Oct 29, 2021 4 min read

This last week of October always brings back a weird memory for me. I’m crawling through a dark tunnel, eyes shut as I feel my way, jammed between a friend in front of me and a friend behind, and I am freaking out.

I was in middle or high school, and had taken a friend up on an offer to go through a haunted house. A traffic jam in the tunnel trapped me in the dark for probably 30 seconds. It felt like an hour, and I couldn’t breathe.

That was the moment I added claustrophobia to my not-short list of neuroses, and why, even to this day, I will not get on an elevator unless the walk up the stairs is more than seven floors.

I don’t really like Halloween, don’t go to fright-night events, decline invitations to dress-up parties and am generally an all-round party pooper when it comes to scary things. I find real life plenty scary enough without paying admission to a place where, around every corner, some kid in a Freddy Krueger costume is waiting to jump out and slash me.

And while I’m on the topic of of scary realities, it was just a few weeks ago that a spider bite triggered an infection in my leg that was as horrifying as any costume.

Halloween presents a dividing line between two kinds of people: those who are able to laugh at the trick-or-treater with a hatchet in his head, and wimps like me who take that sort of thing personally.

My daughter is the laughing type. My son, not so much. Like me, he does not like slasher movies, and he doesn’t care for trips to the amusement park, because he won’t go on the big coasters.

Like coasters, Halloween gives the feeling of being left out. I was OK with the holiday for a few years when my kids were young and I could sew them cute and benign costumes like elephants and princesses. When she was about five, Grace decided to ditch the glamour and dress as a witch, and she was off and running to the dark side. Last weekend she and her friends went on a ghost tour of an abandoned prison.

“So much fun,” she reported the next day, as if she’d been to the Ice Capades. I can think of nothing “fun” about any prison, abandoned or busy, but Grace approaches life from a different angle. Sometimes I envy her breezy perspective.

Growing up, our family loved the “Peanuts” characters. The year I was about eight or nine, our dad used wire and papier mache to make huge Charlie Brown and Snoopy heads for us to wear in the Finleyville Halloween parade. Snoopy and I held hands as we walked down the main street that dark night. Those heads were heavy, and the eye holes were under Charlie’s chin. All I could see were my feet, and it was hard to breathe.

But we did win a prize.

Since then, Halloween hasn’t been much fun for me. These days, I live in a house in the woods at the end of a long driveway. I haven’t had a trick-or-treater yet, and I won’t this year, either.

I do miss seeing the littlest ones in their happy, whimsical costumes, but I know that as the night goes on, things would get bloodier.

And so I’ll turn off the lights and turn on a movie, maybe “Singing in the Rain” or “Mary Poppins.” I’ll feel safer that way, because things outside in the dark are just too spooky for a wimp like me.