Special Guest Blogger: Georg Andreas Helwing

By far the most popular Halloween character for boys is a vampire and Bram Stokers Dracula began the whole thing but he also included a vampire hunter named Van Helsing who was based on me.  
My day job was a pasteur in Poland and during the plague, i would visit grave-yards and watch the locals who had the bright idea that the plague was being spread by the plague victims who would rise from their graves and bite people to pass on the disease so they called them vampyrs, dug them up, decapitated them and stabbed the corpses with wooden stakes.
As i had an interest in the paranormal and supernatural, i wrote about this practise in scientific magazines and the populations general belief in witches, werewolves and werebears and through a mutual friend, Ármin Vámbéry, Bram Stoker heard of it and came up with me as a counter to his horror creation and very lazily did not try very hard to change my surname.
As a bit of a knowledge on things that go bump in the night and as the real-life inspiration for Van Helsing, i am well placed to prepare you for any visits from one of the living dead tonight.
Witches were killed by the thousand back in medieval times and are basically just warty women with pointy hats and a broom so a blunt object to the head should cool her heels and ghosts are just rubbish because they can’t hurt you and the only thing they can do is make scary noises.
Werewolves are a different story as they can only be killed by a silver bullet and are devastatingly quick so you can melt down all that cheap jewellery you have but you will probably be in 27 bits spread around the living room before you fire the first shot.
Skeletons are basically made of dog treats so entice the family pooch to sleep on your bed tonight and within seconds of putting in an appearance, vital parts of it will be buried in the garden by an excited Rover.

Other reanimated corpses are Zombies but their biggest drawback is that they are as dumb as a post and unless you are wearing lead boots, trousers and coat, you should easily outpace the slowcoaches and Mummies are just zombies wrapped up in bandages, which makes it slower and more flammable than a regular zombie. Hopeless.

The achilles heel of Killer Dolls is that no matter how evil it is, its still doll sized and can be launched across the room with a swift kick while monster created from parts of corpses will have body parts from many different sources and it is hard to get them to fit correctly so their main weakness are their own insecurities. A few put downs and ridiculing their appearance should send them running blubbing out of the room.  
Finally, if it's a robot of some sort, cyborgs from the future, aliens or escapees from a local tourist attraction out to kill all of mankind, robots are made of metal, are immensely strong and impervious to fire, bullets, hitting with blunt objects or swords and have clear, logical thought which anticipates your every move so might be best to make sure you run to a room with intestine coloured wallpaper so the cleaning-up is not so hard on the rest of the household.