

    I don’t think this is wrong, since several higher ups in my organization kept pulling me out of my clinic to show me off, but last year I wore a poofy blow up calico cat costume LOL
    I had to keep replacing the fan batteries because I quickly realized I couldn’t sit nor actually function.
    The last hurrah was when I was ordered to waddle to the opposite side of the building for a photo op with the Sta-Puff marshmallow lady

  73. Former preschool wrangler*

    I’m now the Program Manager of an Early Childhood Education Apprenticeship at a non-profit (full-time, paid program to earn a teaching credential, recruiting un-or-under employed folks and recent immigrants to the country) but before this, I worked in Early Childhood Education as a teacher for a decade.
    I have an endless supply of hilarious preschool Halloween mishaps, including:
    – One child who dressed up as the skeleton from Coco, his favorite movie. Absolutely obsessed with the movie, he worked for weeks making a completely accurate costume with his parents, talked about it all the time. Big day arrives and everything was perfect. Unfortunately, however, we quickly realized he was terrified of his incredibly accurate skeleton face paint and burst into frightened tears every time he saw his own face in the mirror throughout the day. full on panic at his own reflection.
    – I had a very fancy, fashionable student originally from Milan. She was a tiny little 4 year old diva with a HEAVY Italian accent.
    her parents dressed her up as a princess (of course) that looked like Marie Antoinette cosplay. Turned out her gigantic hoop skirt had an actual hoop in it, like 1745 style. It was beautiful but like Marie herself, she couldn’t go to the bathroom by herself. My co teacher and I were forced to be ladies in waiting every time she had to pee, hoisting the hoop up over the toilet. Preschoolers pee. all. the. time. so this happened at least 10 times.
    The end of the day comes and we’re making one final trip as her personal chambermaid. we hoist the hoop one last time and heard the girl quietly sigh and say, “Oh, mama, mia” to herself as she sat down. I just about lost it right there.

    1. The Prettiest Curse*

      That Italian kid sounds like an absolute trouper, good on her for keeping her sense of humour!

  74. SoCal Kate*

    I once had a job interview on Halloween where the interviewer was dressed in her Halloween costume. It was a work appropriate costume, but it felt so awkward to be interviewed by someone in a full on ball gown. It really felt that she wasn’t taking the interview seriously. (I did not get the job.)

    1. Mouse named Anon*

      Same thing here! Only the woman’s dress was a tight black dress that was super short, fishnet stockings and like 5 inch heels. Not sure what she was going as. It was weird.

      2. Juicebox Hero*

        Yep, our admin assistant wears short, tight dresses and 5 inch heels every day. No fishnets, though, because she hates pantyhose.

  75. OneBean TwoBean*

    I’m sure some people saw this as Halloween gone wrong, but I loved it.

    This was in the late 90s/early 2000s. The corporate office I worked at was big into Halloween. There were department decorating contests, costume contests, and then employees’ kids came by to trick or treat in the afternoon.

    The HR department decorated their area to look like a zoo. It was really well done and all the people were dressed as zookeepers or animals. Their department also happened to back up to this glass-enclosed atrium area. A bunch of employee’s kids were in there, dressed as monkeys, with a supply of chocolate pudding. When people from other departments walked by, they’d throw handfuls of chocolate pudding against the glass since they were “poo-flinging monkeys”.

    1. Awesome Sauce*

      OK this wins today’s internets. I hope this story gets picked for the highlight reels because this is incredible.

      How many kids emerged covered in chocolate pudding, by the way?

      1. OneBean TwoBean*

        I’m betting most of them!

        I think the next year they made some rules about not using the atrium and only inviting kids for a specific hour in the afternoon.

  76. Toby*

    One of our outside sales people decided to pay the office a visit on Halloween, wearing a VERY LARGE TARANTULA HAT. There are two of us who are deathly afraid of spiders, so it turned into a big thing about asking her to take it off and put it in her car. She was really offended and didn’t understand what the problem was.

  77. Sabrina*

    The building my office was in had an empty office floor, and for reasons I still don’t understand one of my coworkers got permission to turn it into a haunted house for our Halloween party. I don’t think he did anything for a month but work on it. There was a reception area that was a graveyard complete with a smoke machine, then you turned into a hallway with a bunch of scarecrows, one of which was headless and “came alive” to attack people. Then the grim reaper chased you into a room with clowns screaming about haunted dolls. The final room was a butcherer shop where a large man with chainsaw menaced you.

    We were a fairly stodgy engineering company. This was supposed to be something fun for people to check out during the Halloween potluck lunch break. I was the scarecrow that came alive and since I was in it I didn’t realize what a masterwork of lighting and perspective the setup was. While we preformed I noticed people were screaming a lot, but it wasn’t until afterwards that I realized how badly we freaked our coworkers out. What I thought was a goofy and fairly obvious set up was actually so well done that no one had realized I was a person until I moved, several believed I must have dropped in from the ceiling and wasn’t part of the display they saw when the entered the hallway. The other rooms were less jump scare and more straight up scare, but the costumes had been elaborate so no one could recognize their coworkers. Already freaked out people were suddenly faced with their senses overloaded. People in the later half of the walkthrough told me people straight up ran through it, trying to get out. Our chainsaw guy was almost punched by a few people.

    We were never allowed to have a haunted house again.

  78. AG*

    When I worked in an elementary school, in order to de-emphasize Halloween (which was controversial in this community for a couple of reasons) but still acknowledge that people like to dress up and be festive, we had a full theme week: dress like a superhero, wear your favorite sports jersey, etc.

    One of the days was pajama day. Children all came in their PJs and with a stuffed animal. It was adorable.

    Less adorable: the kindergarten teacher who came in wearing negligee. I suppose it’s what she wears to bed…?

    (That was her one and only year teaching at this school).

  79. IHateHalloween*

    I have a no-nonsense senior co-worker who was known for her “work uniform” of black pants, black turtleneck, and multiple bracelets who also brought her small dog to work everyday. Our party planning committee was threatening to withhold our holiday party tickets if we didn’t participate in the Halloween costume contest that year. I work a physical job and dislike Halloween, so I chose the only free costume I had – black pants, black turtleneck, bracelets, and a little stuffed dog! My co-worker was so angry and upset that I packed the dog away and told everyone I was a ninja the rest of the day!

  80. Zombeyonce*

    Very early in my career, I worked for a man who wore basically the same thing every day. I always joked that I’d dress up like him for Halloween and he always laughed. So one Halloween, I showed up in his “uniform”, including using some temporary spray to make my hair gray. In a move showing just how young and dumb I was, let another employee—who happened to be my much older but less mature boyfriend—convince me to wear a pillow under my shirt to represent my boss’ beer belly.

    Needless to say, my boss DID NOT like this. People wanted to take our photo together all day and, while he went along with it, he wore a scowl in every photo. I was very young and didn’t really get why he seemed to think the idea was funny when I brought it up but disliked the execution (the early aughts were an ugly time that normalized weight-related jokes), but have since learned to keep my Halloween costumes to fictional characters. I still feel bad about it, all these years later.

  81. BookishMiss*

    I once worked somewhere incredibly dysfunctional, and a coworker came in on Halloween in blackface. Not only was she not spoken to about it, she was complimented on her costume!

    I do not work there anymore.

  82. Czech Mate*

    I’m a higher ed admin. Once upon a time, one of the students developed a crush on our office administrative assistant. They were about the same age, but she was a full-time staff member, not a student. She politely but firmly told him that she would not date anyone enrolled at the school under any circumstances. Not to be deterred (and I guess deciding that a grand romantic gesture was in order?) he showed up at our office on Halloween…dressed as a present. As in, he was wearing a box with pink heart wrapping paper, and on his head he had a lid with a giant bow. He said that for Halloween he was “the gift of love.”

    We thanked him for showing us his costume and showed him the door. Mercifully, he found a girlfriend not too long after that, so I think that was the last time he stopped by our office. It certainly was the scariest Halloween costume I’ve ever seen.

    3. Cat Lady*

      As a higher ed admin, I am cringing out of my skin. I’m so glad I work with students who are mostly much older than me and married.

  83. Ann O'Nemity*

    Back at my old job, the CEO was obsessed with Halloween costume contests. Every year, she insisted on having multiple categories like ‘scariest,’ ‘funniest,’ and ‘best overall,’ with prizes for each. She would go all out on her costumes—spending tons of money and time—then complain when she didn’t win, even though I remember her taking home prizes many times. It got to the point where it was less about the fun of the contest and more about feeding her need for recognition. Honestly, it was pretty gross to watch her get upset over something meant to be lighthearted.

  84. Murder, She Typed*

    This is going back a while, but one of my former coworkers “Jessie” lost family to serial killer Dennis Rader, otherwise known as BTK when they were a child.

    The company owners loved throwing parties and their Halloween parties were pretty legendary, but there was a caveat of tasteful costumes being required – no sexy nuns, no over the top gore, nothing political or outrightly offensive. One of our new district managers “Dan” was this cocky kid right out of college from California or something, he was a total ass all the time. The Halloween after Rader was caught, Dan came to the company party dressed as Rader, his wife came as one of the victims. They were asked to leave. The next work day was awkward, and Dan’s desk was cleared by HR before noon.

