Oct 25, 2012 3 min read

Every year around this time, when scary things start lurking on people’s front porches, I think of the time my younger sister scared me half to death with a practical joke. Alice was 10 and I was 12 and we shared a bedroom. One evening while the rest of us were watching TV, she came into the family room with a concerned look on her face and said, “I don’t want to upset you or anything, but I was looking for something under my bed and I think I saw a spider.” Now, we lived out in the woods, and it was nothing to find woodpeckers eating our siding, or tree frogs laying eggs in the swimming pool, or tent caterpillars riding in on the dogs, so a spider under a bed was no cause for alarm. As further proof of the general Dolinar family nonchalance about critters, my dad didn’t jump up to go kill the spider. We all listened to what Alice said, and then went back to watching “Happy Days.” Alice came and sat next to me on the sofa, and without taking her eyes off the TV, made a wide gesture with her thumb and forefinger and mumbled, “It was this big.” I probably told her she was sitting too close, and to move over. You know where this is headed. When it was time for bed, I pulled back the covers and lifted the pillow, and there it was. A big, black, hairy spider on the bright white sheet. The way my sister tells it now, I jumped back and made a noise something like MWAAAAAAA and ran from the room. It was an excellent scare. It would have been startling enough to climb into bed to find a spider under my pillow. That’s what you might expect from a little brother: a frog tossed down one’s shirt or a plastic snake put in one’s shoe. But this was more conniving, with a perfect set-up, reinforcement and follow-through. The payoff was loud and spectacular. She’d planted the worry in my head, and that rubber spider was just lurking there, waiting to make my worst fear come true. I don’t like that feeling. Had I been in those first audiences for “The Exorcist,” I’d have been one of those carried out on stretchers. I spent the entire second half of “The Silence of the Lambs” bent over with my face on my knees. I have yet to see my first “Halloween” movie. Anything with “Paranomal” in the title is out of the question. But my daughter? She loves to be scared. She likes roller coasters and upside-down rides, too, and I think this is all connected. The brain needs a rush of excitement. I remind myself this is the same girl who jumped off a high dive when she was 3. She’s into zombies now, and will play the part of one at a haunted trail this weekend. She found an old prom dress and ripped it and splattered it with red paint. Creeped me out, to tell you the truth. Last night, she asked if we could get out the Halloween decorations for the front porch. She remembers the things stored there from last year, the ghosts and the cobwebs and the giant black spider. I told her to go down to the crawl space to get them herself. I am not going in there.