Oct 31, 2019 3 min read

So, now that the weather has thrown us all a curve and extended Halloween into the weekend and we’re not yet done with the holiday, I will share with you my favorite Halloween story of all time.

We grew up on a dead-end street in Finleyville. For most of those years my sisters and I were the only girls in the neighborhood; next door on both sides, across the street up and down, and at the other end of the block were houses full of boys. We all played, mostly, happily together, usually in our back yard, which was the largest.

Sometimes we would put on plays – long-winded and pointless dramas featuring the Peanuts characters; a couple of times we had carnivals, including one inspired by the Jerry Lewis Telethon which raised about $15 after costing our parents three times that amount.

And then there was the year we decided to do something scary for Halloween. For this we would make use of the tent which, most summers, resided in the wooded area at the bottom of the yard. It was a blue canvas four-person tent that we never actually camped out in. Instead, we used it to play house or store or school.

Around that Halloween when I was probably about eight, we hatched a plan to turn the tent into a haunted house. We cut ghosts and goblins out of white paper and strung them to a pulley, which we would roll out when someone walked in. Some of the neighborhood boys would don sheets and become ghosts and launch themselves at our guests.

It would be scary, and we would make money. At our one and only business meeting, we decided we would charge 25 cents to walk through.

But how would we get people to come?

My sisters and I decided that some marketing was required. Nowadays, a couple of kids might post the news on social media, but all we had were our bikes.

And so it was that, a few days before Halloween 1968, the Dolinar girls would ride down the middle of the neighborhood, playing town crier with the news. More savvy kids might have shouted out:

“Come to our haunted house! Come visit our haunted house!”

But no. What we yelled as we rode down the street that day was:

“Come to our horror house! Come visit our horror house!”

And as you know, we Western Pennsylvanians don’t pronounce that “harrar,” as the rest of the country does. We pronounce it in a way that almost rhymes with “shore.”

Hearing our disturbingly mispronounced invitations, our father came flying out of the front door, hoping to stop this obscene come-on parade from marching any farther down the street. In my memory, he’s running after us, but he doesn’t remember.

But I do remember, like it was yesterday. Turns out nobody paid money to visit our horror house. Some backyard ideas never quite get off the launchpad.

And so tonight and tomorrow, as you regroup and hope the weather holds so the kids don’t have to wear raincoats over their goblin costumes, try to remember a funny thing or two about this most silly of holidays. The ghost stories of Halloweens past are sometimes the best ones.