Halloween Can Be Really Scary

When Halloween comes around and Haunted Houses pop up everywhere, I always am amazed at the brave souls that enter them. Other than the occasional ride at the Fair, where spooky plastic spiders wiggle around and skeletons wave, I have never been brave enough to enter a real, honest to goodness, haunted house that you have to walk through and real flesh and blood monsters chase you around.

I suppose its something left over from my childhood that makes me a chicken. Immediately coming to mind is the fact that Satan lived in the room across from my aunt’s bathroom. Most people don’t know he lives that close. I do. And it tends to stay with you forever.

My aunt and uncle lived in an old house with the only bathroom on the second floor. Also, living with my aunt and uncle lived my spinster aunt who sewed beautifully and made beautiful, collectible dolls. Her bedroom was directly across from the one and only bathroom. Now, as a child, when my mom and dad took me to visit my aunts and uncle, I would usually have to use the bathroom at some point during the visit. My mother, concerned that I would enter my aunt’s bedroom and touch her things, always told me to never enter the room across from the bathroom. Being the good Catholic that she was, she didn’t tell me something perverse or supernatural lurked behind the door. She chose something Biblical. It was the devil.

And also being the good Italian that she was, it was customary to discipline your children with something that made them break into a cold sweat. I can’t tell you how many times I snapped into line because she was on the phone with Sergeant O’Brian who was just waiting for her cue to come over and cuff me. I still tend to really watch my behavior in front of Irish cops.

Now she could have chosen something else Biblical and it would have worked just as well. Had I known Moses was sleeping behind the door, I would have still left him alone. But knowing that the gates of hell yawned just behind that door across the hall, made me definitely take no detours on any trip to the bathroom. I would hurry through the motions, not even closing the bathroom door, just to keep an eye on the gates of hell and make sure that they didn’t open while I was occupied. And would then exit the room to a horrible demise.

My teenage son, growing up in a home where the only thing behind the door across the hall was a bunch of video tapes, has no fear of haunted houses. Every year around this time he and his friends make the rounds from the Corn Maze to the Edge of Madness just to yuck it up and come home laughing at who didn’t make it through without screaming like a little girl.

So I’m standing in the kitchen as he and his friend come home much earlier than expected on a night when they were supposed to be making the haunted house tours, and I asked what was up.

"Well, we were going through the haunted house and this bloody, freaky guy with a chain saw jumps out of nowhere and really startled Roger."

I nodded and wondered why this would bring them home so early. Roger didn’t scare that easily.

"And Roger didn’t really expect it, and he kind of spooked and sort of shoved the guy away from him, kind of harder than he intended....And that sort of shoved the bloody guy into me and I didn’t expect it so I kind of spooked and shoved him away from me too. And so, then they turned the lights on and threw us out for abusing the monsters.....Can you order pizza?"

I stared at my son. Granted that he and his friend were lucky the management of the haunted house didn’t call Sergeant O’Brian, but these two brave souls had fearlessly taken on an undead Freddy Krueger with a chainsaw. While I, his mother, at 39 years old, refrain from beverages at my aunt’s house, because I am still deathly afraid to need to use her bathroom.