Some of the recent favorites we’ve reviewed in the BuzzFeed Books newsletter.
Mollie Shafer-Schweig / BuzzFeed
Riverhead Books
Heike Steinweg
President Obama Couldn't Handle This Kid's Adorable Pope Halloween Costume
This is too cute.
Hundreds of local school children attended Halloween celebrations at the White House on Friday afternoon.
Saul Loeb / AFP / Getty Images
The president and first lady were there to hand out special White House candy to the kids.
Saul Loeb / AFP / Getty Images
It was all going as normal until...
Saul Loeb / AFP / Getty Images
A little kid turned up in this INCREDIBLE Pope Francis costume.
Andrew Harnik / AP
17 Wildly Awesome Things Your iPhone Needs
“Hey Siri, turn off my straightener.”
Amy Sefton / BuzzFeed / Prynt / iHome
Just got a new iPhone? Maybe an iPhone 6S? You're in the right place.
21 Blanket Forts To Shelter You From Adulthood
Take refuge in twinkly lights and artfully draped sheets.
No matter how old you are, blanket forts are probably the best thing you can do with a bunch of sheets, pillows, and string lights.
Ali / Amsterdam & Beyond / Via amsterdamandbeyond.com
But now that you're adult AF, it's time to step up your fort game.
Get ready for some seriously cuddly inspiration.
Grab some tent poles and you're in business.
Quick, efficient and cozy AF. Check out this professional grade DIY here.
Daniel Dalton / BuzzFeed / Via buzzfeed.com
People Who Fucking Hate Dressing Up For Halloween: You Are Not Alone
Boo Halloween, you suck.
Yes, WE KNOW, a lot of people love Halloween. But there are still many of us who feel like this dog: done af with this dumb ass holiday.
Halloween haters have universal dread of ~the question~
And for some very good reasons.
People going topical is just nauseating.
My Obsession With Other-Dimensional Witch Travel
Andrew Richard / BuzzFeed
Late one night in 1960, my mother (she would have been 15 then) woke in her single bed with the blanket kicked off, sweating in spite of it being deep wintertime in small-town Maine. She was far from her family home in Gibara, Cuba, at a Catholic convent boarding school populated entirely by girls from different Latin countries, girls who were learning English and still absorbing their new alien status. She was also far from her closest childhood friend, Mireya, and a disturbing dream about her had startled my mother awake. They were standing across from each other in the nighttime dark, somewhere outdoors, and my mother stepped closer to Mireya, to talk to her. Suddenly, a young man appeared, came between them — and buried a knife in Mireya’s chest. My mother felt as if the blade had split open her own skin.
Months later, after several letters to her friend had gone unanswered, she learned what had happened: Mireya had been killed by a boyfriend. The murder had taken place around the time of the dream.
As told to me by my mother when I was 9 or 10, this story became one of the minor legends of my childhood. Several times, I asked her to repeat it; it seemed to grow in power with each retelling and become more mythic. My mother intentionally raised me to be distinct from the good Catholic she’d been — she wanted me to see myself as a liberal, a feminist — and I grew into the kind of sophisticated skeptic that composes an entire demographic in my hometown of New York City. But I could never shake a natural attraction to the mystical, the inexplicable, the capital-m Mysteries. The root of it, I think, was all my time in church: the ritual, the repeated lighting of candles, the censers of incense, the elaborate robes, the stories of the martyrs etched into glass panels, the high mass of the sacrament. But it was that image, too — of a girl’s impossible trip through space to witness a killing — that suggested the universe might have a far more crooked logic than any we’ve been able to map. Looking back now, this was one of the reasons, ultimately, that I decided to study witchcraft.
Over the past decade, as a writer and a documentary filmmaker, I’ve indulged my fascination with the edges of belief, spending part of that time immersed in witchcraft and the occult through communities around the country. Along the way, I met Morpheus, a witch who was then living on a wild, hundred-acre parcel of land off the grid in Santa Clara County, California, where she and her partner, through Herculean effort, had erected their very own stone henge for group rituals. Through time spent with Morpheus and her inner circle, I came to understand what it means to be “Pagan,” a label used by most people who practice contemporary witchcraft — possibly as many as 1 million Americans today. I came to know Morpheus as a diehard, dedicated priestess, but also a woman with a wicked sense of humor, a too-loud laugh, an excellent preference for the word “badass,” and complete ease with any of my own doubts and questions. She made me want to know more about the Craft.
