Some of the greatest horror and Halloween seasonal music, audio dramas, sound effects and other spooky audio artifacts ever recorded are also, sadly, no longer available. Thankfully, the internet has charged to the rescue, with blogs and dedicated bloggers who find yesteryear’s spooky sounds, painstakingly convert them to digital formats from old LPs and cassettes, and then post them, often with a bit of background and even cover art!

Following are some of The Great Pumpkin’s favorite sources for ghastly audio ephemera. Good luck and good hunting!

Scar Stuff – Named after the great, cheap, waxy scar-making make-up that you could get at any drug store in the 70′s and 80′s, Scar Stuff was one of the first blogs to really find great stuff and post it online. Sadly, it appears that Jason is no longer posting, and many of the things he’s posted are no longer available, but there’s still stuff to be had, here…

The Mostly Ghostly Music Sharing Blaaaahhhggg – Once a standard blog, the owner of the MGMSB was plagued by spammers and overly-restrictive TOS issues, so he moved everything to a discussion board format. It requires a small investment of time to learn the ropes, but your rewards will be many.

Digital Meltd0wn – While not strictly horror or Halloween, there are dozens of posts that are horror-related, especially featuring out-of-print movie soundtracks.

Vinnie Rattolle’s – Like Digital Meltd0wn, this blog is devoted to offering up weird bits of forgotten culture and, like DM, much of that is horror-related.

The Manchester Morgue – Find many classic horror soundtracks at this one.

Monster Shindig – Not posting much lately, but lots of great stuff in the archives.

These are just a few favorites – you’ll discover more sites linked from those. Have fun! Here’s a classic to start you off – Disney’s Chilling, Thrilling Sounds of The Haunted House! Get it at HERE!

Special edition The Dead Matter DVD set including TWO new Midnight Syndicate CDs available at ALL Hot Topic stores nationwide on JULY 30th

Midnight Syndicate will release a special edition The Dead Matter DVD set that will be available at ALL Hot Topic stores nationwide on JULY 30th. The set includes 3 DISCS

. The Dead Matter DVD – The long-awaited dark fantasy film starring Andrew Divoff, Jason Carter, and Tom Savini served up with a score by Midnight Syndicate in glorious 5.1 Surround. The DVD will be loaded with special features including TWO Midnight Syndicate music videos, several Midnight Syndicate Video Contest finalists, and another special feature to be announced soon. Check out the new official trailer!

The Dead Matter: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack CD – Clocking in at just under 75 minutes, this disc will include the score to the movie, composed by Edward Douglas, as well as other tracks that appear in the movie including ghost-rockers Lazy Lane. Also featured will be three exclusive Midnight Syndicate remixes as well as a special track from the heavy metal act, Eternal Legacy.

Midnight Syndicate’s Halloween Music Collection CD. This disc is a compilation featuring some of Ed and Gavin’s favorite tracks from their first 13 years.

This special set will be available at all Hot Topic stores on Friday, July 30th all for the price a regular DVD!

Curtis RX from Creature Feature clued us into a fantastic upcoming Halloween/horror freebie! Rue Morgue and Rue Morgue Radio, our favorite horror magazine / horror podcast, are releasing their auspicious 100th issue on May 1st, and to commemorate that, Rue Morgue Radio is releasing its first ever free downloadable terror tunes compilation, featuring seventeen rare, classic, remixed and world premiere tracks!

Curtis had this to say:

The zero hour rapidly approaches and I’m pleased to announce that our brand new song ‘Grave Robber At Large’ will be premiering May 1st on the free, downloadable Rue Morgue Radio’s Hymns from the House of Horror compilation CD in honour of their 100th issue—we’re track number 13. Since everybody has waited patiently for new CF music, I decided to do something special and offer our friends at Rue Morgue the first exclusive track off our upcoming album and everybody here can download it entirely for free.

The issues hits newsstands May 1st and includes a small blurb about the song and the downloadable CD itself will be available on rue-morgue.com and ruemorgueradio.com. Did I mention it was entirely FREE? Now, lock your doors, fasten your windows, and secure your corpses because there’s a grave robber at large and he’s not afraid to get his hands dirty.

The Cult of the Great Pumpkin anxiously awaits this magnificent bit of macabre musical mayhem!

Kristen Lawrence is a Halloween-lovin’ organist/composer/singer.  Like many people, she is thoroughly enchanted by the Halloween season and month of October, and since the organ is the instrument blood-related to Halloween, writing Halloween music came as a big, “Well, of course you need to write Halloween music.”

The Halloween Carols are a collection she has written for the purpose of celebrating Halloween and Autumn. They are each based on a bit of Halloween history and lore, and fall somewhere between traditional Celtic music, the high gothic musical drama of a Hammer horror film and your favorite spooky Halloween music from when you were a kid.  To date, she has over 60 carols written and is recording and releasing them in batches of 13.

If, when you hear the name Dee Snider, you think 80′s hair metal, you haven’t been paying attention for the last 20 years. A true showman and gifted musician, Dee is the host of Fangoria magazine’s Sirius radio show, a regular on VH1′s history-of-rock shows and the mastermind behind the live musical Halloween spectacular that is Van Helsing’s Curse.

Combining a loose narrative with an astonishing group of musicians performing cutting-edge arrangements of horror and Halloween classics, VHC is not to be missed, and will quickly become part of your essential annual Halloween musical rotation.

Recorded in 1996, Andrew Gold’s Halloween Howls was intended for children. Yet despite this, Halloween wouldn’t be the same without Mr. Gold’s quirky, signature songs – often without us realizing that we know them. I’ve heard them show up in DJ mixes, mashups, podcasts and elsewhere, yet these are tracks that, typically, you wouldn’t be able to name. Now you can!

Composer Michael Allen was so impressed with the Netherworld Haunted House in Atlanta, Georgia that he started writing music themed around the attraction’s many set pieces and scenes, culminating in NETHERWORLD HAUNTED HOUSE : SPIRITS OF THE DEAD, a fantastic collection of 16 tracks based on the characters and scenes in the haunted house. Yours truly has had this disk in his musical rotation for 2 years now – it’s just that good.

From Italian composer Massimo Nero and Tenebre Records we have Halloween Obscura, an astonishingly spooky, original recording that came out in 2008 and really raised the bar for themed horror/Halloween/haunting music. It’s hard to qualify what sets this album apart from similar artists – it’s informed and influenced by horror movies, other dark music composers, scary video games and other places that hardcore spooksters will recognize. But at the same time, this music is original, and genuinely scary.

If you like your music creepy, you will LOVE this album, period. The Pumpkin Cult’s only complaint is that there hasn’t been a follow-up!

For the last few years, Nicole Buetti and Dirk Montapert’s collaborative project IN A WORLD… has been producing terrific original Halloween and haunt-themed music for both children and adults. Each CD features a divergent collection of themes and styles, and can be enjoyed as a stand-alone musical offering, or put to use to theme a haunted house room or Halloween party.

Continuing this week’s musical theme, composer Virgil Franklin is a haunted house and Halloween industry staple, providing themed music and ambient sound effects CDs to the spooky community for many, many years.

Scary clowns to hellish hillbillies, plundering pirates to evil aliens, Virgil’s got you covered thematically, and if he doesn’t, you can hire him!