There Is No Off-Season for the Professionally Haunted

There are people who like Halloween. They buy a pumpkin in October. Maybe they even carve it.

They put a tasteful ceramic ghost on a shelf. They watch “Halloweentown” once. They drink something with pumpkin spice in it, say “spooky szn” in an Instagram caption, and then, on Nov. 1, they put the skeleton back into a plastic tub labeled FALL DECOR like freaking cowards.

Brittany Petronella is not one of these people. Brittany has haunted portraits, spooky dolls, and cauldrons. She has hundreds of photographs of graves in her camera roll and Google searches that would be considerably difficult to explain to law enforcement.

@ghoul_please

Brittany begins decorating for Halloween on July 5. July FOURTH: America. July FIFTH: THE DEAD MAY ENTER.

Her year-round aesthetic is what she calls “Spooky Victorian grandma haunted house vibes.” An illuminated ghost blow mold from her childhood lives permanently in her bedroom. She has the same ghost tattooed on her arm. People enter her apartment and ask if they’re going to get possessed. Other people walk in and immediately understand.

That is perhaps the shortest possible explanation for Ghoul Please: Halloween Instagram and TikTok accounts with a combined audience of more than a million people built by someone who did not identify a market opportunity, construct a content pillar matrix, or ask generative AI to define her personal brand.

She just loved something an unreasonable amount. Then she kept loving it in public. 

The Ghoul’s Out; You’re Allowed to Just Keep Halloweening

Six years ago, Brittany did not have enough social media experience. We know this because someone specifically told her so.

She had lost her full-time job during the pandemic. She was applying for hundreds of others, including jobs adjacent to her field, because, as anyone who experienced unemployment in 2020 will remember, the career strategy at the time was essentially PLEASE, GOD, I HAVE LOGGED INTO LINKEDIN AGAIN.

She interviewed for a social media position. They rejected her. They said she didn’t have the proficiency. 

“They were right,” Brittany said. “At the time, I didn’t.”

And so, unemployed and depressed, Brittany did what millions of us did during the first weird stretch of the pandemic: began cycling through hobbies trying to find the one handicraft that might restore her constitution.

Wood burning. Resin. Cricut. (She skipped bread.) 

Eventually, she asked herself a much more useful question: What would actually make me happy? The answer was Salem.

Brittany had loved Halloween since childhood. She and her best friend Kristin used to make multiple trick-or-treating rounds in different costumes to increase their candy haul, an early demonstration of both seasonal commitment and operational excellence.

And there was Hocus Pocus, the movie she watched every night on a small white VHS player in her bedroom as a kid. The movie she can still quote in its entirety.

So in 2020, Brittany finally visited Salem, Massachusetts.

“I’ll never be able to properly explain how I felt during that first visit. It felt like I was reconnecting with my inner child.”

Salem gave her all the permission she needed. Halloween didn’t have to be a box you took out of the garage once a year. It could be a lifestyle. A community. A field of study. A reason to travel. A thing adults were allowed to care about with their whole chest.

“I didn’t know I was allowed to celebrate the spooky season all year long. I was like, wait a damn second. I can… do this every day?!” And because she’s an adult, she was able to choose violence. 

Somewhere in the back of her mind, though, was the voice from that failed social media interview.

Not enough experience. So Brittany thought: “Fine. What if I make some?”

She could post about Salem. Visit other spooky places. Research their histories. Make videos about them.

There was only one small problem. She wasn’t quite there, confidence-wise. Posting Halloween content on her personal Instagram after October felt a little too much like letting everyone from high school watch her release the bats.

So she made separate TikTok and Instagram accounts. She told almost nobody. And Ghoul Please crawled out of the earth with a vengeance. 

People Discovered the Secret Accounts

The first videos were therapy; something fun to make while unemployed. Somewhere to put all the curiosity and creative energy that had nowhere else to go.

Then people started watching — a lot of people. The first video that truly escaped containment was about the so-called legally haunted house in Nyack, New York, where Brittany grew up. It got more than 3 million views on TikTok.