And so, more than 20 years after my mother first told me of that nighttime episode, I found myself surrounded by people who believe they can explain it.
It comes down to something called “astral travel,” one of the most far-out practices I’ve encountered in present-day American witchcraft. It’s a way of leaving your body and wandering through another, parallel level of reality known as “the astral,” or the astral plane. Many witches believe that we all travel this way while we sleep — but, once awake, our memory of the experience is so cluttered with dream imagery that we often can’t see the truth of it. With skill, focus, and intention, they say, your actions in this "otherworld" can take deliberate shape, answer specific questions, help change your personal destiny. On this plane, you can battle malevolent spirits, build sprawling temples using only your mind, merge with a stranger through staggering, transformative sex, walk side by side with celestial beings.
The concept of astral travel has been around for centuries, across several cultures, from ancient Hermeticism to Taoism and Hindu mysticism. And in medieval times, there were the benandanti, or “good walkers” — farmer-visionaries in northern Italy, in the 16th and 17th centuries, who believed they had the ability to travel outside of their bodies at night to fight off evil. Two of the major occult societies to rise up in Western Europe during the 18th century, the Golden Dawn (whose members included Yeats) and Ordo Templi Orientis (made famous by the incredibly controversial Aleister Crowley), claimed that some of their core magical work took place “on the astral.” And now this practice has its place in the modern American Pagan movement. Add to that the sprawling, affluent New Age set, and the number of Americans today who believe in astral travel may be in the several hundreds of thousands.
One American witchcraft tradition that requires astral work before initiation is Feri, a secretive, influential group whose following on the West Coast has been escalating over the past decade. Feri was founded in southern Oregon in the ’50s by the poet Victor Anderson, the son of a ranch worker, who combined indigenous American and African diaspora practices with the magic he learned from a local coven of Dust Bowl refugees. Victor was blinded in an accident when he was 2 years old — and yet he said he’d developed etheric sight, enabling him to experience the astral plane. He claimed he’d been trained in astral travel at a young age by a collection of witches, and he and his priestess-wife, Cora, believed they first met and became lovers in this otherworld. This explained why they got married only three days after saying hello.
According to members of the second, younger generation of Feri witches whom I’ve gotten to know, this is some of what’s possible on the other plane:
While wandering on the astral, a witch may come across a place to worship her gods — maybe an Old Irish roundhouse, or a Roman temple with Corinthian columns. And, on a given night, she might instruct her covenmates to leave their bodies and travel to meet her there for ritual.
A witch who wants to join in a ceremony thousands of miles away from where she lives in the Bay Area — say, at the home of other initiates, in the Northeast — might travel outside her body to get there, following a signpost the group has laid out for her in the ritual circle. And afterward, she can return to her physical body where it’s been lying all along, on the floor of her bedroom, on the opposite coast.
A witch may be enlisted by his otherworld “guardians” to spend his nights on the astral, doing battle against wicked spirits for hours on end. And this might go on for weeks, until he is so exhausted from lack of sleep that he strikes a deal, promising to keep up the fight as long as his guardians give him time each night for rest.
A priestess, while traveling on the astral, may find herself rerouted, as if her GPS coordinates had been recalculated by a force larger than her. And this place might be a strange, cavernous building hung with hundreds of swords, and there might be a river of blood flowing through it. And there her goddess might appear, blood-covered, and give her instructions to follow once back in her mundane life.
Or a witch might have an other-dimensional sexual encounter. Victor (who died in 2001) wrote about one such episode that took place when the Grand Master of Feri was already 59 years old. He awoke just before 4 in the morning, aware that he had left his body, and began traveling up through a series of ceilings and floors to a higher room, where he met a group of people — mostly young women and androgynous men. And they asked him to remove his shoes (but not his socks); and eventually, he was left alone with a woman he calls “Karen,” who told him “Now, move with me as if we were dancing.” And soon they were dancing; and he could sense that, in this other reality, they were both equally male and female at the same time. And suddenly, he wrote, “we were swept together, like two magnetic fields, our astral bodies blending together” — because on the astral, as Karen put it, “flesh doesn’t stand in the way.” His description of the climax is ecstatic, seven sentences long.
