Halloween was kind of a bust here.  We only had 19 trick-or-treaters before I closed up shop at 8:30. And 3 of those were my little friends whose parents drove them over just to see me.  If they hadn’t come, it would have been 16.  A LOT of leftover candy… sadly we bought stuff that we like.

One of the things I like to do when kids come up to the house is guess what their costumes are.  Some are easy.  Spider girl.  Cowboy.  Ninja.  Cat.  But some were clearly off my radar; my knowledge of popular culture is just not up to snuff for Halloween.  One tween was all sparkled up with tuile and a jaunty hat; she told me she was Moulin Rouge.  I was thinking another was Barbie but turned out she was the American Girl Doll Courtney, complete with a small rollie case with the doll itself inside.

The one who took the cake was a kid, maybe 11 or 12.  I thought he was a monk… robe with rope as a belt, a few medallions, a long cross necklace.  Nope… he told me he was a plague doctor.  It took me by surprise and by the time I had the question “Where is your plague mask” come to my lips, the little group he was with had headed back the sidewalk where some parents were waiting.

Plague doctor?  Really?  I was dumbstruck.  Do kids know what a plague doctor was? Are plague doctors in popular culture these days.  Rabbit hole time.

Apparently plague doctors are alive and well among us:

• The Plague Doctor from Vigil: The Longest Night. He’s a bad guy trying to resurrect an evil goddess.
• The Doctor from Plague Road. This is a post-apocalyptic and ruined world game in which The Doctor explores and fights bad guys.
• Plague Knight from Shovel Knight. Also a villain whose modus operandi is explosive alchemy potions.
• The Leech from Wytchwood. Yet another sinister figure who injects diseases into his patients.
• The Warden from The Serpent Road. This alchemist’s role is stopping a spreading infection with potion crafting.
• Corbus from Thymesia. This character has survived the plague with an experimental treatment that leaves him with raven-like abilities.

This is just a handful and most of the games are in the dark fantasy genre.  Almost all of them wear the traditional bird-like mask (which I also discovered, were fashioned so that there were receptacles along each side of the long beak for perfumes and drugs).  I suppose that it’s easy to cast such a scary and suspicious-looking character into a bad guy in these games but it seems a little unfair to stain the service of all the doctors who tried to help with the plague despite the risks and the odds of not surviving themselves.

Any memorable costumes this year (or that you can remember from past years??