    Thankfully Jessie didn’t see Dan’s costume. When HR told her about it her response was “what an asshole.”

    2. Strive to Excel*

      Did Dan *know*? It’s wildly inappropriate no matter what, but if he knew… wow. I agree with Jessie.

      1. Bast*

        It sounds like Dan was all around unpleasant to deal with, and this was the straw that broke the camel’s back, but I also wonder if 1) Dan knew about Jessie’s family member 2) Dan knew the rules of the party and 3) when this party took place. I can definitely see something like this happening and no one batting an eye 20 years ago, but things like this still crop up even now, when you WOULD get side-eye for it. Due to the popularization of a Netflix series featuring Jeffrey Dahmer, I saw suggestions last Halloween on how to dress up as him. Most people agreed that it was in poor taste.

        1. Katydid*

          People seem to struggle to understand that these things happened to real people, whose loved ones just might live amongst them. Dahmer murdered the nephew of one of my coworkers. Dressing up as Dahmer or any other modern serial killer is not okay. The affected families are still here.

      2. Murder, She Typed*

        I think he had to have known, as Jessie took time off to be with family and participate in some parts of the legal process and give victim statements. It’s possible he didn’t and he was just a jerk, but Rader’s impact on the community was well-known, even to people newly moving to the area. They were hustled out of the party very fast by the CEO’s wife. Just so gross.

    3. JustaTech*

      Oh My … What on earth was wrong with Dan that he thought that *that* would ever been a good costume choice for any party, let alone a work party?
      Gross.

  85. CrossWord*

    I worked for a year at a large publishing house that had notoriously riotous Halloween parties back in the day–this was like twenty years ago, so they might have cleaned up their act. Each department would put up elaborate decorations — a Marioland and an Old West Saloon theme were stand-outs. I think each department also had a different alcoholic drink. The president/publisher of the company gathered us in the “saloon” for a shot shouting, “You may have been to Halloween parties before, and you may again, but there will never be a Halloween party like an XYZ Publisher party!” Then we all chanted his name. I’d say there were at least a hundred people there. That night, I saw people making out, barfing, and smoking weed in the normally staid hallways. I myself got home and yakked in my bed.

  86. Tasha*

    I worked for a health insurance company and we had a male doctor on staff. He dressed as a pregnant woman and gave birth in the cafeteria on a table. Totally tasteless.

  87. Mouse named Anon*

    I shared this a few weeks ago. One year I decided to dress up as Banana’s in Pajamas for Halloween (give it a google if you don’t know what it is). I had a Banana costume and thought it would be cute. Well the end of my Banana hung out over my pants. I’ll give you one guess as to what it looked like… There were lots of snickers (not the candy) and staring in my general direction. Finally I figured out why (sweet summer child that I am). I was so embarrassed and left the party early.

    1. JustaTech*

      I had a coworker who wore a very, very suggestive banana costume where the “peeled” part of the banana was the bottom, rather than the top (where your face goes). About as far from the wholesome Bananas in Pajamas as you can get!

  88. Tasha*

    Oh,I have another one. I started a new job the week before Halloween and was assured that “everyone” dressed in costume for the big day. Well, I did, but no one else in my department of middle aged men did. Luckily I could remove my cat ears and tail and just look like I was wearing black pants and a black shirt.

  89. Rachel*

    Around 2006 was working in an office with about 20 employees total. We didn’t decorate for Halloween at all – maybe someone had something small in their cube but nothing large. No mention of dressing up or party for the actual day.

    Everyone came into the office that morning wearing regular clothes (we were casual dress everyday). 1 employee who was there about 6 months, arrived in horror costume and full ghoul makeup. Her whole face, neck and arms of thick grey/black/green makeup. I think we were surprised a little but didn’t make a fuss (we were a very casual office). She worked all day like normal, interacted with other employees and the owners like normal, but when 5:00 hit, she stood up and said she was never coming back and just left.

    Never to be see or heard from again. Like a ghost or ghoul!

  90. Camilla Cream*

    Back when I was an educator, school faculty dressed up as storybook characters for Halloween one year. I dressed as Camilla Cream, the girl from A Bad Case of Stripes – complete with face paint. It was fun and we all had a good laugh until I was called into a surprise meeting with a set of (unrelatedly) unhappy parents later that afternoon. Nobody was laughing as I led the meeting with stripes painted all over my face!

  92. Irish Teacher.*

    Not exactly gone wrong, but I did work somewhere where we literally left the city for Hallowe’en. I mean, I was working in an afterschool project and we arranged an overnight trip for Halloween. It was partly because Halloween is mid-term break here in Ireland and the kids were off school, but it was also because…this was one of the areas where Halloween gets really rough in and we wanted to be out of the estate.

    Illegal bonfires and illegal fireworks are fairly common in much of the country and kids throwing eggs and flour is common enough that when I worked retail, we checked ID for those products that week. But there are some places where things get really out of control. It’s a very busy night for gardaí (our police) and fire services.

  93. heyella*

    About a decade ago I worked in a public library with a really fantastic director who was very reasonable and smart about most things in her job…but for some reason she insisted that dressing up on Halloween was a requirement for all staff, not just for the children’s or teen librarians or for anyone who wanted to. (She is the type to go all out with her costumes each year and I used to look forward to what she came up with.) About half the staff got into it, and the other half had one costume-like accessory (like cat ears or a fun hat) they’d don only somewhat begrudgingly. Well, one year we had a page (part-time, college student) who clearly wasn’t vibing with the library work place but the Halloween requirement was too much for her. She adamantly refused and showed up to work sans costume. The children’s librarian needed her help with our Halloween storytime, but noticed the lack of costume and tried to convince her to wear the Cat in a Hat hat from the supply closet. Page refused. Words were exchanged, things were getting heated and children and families were noticing. Even though I was pretty senior to her, I hopped over and try to defuse the situation by suggesting she go cover my desk (not really allowed as she was just a page) so I could assist the children’s librarian. That seemed to be agreeable to everyone and the page walked off…but she was only about 5 ft out of the storytime area when she proclaimed, “I HATE THIS F*CKING HOLIDAY!” at the top of her lungs. Everyone heard. We had so many complaints.

    She did not get fired for her outburst, but next year Halloween costumes were optional but still highly encouraged. I think most of the staff wore them anyway because we were all too afraid of our director getting upset with us, and by that time the page was long gone.

      3. New Jack Karyn*

        The boss should not have pressured everyone so thoroughly about dressing up, and the children’s librarian should not have pushed the page more than once about wearing the darn cat hat.

    3. Strive to Excel*

      Wow. I get not liking Halloween, costumes, or being interested in dressing up…but I feel like if you’re working a job where there are small children involved and you are going to be doing the occasional themed storytime, there’s a certain amount of “I’m going to grit my teeth and wear the hat” involved.

      1. New Jack Karyn*

        We have no idea why this particular person hated Hallowe’en, but there are some folks with religious objections.

  94. Dek*

    This one wasn’t awful, but I remember my first year working at the public library, one of my coworkers decided to throw together a costume last minute. I *think* he was a zombie, or maybe a murder victim? He had a massive gross wig on, torn up clothes, and then for blood he used…ketchup. So much ketchup.

    It was a few months before smelling ketchup didn’t make me nauseous

  95. Tess McGill*

    Yep. I work in municipal government. One year someone in customer service wore a sexy catwoman costume, full on leather. Another year someone else wore a purple body suit with exaggerated nipples underneath. No idea what that was supposed to be.

  96. MamaG*

    I have been wanting to share this story for years.

    Our business office team was celebrating Halloween week with daily themes and the obligatory Midwestern potlucks. On pajama day, one of the employees showed up in her full Blanche Devereaux negligee and was absolutely shocked when she was sent home to wear something more appropriate. It was see-through and for the last 15 years I still cannot unsee that in my mind.

    1. Ama*

      I am consistently baffled, every Halloween, by stories of people who seem to think “wear a costume” means they can wear anything (or nothing) with no consequences.

  97. Carls*

    At old.job we had a department competition for best theme every Halloween. Usually it involved decorating the desks and coordinating costumes, maybe some music or games that the judges could play. Some departments were way more into it than others (accounting once made a functional Price is Right spin the wheel) but it was generally seen as light and fun, and prizes were usually something like a $10 gift card to a local lunch spot. One year though our new HR Director decided his team would win, and their theme was going to be a second line parade. That morning there were funeral programs on everyone’s desks that listed one of our coworkers and real facts about her life – it read like an actual funeral program. Just before the judging started our HR director and one of his department managers started playing a trumpet and trombone, marching around the building trying to gather up everyone to parade by their cubes, where the aforementioned coworker was laying ‘dead’ across the desks. Not only was it incredibly loud (and many of our jobs involved being on the phone) but it was perceived in pretty poor taste. A lot of people were put off by the fake death/funeral and annoyed by the loud disruption. I don’t remember who won that year, but the HR director was pretty sheepish for weeks after the event.

