This October, Vertigo is publishing its first ever HOUSE OF MYSTERY Halloween Annual with insert stories from some of our ongoing series including HELLBLAZER, MADAME XANADU, and the upcoming I, ZOMBIE.

This special issue also includes some fun Halloween related questions answered by many of its amazing contributors. Here’s an exclusive sampling. Enjoy!

What’s the eeriest thing that’s ever happened to you?

MICHAEL ALLRED, artist I, ZOMBIE
When I was in high school I was lying in bed trying to go to sleep. I opened my eyes to find a black figure looking down at me about eight inches from my face. It had no features. And it filled me with pure terror. It absolutely had an evil presence to it. There was a street light outside my window giving the room a soft glow, yet I couldn't make out anything but a shape as I froze in a freaky staring contest. I eventually got the nerve to move and quickly rolled off the other side of the bed and grabbed my baseball bat on the floor. When I sat up it had moved to the far side of the room which was open to the stairs. The figure had its back up against the wall and slowly oozed down the stairs. I yelled for my folks who slept downstairs. I heard them stirring. They were kind of mad actually that I was yelling my head off late at night. I ran to the light switch and as soon as I turned on the lights, the shape was gone. I hope I never see it again.

GIUSEPPE CAMUNCOLI, artist HELLBLAZER
I have no eerie story, but if you allow me, I can tell you this: I met my wife at Halloween (which makes it very easy for me to remember the day we met!). It was at Lucca, in Italy, during the annual Comic Convention. I met Jessica in the evening, through common friends, and we really couldn’t wait until dinner was done to kiss each other, when she invited me over the counter, to have a couple of drinks on our own, in a more intimate corner. That was an unforgettable moment for us. Oh, wait, now I remember an eerie detail: The day after we met, at night, we were making out in my car, and at some point we heard some noise, and there was a bunch of cosplayers from the Comic Convention passing on the street: an elf, an ogre, a magician—Now, that was creepy!!

MATTHEW STURGES, writer, HOUSE OF MYSTERY
I went rock climbing once when I was twelve. I'd just pulled myself up onto a narrow ledge and had begun to ascend the incline beyond when I slipped on a loose rock and tumbled backward. In that instant, I pretty much knew I was dead, because the ground was about fifty feet below me. Instead of plunging to an early demise, however, I slammed into a tree that was growing improbably out from the corner of that narrow ledge. Now, the weird thing about this was that when I was climbing up the ledge, that tree WASN'T THERE. I'm sure of this, because if it had been, I would have used it to climb up. I climbed down, shaken, and didn't climb anything more dangerous than stairs for years afterward.