This October 31st costumed kids and a good number of grown-ups will be fanning out across neighborhoods and going to parties in cities and towns all over the world. The creatures and characters on display will range from the topical (covid, anyone?) to the classic (ghouls, pirates, witches, superheroes, zombies).
But no single emblem captures the spirit of the holiday quite as neatly as that old stand-by: a ghost.
Way back in 1957, in an article titled “American Ghostly Legends,” LIFE magazine paid spooky tribute to some of the country’s most celebrated ghosts and ghost stories. The magazine’s editors introduced the elaborate, multi-page feature thus:
The native ghosts of the U.S. are less famous than their Old World, other-world counterparts. But there are a surprising number of them and they make up a colorful and diverse group.
Most American ghosts were born in the simpler past of colonial or frontier days. Even in today’s scientific age their stories, like the ghosts themselves, die hard. From the annals of unearthly Americana, nine of the most fascinating stories were selected [for this feature]. At their sites photographer Nina Leen caught the haunting and haunted atmosphere which might make any man, having heard the creaks and seen the eerie moving lights and shadows, believe that ghosts still walk.
Here, on Halloween a six full decades after it first published, LIFE.com recalls “American Ghostly Legends” with a gallery of Nina Leen‘s striking color pictures, as well as reproductions of the article’s pages as they ran in LIFE.
Finally, it’s worth noting that Leen’s work while perhaps rather staid when compared with the filters and effects available via Instagram, Photoshop and other modern media was impressive enough at the time to win first prize for Magazine Color Story in a 1958 contest sponsored by Encyclopaedia Britannica, the National Press Photographers Association and the University of Missouri School of Journalism.
Sure, we all loved Lucy, but which one? The rubber-faced Lucy Ricardo of her classic TV sitcom, I Love Lucy? That goes without saying. But what about Lucille, the struggling but determined Hollywood starlet who spent two decades lingering in B-movie purgatory? Or the powerful Ms. Ball, the behind-the scenes TV pioneer and the medium’s first major female executive?
Truth is, Lucille Ball lived several fascinating lifetimes, many of them captured by LIFE’s photographers on her way up the showbiz ladder. She was the vice president of Desilu Productions, making her television’s first female mogul. The strain of running a business with her husband and longtime onscreen foil, Desi Arnaz, and Desi’s drinking ultimately doomed the partnership. The couple divorced in 1960, and Ball bought Arnaz out of the business in 1963. Lucy went on to star without Desi in hit sitcoms The Lucy Show (1962-68) and Here’s Lucy (1968-74). Desilu, meanwhile, remained a prolific producer of classic 1960s shows like The Untouchables, Mission: Impossible and Star Trek.
Here, LIFE.com presents photos—none of which ever ran in LIFE—of Lucille Ball, including a surprisingly sultry 1942 portrait (slide #1) by John Florea, made when Ball was known as “Queen of the B’s” for the string of sub-par films that had failed to make her a star. Years of dues-paying hard work are apparent in her eyes. And yet, there is something sweetly defiant, too, about her look: a sense that, with a little luck, her big break is just around the corner.
Man, was it ever.
Liz Ronk edited this gallery for LIFE.com. Follow her on Twitter at @LizabethRonk.
Lucille Ball, 1942. An outtake from John Florea’s 1942 photo essay on Ball, which touted her as being on the brink of fame after a decade of kicking around Hollywood.
John Florea The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Lucille Ball, 1942
John Florea The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Lucille Ball in costume for the extravagant dream sequence set in 18th-century France at the center of DuBarry Was a Lady, 1943.
Walter Sanders The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Lucille Ball plays upon her modeling past for Lured, a comic thriller in which she starred as a woman who agrees to pose as bait for a serial killer, 1946.
Bob Landry The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Lucille Ball signs autographs for admiring seamen at one of the January 1944 galas celebrating President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s 62nd birthday.
Thomas D. McAvoy The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Lucille Ball performs at one of the gala balls in Washington marking President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s birthday in January 1944.
Thomas D. McAvoy The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Lucille Ball, 1944
Thomas D. McAvoy The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Lucille Ball, 1944
Thomas D. McAvoy The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Lucille Ball, 1944
Thomas D. McAvoy The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Lucille Ball, 1944
Thomas D. McAvoy The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
In 1958, on the set of The Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour a collection of occasional, lavish specials that followed the adventures of the Ricardos and the Mertzes after I Love Lucy.
Leonard McCombe The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
The RKO studio lot was where Lucille Ball met Desi Arnaz, when they co-starred in the 1940 musical Too Many Girls. Here, in a rare color photo from his 1958 spread on the launch of Desilu Studios, LIFE’s Leonard McCombe catches the couple as they ponder their risky new venture.