  98. Harper*

    A few companies ago, I was part of an all-female HR team who reported to the male VP of HR. He was funny, sarcastic, and well-liked by most people at the company. He also had a pretty standard uniform every day: khaki dress pants, white or light blue dress shirt, matching tie. He was a tall guy who was balding and wore glasses.

    On Halloween one year, all of the women in HR (about 7 of us) decided to dress like our boss. We slicked back our hair (one woman wore a cap that looked like a bald head), donned glasses, and wore khakis, white shirts, and ties. Because we had access to the badge maker, we made ourselves copies of his employee ID badge with his name and picture, and we all wore them. We weren’t sure how he would react, but he was super flattered, called us all “sweet”, and insisted on group pictures. It was the best group costume I’ve been a part of!!

    1. JustaTech*

      That’s lovely! One department at my work did that to their boss and the best part was that it took all of them lining up next to him for him to even notice that they were all dressed just like him!
      He was very flattered.

    2. Csethiro Ceredin*

      A team did that here too! He isn’t their manager but has been here forever and is a very friendly, outgoing guy with a penchant for Hawaiian shirts and sports jerseys from his team of choice. He came in to find a very diverse group of ‘hims’ all wearing name tags. It worked out well because his family was visiting from out of town and stopped by the office, so they got to see the tribute and take photos.

  99. Madame Señora*

    I’m a teacher and we usually have a spooky door decorating contest. One year, an English teacher decorated his door with fake exams marked up with red marker with “F-” “See me after class!” etc. The principal made him take it all down.

    2. Katydid*

      I agree with The OG Sleepless—that’s too bad; it sounds like a great entry. If one used the names of famous authors* on the fake exams rather than the names of actual students, I don’t see what’s objectionable.

      *or the like

  100. Quill*

    This an extremely minor example, but:

    In the days before cell phones had cameras worth a damn, I was an intern at a local manufacturing plant, and my boss, liking the cut of my jib so far, deputized me and a corporate card to go to a local hardware store to pick up some tools and get a replacement key cut for a storage shed. No problem. I drive there successfully without the aid of a map with my shopping list and immediately realize there is going to be a problem.

    The store is in full Halloween mode. There are pumpkins. There are scarecrows. There are four aisles of “skeleton” animals that I can only describe as grotesque, particularly the spider. Because of the Halloween that has taken over the front of the store, I take maybe an hour, maybe an hour and a half to actually find all the stuff, get checked out, and drive back. My boss wants to know what took so long, and I truthfully told her that I had trouble finding things because of the Halloween sale.

    My boss scoffed. “It’s a week before Labor Day” she said, “What could they possibly be selling this early?” She chalked it up to the intern being clueless and sent me to go scan approximately ten million documents.

    … Two weeks later, however, we needed a different tool, and I was more useful running mail than running errands, so my boss decides to go out to the same hardware store. I get called in from my package delivery to do something intern-y, and my boss says “by the way, you were totally right about the Halloween sale. It was a nightmare getting anything at the store.”

    Me: Yeah I bet it’s an even bigger sale now.

    My boss: Not really. They’ve just moved on and added Christmas.

  101. Cedrus Libani*

    I’m a data person on a “special projects” team. Part of the job is monitoring the quality of our widgets and, if needed, figuring out what’s gone wrong.

    When I first started, I was told that the company took Halloween seriously, so I decided to dress in honor of one of my new team’s recent big wins – an expired ozone filter, which had been causing all sorts of trouble. And yes, it took a while for the US-based data team to realize that this specific part would fail if made on a smoggy afternoon in Singapore. But we found it!

    What I didn’t realize was how close the upper management had come to getting fired over the whole mess. The parent company was about to clean house, because our product kept getting recalled and nobody knew why. They were NOT ready to laugh about it. As my director put it: “Ugh. Too soon!” Oh no.

    After that debacle, I bought a completely non-controversial dragon onesie, and I have worn it every Halloween since.

    1. Edward Fairfax, Rochester, NY*

      username pro hint: specific epithet is not capitalized (but I like the thought, Cedar of Lebanon)

      1. New Jack Karyn*

        grammar pro hint: they are when used as a username, designating a specific person

        commenter top tip: we don’t nitpick word choice here.

  102. JustaTech*

    Please let me share the story of Tweedle Dee, Tweedle Dum, and the smoke machine.

    Halloween is a big deal at my office. Back in the day it was a full day party, everyone in costume, each department doing a skit, big, big deal.

    One year the Halloween party planning was taken on by two party enthusiasts, Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum. They were *so* excited about this party. And then Dr Boss gave them a company credit card. So they got a bit carried away. While shopping for party supplies Dee discovered an amazing deal on a smoke machine. “Just the thing!” said Dum, so they ordered it. But neither of them had used a smoke machine before, so when it arrived they decided to test it out.
    So they fill it up and set it to maximum smoke. In the middle of a large room in a modern office building. You know, the kind with windows that don’t open.
    Some time later Dr. Boss happens to walk past the room where the smoke is now so dense that you can’t see your hand in front of your face. Dr. Boss can, however, hear Dee and Dum giggling maniacally, somewhere in the fog.
    “How have you two not set off the smoke detectors?”
    *RING RING RING RING!* Goes the fire alarm.

    Everyone evacuates (the smoke machine is turned off) and the fire department comes out and yells at our Facilities head, Dr. Boss, and Tweedles Dee and Dum.
    Everyone heads back inside and settles back to work when the fire alarm goes off again.
    Again, everyone evacuates and the fire marshal is very frustrated, but the truth is that there’s no way to quickly vent a building like this, so unless the fire department will let us cover the sensors (absolutely not) there’s nothing anyone can do to make the alarm stop going off.

    While we are standing around outside discussing all of this Dr. Boss says “at least it’s not raining!”
    It starts to rain.

    (The smoke machine was returned.)

      1. JustaTech*

        It was pretty funny even at the time! The third time the fire alarm went off people just got their stuff and either went home or went to the coffee shop (after checking in with the attendance taker so they knew no one was still inside).

        I have to think a little part of the motive to put in a patio on the roof was a reason to put an exterior door in the large gathering room, just in case someone decides to try the smoke machine again.

      1. JustaTech*

        Considering that one year Tweedle Dee thought it would be *hilarious* to hide behind Dr Boss’ car wearing a scary clown mask and jump up and scare Dr Boss (who is terrified of clowns) (Tweedle Dee was talked out of this with “but he’ll run you over!” “Oh, didn’t think about that.”), and Tweedle Dum wore a colossally suggestive Twister board costume one year, yeah, they could really be Dumb and Dumber.
        (But both were actually good at their jobs, just left good decision making at the desk.)

  103. TheLittleTramp*

    Okay, this is not really a disaster, but it made people mad.

    This office was well run and pretty fun, with lots of morale activities, so it’s no surprise we had a costume contest. And had plenty of entries. Some incredibly creative and put together ones. Me, I was dressed as Charlie Chaplin – full B&W style (looked pretty good if I say so myself. I cosplay so put a ton of effort into this sort of thing and I wore it for a few years at cons), a group of employees put together a Force Awakens set that looked pretty solid, and others I can’t remember. There were also 3 folks who dressed as well-liked mid-level manager. He had a particular style (think very Guy Ferari) and stood out (along with being just a good guy, so the dress up wasn’t in meanness). One downside of this guy is he played favorites- get on his good side and you’re super set. He also judged the contest. He was over the moon about the 3 dressing up as him, so… you can guess here… they won all three placements. Maybe giving the set one of the entries as a group, but all three? Grumbles.

  105. MapleMobile*

    I was working in a nursing home and a bunch of staff went over the top in decorating the whole facility, including resident’s rooms. They had witches, creepy rats in silhouette, pumpkins, ghosts, everything you could imagine. Some of the residents had dementia or conditions that impaired their visual and tactile understanding of their environment and began complaining about mice and rats being in their rooms at night. These complaints were attributed to the pictures throughout the care home. Well, the complaints continued after the decorations came down, and that is when staff noticed that with autumn came a bunch of real life rodents in the home who were nibbling on food left on bed side tables with droppings even being found on patient’s beds. The next year there were no pictures of rats allowed in the home!

  106. Fat Mermaid*

    One year when I worked at the public library, a co-worker came to work dressed as a “librarian.” Large glasses, elaborate cardigan, whatever you are imagining.

    A librarian from another department came up to her and started complimenting her cardigan, asking about it, etc. You could see the horror of realization come across her face before she asked “…This is your costume, isn’t it?”

    Librarians are what we are.

  107. Jonathan MacKay*

    I don’t know if this fits, because it’s something that COULD go wrong, but we haven’t tried to do yet.

    I am what’s called a half-identical twin and we’ve been looking into getting photo-realistic half-masks made of each other’s faces.

    That is, I wear something made to look like the right side of his face, and he wears one made to look like the left side of mine.

    Closest we’ve found of being able to do that is a place which wanted us to send photos, which they’d then create masks based on the blended image.

    It’s a great idea, but way out of the price range of a Halloween gag.