These are just a few of the otherworldly experiences claimed by American witches in college-town Massachusetts, in the woods of Oregon, and in so many corners of the Bay Area. These are the parallel-universe adventures of the sons of ranchers, government employees, massage therapists, publicists, and schoolteachers. When you learn of a belief like this, belief in a human ability so exotic and enormous, you must decide how to react: You can reject the notion outright; you can subscribe to it wholesale as the superpower you’ve always longed for, now available through careful training; or you can do as I did and take a kind of middle road. I chose to roll with the possibility that there might be things in the universe I just didn’t know about yet.
But if this is pure fantasy (go ahead and call bullshit if you need to; it’s understandable), what desire does this astral-plane business tap into? To me, it seems clear: It’s a desire to take action, to be effective — if not in this world, then on another, parallel plane. To have a purpose; to be useful. As if so many thousands of witches are asking, Could there be another world in which my actions matter more? Could there be a way to live a life larger than the one inhabited by my heavy, physical self? For many Pagans, their mundane lives are elevated by time spent on this other plane. As Victor wrote of the aftermath of that night of astral sex, “[I] returned to my body and found that the presence of my wife with her arm about me was most exquisite. She was enhanced. My feelings toward her were greatly enhanced.”
If you believe, then you believe you have found access to a talent as close to a supernatural power as a person can imagine having, a tool through which to realize your most superhuman self. And if you do not believe, and you read these stories here, or listen as they are told to you by witches, there is this: The idea of astral travel — as a skeptic, you’d call it a “delusion” — is still linked to the better part of ourselves. Because what could ever be wrong with wanting to be useful, to be strong, even if you have to invent an entire separate plane of reality on which to make that possible?
It is hard to be around practices like this one and not grow curious. And as my curiosity deepened, my relationship with a particular priestess — with Morpheus — gave me the guts to push further. And soon I found myself studying, practicing, a part of me wondering if I might someday access that place my mother traveled to on that late night at a Catholic boarding school.
I know I am not alone in this curiosity, even outside of the Pagan community. There are many more who, unexpectedly, will recognize some piece of their secret experiences or family legends in stories of this kind of “travel.” Over years of trying, as a writer, to explain my more esoteric interests to friends or half-strangers, in a bar or in some work meeting in New York or L.A., I’ve been met with confessions — from people who count themselves as grounded, level-headed professionals, non-flakes, mortgage-payers, solid parents, takers of no bullshit, the whole gamut. Again and again, I’ve fielded asides, in lowered voices — descriptions of that one experience that defied logic. “I never talk about this, but once...” I simply took that haunted feeling, that personal mystery, a few steps further.
I still cannot completely accept any explanation of my mother’s encounter. But, in deciding to train in witchcraft, I eventually had my own inexplicable experience — on a long, late night in New England, in a castle, surrounded by the coven with which I’d been studying. Exhausted, dancing, chanting, I felt I left the body I was tethered to and found myself in another landscape; I felt the warm air there and smelled the sea and the cypress trees. It lasted for a few moments — and then it was gone.
***
Alex Mar is a writer based in her hometown of New York City. Her work has recently appeared in The Believer, The New York Times Book Review, Elle, The Oxford American, and The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2015. She is also the director of the feature-length documentary American Mystic, currently streaming on Amazon. Witches of America is her first book.
To learn more about Witches of America, click here.
Sarah Crichton Books
Problems Only Book Lovers Understand
With LeVar Burton.
When you get into a good book, the last thing you need is life's distractions. Don't worry, Reading Rainbow's LeVar Burton feels the book lover struggle too.
Many a time, you've sacrificed pages of your book to the food gods, because you just can't put it down.
BuzzFeed Video
And you have one too many bumps and bruises from running into things.
BuzzFeed Video
Let's not forget that your alone time is valuable reading time.
BuzzFeed Video
We Read An Erotic Trudeau-Inspired Story And Were Only Mildly Aroused
“I was like, not negatively aroused.” (NSFW!)
Serving the Prime Minister: A Canadian Romance is an erotic story that is not about Justin Trudeau while at the same time totally being about Trudeau.
Written by Sam Shiver, the short book (as in, nine pages) is available for Kindle devices from Amazon.
The book's protagonist is Shawn, a fresh-out-of-University campaign volunteer who ends up working for the new prime minister, Dustin Waterhole. One late night at the office, the two share some beers and then (spoiler!) they bang.
Amazon / Via amazon.com
Elamin: None whatsoever.
Sarah: None.
Ishmael: No doubt, but I can't understand the name's origin. I mean Justin>Dustin. Sure. But Trudeau>Waterhole? WTF?
Scaachi: Because of butts. I think.
