50 Times People With Disabilities Stole The Show With Their Epic Halloween Costumes

Artist Riva Lehrer, who reflects on living with disabilities in her memoir Golem Girl, once mentioned that it took her time to reach a point where she could enjoy Halloween as much as the people depicted in these pictures.

"I've never dressed up all that much for [it]," she wrote. "I remember once slathering myself in makeup and going as a Mary Kay saleswoman, and another time covering a leotard with several hundred Band-Aids and going as the self-destructive performance artist Chris Burden, infamous for crawling over broken glass and having himself shot with a gun."

"I see now that every costume dealt with the history of my body, whether I knew it or not. Covering myself with makeup, trying to feel female; covering myself with bandages, trying to wink at my wounds."

Then, in her thirties, Lehrer hit a wall.

"When friends asked, 'What are you dressing as this year?' I'd reply: 'I am a costume of the future! My task is to perfect the details of being me.'"

"It was a joke, but also a response to a lifetime of being stared at, for my curved spine, orthopedic boots, arrhythmic limp, being short — in short, all the things that made me unacceptable. I felt that no matter what I wore, viewers just subtracted the costume right off my body. What was the point of putting a monster over a monster?"

Lehrer said 'monster' because she felt like that was how she was treated. But writing Golem Girl allowed her to claim the 'monster' for herself.

In it, she traces the history of the legend of the Golem and how the concept of the artificially constructed creature has been woven into Western culture. That’s how she sees herself — as a rough body fashioned from clay, a being as much built as born.

"Halloween is the time of monsters, of course," Lehrer said. "Creatures with damaged bodies, scarred faces, lumbering gaits, missing limbs; brutes that drool, emit miasmas, bleed, leak, manifest psychiatric conditions that put them beyond the pale of acceptable society. Frankenstein (a Golem); his Bride (a Golem); the Borg (a Golem, and so is Mr. Data); Dracula (infectious); the Wolfman (infectious); Darth Vader, Captain Hook (amputees); Freddy Krueger (facial disfigurement and mental illness) … I'll stop there. If I listed every disabled villain, I'd be here till I was not a Golem but a ghost."

It can be incredibly hard to leave the house if you feel like a monster and don't want to be seen. But in a way, Halloween levels the playing field—at least for one night—allowing everyone to embrace their individuality without fear of judgment. On this day, costumes become a way to celebrate differences rather than hide them, and who among us hasn’t felt like they were lacking that sense of belonging at some point?