    The original idea was to wear full-on masks of each other, but this seemed like a good modification to the idea

  108. Rainbows all the time*

    I have a pretty high-visibility job doing internal trainings, so even though there’s about 2,000 employees in my company, I get recognized a lot around the office. It also helps that in a fairly conservative environment, I’m a woman who presents butch (pants, button-down shirt and boots are my go-to work wear). I’ve never met another openly queer person at this job.

    One Halloween, I dressed up as Rainbow Brite – blonde wig, blue tube-style dress, rainbow tights. I had so many (very delayed) double-takes. There were even a few people that I had extensive conversations with who came up to me later (while I was back in my regular clothes) to ask why they didn’t see me at the party. It was glorious.

  109. Corporate Goth*

    My former organization used to go all out – even a Halloween costume contest with leadership judging. The problem tended to be a lot of last minute overkill – themes announced the week before, resulting in last minute and often expensive wrangling for bits and bobs. I love Halloween, but don’t miss the chaos or forced participation.

    However, one year I missed the fuss because I was at a different part of campus for training. That area wasn’t security restricted, so I was unexpectedly surrounded by employees’ kids trick or treating.

    Just when they were sugared up and on the verge of cranky, the fire alarm went off. It had also started raining heavily, but no one was allowed to leave for obscure and unspecified accountability reasons.

    I will never forget herding tiny, sobbing rhinos and witches in the rain.

  110. It's Probate, not Probation*

    I work for a Probate Court – decedent estates (wills, heirships, trusts) and guardianships (aka conservatorship in some states). Both administrations I’ve worked for like to decorate the courtroom and offices seasonally.

    There has been much discussion about the appropriateness of Halloween decor in the courtroom, particularly skeletons, tombstones, and ghosts.

    On the one hand, I see the concern about questionable taste with funny death themes in a court that handles matters related to death. On the other hand, all hearings are almost exclusively on Zoom, so no one is ever in the courtroom except for weddings.

  111. JustaTech*

    This was my spouse: He’s not usually into costumes like I am, but one year for Halloween decided he wanted to do something, so decided that he would cover his face with goggly eyes. In the morning I helped him glue on like a hundred or so with liquid latex (we pre-tested), filled a little jar with extra latex and a bag with extra eyes in case they fell off, and away he went (on the bus!).

    His coworkers thought it was hilarious and delightful (he sounded like a maraca when he shook his head). At the end of the day his boss took him aside and said “Hey, just so you know, I have trypophobia* and you’ve been freaking me out all day, so that’s why I’m avoiding you, not because of anything you’re doing about work.”

    My husband was mortified that he’d spent the whole day sending his boss into panic-mode.

    *Trypophobia is a phobia of repetitive clusters of small holes or bumps. Things like a lotus pod, or an employee with goggly eyes all over their face.

  112. Mostly Managing*

    My husband interviewed one Oct 31 at a company who took Halloween VERY seriously.
    Sitting across the table from a clown, a nurse, and a vampire was not what he was expecting!

    (He went in a suit. He got the job. He dressed up every year while he worked there!)

    2. Why Yes I'll have a Beer*

      Ha. I was once interviewed by someone wearing a lobster costume. But it wasn’t Halloween. It was early September.

      I got the job. Turns out the company was really into partying, made a big deal out of everyone’s birthdays, themed cocktail hours on Fridays, etc. I enjoyed my time there.

  113. KK*

    My company had a grand Halloween party in the office & everyone was assigned a category to bring food (starters, the bread, the meat, tableware, drinks, desserts, etc etc).

    I was assigned starters so I brought chips & queso (this is Texas!) in a Crock Pot. My husband thought it would be neat to dye it black for the theme. He added black food coloring to the melted cheese. No idea what went awry but the cheese never turned black, it was dark brown.

    I did not think much of it until I set it up. It looked like some creamy, melted brown contagion. It just looked gross. My coworker with zero filter exclaims “OMG someone brought what looks like di@rrhea!”

    No one touched it. Myself included. Too much of a mental image more than anything else. I will no longer listen to hubby’s “cute” ideas.

  114. The HR Reaper*

    In a previous HR role I was responsible for a portion of our production departments and the retail division. Since we had several stores spread across the state, some stores did not get to see me as much unless I needed to address some employee concerns, conduct an investigation, or terminate an employee. Over time I earned the nickname of Reaper, which was mainly done in jest. After a year or two of joking about it, I was challenged to come to work as the Reaper for Halloween. Of course I had to go all out with full Reaper makeup as well. Unfortunately, we had an employee who made it unavoidable that day to not terminate them and I had to do it in full costume. I’ve chosen my Halloween costumes much more selectively since then.

    1. Roy G. Biv*

      ….. but that is awesome. Cartoon-level work nightmare. If the terminated employee has any sense of perspective at all they have THE BEST “And that is how I got fired” story.

  115. Scully*

    One place I worked went alllll out for Halloween- it was a small, family-owned, nepotism-and-favoritism-fueled workplace, so senior management encouraged everyone to go all out with costumes and to enter the contest. The #3 executive (who was also the darling protégé of the CEOs/owners) was a makeup guru and won the contest almost every year.

    I’d been there 3 months and figured ‘what the heck?’ and showed up in my professional-grade Disney princess ballgown, hoopskirt and all. Everyone was amazed! Except for the #3 executive. You could just see her inwardly raging at having her spotlight taken away, and by an entry-level girl a few years out of college. (Her costume was basically elaborate face makeup.)

    It ended up being a very toxic workplace that management was complicit in, which I’m glad to have left years ago. But I’ll always treasure swooping in and practically stealing that Halloween!

  116. EttaPlace*

    I taught at a high school that had always allowed staff and students to dress up for Halloween with a few caveats (nothing inappropriate for HS, nothing that obscures your face). We got a terrible new principal who crushed the costume tradition as hard as she could. We got emails about not wearing costumes. It was in the announcements every day for weeks. It was broadcast on our school news show several times. It was evident that the principal did NOT want costumes.

    The day of Halloween arrives. Everyone is grumpy about not wearing their costumes, but… Our Certifiably Very Odd teacher showed up in a giant lizard costume. Head to tail, a giant lizard. It wasn’t subtle. He posed for pictures all day, made lizard faces and jokes, the whole bit. When Evil Principal came up to scold him for wearing a costume, he quite helpfully pointed out that all of her communication specified *students* should not wear costumes. She apparently never specifically prohibited adult costumes. She let him keep it on all day, but she was pissed. Next year, all no costume communications specified that NO ONE on campus should wear anything even remotely resembling a costume.

    2. New Jack Karyn*

      I don’t know how she could enforce that. If a costume meets dress code, and a parent will stay on the kid’s side, any significant punishment cannot stand.

  117. Misapplied Political Assumptions*

    This isn’t terrible, but I wore a Mao hat as part of a punny costume in an office that did costumes and cubicle-to-cubicle trick-or-treating. It got uncomfortable at some point in the day so I put it on the skull that was decorating the top of the cubicle. There it stayed for . . . years? Just part of the general decor of the place. At one point, a new project manager assumed my cubicle-neighbor or I was using it to make a Vietnam War-era political statement. We were both what that era would brand as “pinko commies,” so things were a bit confusing until the assumption came to light.

  118. Brenda B.*

    Fresh out of graduate school, I started a new job in higher ed (an admissions and registration office) in the late 90s where most of my new coworkers were a close-knit group of middle aged ladies who’d worked together for decades and who cared more about taking their 15-minute breaks at exactly the same time every day than about the work. It was early October, and I was informed that for Halloween, everyone would be dressing up like a bumble bee just like last year. Someone showed me a group photo, and indeed the previous year’s costumes, made by one of the ladies who was also an accomplished seamstress, looked like those for an SNL skit about bumble bees, complete with big round yellow- and black-striped bellies, antennae, wings, and black tights. I advised students on a walk-in basis, and I sometimes had to have a difficult conversation with a student. Presenting myself professionally was very important to me, so I said, absolutely not, I will not be participating in this, and I’ll take a day off without pay to avoid it if I must. They capitulated, and the compromise was that we could each wear something we considered “bad fashion” instead, which wasn’t too bad (at least each of us could choose how silly to look). So in the end, nothing went badly, but I shudder to think how it might have!

  119. BowlingGal*

    Back in the mid-aughts, the office I worked in was big on Halloween – we decorated, everyone dressed up, pics got posted on the company intranet, etc.
    I had a new co-worker who was about 6 months pregnant who came dressed as… a nun. Everyone thought it was hilarious, including our manager, but we all forgot that we were hosting a seminar later in the day which would be primarily attended by older women, many of whom were Catholic. Oops! Our manager got a multitude of complaints, and ended up sending my coworker home since she didn’t have a change of clothes. She didn’t get in trouble, and we were all jealous of her half day off!

