Read this: The spooktacular origins of the beloved “Pumpkin Dance”

Some are born great. Some have greatness thrust upon them. And still others don a black unitard and a pumpkin mask and awkwardly dance to the strains of “Ghostbusters” by Ray Parker Jr. on local television newscasts. Such are the origins of a Halloween phenomenon lovingly chronicled by Audra Schroeder in a Daily Dot article devoted to the odd, unlikely history of the viral sensation known as the Pumpkin Dance. Nine years ago, Matt Geiler was a Second City veteran recently hired as an anchor on the 10 o’clock news at KXVO, an Omaha CW affiliate that at the time was trying without much success to reach a younger, hipper audience with its programming. Even the hiring of an ex-MTV veejay had fizzled. Fortunately, Geiler and producer Taylor Stein, a fellow KXVO staffer, shared a taste for boundary-pushing comedy and on-air, Talk Soup-inspired shenanigans. One night, Stein had a gap in the program to fill, and Geiler had a low-tech, dadaist solution: the Pumpkin Dance, a minute and a half of pure, unbridled silliness. Interestingly, Geiler’s character, Happy Jack The Grave Dancer, had a possible literary progenitor in the form of Jack Pumpkinhead, a character who debuted in L. Frank Baum’s The Marvelous Land Of Oz in 1904.