Eminem's Grandson Got His First Real Halloween Scare in the Seasonal Aisle at Home Depot

Elliot is heading into his second Halloween with a working definition of "scary," and his mother has the video — or would, if he hadn't got too scared for her to keep filming.

There is a specific parenting milestone that does not appear in any baby book: the first time your child understands that something is supposed to frighten them. Hailie Jade hit it in the Halloween section of a Home Depot, and told the story on episode 3 of the just a little shady podcast, published August 28, 2026.

The setup was mundane. She needed sand for the sandbox.

Hailie Jade: "One of our ventures was I took Elliot to Home Depot. I had to get sand for the sandbox. And they had their Halloween animatronics, like, all everywhere."

She tried to record it. That did not survive contact with the animatronics: "Well, I was trying to record, but he got scared, so I couldn't record."

The Halloween stretch starts at 34:45:

The parrot: no problem

What makes the story good is that the first jump scare was completely unprovoked and he did not care at all.

Hailie Jade: "One of the things we walked by just went off. I didn't press the button or anything, so I wasn't like, 'Oh, you ready?' It just went off. And he was fine with it. It was like a creepy parrot. So he was just like, 'Oh, okay. This whatever. This weird, like, bird is talking to me.'"

A machine shouted at him unexpectedly and he reviewed it as a weird bird. Fine.

The tall guy with the pumpkin face: problem

Hailie Jade: "But then they had this, like, super tall guy with, like, a pumpkin face. And he was doing fine with everything, so I'm like, 'Oh, not scared, doesn't know this is scary.' … But as soon as I pressed the button and it moved, he looked, and then looked at me, and he was terrified. So I was just like, 'Okay, let's go.'"

Note the sequence, because it is the whole thing: looked at it, then looked at his mother. That is the moment a kid stops processing an object and starts checking whether he is supposed to be alarmed.

Then the detail that clearly rattled her more than him:

Hailie Jade: "He literally got the chills down his spine, and I'm like, 'Wow.' He has an innate — I don't even know — an innate reaction to be, like, scared of this, and he has really no reason to. I guess it's, like, survival instincts or something. But he literally got the chills. He was, like, disgusted at the thing, and I was like, 'I'm so sorry.' He was fine with everything. So, yeah, that was fun."

She apologised to her toddler for pressing the button, which is the correct response.

Elliot was born in March 2025 and turned one this past March, so this is his second Halloween season and the first he will have any awareness of. Last year, by Hailie's account, the effort was wasted on him — she decorated for a baby who had no framework for it. This year he has the framework, and the framework has opinions.

Halloween 2026 is objectively a good one. It will not help.

The other half of the segment is the calendar, and it is a decent piece of information for anyone planning anything this October.

Hailie Jade: "I didn't realise Halloween this year is on a Saturday, and it's daylight savings at night."

Both are true. October 31, 2026 falls on a Saturday, and the US clocks go back the following night — meaning a Saturday Halloween followed by an extra hour. October 2026 also has five Saturdays. As a piece of calendar engineering it is close to ideal.

Hailie and her co-host then worked out, in real time, exactly how little this benefits them now:

"If we were in college… oh my gosh, we would eat this up."

"But yeah, it really won't affect us at all. Even if we do something, we're not staying up that late. Honestly, for me it just means I'm waking up earlier, because Elliot's not gonna care that the time [changed]. He's not going to know he gets an extra hour. There's no extra hour for me."

That is the entire transition from your twenties to parenthood in about forty words.

She also confirmed the decorations are already going up — pumpkins throughout the house, and regular runs to HomeGoods and Marshalls to build the collection. Her verdict on the season: "Great year for the spooky season."

Halloween is a recurring fixture on the show — she gave the season a whole episode back in Ep. 12:

If you have never seen the two of them outside the podcast, I wrote up the whole day at the Season 5 pop-up at Mom's Spaghetti, from the line outside to meeting Hailie.

The family angle writes itself

It is hard to ignore the lineage here. Elliot's mother is on record as a horror fan from a young age. His grandfather made his name partly on horrorcore — a body of work that includes an entire song written from the perspective of a stalker, a persona built on a knife-wielding alter ego, and a documented affection for Jason Voorhees. We have a whole rundown of the Eminem catalogue's spookiest tracks, and it is not a short list.

And the one-year-old in that family got taken out by a seasonal display at a hardware store.

Give him time.

Sources. Quotes are from the episode embedded above — just a little shady Ep. 3, August 28, 2026; Halloween segment 34:45–38:15. October 31, 2026 falls on a Saturday; US daylight saving time ends November 1, 2026.