  120. Definitely not me*

    I worked for an I.T. company with about 100 employees occupying an entire floor of a building. It was mostly a cubicle farm. I was a technical writer on a project team, which meant I often was the one staying late to finish a deliverable or a presentation due the next day. Our office allowed employees’ children to come in and trick or treat down each hallway, and many of us had a plastic bowl or pumpkin filled with candy. I’m sure the two guys who worked for the contracted cleaning company didn’t expect anyone to know they were emptying the contents of every bowl into a large garbage bag on the night of Halloween, but I heard the unmistakable noise and watched them going from cubicle to cubicle to take all the leftover candy. I let my manager know the next day. Lo and behold, we had a different cleaning crew after that. I hate to get people fired, but I don’t know how they thought 50 or 60 staff wouldn’t notice all their candy was gone.

    1. nnn*

      They could have still gotten a good amount of candy by just skimming a handful off each bowl! People probably wouldn’t have noticed, and if they’d been caught they could have said “Sorry, I thought it was Halloween candy for anyone to take”

  121. Left-handed scissors*

    I once worked at a library that did a haunted walkway every year for Halloween. It was a very popular event and practically the whole town turns out for candy and crafts. I’ll never forget the first year I attended: it was probably fine for adults, but way too intense for the kids invited to this supposedly family-friendly event. At the end of the walkway was my department, so I had the privilege of seeing many costumed little ones sobbing uncontrollably at the end of their wild ride. I’m sure I wasn’t the only one who asked them to dial it back a lot, and thankfully things were a little better the next year.

  122. Party Pooper*

    I work as a teacher with a team of 9 people who always want to dress up for Halloween. One year I mentioned I wasn’t planning to dress up and I was pressured to do it for the kids (middle and high school) and the entire team would be in costume! I was the ONLY person who came in costume. Everyone else just didn’t have the time to throw something together. Annoying, but fine.

    A few years later, my boss brings up that they want to do a themed Halloween dress up and she wants to make sure that my coworker and I are in because we are known party poopers. After a little bit of pressure we agree and the theme is Disney villians. My coworker and I choose Jasper and Horace because that should be easy to throw together and my boss says she’ll be Cruella De Vil. Perfect. This is a month before Halloween. We show up on Halloween and only 2 other people are Disney villians. So 4 out of 9. My boss is wearing a Day of the Dead costume so now all the kids think my coworker and I are random British people. The coworkers just didn’t have enough time to throw something together! I can now comfortably refuse to ever dress up again.

  123. Red Dragon... Of Love*

    One year, at a law firm, we were told there would be a Halloween costume contest, with two prizes available. Everyone professed much excitement and seemed to have big costume plans

    I came in a red dragon onesie I bought off the rack at Target… another colleague dressed as Maverick from Top Gun using her husband’s old Air Force flight suit. And that was it. No one else dressed up, so we won by default (five pounds of bulk candy each).

    Beyond the lack of participation, the other downside was an older coworker who was conservative and religious and didn’t celebrate Halloween, and thought I was dressed as Satan. She loudly proclaimed all morning that the whole office was now “under the shadow of the Dark One.”

    I had to go online and show her the onesie on the Target website, and convince her that I was a “good” dragon who only coincidentally was colored red. My winning argument was a sentimental appeal about Puff the Magic Dragon, how red was the color of love (sorry, green or black dragons), and how she had worked with me for months and knew I wasn’t in league with Dark Forces.

    It helped that I have no sweet tooth and gave away almost all the candy. My seatmate couldn’t stop laughing, and my boss found the entire day incredibly amusing.

    2. Wolf*

      Seen from the outside, the idea that Satan comes upon earth in a red dragon onesie has me crying with laughter.

    3. I Have RBF*

      I might have made a complaint about religious harassment. A Halloween costume isn’t a statement of faith.

  124. Fluff*

    I have so many (successes and um events).

    Years ago I was a free lance cellist before I went medical. On Halloween we happened to do a Symphony Petting Zoo concert. We performed fun themes like Star Wars, Disney stuff, etc. After the concerns, the kids could come up close and meet the “critters” which were our instruments. Now, musicians (like medical people) can be a collection of interesting personalities. Our principal cellist, who was an absolutely brilliant musician, was also a warrior for veganism. And I mean Warrior like she was born into an honorable Klingon House directly descendant of Kahless himself. This is relevant.

    We were all dressed in costumes appropriate for kids… or so we thought. I was a toned down vampire and sat behind her (3rd chair). She was dressed as a cow with a few little blood streaks. I thought, ok Zombie cow, that makes sense.

    As the kids came up to meet the cellos, she moved her cello over so the little ones could meet it. In doing so, her costume exploded out BLOODY JUICY fake cow intestines out to the kids like an insane Jack in the box (Jack in the guts). The screaming was epic. The kids backed away and fell over each other trying to get away. Those of behind her had no idea what in sam heck was going on. Except kids. Screaming.

    The Symphony Petting Zoo was never scheduled around Halloween again. Klingon murder cow moved on to another symphony.

    1. Gamer Girl*

      Oh my Gorgons! Musician + Vegan = Militant Vegan Exploding Cow Costume for Children’s Concert was not on my alchemist bingo card. Until today. O.O

  125. BreadCat*

    I work in vet med. Several years ago a bunch of us did pretty elaborate costumes, with full-face makeup and props.

    A routine anesthetic procedure crashed post-op. We were able to regain heartbeat and breathing but the patient was otherwise comatose. The owner came to see the pet and the mood, obviously, was horribly grim and upsetting.

    Attending to the pet at this time was myself, dressed as a Marvel superhero, and my doctor, dressed as a witch with full green makeup and comically false nose, a knee-length wig, and a pointy hat.

    We don’t really dress up for Halloween beyond wearing cat ears these days!

    1. nnn*

      You should wear cat ears, and also see if you can find human ears for the animals to wear!

      (If not, put cat ears on the dogs and dog ears on the cats)

  126. Not Laughing*

    I work in a professional field were there have been a few office shootings. We were in the middle of getting a secure door installed this particular Halloween because a client had made some threats against my department manager.

    It’s a small office

    I was working at my desk in my dark little office with my desk by the door when I look up, there’s a tall man in a suite wearing one of the Purge masks.

    In his hand is a gun.

    a real hand gun.

    pointed at me

    I freeze and watch him carefully. I’m watching for him to move to decide what he’s going to do. If he’s going to make demands or just shoot me or something else-

    he reaches up and pulls off his mask and runs into his managers office. he was remorseful and i could see his was very sorry but I had zero mercy.

    i followed him right in there, tears streaming down my face, and tore into him to demand an apology because pulling a gun on your coworker is in no way ever, ever, ever, a cute office “Fright Night” pranks.

    1. Gamer Girl*

      Holy crumbcakes!!! I’m so sorry you went through that. For what it’s worth, he should be grateful that he was only subject to an emotional reaction rather than a physical defense! OMG!!!!!11!!

    3. New Jack Karyn*

      A REAL gun?! He shoulda been fired for that. Lost his permit (if he had one). Possibly arrested for brandishing a firearm.

  127. pagooey*

    This could potentially out me to many people, but…

    At my first corporate job (in tech), I and a few like-minded brats came up with the anthithesis of Secret Santas: the week of Halloween, you’d draw names and then subject your colleagues to pranks (and candy) instead of thoughtful gifts. What do you call it? Secret Satans! (Eventually someone objected to the name and insisted we call it Secret Ghouls instead. I was much more disappointed in the loss of the joke than they were offended, I think.)

    Anyway. It always started out fun, but inevitably grew into a competitive, mean-spirited time suck, thanks to people who couldn’t distinguish between “clever prank” and “trashing so-and-so’s office.” Despite this, I introduced this tradition to two subsequent employers before I matured enough to tire of it, ooof.

    I will say, the best pranks were splendid and ingenious. One Satan hung an enormous Britney Spears on the back ofsomeone’s office door, so that it wasn’t discovered until they were having a 1:1 in there with a colleague. Someone temporarily replaced the row of function keys on a keyboard with chocolate-covered eyeballs. And the last time we did it, I reaped my own reward; a coworker was doing some home renovations, and I arrived at my cubicle to find that my ergonomic desk chair had been replaced by a fully assembled (though thankfully unused) toilet.

    1. nnn*

      As a society, we need a generally accepted standard for prank wars that the pranker is responsible for clean-up and mitigating any other consequences. (For example, if they misestimate the impact of the prank and the victim flees the office in tears, they have to finish the victim’s work for the day.)

      That would reduce the number of “trashing the office” type pranks, and the best pranks I’ve encountered IRL only take a second to fix anyway.

  128. The Not-An-Underpants Gnome*

    At my current call center job, one of the women from my training class won the costume contest the first year we were on the floor by wrapping herself in a bunch of old landline phone cords and saying she was the phone queue. It was BRILLIANT.

  129. George*

    We always could wear Halloween costumes to work, along with votes on best one etc. One year a white coworker decided to come dressed as a combo of two Johnny Depp characters – Jack Sparrow and Tonto from the Lone Ranger. For those that don’t know, Johnny Depp took some heat about playing that part as well to begin with. I’d heard some questionable comments about society from this coworker and his team in the past but wasn’t around them much in general, but enough for that to stand out.
    While I’m not sure what was said, he later changed his costume, but it was still the same theme, just with less stuff. The voting sheet put out listed him as “Jack Sparrow/Tonto (no makeup)” which was awkward to say the least.
    No idea if it had anything to do with him being in the next round of layoffs at the time.