Leonard McCombe The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Lucille Ball is a calm eye at the center of a storm of activity at her new Desllu Studios, 1958.
Leonard McCombe The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Desi Arnaz embraces Lucille Ball at the new home of their TV production empire, Desilu Studios, in 1958.
Leonard McCombe The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Desi Arnaz and Lucille Ball strike familiar poses as they survey their new empire, the Desilu Studios, in 1958.
Leonard McCombe The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Lucille Ball plays a matador, 1958
Leonard McCombe The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Desi Arnaz and Lucille Ball, 1958
Leonard McCombe The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
After refusing to register for the draft in 1967 — at the very height of his career — 25-year-old Muhammad Ali was stripped of his heavyweight championship title and endured a forced layoff from the ring for three years. In 1971, after winning the appeal of his conviction and five-year prison sentence before the U.S. Supreme Court, the former champ returned to boxing, fighting a few bouts against lesser (albeit ranked) rivals before facing the title-holder, Philadelphia’s “Smokin’ Joe” Frazier.
Long before the first bell sounded at their March 1971 fight, that bout had been billed as “The Fight of the Century” and, amazingly, it lived up to the hype. That night, a star-studded crowd watched two of the greatest boxers who ever lived battle for supremacy in the world’s premier sports arena.
Frazier had earned the heavyweight belt a year earlier. “I often felt bad for Joe,” photographer John Shearer, who died in 2017, once said, recalling the weeks and months he spent with both fighters before the bout at New York’s Madison Square Garden. “He was completely miscast as the bad guy in the fight. In so many of the pictures I made of him that winter, when he’s with friends and relaxed, there’s something genuinely charming there but something in his face suggests that if you scratched the surface, you’d find a world of other feelings.”
“The pictures I made of Ali training in Chris Dundee’s Miami Beach gym, meanwhile, are incredibly revealing in another way,” Shearer said, “not least because you can see that Ali had a belly. And this is not all that long before the fight. He just wasn’t in the kind of shape he needed to be in to battle a warrior like Joe Frazier.”
Many of Shearer’s photos of Frazier, including several in this gallery, make the clear case that Frazier simply wanted the title more than Ali. He was fighting, scratching and clawing for it long before the two men stepped into the ring.
“When I see the pictures I made of Joe running by himself, for example,” Shearer says, “the one thing that strikes me, maybe even more now than when I was making the photos, is his discipline. He was training, training, training. He was driven. And in many ways, he was a man alone.”
“That fight was the last time Ali took Joe for granted,” Shearer says. “I wonder if, deep down, he hit a point in Miami where he looked for that fire, that drive, and it just wasn’t there. You know you want to fight, you want to hold that title belt again, but you can’t make yourself run those extra few miles at five in the morning, or spar for twenty more minutes every single day.”
Another aspect of Frazier that Shearer captured before the title belt was his creative self. Frazier was a singer and a performer, with his own band and with his own backup singers, the Knockouts. The truth is, he wasn’t bad.
“The two places Frazier communicates best,” wrote LIFE’s Thomas Thompson in a March 1971 cover story for the magazine, “are in the ring, when a cloak of menace and fury drops over him, and on a nightclub stage, where he sings with strength and sincerity.”
“The image of Frazier remained, unfairly and for the longest time, that he was just another fighter,” says Shearer. “That he was just another guy with his nose pushed off to the side of his face. But he felt, strongly, that he was every bit as articulate as Ali and, as importantly, perhaps, that he was every bit the showman that Ali was.”
As for the bout itself, one of the key factors that ratcheted up the rhetoric was the record purse offered both fighters. As LIFE observed in its March 5, 1971 issue: “[Ali] and Frazier are both going to get $2.5 million the morning after the fight whether anybody comes or not. A flat $2.5 million. Guaranteed. The most money ever paid to any man for a maximum 45 minutes’ work.”
“It was electric in the Garden the night of the fight,” Shearer remembers. “It was the night of the great showdown between the era’s two gladiators, and there was a sense that the unprecedented hype for the fight might actually fall short of the reality. And, remember, without a doubt it was a very, very pro-Ali crowd. They all came to see him win, to see him destroy Joe Frazier.”
That’s not the way it worked out. The relentless, punishing Frazier stalked and pummeled Ali all night, and in the 15th and final round floored him, for only the third time in Ali’s career, with an absolutely titanic left hook. Ali got back on his feet quickly, but the damage, literally and figuratively, had been done. Frazier won by unanimous decision, and held on to the crown until losing it in spectacular fashion to George Foreman two years later, in 1973.
“Frazier didn’t fight by going for the head, the way a lot of other boxers did against Ali,” Shearer remembers. “He went after Ali’s body the whole fight, pounding away, taking terrible blows to the head himself. You know, you keep whacking at the base of the tree, and the tree is going to come down. And that’s what happened. That’s really the story of that first, unforgettable fight between those two great champions.”
