Buy all appearances: that you can do at Morris Costumes, especially this time of year when business is so good that it's downright scary.

• Author: Frank, Maggie
• Position: PICTURE THIS

He prowls the darkened warehouse at midnight, a jowly man whose heavy lids cover eyes that have seen gore, rotting flesh, the dead and the dead that won't stay that way. In the dim light, Philip Morris moves with the Hitchcockian gait of a man who has beheld the unspeakable. But, wait, is that a gleam in those eyes?

Yes. Halloween is near, the best time of the year if you're one of the nation's top 10 costume dealers and distributors. According to the Washington, D.C.-based National Retail Federation, $3.3 billion of sales waft around the holiday like a lovesick wisp of sewer gas waiting for an amorous spirit to drift by.

Morris, 71, is the patriarch of the Charlotte family that owns Morris Costumes Inc., which he and wife Amy founded in their basement in 1960. She started out renting and selling costumes he used in a traveling spooks-and-magic show, which often played movie theaters late at night. Even then, business was good. When phoning home that first year, he recalls, "I couldn't figure out why I couldn't get through. We were the only costume store between Washington, D.C., and Atlanta."

One costume he sold--a $430 gorilla suit--may have made history, of a sort. He claims it clad a hoaxster in the famous 1967 film clip that purportedly shows a sasquatch--Bigfoot--strolling along a California streambed, stealing a glance over its shoulder before disappearing into the underbrush. In 1970, Morris Costumes opened a shop in east Charlotte and, in '88, moved a few blocks to its 15,000-square-foot store, where it carries about 9,000 costumes for rent and 400 types for sale. Want a witch outfit? It's yours for $48. A guy can turn into a chick magnet by draping a $28 red foam horseshoe, festooned with yellow polyester baby chickens, around his neck.

Here the surreal is real. Outside, traffic whizzes past on a busy commuter route. Inside, customers brush elbows with gaping ghouls and green aliens. Spider webs drape nooks where grinning corpses beckon with bony fingers. This time of year, few notice the tuxedos and dance apparel the...