Halloween

To me, nothing says "Halloween" like a haunted house. And I grew up in one. No, this isn’t a joke or some tongue-in-cheek, cutesy little Halloween story to make you titter nervously and wave off what I'm about to tell you. Simply put, I grew up in a haunted house. Let me back up a little. I actually did most of my "growing up" in a different house, a nice little suburban tract home. But we moved out to the country when I was 15 years old. Our family had outgrown that house and needed something new. And my father,…

I’m an Aussie so what would I know about Halloween, right? Right now in The Land Down Under it’s spring, going on summer. It’s hot, humid and the constant whir of the pedestal fan or air-conditioner is the only sound you want to hear. Doesn’t sound like Halloween, does it? In your neck of the woods, the true picture of Halloween is emerging. Winter is rising like Death himself from his earthen crypt, pointing his bony finger at the trees, curling the leaves a golden brown. They waltz to the ground below, carried by a chill wind that is steadily…

Like most of you, I have a lifetime of Halloween memories, starting in that magical bygone era when it was deemed safe for five-year-olds to wander the city streets without adult supervision, led perhaps by an “older and wiser” eight-year-old sibling. While the joy of dressing up and collecting a feast of candy was heaven enough for most of us, my brother Mike took it to the entrepreneurial max, maintaining a list of addresses of people who gave out coins instead of candy. He’d lead us out the door to please our parents, then send our slow-moving asses on our…

Halloween makes me restless. It’s a subtle thing, a bout of nervousness that I can’t seem to quell, a nostalgic remembering, a yearning even. It’s a restlessness tied inexplicably to half-remembered details of a time when the night was different, when it was real. The images are brief, blinking, nearly faded: the wind lifting a bag and floating it across the street like a pale vapor, the shouts of the older kids as they charge through the darker parts of the neighborhood, their joy rushing out of their mouths and running ahead of them like breath-fog on a cold night,…

January 3, 2011, at 5 PM I stood over the bed watching as his little body breathed, inhale and exhale, then inhale and shudder slightly as he exhaled. I was glad he had made it out of surgery alive and was just waiting for him to wake up so we could go home. It had been a long day already. We had arrived at 7 that morning. They started an IV on his small arm. He cried. We sat for hours waiting for an available opportunity for the operating room to be free. It was hard for mom to not…

My sophomore year in college, I rented, along with a couple of friends, a house within walking distance of the University in Albuquerque, New Mexico. It was a large house, at least for the price we were getting, a little rundown, but we didn’t care. And it had a basement. A strange basement, with an ancient cast-iron furnace with pipes that snaked up through the floor, and there were some weird things down there. “I shouldn’t tell you this,” the lady showing us the place told us, after I insisted we see the basement, “but the residents a couple of…

My October birthday is kind of a holy day for me. I try to take it off, spend it in a graveyard if at all possible. I’ve celebrated my birthday in Pere Lachaise Cemetery in Paris (http://cemeterytravel.com/2011/04/06/cemetery-of-the-week-10-la-cimetiere-du-pere-lachaise/), in the Bone Chapel of Kutna Hora in the Czech Republic (http://cemeterytravel.com/2011/10/26/cemetery-of-the-week-38-the-bone-chapel-of-kutna-hora/), and in Colma, California’s Cypress Lawn (http://cemeterytravel.com/2012/04/11/cemetery-of-the-week-55-cypress-lawn-memorial-park/). Like the poet said, “Any day above ground is a good one.” If there’s sunshine and green grass, birdsong and statuary, or trees and flowers and poetry involved, so much the better. Last year, I spent the morning of my birthday poking around Westwood…

I wasn’t a social kid. I was bookish and shy and a daydreamer. We lived in a very small town and Dad was an alcoholic and everybody knew it. I imagined sometimes that we had kept it a secret and was always surprised that other people seemed to be aware of our circumstances. Other kids rarely visited our house. (It’s funny how I didn’t put those two things together until I was an adult.) To be honest, although the adult in me says that’s an unhealthy circumstance, I don’t remember feeling that I was suffering for it. I wasn’t developing…

I spent my childhood growing up in Sacramento, California. Halloween for my family meant my dad running out to buy last minute costumes. My youngest sister always got the princess costume and I got whatever they had left in my size—Spider Man, the Scarecrow from the Wizard of Oz, even G.I. Joe one year—and I don't mean the fancy costumes. I mean the ones with the sharp mask edges, a rubber band stapled to the sides to keep it around your head. Where the seeing and breathing holes were cut wrong, and you spent half the night wiping breath sweat from the inside. Then we'd come…

My dear fellow and lady horror authors of the HWA: I have begrudgingly—kicking and howling all the way—let go of summer. I’ve hung up my sandals and shorts, exchanging them for my suit jacket and trousers. Still, in Philly, she teases us with 80 degree days, yet the mornings chill us; and we dig ourselves under our fox blankets—mine made for me by Tara Fox Hall. I am comforted each year by the turning of the seasons. Now comes Samhain, the ancient celtic cycle of the years, when we approach symbolic death—transition. This world and the next aligns; a thin…