Pumpkins and gourds sit on a hay bale on a sunlit deck in Guerneville, Calif., on Sunday, Sept. 23, 2018. (Roger Coryell/Bay City News)

A saint. A place to sleep. A dried-up body. A fire full of bones.

That’s where a good share of October’s vocabulary started. A lot of it wasn’t scary at first. It got that way over a few hundred years.

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