—gallery by Liz Ronk
Muhammad Ali with the press during a pre-fight weigh-in at Madison Square Garden in March 1971.
John Shearer/ Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Muhammad Ali, Miami Beach, Florida, 1971.
John Shearer/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Joe Frazier during a break in training before his March 1971 title bout against Muhammad Ali.
John Shearer/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Muhammad Ali in 1971.
John Shearer/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Muhammad Ali, Miami Beach, Florida, 1971.
John Shearer/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Muhammad Ali took a break during training in Miami Beach in 1971.
John Shearer/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Muhammad Ali (rear), Miami Beach, Florida, 1971.
John Shearer/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Muhammad Ali, Miami Beach, Florida, 1971.
John Shearer/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Muhammad Ali, along with light heavyweight José Torres (in suit) and others, watched the action at boxing promoter Chris Dundee’s gym in Miami Beach in February 1971.
John Shearer/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Muhammad Ali taunted rival Joe Frazier at Frazier’s training camp in Philadelphia, 1971.
John Shearer/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Fans at Joe Frazier’s training headquarters in Philadelphia in 1971.
John Shearer/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Joe Frazier in training, 1971.
John Shearer/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Joe Frazier in 1971.
John Shearer/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Joe Frazier, rear, trained for the title fight versus Ali.
John Shearer/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Joe Frazier in rural Pennsylvania in the winter of 1971.
John Shearer/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Muhammad Ali clowned in his new Cadillac limo in Miami, February 1971.
John Shearer/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Muhammad Ali with fans in Miami Beach, February 1971.
John Shearer/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Muhammad Ali drew a crowd when he playfully sparred with an unidentified man in the parking lot of a grocery store in Miami Beach in 1971.
John Shearer/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
A sign advertised a concert by Joe Frazier’s R&B act, Joe Frazier and His Knockouts.
John Shearer/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Joe Frazier and the Knockouts performed in January 1971.
John Shearer/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
At 214 pounds three weeks before the fight, Frazier began drinking only orange juice for breakfast and skipping lunch to peel off five more pounds.
John Shearer/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Joe Frazier backstage before an appearance with the Knockouts in 1971.
John Shearer/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Joe Frazier in the recording studio, 1971.
John Shearer/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Joe Frazier tested out a band member’s trumpet on the set of NBC’s “Kraft Music Hall” variety show in 1971.
John Shearer/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Joe Frazier in the recording studio in 1971.
John Shearer/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
A ticket window at Madison Square Garden, the site of the March 8, 1971, heavyweight title bout.
John Shearer/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
A Muhammad Ali fan waited for the title bout to begin at Madison Square Garden in New York on March 8, 1971.
John Shearer/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Jazz great Miles Davis (right) at Madison Square Garden, March 8, 1971.
John Shearer/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Future heavyweight champ George Foreman gazed into John Shearer’s camera at Madison Square Garden on March 8, 1971.
John Shearer/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Muhammad Ali with assistant trainer and corner man Bundini Brown, 1971.
John Shearer/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Joe Frazier (left) and Muhammad Ali at Madison Square Garden during the “Fight of the Century” on March 8, 1971.
John Shearer/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Joe Frazier lunged at Muhammad Ali during the fight.
John Shearer/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier rested in their corners between rounds at Madison Square Garden on March 8, 1971.
John Shearer/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Heavyweight champ Joe Frazier celebrated his title bout victory over Muhammad Ali at Madison Square Garden, March 8, 1971.
John Shearer/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Joe Frazier, pictured in his dressing room after defeating Muhammad Ali on March 8, 1971.
John Shearer/Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Joe Frazier savored his heavyweight title bout victory over Muhammad Ali on March 8, 1971, in New York City.
On April 16, 1943, a Swiss chemist named Albert Hofmann accidentally dosed himself with a miniscule amount of a new, virtually unknown, clinically-synthesized compound, lysergic acid diethylamide, or LSD-25 becoming, in the process, the first human being to trip on acid. A few days later, Hofmann experienced a full-blown intentional acid trip when he self-administered 250 micrograms.
The 250 micrograms with which Hofmann dosed himself represented what he believed to be a “threshold” amount, i.e., a dose that would spark a noticeable and perhaps even quantifiable response in the test subject. Subsequent clinical studies indicate that a threshold dose of LSD is actually closer to 20 micrograms.
