This 16th anniversary party arrives in San Jose on Halloween night, Friday, October 31, 2008. From 8pm until the witching hour, we'll scare up the spirits of the dead, do the dance of death, and compare corpses. Look for the skeleton on the porch, and you'll know you're in the right place! Need some costume ideas? Every year has great deaths, so toast to the passing of some great ones by dressing up like them! Everest climber Sir Edmund Hillary, dancer Cyd Charisse, Heath "the Joker" Ledger, illustrator Tasha Tudor, Dungeons & Dragons inventor Gary Gygax, comedian George Carlin, golden girl Estelle Getty, even seemingly undead Vampira -- those are just a few from 2008. You can find plenty more from years gone by at The Dead People Server. Dead concepts have been popular too: Romance and Chivalry (yes, we have bitter friends). Russian Communism. Cyberpunk. Bloodletting with leaches. Privacy (not only bitter, but jaded). Strike up an entertaining debate by picking a potentially dead concept! We've also seen God and Nietzsche together. Jim Jones showed up with packets of Kool-Aid. We even had the King (Elvis) and the King of Kings (Jesus) at the same time. Nothing is sacred here. Fictional dead people are always fun. Everybody seems to die in Shakespearan tragedies and Italian operas. Gothic romances usually feature a dead bride or maybe a ghost. Gangster movies create lots of dead bodies: Don Vito Corleone and much of his family died in The Godfather movies, and Adriana La Cerva and many more died in The Sopranos. Some key figures in the Harry Potter series die or start out dead as well. Real and fictional military action produces quite the death toll. For example, everyone in the troop except for Ryan dies in Saving Private Ryan. Science-fiction and fantasy have some of the most unusual (and transitory) deaths. Suzie Costello, Owen Harper, and Toshiko Sato all die in Torchwood, and Jack Harkness dies over and over again. The main characters in The Lord of the Rings all die, if you consider 'passing into the West' dying (which we do). Doctor Who companions like Adric and Astrid die, and it could be said that the Doctor himself "dies" when he regenerates. Literary, movie, and TV vampires are undead, so grab some fangs and be Lestat or the Count. Just because a famous dead person has been to a previous ball doesn't mean the person can't come again. Everyone has their own interpretations of famous people. We've had a Janis Joplin at almost every ball, and no two looked alike (aside from the bottle of Jack Daniels, of course). You can dress as the person looked during life, at death, or after death (think corpses and ghosts). An idea that works well for actors is to dress as they appeared in their most famous roles, e.g., Judy Garland as Dorothy or Christopher Reeve as Superman. Get creative, and keep us guessing. Prizes will be awarded for the cleverness of the costume concept, as well as for the costume's own attractiveness. Everyone will vote for the Dead People's Choice Award to honor the best costume of the evening. It could be you. For more costume ideas, check out our Costume Tips, including I see dead people... at Target!