Suddenly, people from high school were messaging her: “OMG, is this you?”

She created a secret second identity only to have three million people kick down the door. But the viral hit made Brittany look around.

She’d grown up in Nyack. She’d spent most of her life there. And suddenly she realized how much strange history had been sitting around her the entire time, saying, “There is spooky stuff… literally everywhere.”

That became the engine.

1. Find place.
2. Visit place.
3. Film place.
4. Go home.
5. Fall into historical rabbit hole.
6. Emerge several hours later covered in browser tabs.
7. Make video.
8. Repeat until deceased.

‍

“I became hungry to visit these places, film them, go home, research their history, and turn what I learned into videos,” she said. Brittany is interested in what happened at the chosen locations, who lived there, why people tell this story, whether any of it can be explained, and what piece of history is hiding underneath the thing everyone else walks past.

Her account just happens to smell like cemetery dirt.

Halloween has Annexed the Calendar

Brittany is spooky 365 days a year. So, what does Ghoul Please do on April 17?

There is no off-season. There are merely different administrative phases of Halloween. Her macabre Victorian decor stays up all year. The seasonal Halloween decorations (your pumpkins, ghosts, and other civilian-recognizable objects) begin to emerge on July 5th and remain through November.

Then Christmas arrives. But…haunted. “Think Krampus.”

November does bring a crash. Brittany calls it the Halloween hangover. She’ll take one to three weeks to hibernate after October, which makes sense when you learn that, for her, spooky season involves Halloween activities, road trips, brand partnerships, a full-time job, and, last year, an attempt to do something Halloween-related every single day in October.

By November, the ghoul is paste. But even that sadness points toward the philosophy underneath the account. Most of us have been trained to ration joy. Halloween belongs in October. Christmas starts after Thanksgiving. You’re supposed to grow out of certain things. You’re supposed to develop more sophisticated interests. You’re supposed to put the ghost away.

Brittany simply… didn’t. “You realize there are so many ways to bring a little spooky into your everyday life. You don’t have to wait until October to keep the magic going.”

She has never met a pumpkin she didn’t love. This woman cannot be helped.

Okay, But Are The Ghosts Real?

If you visit enough supposedly haunted places, eventually you develop standards. Brittany’s most genuinely haunted-feeling location is Letchworth Village in Theils, New York, a place she visited several times growing up nearby.

The last visit was enough.

But for someone whose entire brand is essentially COME WITH ME INTO THIS BUILDING WHERE SOMETHING TERRIBLE HAPPENED, Brittany is surprisingly unwilling to declare every flickering bulb the work of Margaret, 1876–1912.

She tries to debunk shit. “The lights are flickering? Did something move without you touching it? Let’s think about all of these things logically first before assuming it’s paranormal activity.”

There is also, apparently, a George Washington heuristic. “If a place advertises by saying George Washington has stayed there, it’s probably not haunted.”

She was kidding. Mostly. (The Merchant in Salem gets an exemption.)

Her real test is physical.

👻 How does a place feel after the initial adrenaline wears off?
👻 Does she feel comfortable?
👻 Drawn somewhere?
👻 Does she want to leave?
👻 What is her body doing?

You can believe in ghosts or not. Ghoul Please works either way because the ghost is almost beside the point. The haunting is the invitation. Come inside. Something happened here. Let’s find out what.

Normal Career Stuff, Like Talking to a Haunted Priest in Times Square

The funniest part of becoming Professionally Halloween is that eventually, profoundly stupid sentences become legitimate work obligations. Brittany has entered a pop-up booth in Times Square to talk to a haunted priest while promoting The First Omen. She has interacted with Pennywise in Manhattan for IT: Welcome to Derry.

Her assessment: “Some people might think it’s absurd, but I love it!!!”

And then there was Hocus Pocus 2.

Disney and Airbnb transformed the Rebecca Nurse Homestead in Danvers, Massachusetts, into a replica of the Sanderson Sisters’ cottage. The water wheel. The cauldron. The green light glowing through the floorboards. The Black Flame Candle. The whole damn witch house.