Here, LIFE.com presents a gallery of artworks created in the 1960s by a group calling itself USCO (an abbreviation for “the Us Company, ” or “the Company of Us”) a collective of artists, film makers, engineers, poets and other creative folks who staged interactive, acid-inspired art shows in lofts, galleries and museums around the country. In its September 9, 1966 issue, LIFE reported on the then-new phenomenon of what it called “LSD Art” through the lens of a show at New York’s Riverside Museum:
Amid throbbing lights, dizzying designs, swirling smells, swelling sounds, the world of art is “turning on.” It is getting hooked on psychedelic art, the latest, liveliest movement to seethe up from the underground. Its bizarre amalgam of painting, sculpture, photography, electronics and engineering is aimed at inducing the hallucinatory effects and intensified perceptions that LSD, marijuana and other psychedelic (or mind-expanding) drugs produce but without requiring the spectator to take drugs. [Viewers] . . . become disoriented from their normal time sense and preoccupations and are lifted into a state of heightened consciousness. In effect, the art may send them on a kind of drugless “trip.”
Psychedelic art is not all new. It derives from earlier innovations of art and electronics, as well as from such old-fashioned devices as the kaleidoscope and slide projector. Some of it even incorporates ancient Oriental philosophies and American Indian lore. But what is new about the art is its complex integration of these techniques and elements as well as its overall purpose. “We try to vaporize the mind,” says a psychedelic artist, “by bombing the senses.”
Of the show at the Riverside Museum and other trippy USCO exhibitions, LIFE wrote that the art found “its most receptive audience at colleges. Young people who grew up with TV and transistor radios and who take electronic equipment for granted have no difficulty in attuning themselves to the audio-visual bombardment. Older people,” the LIFE article concluded, “who prefer what is called rational sequential experience, i.e., just one movie or a single radio station at a time, tend to freak out.”
John Birks “Dizzy” Gillespie, who would have celebrated his 103rd birthday on Oct. 21, was the very model of the modern American musical genius: a brilliant instrumentalist and stylistic innovator, he was also an extroverted performer with a wicked sense of humor.
One of the primary creators of bebop in the mid-1940s and an unparalleled trumpeter, Dizzy was a populist who wanted his music to be understood, appreciated and enjoyed. Audiences may have associated him with signature visual clues the beret and goatee he sported in the 1940s, and the trumpet with the upturned bell he began playing in the 1950s and adored his onstage clowning and dancing, but anyone with ears could tell how seriously he always took the music. An international star until his death on January 6, 1993 (the same day as Rudolph Nureyev), Gillespie was as fervently respected by fellow musicians, as he was beloved by generations of listeners.
A spread by LIFE photographer Allan Grant in our October 11, 1948 issue, during bebop’s glory days. Conspicuous in his absence is Charlie Parker, the avatar of bebop, and the man whom Dizzy called “the other side of my heartbeat,” but Gillespie’s vivacious personality was far more palatable to the mainstream. To see this magnificent musician in his youth, ready to convince the world that the music he and his not-yet-understood peers were making was the sound of the future, is still a glorious thing to behold.
With the possible exception of Betty Grable and her fabled legs no single Hollywood star was more popular with American troops during World War II than the actress and dancer Rita Hayworth. Thanks to a photo made by Bob Landry that ran in LIFE magazine in August 1941, months before the U.S. officially entered the war, Hayworth (born Margarita Carmen Cansino in Brooklyn on Oct. 17, 1918) was the face and the lingerie-clad body of arguably the single most famous and most frequently reproduced American pinup image ever.
LIFE.com remembers the star of films as varied as Pal Joey, Strawberry Blonde, Orson Welles’s Lady From Shanghai and the 1946 noir classic, Gilda in which she played one of moviedom’s most devastatingly sexy femmes fatale. Hayworth could play comedy, was stellar in dramatic roles and danced well enough that none other than Fred Astaire, with whom she starred in two hits for Columbia Pictures in the early 1940s, asserted that she was as talented a partner as any he’d ever had.
Hayworth’s offscreen life, meanwhile, was frequently tough. She married five times; she struggled with alcoholism; and for the last years of her life she suffered from a disease that was only diagnosed (and given a name) a few years before she died: Alzheimer’s.
For countless Americans of a certain age, however, and for movie fans around the world, Rita Hayworth remains one of those rarest of creatures: a bona fide movie star from a classic era the Hollywood of the 1940s and ’50s that will never come again.
Rita Hayworth on August 11, 1941 LIFE Cover
Bob Landry (LIFE Picture Collection)
Rita Hayworth 1941
Bob Landry The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Rita Hayworth, 1945.
Bob Landry (The LIFE Picture Collection)
Rita Hayworth in Gilda, 1946
Columbia Pictures
Rita Hayworth 1941
Bob Landry The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Rita Hayworth 1941
Bob Landry The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Rita Hayworth 1941
Bob Landry (The LIFE Picture Collection)
Rita Hayworth with husband Orson Wells and daughter Rebecca, 1946
