The Weird and Wild Story of Morris Costumes Founder Philip Morris

Bigfoot stalks the Pacific Northwest. A rampaging gorilla climbs a billboard in Uptown Charlotte. A beautiful woman transforms into a rotted zombie. A mad doctor takes over late-night TV. Ghost hunters track a showbiz spirit to its lair.  

All these mystifying moments have one thing in common: They all involve Charlotte’s maestro of the macabre, Philip Morris. 

Morris and his wife Amy launched Morris Costumes 60 years ago from the basement of their Queen City home on Kistler Avenue. From those humble beginnings, the family business grew to be the world’s largest costume distributor until the company sold its online distribution arm to Oriental Trading Company, a subsidiary of investor Warren Edward Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway, for a reported $500 million in 2021.

Philip’s grandson Sean Morris currently runs the business, which includes Morris Costumes’  20,000-square-foot retail shop on Monroe Road and more than 250 seasonal Halloween Express stores. The shop at 4300 Monroe Road, built by the family in 1988 on the site of a former Red Lobster restaurant, is not just a hot spot for Halloween costumes.

A visit to the store reveals rows of bunny suits and passion play Roman armor for Easter, seasonal attire and Santa suits for Christmas and much more. The company has licensing agreements for popular franchise costumes including Marvel, Michael Myers, Toy Story and Harry Potter while also specializing in magic tricks, animatronic figures, tuxedos, dancewear and theatrical makeup.

“We rent costumes [to] all the theatre departments from CPCC to UNC Charlotte,” Sean says. “Even movie studios reach out to us on a regular basis to rent [costumes].”

But focusing on the Queen City-based costume empire Philip Morris bequeathed to his family can be deceiving. It merely scratches the surface of the master showman’s achievements over more than six decades in show business. The elder Morris was a scary stage magician, a circus ringmaster, a TV horror movie host and an unwitting contributor to one of the greatest scientific hoaxes in history.

“Philip Morris is a spooky icon, part of Charlotte’s history,” says Jason Tapp of Spooky CLT, a platform that explores the city’s haunted locations and historical mysteries. “The fact that people don’t know much about him … is something that I hope to change.”

With that in mind, we peer behind the showman’s mask and raise the curtain on Philip Morris’ magical, influential and crazy-but-true career.

From magician’s apprentice to creepy costumer

Born in 1935, Philip Morris grew up in Kalamazoo, Michigan. When he turned 11, Philip started hitchhiking 45 miles from his home in Kalamazoo to the town of Colon, where he learned magic from famed stage illusionist Harry Blackstone, Sr.

“When he was 15, [Philip] lit a cherry bomb and threw it into a kid’s tuba at the school orchestra,” Sean says. Philip’s mother tossed him out of the house and he hit the road, traveling from town to town performing magic on America’s vaudeville circuits, networks of theaters where traveling entertainers took part in live variety shows . 

“My grandmother [Amy]  joined him when she was 16 or 17, and they were together until my grandfather died,” Sean adds. Philip and Amy launched a traveling spook show called Dr. Evil’s Terrors of the Unknown, with Philip playing the titular Dr. Evil. 

Spook shows were macabre magic acts that played on people’s superstitions, Sean explains.

“They did things you couldn’t get away with today,” he notes. “They would turn off all the lights in the theater, even the exit lights. They would tell people spiders were going to come crawling through the audience and then they would have somebody up in the balcony, throwing rice on top of people.” 

One sure-fire gimmick to get audiences screaming was called the ghost paddle. On one side of the paddle, a ghost or ghoul was rendered in luminescent paint; the other side was pitch black. In the darkened theater, Philip or Amy, also clad head to toe in black, would run through the audience displaying the glow-in-the-dark ghosts. Once they flipped the paddles to the black side, the ghostly specters immediately vanished.

As his conjuring improved, Philip Morris advanced to performing the girl-to-gorilla illusion, a popular carnival act where a beautiful woman transformed into a simian beast, played by an actor in a hirsute costume, before the audience’s eyes.

“My grandfather did the first two-part girl-to-gorilla change,” Sean says. “Instead of the girl just changing straight into the gorilla, the girl turned into a rotted zombie and then into a gorilla.” 

When the spook show came to town, it usually played at the downtown theater before a screening of a horror movie. Several towns had two theaters, so the Morrises would perform one spook show at one theater and start the movie, pack up their gear, run across town to the second theater and start their second spook show.

“The shows were standing room only,” Sean claims. “I heard they were doing about $30,000 a week. In those days [the 1950s] those were unbelievable numbers.”

