Halloween Horrors
Now when we were kids there came no other day so well enjoyed as Halloween. That day was special. Things were very different back then. There were no store bought costumes, no pre-wrapped candies, and not many parents out with the kids. Yeah that’s right back “when” moms and dads didn’t have to participate by going with the kids. It was safe and you never had to worry about some nut placing a razor blade inside an apple or sewing needles inside a candy bar. There were no kids “bussed in” from other neighborhoods into housing projects where the harvest of candy would be bountiful. Kids went trick-or-treating in their own locale and the limits were as far as they wanted to walk. After these days came the days when folks carried the harvest from the kids to the local hospitals to have the sweets x-rayed to prevent injury. By that time I had aged out of the kids games and became a participant in distribution of the candy cache.
Now back to the costumes. As I said before the uniforms for Halloween were limited only by your imagination. Old clothes that sagged on your frame, hats too big and painted on mustaches were seen everywhere. Now if you had a bed sheet with eye holes cut into it tied under the chin and falling over the rest of your body then you were the “cat’s meow.”
Now I remember there were a few sponsored haunted places, scary walks through the woods, and other inviting places to visit. That’s when I was about eight or nine years old. Many of these special events were endorsed by local churches. They were referred to as “haunted houses.”
Then I got grown and married. The church I attended put together one of these productions in the area civic center. I remember one year I was in charge of the haunted room and I supervised the kids with their activities. That year the room proved to be very popular. There were all types of scary things to experience when you walked in. From a real head with no body to a plate of spaghetti colored with food coloring to resemble worms and a goblin using his hands to eat the brown noodles. We had a great time.
The next year, for some reason, I didn’t participate in the festival and no other adult supervisor attended to the walls of horror within that aforementioned room. One of the older kids kind of looked after that attraction. In the attempt to be scary and real that thirteen–year-old kid fashioned a noose and attached it to the ceiling. So to be effective someone had to place his head into the noose that was suspended close enough to the floor the kid had to get down on his knees in order to wrap the rope around his neck.
Then there developed into a problem. That young boy leaned forward into the rope enough to cut off the circulation on both jugular veins. He then lost consciousness and his weight caused his body to lean so far forward into the noose that he actually accidently hanged himself. No one there knew how to give life support so the young man died in a freak occurrence of mishandled and unsupervised attempts to have fun on Halloween.
The above story is true and that’s the last time I ever “celebrated” Halloween. Now when that day comes we make sure there is no light visible in the house and my wife and I usually go out to eat so we won’t be home.
