Think about classic Halloween gross-out food, and it may conjure up the bowl of peeled grapes that blindfolded kids stick their hands into at neighborhood parties. You may love grapes in real life, but when they’re peeled in a bowl and you’re sightless, they feel like a handful of eyeballs.

A bowl of pasta? Intestines. With sauce? Bloody intestines.

Yet those horrors are imaginary. There are plenty of ordinary foods that spook people in real life. Things that are just so repulsive to someone’s palate, for one reason or another, that they will never, ever let them pass their lips. We asked a wide range of Mainers what foods frighten them, and why. Here’s what they had to say:

“Oh God. Uh. No.”

Maine psychic Vicki Monroe doesn’t have to consult the spirit world to know what foods make her ill. Her biggest nemesis is raw oysters.

“Even thinking of it makes me sick,” she said. “I cannot fathom the thought of swallowing oysters. I just can’t. I feel like they’re looking at me, and they’re still alive and they just slide down your throat. It just grosses me out.”

Have she ever tried one?

“Yes I did, and it didn’t stay. I re-gifted,” Monroe said, laughing. She has a hard time even sitting next to someone in a restaurant who’s eating oysters, and will switch tables to avoid them.

Monroe is surprised to have an oyster phobia because she used to go clamming as a kid. She collected periwinkles too. But oysters?

“I can’t do it. It’s disgusting. Oh god. Uh. No.”

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“It looks too much like something that’s ready to bite me back.”

Does Maine blockbuster horror writer Stephen King have food fears? “Anything flabby,” he says. For instance, summer squash or steamed broccoli. King also refuses to eat sushi, because “it looks too much like something that’s ready to bite me back.”

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“Eating squishy things bothers me.”

Dan Murphy, a 17-year-old senior at Deering High School, is described by his mom as “6′ 1″ and thin.” There’s a good reason for that, at least the thin part: Murphy won’t eat pasta. Or anything else that’s “squishy.”

It’s not because he’s a fan of the Paleo diet or other low-carb routines. Pasta, in particular, can make him sick – literally.

“I’ve eaten it,” he said, “but from an early age I never liked it. I didn’t like the taste of it, and more importantly, the texture of it. It was always squishy. Eating squishy things bothers me. Like rice – no way.”

That means no Italian or Asian food. Murphy said he is OK with eliminating entire cuisines from his diet. In their place, he eats a lot of pork, lamb, steak – any kind of meat.

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“It seems like such a bizarre, unhealthy thing to eat.”

Here’s one thing you will never see on the menu at Francine Bistro in Camden: Brains. Chef/owner Brian Hill describes them as “vile,” “unappealing” and “really, really gross.” (Clearly, he will never be a zombie.)

Hill’s friends in the food world have talked to him about roasting a sheep’s head and described how the brains sputter out the top. Hill himself has cooked a lot of goat heads, and he finds lamb cheeks delicious. But he draws the lines at brains. And yes, he has tried them.

“When you think about it, it’s the only food that’s 100 percent cholesterol,” the chef said. “It just seems like such an unhealthy, bizarre thing to eat to me. Andrew Zimmern, of course, on ‘Bizarre Foods’ has made it popular, and it’s very showy when he eats something disgusting, but that just seems like something I’m not going to be able to overcome.”

It doesn’t help, he added, that many chefs describe their brain dishes as “custardy.”

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“Since I’m a strict vegan, I’d never eat a bigfoot.”

As director of the International Cryptozoology Museum in Portland, Loren Coleman spends his days pondering the possible existence of creatures like the Abominable Snowman and the Loch Ness Monster.

“Since I’m a strict vegan,” he said, “I’d never eat a Bigfoot, even if I was starving to death deep in the wildest wilderness. The thought of eating meat is horrifying, and to be feasting on a possible rare yet-to-be discovered species is just beyond comprehension.”

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“My low reptilian brain is screaming out ‘do not put this in your mouth.'”

Is anything scary, foodwise, to a man who regularly cooks fried monkfish cheek and pairs octopus with egg yolk? Yes. Mike Wiley, chef/co-owner of Hugo’s restaurant in Portland, says there’s one thing that turns his stomach: pork liver.

“I think it’s gross,” he said. “I had it prepared beautifully once. I had it really early in my career at Dan Barber’s restaurant, at Blue Hill in Manhattan. He did this pork liver mousse with a dark chocolate tuile, and it was just amazing. It sounds weird, but for some reason it worked.”

Wiley credits that experience with launching him head first into charcuterie and learning nose-to-tail cooking. But every time he’s tried to replicate the Blue Hill pork liver experience, “it has been garbage.”

“I can get past the texture – you can puree it or poach it or whatever – but yeah, it’s just that chalky, bloody, musky, iodiney (flavor). It tastes like my low reptilian brain is screaming out ‘Do not put this in your mouth! Do not put this in your mouth!'”

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“All I see are legs with suckers.”

Kathy McKechnie encounters all kinds of spooks in her work with Maine Ghost Hunters. But nothing scares her like squid.

“I don’t think I could ever eat whole baby squid,” she said. “The kind of calamari that looks like it has a head and legs? I couldn’t eat that, which is funny because I like calamari. I take one look at a whole baby squid and all I see are legs with suckers. Imagining all those little suckers sliding down my throat? No way. I can’t do it!”

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“You don’t know what the content is until you put it in your mouth and then it’s too late.”

Portland Mayor Michael Brennan can eat tomato soup. He can eat fish chowder. But stews? They’ll never get his vote.

Why? “I don’t know what’s in it,” he said. “It makes me hesitant because I can’t see the content. Oftentimes you don’t know what the content is until you put it in your mouth, and then it’s too late.”

Brennan doesn’t eat red meat, so that’s why stews make him nervous, he said, “because there’s usually some kind of meat thrown in.”

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“Anything with a real gelatinous texture to it is probably not something I’d sidle up to real easy.”

Leon Seymour, executive director of Friends of Fort Knox and founder of the haunted fort experience they sponsor every year in Prospect, calls himself “a pretty liberal eater.” But there are some foods he can’t stomach. “Organ meats would be up there, like brains and Rocky Mountain oysters,” he said. “Anything with a real gelatinous texture to it is probably not something I’d sidle up to real easy. Squid-y kinds of things. Yech.”

Another item Seymour won’t eat: Bugs. Since that’s the theme of this year’s “Fright at the Fort,” he’d better stay away from the new costumed character, “Manty.”

A praying mantis? Perhaps saying grace before feasting on one of the humans coming through the fort on Halloween?

“We’re not telling you exactly what it is,” he said.

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“There’s something too elastic-y and amorphous about them.”

Allen Baldwin, co-producer of Damnationland, won’t eat oysters, but for an unusual reason.

“I’ve always been really creeped out by the bottom of the ocean – the darkness,” he explained. “I’ve made a movie about it. It’s where so much of very basic life happens, and the sense of that very basic life is very frightening to me too.” Urchin roe is out for the same reason.

Baldwin’s movie about the dark, sludgy ocean bottom was called “Merrow,” the word for a Gaelic sea troll. The creature in his movie was his version of a Siren (from Greek mythology), who took the shape of a woman and preyed on men.

Mythology aside, Baldwin says his dislike of oysters is “a texture thing.”

“There’s something too elastic-y and amorphous about them. People make fun of me for eating stuff with mold on it. I’m really not a picky eater. The scariest thing about my eating habits is that I will eat things that have been sitting out for days.”

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