Halloween Countdown: October 18 - come on, sing out

Ladies and gentlemen, bats and ghouls, I give you...

...Josie McCoy, Prophet of Doom!
While it may seem unusual that a promising teenage pop star would turn her back on her music career in favor of issuing cryptic warnings about the End of Days, one needs to remember that Josie has shown a certain sensitivity to supernatural influences.

Perhaps it's her red hair. Or maybe because she once listened to South of Heaven and "kind of liked it." Or it could be that Mr. McCoy pledged his infant daughter's soul to the Horned One in exchange for a really sweet deal on a gas-powered leafblower. The true cause may never be known, but the fact remains that the perky frontwoman for the Pussycats walks in the shade-haunted borderlands between the natural and supernatural worlds, and even the most mundane activities, such as buying a piece of costume jewelry at a yard sale...

...can invite the attentions of the Dark Powers.

Fortunately for Josie, she is blessed with friends both pure of heart (Melody) and hep to the sinister snares of the occult (Valerie). Val determines (by making a check against her Lore skill) that Josie's necklace is actually the Falcon's Claw, a totem associated with the Falcon's Nest, one of the many places of unholy evil which surround the Greendale-Midvale-Riverdale metropolitan area.

The girls pile into Val's VW Beetle to check out the place, which has been abandoned since a "vigilante committee" drove the resident suburban death cultists out of town. While axe handles and baseball bats are suitable countermeasures against amateur hour Satanists, they are not quite as effective in dealing with unclean spirits.

The spectral inhabitants of the Falcon's Nest, suffering from abandonment issues and hungry for human company, rush in to greet their young visitors, though perhaps a little too rambunctiously for their guests' comfort...

Before the ectoplasmic shenanigans get too out of hand, however, Josie finally cops wise to the connection between the yard sale trinket and the ghostly manifestations (and they call Melody the "dumb one" of the group), and violently casts the pendant away.

In the process, she also casts the candle she was holding in the direction of the drapery, causing a catastrophic blaze which quickly consumes (or in terms that would please Cotton Mather, "purifies") the Falcon's Next in a matter of minutes.

The girls manage to escape the flames and the story concludes on a cheery, upbeat note...

...followed by an pointed warning about the dangers of buying things from yard sales, because "sometimes you get more than you bargain for." Sure, that second-hand salad shooter seems like a steal at three bucks, but is the convenience worth the cost to your immortal soul? The road to utter damnation is paved with incomplete skittle ball sets.

Think about it.

(from Josie & The Pussycats #68, April 1973)