(We have realized that "Waterhole" is English for "trou d'eau." Sound it out.)
BuzzFeed Canada
Elamin: Yep, fresh out of uni.
Lauren: And somehow assisting the prime minister? Also probably for no pay? This whole thing is an HR violation.
Scaachi: He's also very fit. He is sure to talk about his fitness.
Sarah: He ate EGGS and a PROTEIN SHAKE.
Ishmael: "I liked having a nice body and wanted to keep it," says the 23-year-old protagonist who also has a "useless" poli-sci degree.
Lauren: Also his whole "I'm not gay, I like CHICKS and PROTEIN, but also totes let's have sex, PM man."
Elamin: RIGHT. Like what. I don't even remember when we started kissing, but then boom, my first gay sex of my life.
BuzzFeed Canada
Everything You Need To Know About Toronto's Harry Potter-Themed Bar
Yes, they have “Butterbeer.”
Welcome to The Lockhart, a cozy bar that will conjure up all your nostalgic feelings for the wizarding world.
Sarah Aspler / BuzzFeed Canada
Ever dream of meeting your fellows Gryffindors for a cocktail? Dream no longer. This place will put a spell on you and make any hardcore Harry Potter fan drunk in love.
Sarah Aspler / BuzzFeed Canada
The small, exposed-brick bar serves up hand-crafted cocktails made with house-infused liquors. One of their most popular drinks is "The Shacklebolt," a spiced rum and ginger-beer-based cocktail.
Sarah Aspler / BuzzFeed Canada
Here's How Much Fun I Had On The "Harry Potter" Studio Tour
I had fun.
The Great Hall
Costume Display Area
The Entrance To Dumbledore's Office
Various Paintings
44 Inspiring Songs To Listen To While You Write
As suggested by you.
Daniel Dalton / BuzzFeed
Daniel Dalton / BuzzFeed
"Prelude – The Atlas March" – Cloud Atlas, Tom Tykwer, Johnny Klimek & Reinhold Heil.
"Hearts of Courage" by Two Steps From Hell
Suggested by zarayachan
We Tried Out Magic Wands And Here's What Happened
Swish and flick!
Lynzy Billing / Chelsey Pippin / BuzzFeed
They say the wand chooses the wizard, but we (Ailbhe and Chelsey) thought we'd have a go at picking our perfect magical match from a selection of some of the most popular magic wands on the market.
We may be Muggles, but with the wand trade expanding from niche Diagon Alley shops to the much more accessible Amazon, we wanted to try our luck to find out if we've got some magical blood after all and our Hogwarts Letters just got lost in the mail back in the day.
£34. Buy it here.
Lynzy Billing / BuzzFeed
A: This wand feels great in your hand, sturdy so you can shove it in your robes, but not too heavy. It's plastic, with a nice, bright light-up tip. It turns on and off easily – which is probably really handy when you're up all night studying.
C: It's really rather balanced, nice and weighty handle and definitely tough, but quite sensitive – it hardly needs to be waved to get the magic going. Definitely practical, and also fashionable! it's got a bit of an elven touch, with vines and leaves carved around the rod.
I Moved Back To My Parent's House At 29, And It Wasn't The End Of The World
Illustrations by Alice Mongkongllite / BuzzFeed
The weirdest thing about living with your parents is having people constantly observing your every move: “Is that a second glass of wine?” “Who’s calling?” “Are you going to put the cheese away?” “Why does the dog like you more than me?” “Haven’t you already taken a shower today?” And on and on, world without end.
After five years in New York, I decided it was time for a change. I packed up my Williamsburg apartment and moved across the country to the little island in the Puget Sound where I was born. I had decided to go to nursing school, and I had also decided to live with my parents while I completed a year of prerequisites at the local community college. It’s been four months.
I’m an only child, which means my parents are basically obsessed with me. People think that being stalked by strangers is such a big deal, when a far more insidious form of stalking is the one that happens when my mom comes and leans against my door jamb to see what I’m watching on TV and then suggests that maybe I’d like to go outside. It’s a kind of stalking that has been heretofore ignored by the legal system.
The worst is actually when they don’t comment, because it usually means they are too horrified to fully process my latest affront and will need time to think about it before knocking on my door three days later while I’m in the middle of an episode of The Good Wife — “Another episode?”— to say, “I’ve been thinking about what you said the other day.”