In the meantime, Philip also served as ringmaster for a number of circuses, including the Hannaford World Circus and the Nashville-based Ronald McDonald Circus. Both traveled the country and Sean remembers joining his grandfather in the family business years later, playing as a magic conjuring clown in the Ronald McDonald Circus.

By 1960, the Morrises had arrived in Charlotte to stay. Philip bought a local booking agency that toured acts like b-movie cowboy star Lash LaRue, a black-clad desperado who wielded a mean bullwhip. Philip and Amy also ran traveling Dr. Evil magic shows up and down the East Coast.   

“They were here in the town and had all these costumes from all these different shows they were doing,” Sean says. From their Kistler Avenue home, the Morrises started renting costumes to neighborhood kids at Halloween. 

Since gorilla suits were in demand for other acts performing the girl-to-gorilla trick, the Morrises started making their own to rent to other magicians. They split the labor, with Philip making plaster molds for the feet while Amy sewed the fur costumes. 

“That’s what got the family into the costume business,” Sean notes. 

Soon the Morrises’ new enterprise outgrew their basement. They opened their first commercial shop in a house on Monroe Road in 1965, then moved down the road to 3108 before building the current retail store at 4300 Monroe Rd.

Today the business also includes a half-a-million-square-foot distribution facility on a street that bears the family’s name, 6900 Morris Estate Drive, in University City. 

Morris Costumes remains a family business where Sean works alongside his 89-year-old grandmother Amy, Philip’s widow, who still comes into the shop six days a week. 

Playing (and suing) Dr. Evil

Running his nascent costume business didn’t stop Philip from pursuing other gigs and promoting them with memorable stunts.

In 1960, The Charlotte News ran a story titled “Don’t Monkey Around My Roof” about a giant gorilla climbing a billboard for television station WBT, later WBTV, at the intersection of Trade and Tryon streets.

“That was my grandfather!” Sean says. “He brought the [WBTV] news crew with him, and he set [it] up for the police [to arrest him.]” Philip simply entered the drugstore located at the base of the billboard, politely asked where to find the business’s roof access to the sign, pulled a gorilla suit out of the bag he was carrying and put it on before beginning his simian ascent. 

The stunt was a bit of ballyhoo, old-style showmanship designed to promote the touring Dr. Evil spook show. The incident, however, must have sealed a relationship between Philip and WBTV because, in 1962, the station debuted Dr. Evil’s Horror Theatre. 

On the show, which aired Friday nights at 11:30 p.m., Philip Morris as the fez-wearing Dr. Evil presented movies and performed magic. The show ran seven years before being canceled in 1969. For a few years in the 1960s, Philip also hosted a kids’ cartoon show, Captain Phil’s Island of Adventures, for the station.

Long after Philip ceased to play the character, Dr. Evil came back to haunt the Morris family in the late 1990s in the form of Austin Powers’ nemesis in that popular spy spoof movie franchise. Sean says people using an assumed name contacted the Morris family for rights to use the name Dr. Evil for a play to be produced in California. The family subsequently heard nothing more from the supposed play producers. 

Then in 1997, Austin Powers, International Man of Mystery debuted on movie screens. The hit comedy featured a villain named Dr. Evil, who has a son named Scott Evil. Scott is also the name of Philip Morris’ son, Sean’s uncle. Scott Morris ran Morris Costumes with Sean’s mother Terri until Sean took over the business.

The Morrises sued the comedy film series co-producers New Line Cinema for copyright infringement. Sean says that, after an eight-year-long lawsuit costing the Morrises almost $10 million, the family won.

“We proved that grandfather was the original Dr. Evil [but] they never came out publicly and admitted that,” Sean says. 

Bigfoot goes for a walk

In 1967, Philip got involved with his most notorious costume customer, Roger Patterson, co-creator of the Patterson-Gimlin film depicting an unidentified creature that the filmmakers claim is a Bigfoot stalking through the Northern California woods. 

The shaky, 60-second, black-and-white film is frequently cited as evidence that Bigfoot is real. There have been many attempts since the film surfaced to either authenticate or debunk it. The Morris family knew the truth behind the recording from the start.   

“At the time we were the only people in the country making high-end guerrilla suits,” Sean notes. 

In fact one of the Morrises’ gorilla suits appears in the 1971 James Bond film Diamonds are Forever, in a scene where Jill St. John’s character Tiffany Case gives CIA agents the slip in a sideshow attraction featuring the girl-to-gorilla illusion. 

