Eric Church had quite the Halloween costume back in his college days. We’re inching closer and closer to the end of October, which means we have undoubtedly entered into “Spooky Season.” I don’t know when it was officially coined that, but it seems like it really caught on in the last decade or so. And if you ask me, I love the tagline for this time of the year. Halloween has to be the most underrated holiday of them all. There’s nothing like having fun sized candy all over the place at all times, watching scary movies to really ring in the fright-fueled holiday, and dressing up and pretending you are someone (or something) you aren’t Sometimes, you don’t pick the costume… the costume picks you. That’s exactly what happened to country music star Eric Church back in the day. He fondly remembers that a last-second Halloween costume quickly became one of his most memorable… and actually one of his favorites. The Chief WKML 95.7 that he and some friends that he went to Appalachian State with were headed to a Halloween event in Chapel Hill (App State alums aren’t gonna like that) when they realized none of them had costumes. So they found a costume spot that was on the way and improvised: “My favorite Halloween costume really came, I remember when I got a little older, my first year of college, there’s this thing they do every year in Chapel Hill, North Carolina – Halloween on Franklin Street. We drove down from Boone, North Carolina. I had a bunch of friends that went to the University of North Carolina, and we didn’t have costumes and didn’t realize until we were on the way that we had to have costumes. So, we stopped at a costume place in Greensboro, North Carolina. It’s Halloween, so there’s a run on everything, and couldn’t find anything. We ended up finding this hole-in-the-wall place, but they had the full costume, Sesame Street outfits. The real deal. The real ones (with) feathers and fur. We were Elmo, Cookie Monster, and I was Big Bird.” I wouldn’t have ever thought of Eric Church as the “Big Bird” type, but hey… clearly he and his friends thought the group costume was a good idea, so they went with it. And like he said, these weren’t just run-of-the-mill, cheap costumes from Spirit Halloween. These were some authentic, crafted costumes Eric and his friends were wearing. The way Church describes it… the Big Bird costume was probably a little too intricate and complicated for a night out on the town with some friends, which only adds to the lore of the Chief’s favorite Halloween costume: “It’s about 7-foot-4, and you looked out of the body, and then you had these straps that went on since the head was a lot higher. There’s a lot of beer involved on Franklin Street, so we get down there, and as the night went on, my straps broke, so the head would pivot. And so, I would be walking one way, and the head would be facing the other, and it just became this funny… I didn’t know the head was on backward. I had no idea. I see out of the body, so I’m just kinda walking around, and people were talking to my ass-end. The whole time people’d come up and start talking and go, ‘Hey, turn around.’ And I’d turn around, and they’d go, ‘No turnaround.’ It was a mess. That year, there was no other Big Bird on Franklin Street.” If only there were a picture of Eric Church rocking a head-turned-the-wrong-way Big Bird costume out there. I’m sure there is… but it’s evidently a tough photo to track down. Eric, if you are reading this, give the world what it has no idea it needed: photographic evidence of you rocking a 7-foot tall Big Bird costume. The post Eric Church Recalls His All-Time Favorite Halloween Costume From His First Year Of College: “The Real Deal… Feathers & Fur” first appeared on Whiskey Riff.