Whenever my mom says that she’s been thinking about what I said the other day, I know nothing good is coming. She’ll relay some recent observation, and then share how it fits into a pattern of bad behavior she’s been observing for decades but hasn’t been able to fully comprehend until now, when I’ve finally handed her the last piece of the nasty little puzzle. If I try to argue she’ll say OK in a serene way that suggests you can lead a 29-year-old to water, but you can’t make her fall in love with the nice guy down the block.
My mom has become obsessed with the idea of niceness, as well as the idea that I only date “assholes.” I tell her about someone I’m seeing and her first question is, “Is he nice?”
This is always asked in a tone that suggests the answer is not likely to be yes. I say yes immediately, even though, until this moment, I hadn’t even considered it. Funny, smart, attractive, sure — but nice?
My mom relays the story, again, about how when her brother was dying of AIDS in the ‘80s he told her that he had never really cared about kindness, but could now see that it was the only thing that mattered. I liked this story, but couldn’t totally see how it applied to me. Why would you want to date a nice guy when you could date someone who didn’t care about you one way or the other?
The dog has recently taken a shine to me. She follows me from room to room, not unlike my parents, and stares at me with an anxious yet vacant look on her face, not unlike my parents. The only real difference between her and them is that when she does this, I love it.
I’m so much more patient with a dog who wouldn’t even notice if I died than I am with my mom, whose life would end if that happened. Of course, my mom noticed that the dog had started following me around. She asked, “Why does Bella like you more than me?”
This made me wonder, Why does Bella like me more than you? And then I remembered: Can’t dogs smell cancer?
Something about living with your parents is that they are getting old. Their friends are dying. Since I’ve been home, two peripheral but longtime friends have been diagnosed with incurable cancer. For the first time I’ve started to think about death in a serious way. Every time I can’t think of a word — what is the other, better word for incurable cancer? — I assume it’s the beginning of early-onset Alzheimer’s.
My dad tells me that his friend’s wife was diagnosed with the kind of brain cancer that people die from — WHAT IS THAT GODDAMN WORD — and I start to notice these two vertical wrinkles between my eyes. These lines are called “11s.” I know this because I spent almost two years writing for a beauty magazine. I wonder if I would still be obsessed with these wrinkles if I didn’t have a name for them. Like how cultures that don’t have a name for “periwinkle” just don’t see that color.
A month later my dad tells me that his friend’s wife with the terminal (GOT IT) brain cancer has died. The same day, I almost veer off the road while studying my “11s” in the rearview mirror. The parallels between our lives grow stark. The parallel lines between my eyes starker still.
In the nutrition class I’m taking, I learn that women are supposed to have only one alcoholic drink a day. I text my friend who is a nurse at NYU and he tells me that he’s had several good-looking, educated, and well-off female patients (he uses those adjectives because he knows me) come in dying of alcohol-related organ problems. He says that these women drank only a couple glasses of wine a night. The follow-up frowny face feels pointed.
I wonder if drinking two drinks a night (and sometimes more, reader) is contributing to my “11s.” I tell a friend about my “11s,” and she says, “Yeah, I see them,” instead of the correct thing, which is, “Are you kidding? You look 9!” Then she tells me that she gets Botox every three months. Twenty-nine years old. Botox is an arms race; as soon as someone starts getting it, we all have to. I suppose you can choose not to participate in an arms race, but would you still be able to call yourself an American?
Bella, finalist for the MacArthur Genius Grant.
Ramona Emerson
Something I have always liked about my mom is that she never talks about her looks. She never says she looks fat or asks if she looks fat or stares at herself for a long time in the mirror with her brow all squinched up, thinking about how she looks fat. My mom discourages me from doing things like buying $51 exfoliating shampoo. I try to convince her that the shampoo might be worth it: “This woman says it changed her life!”
“Yeah, it made her poor,” she says.
It’s weird to be around people who aren’t in their twenties. They have a seizure every time their cell phones make noise, but they do seem to understand other things.
My dad eats pickled herring straight out of a jar in the refrigerator. When I try to explain to him that this is disgusting, he says, “It’s just herring.” This is his favorite line of reasoning. You object to something, and he responds by saying, “It’s just [insert objectionable thing here].” Obviously, it’s impossible to win against someone who fights this dirty.
But then I had this weird thought: Maybe it is just a herring or a wrinkle or a dog who likes you. So many of the things that consume my mind don’t matter to my parents at all. In fact, the only things that do seem to matter to them are being nice, trying to do the right thing, and enjoying yourself in a way that doesn’t make other people want to die. Everything else is just.
