Shelf Mummy (Safeway)

It's been a pretty solid year for goofy mummies! If I had a lot more money to burn, I'd be rebuilding my half-lost mummy collection as we speak. This small shelf-sitting specimen has enormous wonky eyeballs set in the pure blackness between bandages, pretty much one of the ideal faces a Halloween mummy can possess. It's also holding a Jack O' Lantern and wearing a festive Halloween-colored party hat, which again, I always find really cute about seasonal mummies. They clearly have nothing whatsoever to do with the Ancient Egypt variety, even though, for some reason, that's still almost always the go-to assumption. I guess they can be mummies who came to life in a museum and took an interest in modern Americana, for whatever reason.

Double Plushes (Safeway)

We now have JUST enough Safeway items that I could have given it its own update, honestly! These are double-headed plush animals with big "stitches" down the middle, as though unnaturally taxidermied together; a black bat sewn to a purple bat, a white cow to an orange cow, and a dark red bear to an orange bear, all in a very cute and cheerful stuffed doll style. Adorable! I might have expected them to come more "mixed up," you know, like bat to cow, cow to bear, but if it's specifically bats you're into, you'd probably rather just have double the bats, right?

Butterfly Skull (Safeway)

Currently our last Safeway item, this is a nicely detailed sculpture of a human skull half-covered by a dark gothic butterfly, which is something we've actually seen before, but not where the butterfly's wings have a perfectly sized bony eye socket, right over the socket they're covering, almost where the insect could have had a false eyespot of its own. It's just a cool effect, I think!

Mummy Sloth (Marshall's)

Another undead Sloth, but this one still bears soft tissue, skin and fur. Probably most of its organs are in jars somewhere, but it's still a lot more matter than the skeleton we already talked about, and while skeletons can be nimbler than they were in life, mummies are generally expected to be much, much slower than either living beings or most other undead. We can only surmise that an undead mummy sloth basically just doesn't move at all, so the threat of its curse is more that you might accidentally touch it. Effective application, then, is to litter your castle of the dead with a veritable minefield of serene slummies for your hapless intruders to navigate, maybe even have them link their arms together to function like essentially an electric fence with no utility bill.

"No Evil" Pumpkins (Homegoods)

A stack of three pumpkins doing the No Evil routine, but they've got veiny realistic eyeballs protruding from their pumpkiny eyeholes, and pale skeletal arms, both no doubt pilfered from human cadavers, I'd wager! Maybe they're doing an ironic joke together, or maybe they took their new body parts from evil people anyway, and this is their warning to all mankind that these are the true wages of wickedness.

Still More Hair Bow Ghosts

...And it still isn't all of them, from all sorts of stores. What am I missing here. Who made the first sheet ghost with a bow on it, and where was it such a groundbreaking success that the entire holiday figurine industry tripped over themselves to get a piece of the apparently enormous hair bow ghost pie??

Hair Bow Alien

Thank God, something different for a change.

Cat Ghosts (Ross)

Simple but adorable! A set of three ceramic figurines of sheet ghosts whose triangular ear-bumps indicate feline origins! One can only assume that if you pull the sheet off of one, there will be another, smaller ghost underneath until you get down to the ninth ghost.

The ninth ghost is the smallest, but it's also the one that kills you.

Babyhead Pumpkins (Craft Warehouse)

Focusing on supplies to make things of your own, Craft Warehouse doesn't put out a lot of prefab Halloween. Perhaps that's just as well...do you really want more of these child-faced, bruise-blue pumpkinoids lurking our world?

Spookies

I tried to make a play on "spooky" and "cookies" for these fake decorative Halloween gingerbread men, but I failed. It doesn't work. It doesn't work when there's only one letter difference. You just end up with one word or the other. I double dead dog dare you to succeed where I failed.

Spooky Mushrooms! (Meijer)

MORE eyeball mushroom creatures! The kind with an eye jutting out right between the stem and the cap! One figure has a taller specimen growing out of a little flowerpot, with an eyeless (younger?) mushroom forming beside it. The other has two complete eyeshrooms emerging from a little cauldron. That's so cute!!! If only my state had Meijer at all!

Entirely Different Spooky Mushrooms (Meijer)

This lone mushroom apparently glows in the dark, and doesn't have a stand or base or anything; just pure standalone mushroom critter! Instead of a cute eyeball or two, it opts for a more gruff and threatening Oogie Boogie sort of face forming in its stem.

Dinosaur Embryo Dog Toy?! (Meijer)

Shown to me by preventthetoast over on tumblr, this is a dog toy Meijer is selling, which consists of a tough rubber half-broken egg shell, attached by a stretchy green fabric cable to an otherwise featureless plush sphere with a single reptilian eye, referred to by its tags as a dinosaur egg. Essentially some sort of mutant dinosaur embryo creature!