The goblins seem to be showing up earlier every year.

I was at convenience store over the weekend when a couple of adult witches bounded in, dressed in full green-faced, warty-nosed, pointy-hatted hag regalia and cackling gleefully about the pre-Halloween party they were heading to that evening.

The next day, I spotted a tall, beefy man clad in a flowing blue evening gown, high heels and blond beehive wig walking arm-in-arm down the street with a woman dressed as a circus clown.

With a little more than two weeks to go before the official arrival of Halloween, the dress-up season appears already to be in full swing. Many of the houses around town have been adorned in elaborate Halloween decorations for what seems like a month now. The witches, black cats, ghosts, spider webs and outsized plastic pumpkins are everywhere you look, suggesting that what traditionally had been a one-day event for the kiddies has grown over the last few years into a nearly monthlong celebration of ghoulish good times for grown-ups.

“No doubt about it, Halloween has turned into an adult event that’s probably equal to the partying that goes on for New Year’s Eve,” said Marlene “Bunni” Paulette. “It’s not just for kids anymore.”

Paulette and her husband, Bob, have been monitoring the expansion of Halloween from a single day to a season unto itself ever since they opened The Castle of Costumes on Stillwater Avenue in Bangor about 10 years ago. Back then, the fledgling home business seemed a fitting way to make some cash from all of those clever Halloween costumes Bunni had sewn for her six children over the years. Once the kids left home, the Paulettes decided to rent out the 30 or so costumes, along with 200 more they bought from shops in New York, and to stitch up custom orders.

“It all started with children’s costumes,” she said, “but it soon turned out that the parents who came in with their kids wanted costumes for themselves, too. Now, we have so many adult customers that we’ve stopped doing children’s costumes. Halloween has become as big a time for adults as Christmas is for kids.”

Over the years, Bunni has learned never to question a fun-loving adult’s taste in costumery. When a few local orthopedic surgeons wanted to go to a medical seminar dressed as a herd of cows, Bunni obliged them, udders and all. When a Bangor businessman got the idea to scare his buddies at a hunting camp, Bunni made him a hairy Sasquatch suit that more than fulfilled the man’s Big Foot fantasies. And if a person should yearn to be a pickle at a party, as one man did a few years back, Bunni will sit at her sewing machine and whip up a life-size dill.

“Nowadays there are so many more adults throwing Halloween parties at home,” Bunni said, as a middle-aged man walked into the shop and asked for an ever-popular Grim Reaper costume. “I know several people who right now are busy turning their barns into spook houses – not for the kids but for the adults. By the time Halloween comes around, we’ll have rented from 400 to 500 costumes.”

Gorillas are always “terribly big” among the adult dress-up crowd, she said, and Elvis never seems to go out of style. Pirates have become a perennial favorite, too, and his-and-hers medieval garb is fast becoming a party staple. But anyone looking for such scurrilous alter egos as a Monica Lewinsky, let’s say, or an O.J. Simpson are out of luck – the

Paulettes prefer not to deal in real-life scandals.

“Last year, because of September 11, everybody wanted to be patriotic,” Bunni said. “We had Statues of Liberty, Uncle Sams, Miss Libertys, all of that kind of thing. We got mobbed for patriotic costumes on July 4, too.”

While the Paulettes are old enough to remember when Halloween was largely the domain of young trick-or-treaters, and house decorations were limited to a jack-o’-lantern glowing in the window and a paper skeleton hung on the door, they’re glad to indulge the whims of that growing population of adults looking to shed their responsibilities and slip into a new persona for a night.

“I think adults like to fantasize a little more these days,” Bunni said. “It’s a way for people to escape the pressures of their busy lives, I guess, and just have fun being someone else for a while.”