The Strange Halloween

A true story

I was around eight or nine on that cold and misty Halloween night. The harvest moon shown occasionally through the clouds only to disappear again. The air smelled of smoke from chimneys.

I wandered about the neighborhood, trick-or-treating in a Darth Vader costume that did not protect against the cold. I could see my breath.

After a moment's hesitation and a jack-o-lantern shaped bucket almost full of candy, and walked up to the doorstep of a house that I had only the faintest and darkest memories of from when I was tiny. It was an old farmhouse (likely the neighborhood's oldest) across the intersection just down the street from home. It was tall, with an A-frame roof and had a light gray siding with blue window and door frames. This house had always stood out, and I had never not turned my head to look at it when walking past.

The lights were on and I had seen a group of kids receiving candy several minutes before. I had also seen a man walk into the house after being greeted by someone at the door. Jack-o-lanterns lighting the entrance, it looked open for business.

Nervously, I walked up to the enclosed doorstep and knocked. I had memories of being inside that house and sitting on the floor of the living room, longing for egress. The memories would always involve my mom - also in the living room - having a conversation with someone who lived there. I had visceral images of looking up at my mom and hoping that she would notice that I wanted to be outside. A strange sensation of being dirty came back.

As I waited at the boxed-in doorway and thought, I began imagining what lay beyond that was so bad. I recalled a strange woody smell - it was similar to the smell at my mom's friend's house with the wood stove. It was a smell that had given me the creeps, but the house whose door I stood before had a version of it that was a zillion times worse. I revisited myself sitting on that living room floor surrounded by that dirty smell that made me sick to my stomach and made my head spin, just longing to leave.

What could be so bad about it? I am older now – 9 years old. No big deal, I thought. I'm Darth Vader, the dark overlord of the galactic Empire!

But what else could it be? I continued thinking, and an image of a spiral staircase came to my mind. I recalled it being dark and creepy. Was it palatial?, I thought. There was something odd about this house in my memories, but I could not quite put my finger on it. Perhaps the kitchen will be right there on the other side of the door, I continued. What is it that is so creepy about this house? What evades my memory?

Just then the door opened and all of my expectations were turned upside down. It was neither palatial nor grand. In fact, it was a mess. The staircase and vaulted ceilings that I had expected were zapped from existence by a living room about the size of a walk-in closet with stuff scattered all over the place. The overall dimness of the house that my memory banks held was illuminated by what seemed like a whiteout of light. My eyes went directly to a wacky TV set whose rabbit ears shot straight up, and then diverged at bizarre angles into the distorted air. The only thing that I had recalled accurately was that smell, which hit me like a ton of bricks. The sheer contrast of memory and reality made my head spin.

I looked up and saw a beefy man with no hair on top and thick eyebrows beam down at me. My thoughts in a state of chaos, I don't recall much except for the TV set, the toxic smell of smoke and the man beaming down and calling me “little buddy”. The rest was a blur.

I don't recall if I got candy or not and I didn't care. The door closed, and I made a 180, wandering quickly back into the chill of the night. As I walked across the street back home, my thoughts turned to the Animaniacs as a distraction against what I had just experienced.