The First Night of Halloween: What on Earth is a Globster?!

Welcome to the Ten Nights of Halloween! Each day I'll introduce you to one of the characters in my picture book, Halloween Good Night.

So what is a Globster, anyway?

Today begins the first of the Ten Nights of Halloween! So where do we start? One little Globster lurking in the swamp, of course! When I started Halloween Good Night (HGN for short) I knew I wanted a mix of well-known and unusual creatures. One of the most unusual and least "famous" (though still famous in its own way) is the Globster. 

Mythologically, the Globster is a creature imagined based on huge gelatinous masses that occasionally wash up on ocean shorelines across the globe. And here Globsters are like many other Halloween creatures: there's an element of history behind the myths.

Globters have been washing up for most of history, although only since the 1960s have they been called Globsters (previously they were known as Blobs, like the movie!). Most are thought to be huge bits of partly-decomposed whale, squid, or other large sea creature. The theory is that they're so badly deteriorated they no longer resemble the animals they were when alive. Like this poor fellow below.

But without DNA testing (which wasn't always available, remember), the imagination often turned these masses of flesh into never-before-seen monsters of the deeps.

One famous globster was the Stronsay Beast which washed ashore in Scotland in 1808. Did this globster fuel stories of the Loch Ness Monster? Sketches of the carcass look startlingly similar to Nessie, so perhaps it was a relative. Or maybe it was just an over-large basking shark, as experts later concluded.

A video exploring Globsters:

I'm not quite so cynical as the narrator. With so many unexplored regions of the ocean, couldn't the globster be remains of something we haven't yet discovered? Hmmm.

Our favorite Globster crafts!

You'll find few globster crafts online, but I scrounged up a couple. One from right here on my website!

Sew your own plush globster! Complete with free downloadable pattern.

Blob-monster paint tutorial at Activity Village.