Halloween Memories: Horror Sounds of the Night

At some point in the late 1980s, I saw a cassette tape for sale in the Halloween aisle of either Wal-Mart or K-mart.  The packaging was the simple cardboard back with a plastic blister-bubble glued to it which contained the tape.  The tape itself did not come with your standard cassette case, just the actual cassette, which was black with orange sticker labels showing the title in black print, Horror Sounds of the Night.  I ended up taking the case from a tape-head cleaner and keeping my copy of Horror Sounds of the Night in it.  I even wrote the title on the spine of the j-card for the tape-head cleaner.

Side A of Horror Sounds of the Night

After buying this tape, it quickly became a favorite of mine.  I would play the tape and listen to it, just as I would have listened to my Twisted Sister tape.  One year, I went to a Halloween party at the church of a friend (I was not a church-goer, but some of my friends were, so I tagged along at their invitation sometimes for these kinds of events).  In addition to bobbing for apples and the dead man's brains game, there was also a simple haunted house set up in the hallways.  The walls were covered up with black material and people dressed in costumes would jump out from the now-hidden doorways along the hallway.  During this, they had a tape playing for some atmosphere and I easily recognized it as Horror Sounds of the Night.  

The tape lasts all of about 15 minutes (or technically 30, since there is still side B, but it is just a repeat of side A).  It opens with some really eerie organ music with some sound effects mixed in from time to time.  From there it progresses through evil laughs while a woman screams in horror, moaning, growling, witch cackling, and more.  The are no credits supplied with the tape, so there was no way to know who had made the recording or where and when.  

The j-card from the tape-head cleaner case I keep Horror Sounds of the Night in

 

Eventually, the internet became ubiquitous and I searched for more information about the tape.  As it turns out, it is a tape that many other people also remember.  The contents of the tape are really a compilation from 2 or 3 earlier releases, almost making it something of a "best of" collection.  Of course, I am not really sure how authorized this collection was by the copyright holders of the original recordings.  Another benefit of the internet is that today you can go on to YouTube and easily find a few different uploads of Horror Sounds of the Night in its entirety, as well as at least some, if not all, of the original releases that were used to create Horror Sounds of the Night.  Then, of course, if you are so inclined, you can also hop on over to eBay or some other internet shopping platform and buy an old copy of any of these releases.  Naturally, some are harder to find than others.

To this day, I still enjoy listening to Horror Sounds of the Night.  I don't listen to it as much as I did as a kid, mainly due to the fact it is now a 30-plus-year-old cassette tape.  Sometimes I will just look it up on YouTube when I want to listen to it, but still, nothing beats taking out the actual tape and popping it into the tape deck.  When I do that, it always feels like Halloween.