Gregor McCabre
	Our own Professor Gregor McCabre has graciously requested our acceptance for a Rattskeller interview. Sorry freudian slip, graciously accepted our request... Actually our story begins 45 years ago, while standing outside the Strand Theatre in Summit, New Jersey. Vincent Price was starring in the Raven and a young boy with a quarter in hand braved the crowds with his older brother. The scene fades and transitions to a small television station in Newark, New Jersey where a young boy meets his first TV star, the legendary John Zacherley, the Cool Ghoul. Zacherley's face was a familiar one, being the host of Chiller Theatre and later Disc'o'Teen. Growing up in a small Irish/Italian community also had other benefits...Halloween, complete with haunted houses, real and imagineered, the rewarding Trick or Treating and an Irish Grandmother and Grand Aunt who often spoke of the thinning veil, the need to be out of graveyards by sundown and the myriad of creatures that live in the shadows of our fears. It was these creatures that would plague him forever. That and a question from Zacherley, "Do you read Famous Monsters of Filmland?"
So at the age of 7, the young boy began reading, and studying and reading, not classical Shakespearean literature but monster mags, comic books, the collective Master works of Edgar Allen Poe, Forry Ackerman, Vincent Price and Jack P. Pierce. Monsters were his passion, Halloween his Stage, but it was the 60s and times were changing. He needed an alter ego. So in the dawning of 1965, young Mike Heckel in a self penned horror story became Gregor McCabre. Gregor because it sound foreign and cool and McCabre in homage of his Grand Aunt Catherine "Katie" McCabe. It also began a passion for Halloween, Haunted Houses, Horror Films and SFX culminating a life long dream by providing SFX in the upcoming horror film, Graves End.
It's always Halloween
So what about the other years, oh there were stints involving motorcycles, a brief 21 year career in the U.S. Navy, world travel, computer jobs and such but nothing as rewarding as the Jersey Haunted House tours, Haunted Block parties on Guam, the Texas Zombie Stomps, the Maryland Haunted Hayrides or the Carolina Haunted Trails. The year may begin in January but it always ends in October!