  130. Agency Escapee*

    Back in 2012, I was two years in town my first job out of college at a politics-adjacent organization, so it was already a little tense before an election. I had a coworker who knew my sister (but not me) was a member of a religious organization that she did not like. On Halloween, my coworker came to work dressed as someone from that religion.

    I was already feeling like I didn’t fit in the office, so that on top of some other costumes I thought we’re in poor taste just really aggravated me. I decided to avoid her all day and get through the day as quickly and quietly as I could. Then this coworker came up to my desk to ask what I thought about her costume. When I explained I thought she was mocking the religious group, she said I couldn’t take a joke. I think it fizzled and she walked away but not before I cried at my desk out of frustration.

    The kicker was that I went to HR about it a week later after a few other coworkers heard how upset I was and encouraged me to report it. HR told me everyone’s emotions were high because of the election and I needed to let it go.

  131. BekaRosselinMetadi*

    At this time I worked at a nice office/office building in DC and also in this building was a non-profit arts organization-and they went all out for Halloween. The building had a pumpkin carving contest that they always won-I was just proud my X-Files pumpkin came in third (yes, it was the 90’s). And then I got on the elevator with one of their employees, who usually dressed very conservatively-navy or black suit, white shirt, nice shoes. Easy to tell it was her because she was fairly tall with medium length blonde hair. And she was in a full on harlequin costume-a good one. It glittered and was really beautiful and she had painted her face, she wore the hat and shoes and had the stick. It was beautiful but a lot at 8:00 AM in the elevator. She owned it though.
    But I’ll never forgive them for putting the giant stuffed grizzly bear where people could see it when going out the back of the building. It was terrifying.

  132. Librarian*

    I worked in a library, that was part of a city government. there was an informal group competition where we took a group photo of what was supposed to be a group costume. we all work in government, and across many jobs, so finding something that worked was always a challenge. One year, there was a certain bestseller, controversial, everyone was either reading it or talking about it. all it required was for all of us to wear clothes in a certain color range. so we collectively came as 50 Shades of Gray. Took our group photo,sent it out. The fail was A. Nobody got it. At all. B. Except the one person who bent my ear for a half hour on how we were promoting pornography.

    1. Sic Transit Vir*

      A coworker of mine, also in libraries, came as “Fifty Shades of Grey” that year by wearing a grey dress with paint swatches she’d picked up from Home Depot tacked all over it. Everyone got it thankfully!

  133. Jessica Ganschen*

    I’m really glad that I’m starting my new job at the beginning of November, so I have almost an entire year to learn the general office norms before getting into the Halloween norms. I’m hoping that it’s casual enough that I can wear my wizard hat, but not so enthusiastic that people will want me to wear the beard.

  134. Melody Powers*

    This is very minor but it made me laugh. We were allowed to wear costumes if we wanted to but not required. My coworker came in with a cat costume that included contact lenses to give her cat’s eyes. We used face ID to clock in and out and it didn’t recognize her with the contacts in. My manager thought it was funny and was able to clock her in and out manually.

  135. old curmudgeon*

    I never dress up for Halloween at work, but a couple of years before the pandemic, got arm-twisted into agreeing to come to work in costume because “the whole team is doing it, you HAAAAVE to.”

    So with a deep sigh, I dug out a piece of bright red felt from my craft closet, cut out a large, ornate capitol letter A, embroidered it with metallic gold thread, and attached a safety pin to the back. The morning of October 31, I put on black dress slacks and a dark grey turtleneck, stuffed a pillow in the front of my slacks under the turtleneck, pinned that giant scarlet letter A to my chest, and off to work I went – Hester Prynne updated for the 21st century.

    I got to the office, went to work, and all morning long, was the recipient of many puzzled looks from the various witches, ghosts, cats, and so on – they could tell I was dressed up as SOMETHING, but they just weren’t sure what it was. Finally one of my younger coworkers came over and asked me what my costume was.

    I replied “it’s a literary reference” (I’m a known bookworm so this was not surprising to anyone).

    The curious coworker thought intently for a moment, clearly digging deep to try to figure out what literary work I could possibly be referencing, and then got a bright look on her face as she cried out “I know – you’re Alvin from The Chipmunks!”

    Clearly, American Literature is not taught the way it was when I was in school half a century ago….

  136. Not a Penguin*

    Wish I had had time to put this one in before the tail end of the day! About ten years ago I was working at a non-profit that was very mission driven and attracted people with a lot of backgrounds; it was a true melting-pot style workplace, with epic potluck lunches and diversity events. For Halloween, our company unfailingly held a pumpkin carving contest, a costume contest, and a department decorating contest with prizes for all things. I was new to management in the IT department and improbably, also running the department Fun Committee. Our VP was having a baby with his partner, and somehow, the baby shower was scheduled on Halloween Day (on top of the carving contest, the department decorating contest, and the costume contest, because why not). The decorations went up around the beginning of the month, and no one paid much attention to what they were at the time, but I am sure they included some spooky severed zombie hands, some eyeballs, some bats, vampires, maybe a witch on a broom or something. All perfectly appropriate for a standard middle school, which was a good description of our department on any given Tuesday.

    One of the Fun Committee’s more hapless members, Amanda, decided to combine themes — spooky baby shower. She was the sort who throws herself into decorating and bought probably $20 worth of bunting, plastic printed sheeting, garland and such from Walgreens as well as bringing in the little pumpkins and some models she’d made at home — a trebuchet (I was flinging Mike-and-Ikes from it, at people, probably) and a Ferris Wheel with baby candy pumpkins sitting in the seats.

    Only, that didn’t sit well with everyone. One of our more forceful personalities, Natasha, had flipped out on Amanda, saying that she was cursing the baby even before it was born and bringing the devil into our department. Amanda had responded maturely by ripping it all down, and declaring that she would never, ever decorate again, for ANYTHING, and and then refused to attend the shower at all. Somehow, I got brought in by 3 different parties to mediate, including Natasha herself, Natasha and Amanda’s boss “Sr. Importante,’ and the advocate for our Diversity Council who thought we had a diversity issue on our hands not respecting everyone’s beliefs–like our right to celebrate Halloween as we saw fit.

    I sat down with Natasha to hear more and learned more about her deeply religious but a little fringe-y beliefs, and that the reason that people are dying in the world today, and incidentally also the reason our software had defects and that our projects were running over time, was that we had invited Satan into our lives with our decorations, which featured some skeletons and zombies, and also by our selfish acts. And also that her blood sugar had been spiking which is why it all came out. I did think to ask her why, if it had been up all month, we had to wait to hear about it until she was having a medical episode, and why she didn’t raise it at the time, but she did not have a solid answer for this. I told her that she needed to apologize to Amanda for the way she conveyed the message (Natasha had a solid 20 years on Amanda in life and in the workplace, and Natasha knew she’d been a total jerk about the whole thing by the time she told me about it, and multiple people, including Diversity Council lady had seen it firsthand)

    Later in November the Fun Committee met and I suggested we just dissolve and let one of the several other committees for fun across the organization handle the organization of events, and everyone including Amanda and Natasha looked like I had grown an extra head. And the VP in question was so far into the clouds that he never even heard that it happened until we were planning the retirement party for Natasha a few years later.

    They still have a Fun Committee, but I have refused to be part of the planning for a long while now.

  137. Midwest Manager*

    OMG, yes, two both from the same job. Important context is I was working as an anti-discrimination investigator for my city (so civil rights but on a municipal level. Our city is very liberal, so our municipal code included sexual orientation, gender expression, etc long before it was part of the national conversation). My boss was extremely zealous, to the point where I think it actually impaired her objectivity in investigations. Suffice to say she was turned up to 11 every second of every day on these topics. Our offices were in City Hall, so a public building with tons of citizens coming in to pay water bills, apply for building permits, go to teh police station, etc. LOTS of public traffic.

    1. One female employee (janitor, relevant only because she had zero front facing responsibility and actually was often onto onsite from about 4 pm onward) showed up midday dressed as a dominatrix. Tight black leather pants, tall back boots, a black leather bustier with nothing underneath, and a full 9’ leather whip, which she delighted in snapping along the hallways as she walked all of City Hall. My boss was speechless. And typical of her, spun into a full fledged fit, should we put together a committee to discuss this, how soon could we meet, etc? I went out and pulled the woman aside and said “this really isn’t appropriate in a workplace, so I need to ask you to leave.” Which she did.

    2. One of our clerk in the finance area—so literally someone who spends all day public-facing, taking payments and discussing bills with citizens—came in an elaborate and fantastic Marvin teh Martian costume, complete with face makeup, a full body costume and headpiece. Except the headpiece especially got hot and she overheated and took off the headpiece. Which left her…. standing there in blackface, talking to the public. Yeah, it was bad but my boss literally hyperventilated so much that we had to lie her down in her office and have her breathe into a paper bag. Again, she was twittering about committees and task forces and emergency response teams. I went out, pulled the woman aside, pointed out that without the headpiece she was in blackface, and so she either needed to keep the headpiece on, or wash her face. She was mortified (hadn’t thought of it at all) and washed her face. But holy wow. And the next year, costumes were prohibited.