Obviously things like “being nice” are boring and offer no opportunity to buy exfoliating shampoo. But after just four months of being forcibly immersed in them, I’ve noticed surprising thoughts start to pop into my head, like, I don’t want to kill this person for walking slowly on the sidewalk. Or, If I don’t get into nursing school this year, it won’t be the end of the world. Living in a small town helps — there is no one else on the sidewalk — but it seems like something else is happening, too. The going is slow, but you can go the whole way like that.
If there’s one other thing that’s important to my parents, it’s to always get in the water. Lake, river, ocean, pool, hot, cold, night, day: As far as they’re concerned, if there is a body of water, you would be well-served to be in it. In our family, John Cheever’s short story “The Swimmer” isn’t the story of a tragic descent into alcoholism but a description of the best day ever.
We swim off the seawall in our little town. Each time is the same. I’m up to my stomach, hemming and hawing about how cold it is, and they’re halfway toward the tree-covered island across the sound.
“Get in!” they yell, and part of me hates them and wants to get out and sulk like I did when I was 16, but a bigger part of me knows that the swim is worth the shock. I duck under and come up with a yelp. The water is freezing. It feels great.
This Couple Used Their Wedding Day To Promote Random Acts Of Kindness
The power of paying it forward.
Leigh and James Clark had a simple request for all 100 guests at their Sept. 26 wedding: They wanted them to perform a random act of kindness to honor their union.
The Florida-based couple included a line on their invitations saying, "If you are so inclined, please do a random act of kindness sometime between now and the wedding and use the hashtag #kindleigheverafter on social media."
Leigh told BuzzFeed Life that she started doing frequent random acts of kindness — like dropping off goods to hospitals and giving food to the homeless — during the holiday season three years ago.
Miranda Lawson Photography / Via weddingphotographerfl.com
"We wanted people to do this not only to help celebrate our day, but to also put a drop of positivity in the bucket and hopefully keep helping others," she said. Non-guests have also contacted her on Facebook to tell her how she inspired them.
Paying it forward was a common theme — their friend Keegan Leahy, for example, bought lunch for the person behind him in line at Tim Hortons.
Leigh said that she often calls her friends to rally them to get involved when she volunteers.
Courtesy of Leigh Clark
But the most powerful examples, Leigh said, were people who took it one step further and involved their children.
Emily Schairer, a bridesmaid, and her daughter, Chloe, took pet supplies to a local animal shelter. "They have a cat, so she told her daughter, 'We’re going to something nice for other cats who don't have a home,'" Leigh said.
Courtesy of Leigh Clark
What Lazy Costume Should You Wear For Halloween?
404: Costume not found.
Thinkstock / Chelsey Pippin / BuzzFeed
27 Small But Awesome Ways To Be A Good Friend
It’s all about the ~little things~.
But in reality, it's usually those little easy, underrated gestures that really make your friends feel all schmoopy and loved. And everyone has time for one of those. So here's a big fast list of some small but significant things you can do to up your friendship game.
Text them when you see something that reminds you of them.
Random "thinking of you" reminders are LITERALLY THE BEST.
Anna Borges / BuzzFeed
Fave that tweet or like that pic that's not getting the recognition it deserves.
FRIENDS DON'T LET FRIENDS' TWEETS GO UNFAVED. Same with prof pics and Instagrams.
PBS / Via reddit.com
Stock your pantry with their favorite snack if they're always chilling at your apartment.
This Woman Found An Insanely Creative Way To Deal With Her Husband's Cancer Diagnosis
Absolutely boo-tiful.
Meet 41-year-old Amanda Chapman, an Alabama-based photographer and mother of two.
Amanda Chapman
In 2012, Amanda's husband Greg—who she's been with for 19 years—was diagnosed with cancer.
The diagnosis of Non-Hodgkin's Lymphoma was devastating and it took a toll on the entire family.
Amanda Chapman / Via gofundme.com
To lift her family's spirits, on October 1st of that same year Chapman started a project called "31 Days Of Halloween".
The project is a makeup series where Chapman morphs into one of her favorite characters every day for the month of October. "I started the series to take our minds off of the roller coaster of fear and to lift my family's spirits," Chapman tells BuzzFeed Life.
Amanda Chapman / Via Flickr: amandachapman
And her looks are TO DIE FOR.
Check out that Poison Ivy.
Amanda Chapman / Via Flickr: amandachapman
