Halloween Haunts: This Haunted House Will Save You
By Henry Corrigan
Everything we do, tends to have a purpose behind it. We humans might be weird, but we don’t really do random. That’s because randomness is risky. It invites chaos and if there’s one thing that both scares and offends us, it’s that something could be done to us, and we’re left with no recourse. We’re just done.
So, to deal with this inescapable fact, we do what we do best. We play pretend. We create stories, structures and scenarios where we can come to grips with it safely. We give ourselves a place where we can put the worst parts of ourselves, all the fear, selfishness, violence and greed, in the hopes that by offering up a safer alternative, we’ll prevent the reality from encroaching on us, if for just a little while.
Everything we do, we do for a reason. They might be twisted to hell and back, but the things we create are meant to keep something worse from happening. And that is as true of seatbelts and airbags as it is of…well, haunted houses.
I’ve loved haunted houses ever since I was a child. The eerie lights, the sounds, the crackling tension that builds before someone or something jumps out at me…it brings a smile to my face even to this day.
I can vividly remember building a mini haunted house with my brother on the second floor of our home. I can’t for the life of me remember why. It wasn’t for Halloween, that much I know. But every once in a while, we’d sneak upstairs and grab anything that came to hand.
We’d stick string to the walls and pretend they were guts or vines. We’d take our old clothes, stuff them with pillows and suspend a ‘body’ from the ceiling. Then, once everything was set, we’d turn off all the lights and tell our parents to come upstairs. We’d make them close their eyes and walk blind into whatever horrors we’d created, laughing our heads off the entire time.
No one really knows where the haunted house came from. Its actual origins are one more thing lost to history. But the story I like most comes from Lisa Morton, author of Trick or Treat, A History of Halloween. She believes that the haunted house was born from much the same activities as my brother and I engaged in. Homemade frights built out of whatever could be brought to hand.
During the Great Depression, when money was scarce, but kids were plentiful, neighbors would pool their funds to host house-to-house parties. Local kids would go from one house to the next, where different families put on different attractions. The idea became so popular that kits and booklets were sold, offering up the best ways to create haunted trails, or the perfect time to break out a glow-in-the-dark, cardboard cat.
It was a fun, funny, inexpensive way to give kids a Halloween they would remember while providing them with a better alternative to random acts of vandalism.
Oh, yes. That’s right. I forgot to mention. Haunted houses began as a way to prevent vandalism and destruction.
For almost as long as there have been stories of Halloween, there has been a tradition of pranking. When I was growing up, the worst anyone had to deal with was toilet paper in their front yard, or eggs on their door. But in the 1920’s and 1930’s, roving gangs of ‘delinquents’ would cut down telephone poles, turn over cars, break windows, and do the kinds of damage that would leave perpetrators with a heavy bill come the morning after.
Desperate for something safe but exciting to occupy the whippersnappers, local schools, churches, parents and organizations created an outlet for them. A place where they could put all their anger, fear, hope and guilt. One which reminded them that while there would always be things beyond their control, this wasn’t an excuse to take it out on the rest of us.
For adults of the 1920’s and 1930’s, all those haunted basements and homemade decorations meant safer streets, brighter smiles, and children who carried a lesson through to the next generation. For those of us today, the haunted house might’ve grown into a billion-dollar industry, but the purpose of it still remains.
Remember what, and who, is most important, and don’t hurt people just because you can. Life is random enough without all of us making it worse.
I love those lessons. I love them so much I wrote a book about what happens when we forget them. Haunted houses might offer us a safe place for us to explore our fears, but Somewhere Quiet, Full of Light shows the reader what happens when love and guilt become so twisted that it’s impossible to tell them apart. It demonstrates how easily avarice can take a loving but troubled pair of dads and break them, ever so slowly, with the promise of a better life. It gives you a house of malicious intent…and then it puts its voice inside of your head.
Purpose can be a damnable thing sometimes. It can feel too heavy, too unwieldy to continue carrying. But as Halloween, and haunted houses love to show us, it’s better to carry that weight as far as we can.
Because the alternative…well, the alternative could be much, much worse.
Henry Corrigan is giving away a free copy of his book Somewhere Quiet, Full of Light. To be entered in a drawing for the book, leave a comment below.
Henry Corrigan is a husband, father, bisexual creative, and emerging author who dreams of writing every kind of story. His debut horror novel, A Man in Pieces, (Bloodhound Books) won the Silver Medal from Literary Titan and was shortlisted for the Top 25 Indie Books of the Year. His second book, Somewhere Quiet, Full of Light, (Slashic Horror Press) debuted in the Top 100 of LGBTQ+ Horror Fiction and stayed there for more than a month. Henry is a member of the Horror Writers Association and the admin for the Horror Writers Collaborative on Facebook.
As an obsessive, overly anxious person living with depression, he has dedicated himself to providing readers with the diverse, flawed characters that he desperately needed when he was growing up. But above all, he wants to be known for not staying where he’s been put. To always surprise people, especially himself. Because that’s what makes it fun. The feeling that even he doesn’t know what he’s going to do next.
Buy Links:
A Man In Pieces – https://geni.us/AManinPieces
Somewhere Quiet, Full of Light – https://books2read.com/u/bPklY7