  138. desvaleurs*

    Between undergrad and grad school (decades ago), I worked at a large chain thrift store. One of the quirks of this particular chain is that they would hire a Mr. Halloween/Mrs. Halloween (this was before Mx. was well known, not a progressive company, etc.), as a temporary employee, whose job was primarily to help people develop unique Halloween costumes using a mixture of new and used items. This did not work out well during the two Halloweens that I worked there. The first year’s Mrs. Halloween ended up in some kind of love triangle with one of the cashiers, and also got very upset that she did not get the bonus that the store’s permanent employees received for the month of October, since at the time she was a temporary employee. She did get to become a permanent employee after that though. The second year’s Mrs. Halloween was somehow overpaid by 3x for her time of service (and no, it wasn’t that she accidentally was given the bonus, the bonus was way less than that if we got one), causing her to exclaim “I’m going to the strip club!” (but in more gendered language) when she received the enormous (for working part-time retail around the turn of the century) check. My boss was annoyed at the paycheck mistake for the second Mrs. Halloween, but she didn’t try to get it corrected. I think a guy who worked in the back (in the sorting/culling area) also became obsessed with the second Mrs. Halloween, but I no longer really remember the details.

  139. Jaya*

    Not a disaster story, more a cute one. One of my workplaces was pet-friendly before the pandemic. So the heads of two departments brought their dogs. One was a large Retriever, super-friendly. The other was a terrier, a runt, excited about life and curious. They were both dressed in costumes.
    The two sniffed each other. Then they started circling. And they circled for a full minute, which I got on my video. It was the cutest thing ever, a big boy and a little boy.
    Terrier also got his first taste of pumpkin that week since his human asked if he could try a baby one I brought for decor. He found the inside fascinating.

  140. Healthcare Manager*

    Around 8 years ago, working in Mental Health Assessment Centre, our assessments were primarily done by phone due to the remote area. Due to being phone based our office culture was rather relaxed as client never saw us in that space.

    On Halloween a colleague had dressed up in a very elaborate outfit of a Wicked Witch, with face paint and all, forgetting that they were booked in for a very rare face to face assessment with a client!

    Thankfully there were enough of us to provide cover. Never forget the look on her face when she remembered, right when the client arrived, and her say ‘I can’t do it! I’m a witch!’.

  141. Gamer Girl*

    Nearly a decade ago, I met a new producer in person around Halloween. I knew he was a confirmed jerk, so I was already on my guard. (The very first time I encountered him, Producer interrupted my presentation during a big conference call and proceeded to mansplain why I was all wrong for 20 minutes straight).

    So, we were chitchatting in a group with my manager and my coworker. I am a woman, as is my coworker. I was wearing my autumn pumpkin earrings, and Producer asked about them. I mentioned that I always wear them around Halloween. Producer grinned wickedly, saying, “Well! Everybody knows that Halloween is really just an excuse for you girls to dress up as sluts, amirite?” And then gave me a huge nod and wink!

    Because my manager doesn’t always understand English slang, I then had to pull him aside to explain why I looked visibly stricken. (The poor man turned and asked me “A slut? What is this costume? I do not know it.” And then saw my face! Closing my eyes just thinking about having to explain it to him, in approximately professional terms!)

    My coworker laughed along with Producer and agreed with him, giving a number of bawdy examples. Manager put on his best stern face. Then, Coworker and Producer both proceeded to try to explain Thanksgiving to me. (I’m the only American on the team, and they had no idea what they were talking about).

    Manager filed an official complaint about Producer up the chain (one of many over the years involving Producer’s behavior towards me), but it went nowhere. Producer still works there but has mellowed slightly over the years, as he’s now-a-Father-of-a-Daughter… :/

  142. ElliottRook*

    My wife’s company is REALLY into Halloween, it’s a huge part of the company culture. Lots of teams do group costumes and decorate their area to match, some individuals build movie-SFX level costumes and props, and employees’ children are invited to trick-or-treat through the buildings after school. Mostly this is really cool, it’s a great time for people to let their teams meet their kids and partners, it’s a safe place for the kids to load up on candy, etc.

    However, one year, after a new building had gone up, there was a very large team that had been relocated around the different buildings three times in that year. Apparently this started an inside joke of them being “homeless” …and it spiraled into that being their costume. They decorated their area to look like a “homeless camp” with fake trash/burn barrels, pallets, and tents, and their costumes were traditional “hobos.” Think bandana-pack-on-a-stick, shabby ripped/patched clothes, fake stubble, and at least one bottle-in-a-brown-bag.

    HR was alerted, and the team at least had to take down the “camp” before the kids came through. Not sure how they handled the costumes, if they had to be taken off as much as possible, or if anyone had to go home and change, but there was definitely a statement issued in-house about how this doesn’t reflect the company’s values and an error in judgment had been made.

    Other people’s misfortune is not a good costume, folks.

  143. eeeek*

    This one wasn’t so much “gone wrong” as “wow. That’s odd.”
    In my organization, we had a person in a leadership position who banned Halloween “for diversity reasons.” Their issue was largely with depictions of witches, since Wicca is a religion and decorations mocking members of a faith are inappropriate. But this extended further – ghosts are important to Catholicism (and All Saints Day is important to many faiths), ghouls and zombies are important parts of voodoo/ancestor worship, etc. Soon every type of decor that was descended from a religion (or even mildly adjacent to one) was banned.
    Rumor has it that this leader patrolled the entire administration building in the weeks prior to Oct 31 and demanded decorations be removed and that employees displaying them “have a discussion” about tolerance and inclusion. This went on for several years, until eventually only the most anodyne Autumn Decor was allowed. New employees were warned well ahead of time (pumpkins = yes, jack o’lanterns = nope).
    When that leader announced their departure and left, the building practically exploded with pent up Halloween energy. There were lots of other issues seething underneath that frustration, but my impression was that this was a very visible “best wishes in your new position” festival of not missing that person at all…

      1. eeeek*

        Good question. Nearly every other major festival for which the US decorates – Thanksgiving, New Year’s, Valentine’s, St. Patrick’s Day – was allowed in generic commercial form. (For TG, Turkeys vs. Pilgrims, no discussion of to whom thanks are given; for St. Val and St. Pat, no mention of saints but loads of hearts, cherubs, and shamrocks.) Easter and Christmas were more difficult – bunnies and chicks, evergreen trees and yule logs – but no gestures toward any particular gods/faiths. This, of course, aggravated the “put the Christ back in Christmas” crowd, but as a public institution that is prohibited from public religious displays, that was par for the course.
        I did hear that a very “religious” poster (night sky, a single exaggerated star, silhouettes of people on a hilltop looking up in wonder and awe) was ordered taken down. Until the owner pointed to the people (family groups with telescopes) and the fancy script that said, “Axial tilt: it’s the reason for the seasons.”

    2. Kyrielle*

      LOL! My Halloween decor at my most recent job (where holiday decor was mostly Just Not Done, but was okay) consisted of a cut-out felt pumpkin with “3.14159” on it. This would probably have been okay there as well.

  144. The Pope’s softdev*

    This one is low-key, but an American immigrant decided to decorate their desk for Halloween. Normally that would just be written off as a quirky thing (Halloween isn’t ‘a thing’ in Australia), if not for our particular employer. We work for an arm of the Roman Catholic Church. They were asked to take the decorations down by lunchtime.

  145. WeirdChemist*

    A late addition!

    My coworker showed up this morning dressed in a Halloween costume (a “sexy cop”).

    “This morning” being October 11th.

  146. Cat Lady*

    At my old job, there was a tradition of different units dressing up in group costumes for Halloween and having a group costume contest. My unit was known to be especially competitive and usually went the extra mile to win.

    During my first year there, we collectively went as Mario Kart. I was an item box (that box with the “?” on it that gives you helpful items during races) and I had an actual cardboard box with chocolate coins and other candy inside it.

    When we presented our costume, we pretended to do a race around the conference room where the contest was taking place. In a (somewhat misguided) effort to help my team, I was throwing the chocolate coins in the air as people ran by me to signify that they were getting prizes.

    Long story short, I threw a chocolate coin and it hit one of my supervisors right in the forehead. Thankfully, she wasn’t actually hurt and was extremely kind about the whole thing.

  147. matchasipper*

    This was years ago when I was a teenager working at a grocery store. A young employee in another department came to the store on Halloween dressed as Jesus Christ. This employee was known for being controversial, a bit of a provocateur and was always getting some sort of reprimand for his actions. Needless to say the costume didn’t go over well in our conservative, mostly Catholic town.

  148. Susan Calvin*

    Being a scene kid at heart, I immediately twigged our office manager at a previous job as a sort of kindred spirit – lovely woman in her 40s, with box black pixie cut and eggplant-colored Doc Martens, who’d always take time off when The Cure were touring in Europe.

    Being not in the US, Halloween isn’t really a thing for us as such, but I always liked the opportunity to dig a little deeper into my accessory drawer, and thought this particular colleague would be on the same page, so I proudly showed her my little silver spider-shaped stud earrings.

