Culture
AJ Good, Palefest, and the house that Slipknot built
By: Bradley Cunningham
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(WOUB) – What starts as a six-year-old spotting Slipknot in a magazine at his grandmother’s salon doesn’t usually end with that same kid co-designing a 24-karat gold mask for the band’s 25th anniversary.
But that’s the kind of story AJ Good tells — and somehow, it’s all true.
Good is the owner and operator of the House of Masks, a YouTube-based platform dedicated to collecting, reviewing, and unboxing masks, from horror movie staples and childhood favorites to thrifted finds and independent creations.
I sat down with Good and his business partner, Bishop Walker, to talk about their love for what they do and their music festival, Palefest.
Find a transcript of the conversation, edited for length and clarity, below.
AJ Good: I’m the owner and operator of the House of Masks, which is both an online presence through my YouTube channel, that’s the main gig, and then a bunch of stuff that kind of comes along with that. My Instagram works in cahoots with YouTube, so anytime there’s a new video, I’ll post and show off the piece or whatever I’m doing.
Then there’s a merch store and a festival that I’m a half-owner of. It’s basically everything you’d enjoy about the House of Masks, just brought into a community setting. And then there’s the House of Masks in physical form, which is the church you’re in right now. It’s where I shoot all the videos and keep the collection. It’s basically a museum, just not one that’s open to the public.
Tell me about the mask that started this whole collection.
AJ Good: I got my first mask when I was six years old. My grandma owned a salon, so she always had magazines coming in. I liked Rolling Stone because it had Kid Rock, Limp Bizkit, Eminem. I remember flipping through one day and landing on a page with Slipknot. It was their first record cycle. I instantly knew that was it for me. I’d never seen anything so perfect in my life.
I tried to read the article, but I’m six, so none of it really made sense. So I asked my mom if I could check them out. This was the only time we had a home computer, and she was like, “Let me look first.” She watched a music video and said I could watch “Wait and Bleed.” Everything about it was perfect. The music, I’d never heard anything like it. The way they looked, how aggressive it was, even just the name. I was like, “this is it! This is the real thing.”
After watching it like 400 times and completely changing my brain chemistry, all I could think about was getting a [gas] mask [like Slipknot’s Sid Wilson]. I didn’t care what it was; I just needed one. So I asked my mom how to get one, and she told me to call my dad’s best friend, who’s still super close to me, basically my uncle. I don’t know why she thought that made sense, because if a six-year-old called me asking for a mask, I’d be like, ” That’s the weirdest thing ever.”
But I called him, and he was like, “I think my parents have one in the attic, I’ll check.” And sure enough, he shows up later that night with a gas mask. And it’s the same style mask that Sid Wilson was wearing in that video. Blew my mind.
So that’s my most cherished possession. It still sits right on my editing bay. And now I have the last mask Sid used with Slipknot, the 24-karat gold 25th anniversary mask. He actually gave it to me after their last show, because I helped create it with him. I keep them over there with my 100K plaque and everything else. It’s a really special, weird story that sounds completely made up, but it’s 100% real.
Was there a point when the House of Masks stopped being just a hobby, and you realized it could become more than that?
AJ Good: Yeah, I remember when I realized you could actually make money from YouTube. A buddy of mine, another collector, messaged our group chat and was like, “Man, I made 26 bucks on YouTube this month.” And I was like, wait, how are you getting money?
He goes, “You’re not monetized?” And I’m like, “I don’t even know what that means.” He’s like, “Dude, your videos get way more views than mine. You’d probably make a couple hundred bucks a month.” And I was like, “no way!” If I could just buy one mask a month off the videos, that blew my mind.
I signed up, and my first check was like 300-something dollars. I was like, “this is sick.” After that, the goal was just to make it self-sustaining, because I was tattooing at the time, that was my real job. And then eventually it just kind of took over. COVID hit, tattoo shops shut down for a while, and I was like, well… I guess I’m full-time now.
You mentioned Slipknot. Which era had the most interesting masks?
AJ Good: Oh, their self-titled. Best everything, no question. I think it’s their best record musically, and it’s the perfect mix of weird and heavy. Everybody says Iowa is the heaviest, but there’s this unmatched creepiness to the self-titled era. That comes from everything, the samples, how involved Sid Wilson was with the DJing, all of it.
Even the stage shows, anything went. They were lighting stuff on fire, fighting each other, just complete chaos. And then the masks, that’s really where it all comes together. They were store-bought masks that they customized, added zippers, stitching, and leatherwork. I hate calling it bondage because that sounds weird, but that whole aesthetic was just perfect, and they were really the first ones doing it like that.
And I’ve always had a thing for vintage stuff. Back in the ’90s, all those bands were using masks that ended up becoming super rare, which as a collector is like, that’s everything. Even Shawn Crahan’s clown mask, that’s a specific one, a vintage West German clown mask. There are different versions from the ’70s and ’80s, all with slightly different paint jobs, and they’re really hard to find now. But finding one that matches his, same paint, same details, that’s the exciting part.
Bands like Mushroomhead, Buckethead, Mr. Bungle, they all used stuff that ended up rare. They weren’t using things that stayed in production. So yeah, Slipknot self-titled era. Perfect in every way.
What’s been your favorite design you’ve worked on?
AJ Good: It’s probably tied. I’m super proud that Sid Wilson reached out about the gold mask and everything behind that. But as far as something where I was really hands-on, it’s the headpiece we did for Mudvayne. As soon as Greg Tribbett’s wife told me he wanted to bring the spikes back like the old days but was tired of doing his hair, I immediately knew what it needed to be. I hit him up and was like, “We have to do this, even if we do it for free, just to see if you like it.” We hadn’t really put our stamp on Mudvayne yet, and for us, that’s kind of a big one. Getting to do it was huge.
AJ Good: I’d love to see a return to real YouTube, like the glory days, like 2016. I’m just as passionate about making videos as I was back then, except now I actually know what I’m doing. The quality’s better, the collection’s bigger, and my connections are in a totally different place.
So yeah, if TikTok disappeared and YouTube went back to that, that’d be great. I’m just not into short-form content. I hate vertical video, all of it. Everybody talks about attention spans, but it’s also made every other platform change into something they weren’t. People liked them for what they were, and now that’s kind of gone.
At the same time, we’ve been leaning really heavily into Palefest. That’s becoming the next big thing. It used to be that the House of Masks presented Palefest, and now it kind of feels like Palefest presents the House of Masks. Palefest’s getting huge. It’s its own thing now, honestly bigger than the House of Masks in a lot of ways. We really want to see that become what we know it can be. Every year it grows. We outgrew Chillicothe, so now we’re closer to Cincinnati, and the venue this year is insane.
Bishop Walker: Our relationship started because we’re both nerds, for sure. I’ve been making masks since I was 13, and somewhere along the way I started doing Slipknot replicas and stuff like that. Because of his channel, my mask company got really big, and as we kept working together, we started doing things like Inkcarceration Music and Tattoo Festival, selling masks and everything.
We’ve been to pretty much every festival you can think of, from when we were young up to now. And after a while, it can get exhausting. It starts to feel kind of impersonal, not really interactive. So Palefest was our way of bringing that back into a physical space, something real that people can experience. Now Palefest is at Land of Illusion Adventure Park, and this year we’re theming it as “Bucketheadland,” inspired by the artist Buckethead.
Palefest is July 24 and 25, 2026. Tickets are online now, and the first 500 are $69.99.