Sep 29, 2016 4 min read

Scary season is upon us once again.

This time every year, as the grocery store aisles fill up with candy and a cloud of pumpkin spice hangs over us, the wimps of the world are reminded just how wimpy we are.

Yes, I am a wimp.

Do not invite me to the following: scary movies, corn mazes, haunted houses, roller coasters, ghost tours, zombie paintball parks, haunted hayrides or Halloween parties. A séance is out of the question, as are most Stephen King books.

I avoid things designed and intended to scare, startle or worry me. I find life scary, worrying and startling enough without paying someone to pile on.

When “The Exorcist” first came out in theaters, I was too young to see it, but I remember news film of audience members being carried out of the theater on stretchers; they had fainted from shock and fear. When I finally saw it, sometime in my 20s, I didn’t faint, but I did walk out of there thinking I should go to church. “The Silence of the Lambs” was another; I have only aural memories of the film because I spent most of it with my face in my hands.

Occasionally, my daughter will ask me to watch the latest scary movie with her. She takes the approach that all the blood is for fun, and it’s not really blood anyway. She laughs the whole way through, I keep my head down so I can’t see. The one time I agreed to ride a big roller coaster with her, I screamed like a howler monkey the whole way. She never asked me again.

I suppose it’s human nature to crave adventure and stimulation. But there’s adventure – such as when I pedaled my bike from Washington, D.C., to Pittsburgh in five days – and then there’s masochistic thrill-seeking, such as paying at the door to creep through the dark halls of a house filled with chainsaw-wielding men waiting to jump out at you.

Perhaps I’m missing that gene, the one that discerns between the 10-year-old boy who arrives at my door on Halloween with one arm dangling by a bloody vein and the violence we see on TV every night. One is pretend and the other’s real. But they all start looking the same to me.

When my kids were that age, I favored the princess-and-superhero approach to Halloween costumes. My own first costume, in first grade, was a clown. That paradigm has shifted, hasn’t it? Adult clowns now lurk in the woods, scaring children and causing their mothers to freak out.

I once met a woman who was afraid of the cotton that fills the tops of pill bottles. That, right there, is an irrational fear. I won’t ride an elevator unless my destination is six floors or higher, and it’s not for the exercise. I’m afraid of being stuck. My worst nightmare version of that is being stuck in an elevator with the cast of a haunted house. Or with that kid who has the severed arm.

I know it’s all in the spirit of fun. But I don’t have to look far to see the real, horrific version of that happening somewhere in the world. As I write this, the story is breaking about the train crash in Hoboken.

And so, as we all get ready for Halloween, I will keep my head down. And if things get really scary, I’ll put my face in my hands.

Beth Dolinar can be reached at cootiej@aol.com.