    Reader, that’s the day I learned she was pretty severely arachnophobic.

  149. The Nanny*

    I had the best costumes in my old preschool classes. One little guy told us all for weeks that he was going to be a garbage truck and we thought he was just aspirational (the garbage truck was a bit of a celebrity figure at our school, children would rush the playground fence and chant “gawbage tuck” in awe when it pulled up) but lo and behold, he really was a garbage truck on Halloween and even had actual recycling-type trash pinned to his booty.

    Another kid came in an adorable homemade sheep costume – his parents had glued probably a couple hundred cotton balls to a white sweater. Unfortunately, once one child discovered that they could pull the cotton balls off, he was getting swarmed non stop. We did our best to protect him but he was definitely shorn by the end of the day.

    I’m a redhead, so I was always Miss Frizzle. I loved it!

  150. WestsideStory*

    I put a pumpkin on my desk. I was told to remove it because people would think I was promoting “Satanism.”

  151. Oompa Loompa, Doopity Doo*

    I worked in a place that had an extremely competitive departmental halloween contest. It basically consumed the entire month of October. In 2016, my department held a two and a half hour meeting to decide on a plan. We settled on a parody of The Office, complete with every quirk and reference to our company and 2016 culture we could insert.

    Some outstanding highlights:
    – A scene filmed in the bathroom with two VPs pretending to use the urinal
    – An “HR Violation” jar, which we repeatedly dumped money into
    – References to drugging the competiton judges and the entire team
    – Everyone dressed as classic streakers, complete with trenchcoats and someone saying “I thought he had a *big* idea” after a coat opened
    – Various references to the 2016 election
    – Killer clowns
    – One person singing a spot on, heartful rendition of “I Dreamed a Dream” from Les Mis

    At one point, as I’m filming several of the interview/reaction sections in a glass-walled conference room, the CEO walks in with a guest and I had to stuff the severed head prop I had under the table.

    Alas, we did not win.

  152. Orchestral Musician*

    I once worked a part time job in a university academic department. For context, I enjoy Halloween stuff socially, but I had never been at a workplace before where people took Halloween super seriously!

    Immediately upon starting the job I knew that it wasn’t going to be a great fit, either culturally or work-related. Still, while I was job searching, there was the office Halloween party to get through. Everyone in the office assured me that even though they took this party seriously and considered it the event of the year, that it wasn’t mandatory and I didn’t have to dress up if I didn’t want to. In fact, three separate people came to me in my office and whispered that they didn’t really enjoy the over-the-top Halloween celebrations either and that they probably wouldn’t dress up that year.

    Cut to the day of the party. I was literally the only person in the office who didn’t dress up. Everyone else was in super elaborate costumes, including the people who had confided in me that they weren’t planning on it. I would have been mortified by wearing a costume in front of these people but somehow I was even more mortified in my business casual. Finally, when it was time for the staff picture, there was consternation. The department manager didn’t want me in the picture with no costume on, because it would ruin it for everyone else. The solution she settled on? For some reason she just happened to have a human-sized cutout of the head of my predecessor, who had been a good friend of hers and had worked in the department for 30 years. So I was made to hold the giant severed head of my predecessor to hide my entire face and body so that no one would have a record that I was the one person who showed up to the party without a costume.

    I left that job after nine months (because of other, more serious problems.) Also, later I heard that at a previous Halloween party, someone had left a doll hanging from a noose in the staff break room, so things absolutely could have been worse.

  153. Pirate-time*

    A person from another department came into ours in a very impressive pirate costume (very Jack Sparrow) that he clearly had spent a LOT of money on, including makeup and wig. AND it turned out a real sword that was from his military dress uniform. He evidently bragged about that in another department and was reprimanded for bringing a weapon to work.

  154. Kyrielle*

    It was amazingly not our last Halloween costume contest, but the memorable one was when one of our salesmen went as a nun and called himself Sister (Name)etta all day, the same year that a senior engineer and his wife went as Little Red Riding Ho and the Big Bad Wolf. She was the wolf.

    I…did not need to see him in fishnets and a mini skirt and high heels. (I don’t need to see ANY coworker in fishnets and a mini skirt.) Let alone swaying his (her?) hips…. *cringe*.

  155. anónima*

    I have taught high school Spanish in the Southeastern US for over thirty-five years. I believe this happened around 1995-ish, so by that point, I had approximately five years in the classroom under my belt.

    As October ended, I started teaching my standard “Day of the Dead” (ack – El Día de los Muertos) lesson. This is a curriculum that is state-approved and it is required as, not only am I mandated to teach the language, but also the culture.

    Anyhow, I explained the customs and traditions of “El Día de los Muertos.” Also, I assigned various activities such as having the students make sugar skulls, creating and bringing in items for an “alter” to honor the deceased, writing paragraphs in Spanish about departed loved ones, coloring “calaveras” etc. These are all the typical activities that you are likely to find in any US high school class where the students are studying Spanish. Also, remember, this was not my first rodeo – I had been doing this for approximately four of five years.

    We had been doing these things in my classes for a few days. Then, suddenly, without any warning whatsoever, I was summoned to the principal’s office where I was confronted by an incensed father who accused me of trying to recruit his Southern Baptist son into a satanic cult. The man was … I am not sure how to articulate it very well … He was enraged. As far as I remember his ramblings, he was furious that I was teaching satanism in my classes and that I was assigning my students to participate in satanic practices.

    Luckily, my principal had my back. I explained The Day of the Dead to the father. It turned out that there had been a major breakdown in communication between father and son about what I had been doing in class. The son was given an alternate assignment to complete in the library for the rest of the lesson. Moving forward, I have sent home a preliminary permission slip to parents that outlines what I teach and the activities planned for their students. If they so desire, their student can opt-out and be given an alternate assignment.

    2. Wolf*

      Sometimes, kids can be awful at describing events they didn’t like. In my school, it was a field trip… parents came to complain because their kids had come home saying we had done a strenuous full-day hike, in the deep forest, with huge rocks everywhere.
      What we had really done is a 5km (3 miles) hike on a paved path, with snacks and breaks, around the village.

  156. Vio*

    Halloween isn’t as big a deal in the UK but for some reason our (now long bankrupt) employer decided that our shop should go all out with decorations and costumes. It wasn’t quite mandatory but was strongly encouraged for staff to dress up. But unfortunately “all out” translated to “all out of cash” as they gave us a ridiculously small budget. My co-workers had been putting up with this ‘tradition’ for a few years and so had costumes prepared but I’d been long term unemployed and only recently started the job so I couldn’t have paid myself even if I’d been willing to.
    I went to the recommended costume shop only to find that their cheapest costumes were £50 or they had some to rent but they required a large deposit on top of the rental cost. The budget we’d been given per staff member? £5. So I just bought some fake blood and fake wounds. My boss used some of her makeup to make me look extra pale and pencilled around my eyes. The fake wounds were useless though so I just put the blood coming out from under my hair, implying a hidden wound. It worked surprisingly well and a few customers even checked I wasn’t really ill or hurt.

  157. Cristinutria*

    My ex-boss was very full of herself and decided during her first year of employment to dress up as a sexy cop complete with a tiny mini-skirt uniform, baton and handcuffs. Because she never kept up with emails, she had no idea a company-wide in person Town Hall was being held that day. A handful of others were dressed in more work-appropriate costumes, and the head of our department and her immediate staff wore really beautiful face paint and headdresses that made them look like fawns/deer. There we were, in normal business wear while my boss, Slutty Cop, who didn’t get the memo, stuck out like a very embarrassing sore thumb.

  158. beautiful, talented, brilliant, powerful musk-ox*

    I was in my mid-twenties when I decided to try my hand at wound make-up. Nothing terribly grisly; just a gash on my forehead and some bruising that, if you looked too closely, probably had some sparkle to it because I definitely used eye shadow. I worked for a warehouse club at the time (think Costco, Sam’s, BJ’s, etc.), but I wasn’t customer facing really, and since I was going to be spending the day in a tiny closet of an office by myself counting cash sent over from cashiers, I didn’t think the wound make-up would be a big deal.

    Except that it was apparently more convincing at first glance than I realized. The first manager to see me that morning panicked momentarily because he thought I’d been injured, and, later, a coworker saw me and blurted out, “WHO DID THAT TO YOU?!” I ended up removing everything within the first couple of hours of my shift (and I’m glad I did! Like, I wasn’t OFTEN customer-facing in that role, but I did have to help on the floor sometimes. I don’t know WHAT I was thinking.).

  159. Jamoche*

    My mid-sized startup had an interdepartmental pumpkin carving contest, but Engineering did not want to have anything to do with it. So they assigned it to the team I was on, because I was the only one born in the US. They assumed the rest of us wouldn’t know what a nasty smelly job it was, especially since the pumpkins all ended up sitting around far longer than was good for them.

    Except we had one Brit who’d spent his high school years here, several who’d been born in other countries but grew up here, one Canadian who also grew up with pumpkin carving, etc.

    The pumpkin did not get carved.

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