Brittany was one of the creators hired to promote it.

Remember the unemployed woman watching Hocus Pocus as memories ricocheted around her brain after being told she lacked social media experience? Yeah. Her.

“I think I was one of two creators who had this brand deal.”

She got paid to enter the fantasy that had helped create Ghoul Please in the first place.

Sometimes the universe has a subtle narrative structure. And sometimes it hits you over the skull with a cauldron. Both can be welcome. 

Five Hours of Work for 45 Seconds of Graveyard

Do you think people who make things look effortless are making them effortlessly? A 45-second Ghoul Please video can take Brittany more than five hours to produce.

Her Halloween road trips can require months of planning because seasonal events happen on specific days, locations need to fit a route, hotels need booking, research needs doing, and every logistical domino has to fall in the correct spooky direction.

“It feels like solving a spooky logistical puzzle. I kind of love it.” She is a planner, researcher, location scout, travel agent, historian, videographer, scriptwriter, editor, voice actor, caption writer, and person responsible for ensuring the hotel reservation exists.

Then she comes home. And edits. And researches. And scripts. And records. And posts. During peak season, her apartment fills with PR-box crinkle paper and “doom piles” of souvenirs until the place becomes, in her words, a Halloween studio.

From the outside, a lot of creator work looks like: hehe graveyard video :)

But from the inside? It’s a vertically integrated media company run by one woman standing knee-deep in decorative viscera at midnight. And the genuinely offensive thing is that she still likes it.

I asked whether turning something she loves into a business has ever threatened to ruin it. “Never! I would die happy if I could do this full-time for the rest of my life. I hope to do it full-time one day!”

Someone get her a LinkedIn thought leader immediately! She needs to be taught that work is supposed to destroy the thing you love.

Becoming Halloween 311

Once enough people associate you with one thing, something weird happens. You stop merely liking the thing, and you become a public utility for it. People send Brittany spooky sightings. They ask for haunted recommendations. They plan trips around her videos. In Salem, people recognize her.

Recently, while visiting with her mom, Brittany went to get drinks at a bar when someone waved her down. At first, she was startled. Then: “I planned my trip based on your videos!!”

They ended up sitting together and hanging out for the rest of the night. “It was a really beautiful moment!”

This is the good version of parasociality. The bad version is when a follower finds your mother’s phone number. That also happened.

A few birthdays ago, someone tracked down Brittany’s mom, asked for Brittany’s personal number, and said they wanted to call to wish her a happy birthday. “It was the saddest birthday ever; I stayed at home the whole time because I was so spooked out!”

There is perhaps no greater occupational irony than becoming famous for loving scary things, only to be scared shitless by someone who loves your content. But that tension comes with becoming The Halloween Person to more than a million strangers.

People trust her recommendations. They expect her to know the lore. She feels some responsibility for that. But she also resists positioning herself as the Supreme Court of Pumpkins. “I never want it to feel like I’m the only authority on all things Halloween and spooky. I’m just genuinely curious.”

That word again. Curious. Not expert. Not guru. Not FOUNDER & CEO | DISRUPTING HAUNTED LORE | TOP 10 VOICES IN CORPSES.

Simply someone who keeps finding things interesting. 

Get a Niche, They Said. She Chose The Dead.

There is a very old piece of internet advice that tells creators to find their niche. Usually, this means selecting one of approximately seven approved content categories and posting “value” until your soul leaves through your nether regions. Ghoul Please is what happens when niche means what it is actually supposed to mean: Get weirdly freaking specific.

Not just Halloween: haunted history, spooky travel, cemetery wandering, and seasonal rituals. Small businesses making witch hats and perfume — the strange gravitational pull of places where something may or may not still be hanging around.

And then: do it again. And again. In January. In April. When nobody else is talking about it.

Seasonality still matters. Brittany says brand work gets understandably busier during spooky season and quieter at the beginning of the year. Most people wake up around the “ber” months and remember they enjoy skeletons.

But the internet has also made it possible for the freaks to find one another year-round. “There are people out there who celebrate the spooky season just like I do, whether it’s October or April.”