Sean believes Patterson saw one of Morris’ magazine ads touting the Morrises’ realistic gorilla suits. Using an assumed name, Patterson called Philip and said he wanted to buy a gorilla suit to play a prank on a friend.

“My grandfather thought that that was a rather expensive prank to play on somebody,” Sean remembers.

Patterson subsequently asked Philip for pointers on how to make the costume look more realistic. Philip suggested that Patterson get a pair of football shoulder pads to make the suit’s shoulders seem less human and more Sasquatch. 

“Six months or so after that, grandfather saw Patterson’s film on TV and said … ‘That’s our gorilla suit,’” Sean claims. He added that Philip kept his knowledge of the fake Bigfoot to himself because the magician’s unwritten code requires that you don’t give away people’s secrets.

Finally, in the 1980s, Philip started discussing his role in creating the counterfeit cryptid at costume and magician conventions. He went public with his version of the Patterson/Bigfoot story on Aug. 16, 2002, on WBT radio.

To this day, eight years after Philip’s death in 2025, there are several Sasquatch aficionados busy debunking Philip’s debunking of the Patterson-Gimlin film.

“We’re not saying that Bigfoot is not real,” Sean says, “just that this specific Bigfoot is not real.”

Ghosthunters explore Morris Costumes

Though Philip Morris passed away in 2017 at the age of 83, a mix of ghosthunters, history buffs and curious Charlotteans gathered at Morris Costumes in June, hoping to contact the master of the magical and macabre.

Fittingly scheduled on Friday the 13th, SpookyCLT Presents: The Investigation of Morris Costumes was a collaboration between Sean Morris and Spooky CLT’s Jason Tapp. 

The sold-out event offered 85 participants an eerie history of the shop, presented by Sean, and a paranormal investigation of the property led by the Charlotte Area Paranormal Society (CAPS).

“This was a chance to investigate a location I never looked into before,” Tapp says.

Serving as a hybrid ghost hunt and history lesson, the event also raised funds for the restoration of the Harty Plot in Settlers Cemetery in Uptown. The gravesite was severely damaged in September 2024 during Hurricane Helene, when an uprooted tree crashed into the stone box tomb of the Hartys, Irish immigrants who settled in Charlotte in the early 1800s.

The fundraising part of the evening was spearheaded by Tapp. After launching Spooky CLT as an Instagram page back in 2018 to entertain and educate Queen City residents about the region’s haunted past, Tapp became a preservationist, saving pieces of Charlotte’s history for future generations.

Read more: Jason Tapp of Spooky CLT Talks Latta Arcade, Headstones and Haunted Hotels (2023)

Tapp ran a successful two year long campaign to restore the damaged headstone of lion tamer Charlie Houck, who was killed by one of his charges, Leo the Lion, in 1930. In the process, he connected with Historic Elmwood Pinewood Incorporated (HEPI), which preserves and restores Elmwood, Pinewood, Settlers’ and Evergreen cemeteries. 

In 2024, Tapp was invited to join the HEPI board, and soon after the Harty tomb was damaged, he started raising funds for the plot.

The Friday the 13th event at Morris Costumes raised funds needed for the restoration efforts but Tapp is equally excited by clues uncovered during the ghost-hunting portion of the evening. He believes that Phillip Morris was contacted from beyond the grave.

“A group [of attendees] using a spirit box, [a modified radio scanner used to speak with ghosts], communicated with a spirit,” Tapp says. “When they asked the spirit what it missed most, they were getting words like ‘jokes’ and ‘whisky.’”

“Guests also confirmed that they smelled carnival smells like cotton candy and hay for the animals,” Tapp notes.

Listen: Nooze Hounds: Charlotte Ghost Stories and Other Spooky Tales (2020)

Sean says there has been paranormal activity at the shop long before June 13, including items getting knocked off shelves without anyone nearby, flickering lights and lights switching on and off, drastic temperature changes and the feeling that there is a presence close by.

“This has been felt not just by me but by several employees that were here in the building,” Sean says, noting that the phenomena may have a family focus. 

“I don’t know that it’s necessarily [Philip] haunting the shop, but I feel like he’s hanging out with us,” Sean maintains. “I feel like he’s looking over me and watching over my grandmother, who’s still here in the shop nearly every day.”

It’s a fact that Philip Morris took his final bow in 2017, but could he be coming back to the family business every now and then to make a ghostly curtain call?

It’s not as if the illustrious illusionist, cryptid costumer, incomparable Dr. Evil and master showman doesn’t deserve accolades. Turning Charlotte into a Halloween haven for hauntings and eerie entertainment may be the greatest and most enduring magic Philip Morris ever conjured.