Spook-tober

I don't exactly ignore Halloween, but....

Yeah, not my favorite time of year. It's not the 🧛🧙🏼 trick-or-treaters (soo adorabs!), and it's not the 🪦yard decorations🎃 and spooky sounds coming from speakers... in fact, some neighbors have this AWESOME dragon!! I'll go out specially just to admire it at night when it's all lit, I just love it!

No, it's the movies, and the clips and memes with pictures from the movies, that make me want to hide during most of October. I don't know the why of it (I'm sure a psychologist could explain it), but scary movies... scare me. And not in any good way.

I have a life-long history of being terrified by scary movies. Well, I don't generally count running home from the neighbor's house because I was scared by the witch in Wizard of Oz... I mean, I was 5. Come on. Any 5-year-old would be scared! But just a few years later, there was some show or TV movie that had some people looking for treasure guarded by an evil spirit. I had nightmares for weeks, and was terrified to go to to sleep in case it came for me.

Then, when I was 16, I was visiting my grandmother in St. Louis, and some friends of hers asked me to babysit. Picture a large 2-story brick home, Federal type, on a very large lot, lots of trees, spreading lawn that sloped down to a river (the Merrimac). Cue in a windy night. The kids had all gone to bed, and I was otherwise alone in the house. My grandmother didn't really have many books in her house, so I had nothing with me to read. The people who lived there also didn't have much in the way of books, but on the coffeetable was a book whose title I had heard of, because it was a Big Deal and everyone was talking about it. So I happily settled in to read it. Too bad I hadn't actually paid attention to what it was everyone was saying about it...............

The book was called The Exorcist. By the time the parents got home, I had spent hours sitting huddled against the wall in the middle of the staircase, so I could see anything above or below me, flinching at every sound, scared out of my absolute mind.

When it came out as a movie a few years later, my boyfriend, who was a former Army Special Forces guy who'd just come home from 'Nam, insisted I go watch it with him. Because, he insisted, there wasn't anything to be afraid of, it was just a movie. I spent most of it with my feet up on the seat and practically crawling into his lap (and not in any fun/naughty way).

Impromptu deviation: In an amazing case of serendipity, I was just writing the above about The Exorcist, this meme showed up in my FB feed (I then re-made it so the text was more clear). The timing of it was delightful, but it was the content that made me laugh and facepalm at the same time!

Back to our original discussion: Some years go by, and I'm about 26 years old or so, at my Mom's house for dinner. After dinner, we're in the living room watching TV, and Friday the 13th comes on. So I told myself, very sternly, "Now listen up. You are an adult now. You're at your mom's house, and it's just a movie. It'll be fine."

I spent the next two months laying awake in bed at night, a butcher knife under my mattress with the edge of the handle right where I could get it fast, and playing out in my mind just where I would stand behind my bedroom door, and how to hold the knife and 🗡️stab any bad guy as he walked in. Or, alternatively, how to stand behind the bookshelf by the window (which I had moved there for the purpose) to hide, so I could stab him as he climbed in the window.

I not only didn't sleep at night for those 2+ months, I haven't slept without some kind of light in the bedroom ever since, and I never... and I mean, never... walk through the house at night with no lights. I don't even put my arms or legs outside of the bed. God Bless Alexa.

All that was decades ago... but even so, I still simply... can't.

Now it's your turn! Talk to me about your relationship with Halloween. Do you embrace it or avoid it? Do you turn off your lights after dinner and pretend you're not home (<-that'd be me), or sit by the door with a bucket of 🍭candy (<-that'd be me also... depends on my Introvert status at the time, LOL). I'm not going to ask what your favorite Halloween movie is, because I sooo hate to be cliche, and everyone asks that! Instead, I'm going to ask what are your favorite ⚰️🔮Halloween decorations to put around your home, whether inside or outside.

Leave comments!