Perhaps the internet’s greatest remaining feature is that somewhere out there is another person who is precisely your flavor of strange. You just have to make enough noise for them to find you.

“I’ve leaned really hard into what I love, and somehow there are over a million people who love it, too.” There is a lesson here that every creator economy webinar will now spend 48 slides trying to explain.

The Little Girl With The VHS Player Won

The obvious story would be that Brittany built a huge audience. She did. The obvious story would be that she proved the person who rejected her for lacking social media experience wrong. She did that, too. Spectacularly.

But that isn’t really the interesting part. Technically, Ghoul Please began before the followers. Before Disney. Before Airbnb. Before strangers in Salem recognized Brittany at bars, before millions of views.

The wheels started spinning because Brittany was unemployed and discouraged, trying to find something that would make her feel like herself again. Then she went somewhere that reconnected her with the little girl sitting in front of a VHS player watching Hocus Pocus. And instead of having that experience, enjoying it, and returning to normal adult life, she made the catastrophic decision to listen to the little girl who wanted more Halloween.

“My curiosity and creativity! That hasn’t changed and will never change.”

Even the historical research is personal. Brittany says she struggled with history in high school because the way it was taught didn’t work for her. Ghoul Please gave her another way in: visit the place, film it, investigate it, turn what she learns into something creative.

The audience came later. The career opportunities came later. The spooky logistical puzzles came later.

Curiosity was there first.

Please Do Not Put the Weird Thing Away

When Brittany talks about the person who started Ghoul Please, she talks about her almost like another person. Someone lost. Someone unsure. Someone making things without knowing whether they were going anywhere. Someone who had no earthly clue.

“I think about her so often. I would tell her to just keep going. Trust yourself and just keep creating.” That version of Brittany couldn’t see the million-plus people on the other side, the travel, the partnerships, the people she’d meet, or the companies she’d work with.

“She had no idea what she was doing or where this would go. She was lost, but she had passion and curiosity driving her.”

There’s also something less cute waiting on the other side of visibility. People will misunderstand you. People will criticize you. People will forget that the avatar they’re responding to has a nervous system.

Her answer isn’t to harden into some fuck-everybody creator bunker. It’s almost annoyingly generous. “There are going to be people who do the same things as you. Support them. Lift them up in the way you want to be lifted. There is room for all of us.”

There it is. Under the graves. Under the haunted dolls. Under Pennywise, Krampus, and the childhood ghost blow mold, and enough pumpkins to destabilize a mid-sized agricultural economy. The whole thing is remarkably sincere.

Ghoul Please is a person who publicly refuses to be embarrassed by her own delight. And maybe that’s why people watch. Yes, they want haunted places. Yes, they want Halloween recommendations. Yes, they want spooky rabbit holes.

But it is also deeply satisfying to watch someone encounter the adult world’s endless instructions to calm down, specialize correctly, be realistic, stop being cringe, make yourself employable, put away childish things — and respond — Nope :)

A Sincere Sign-Off From Beyond The Grave

I asked Brittany what she hopes people feel after spending ten minutes in her haunted corner of the internet: “I hope they leave with an inkling of curiosity!”

Maybe you find a place you’ve never heard of. Maybe you discover a strange business. Maybe you learn some history. Maybe you realize you are, in fact, allowed to care about the thing you care about after the culturally sanctioned period for caring about it has ended.

Maybe your Halloween is knitting. Maybe it’s bugs. Maybe it’s medieval plumbing. Maybe you’ve been suppressing a powerful desire to rank every municipal fountain in Ohio.

I don’t know your life. The point is: the weird thing might be the thing.

The thing you’re embarrassed to post after October. The thing nobody hired you to do. The thing you keep returning to because it makes some forgotten little version of you sit up and go: “Wait a damn second. I can… do this every day?!”

Brittany did. Now more than a million people are watching.

Oh, and when she dies? She wants an excellent headstone for fellow cemetery wanderers to visit. 

Perfect. 

The content strategy continues postmortem.