It's a grave understatement to say there's a ghost in the machine; on monitors worldwide, there are also vampires, jack-o-lanterns, and haunted houses. The Web may be our youngest medium, but it celebrates the holiday of death with frightful enthusiasm. One site alone - The Dark Side of the Web - indexes nearly 500 Halloween-oriented links.

The cyber community has adopted the children's candyfest of yesteryear as a serious adult pastime: gory, commercial and even politicized. Although scads of kiddie sites do feature Halloween crafts and party ideas (along with trick-or-treating safety advice), they look pretty dull beside the competition. Jaded netkids will quickly realize that real entertainment can be found at "gross-out" sites like The Night Gallery, which showcases Java-animated ghouls and skeletons.

Like much of the web, a sizable percentage of Halloween sites are commercial. Catalogues abound, from costumes to pumpkin-carving kits; some, like the polyurethane frightmasks at Monster Makers, even merit a visit. But not everybody is pushing product, and plenty of personal Halloween pages offer ghost stories, folklore, and "spooky" sound files for the sheer love of it. Such sites apparently obtain their dripping orange horror-fonts from a downloadable selection at the Ultimate Halloween Page, an excellent example of how the medium has digested the holiday technologically.

Also numerous, and relevant, are sites for the Gothic and Pagan communities. Goths - the black-lipstick set who live the Halloween lifestyle year round - mostly fill their server space with "dark" music and fashions, but often include links to creepy cemetery and vampire pages, and similar morbid destinations. Clearly, Gothic.net is the place to begin explorations of this sort.

Meanwhile, "Wiccans" and other earth-worshippers work the holiday from another angle. These modern witches (not the pointy-hat variety) defend Halloween as an earnest, legitimate religious festival. Sites like those on Arachne's Pagan/Wiccan List are well-intentioned, but their New Age style doesn't cackle, and they're disappointingly short on naughty trick-or-treat spirit.