Halloween Listener Special

The hosts of You're Wrong About put out a call for scary stories and got almost none. What they received instead was a flood of Halloween memories — tender, funny, strange, and occasionally heartbreaking — and they decided to build the episode around what listeners actually sent in. The result is a collage of personal Halloween moments spanning decades and continents, held together by a shared sense that this holiday matters in ways that go far beyond candy and costumes.

The first time you get to be yourself

Several listeners describe Halloween as the holiday where they first tried on an identity that felt more true than their everyday one. One listener, now 40, recalls dressing in drag for the first time at 14 — a Spice Girl–inspired costume involving a unitard, a cotton candy wig, and pudding-filled water balloons. Sneaking out of the house, he ran into his mother, who stared at him in silence before saying, "You look like me." They both laughed, and from then on, every time he did drag, she would pull out old photos of herself as a teenager to show how much he resembled her. "I think for a lot of us queer people," he says, "Halloween really is that first opportunity to put on the other clothes or express yourself in a way that's kinda safe, kinda dangerous, a little bit of both."