Another Editorial for the Crypt

Here's today's aborted editorial for Halloween Week. I like it too much to simply delete it, but not enough to submit it for publication in the newspaper.

There’s a reason we all understand the phrase “deliciously creepy.” This Friday, Oct. 31, the kid in each of us celebrates it.

The first time you plunge face first into a tubful of water and bobbing apples, it can be a bit scary. But when you feel your teeth biting into a crisp apple, the payoff is instantaneous.

A lot of the ghoulish decorations are more silly than spooky. They enable you to make fun of things that really make your flesh crawl, so perhaps you can face them without showing fear.

Halloween dares, like ringing the doorbell of the scariest house in the neighborhood, can give a nice goosebumpy thrill. No one can blame you if you’re scared, but passing the test of courage can make you feel like a hero.

Now and then a Halloween prank really scares you. I don’t just mean a momentary startle, like when a hairy claw reaches from behind and grabs a shriek out of you. I mean the lingering horror of a scene that keeps replaying in your mind for hours or years afterward.

I still think about a big Victorian style house in the neighborhood where I grew up. One Halloween when I was trick-or-treating, I clambered up the steps of that house and rang the front doorbell.

Through the oval window in the door, I could see straight through the house, tidy but old-fashioned in its decoration. Sitting in the parlor, facing away from the door, was an older woman who did not stir when the bell was rung. Somehow that scene stuck in my brain with a shiver of delicious creepiness.

Often the delicious part, if you’re a child, is what tumbles out of your swag bag when you get home from your trick or treating rounds.

For parents, though, this may be the scariest part of Halloween. Besides being fattening, tooth-rotting, and unhealthy in so many ways, the treats might have been tampered with. Anything that isn’t factory-sealed inside a fully intact wrapper will go straight in the bin. You never know, these days.

This is why many parents see the wisdom of taking their kids to a safe Halloween party with people they know and trust. or escorting them on planned sugar safaris to places like the park or the nursing home.

Like sugar, spookiness can feel good, but only in moderate doses. Overdoing it can turn a night to remember into something you would rather forget.

As an adult I have watched movies that scared me when I was a child, and I wondered what the big deal was. I have also seen some films so gruesome that I wish I hadn’t seen them.

The approach to Halloween I recommend to kids of all ages is to allow yourself to be scared only enough to have fun - then just a bit more. Then let the sugar buzz make it all better.

The Halloween Editorial that Wasn't

I decided, without even running it past my publisher, to withdraw the following piece that I wrote for my editorial in the Oct. 29 issue of The Morgan County Press. I did show it to my Dad, a fellow newspaperman, who agreed it would work better on my blog.

I moved around a lot as a child. I remember spooky Halloweens in several different states.

I remember being freaked out by a Halloween episode of “Little House on the Prairie” when I was an Indiana tyke knee-high to Melissa Gilbert.

I remember trick-or-treating as a middle schooler in Nebraska, where the scariest house in the neighborhood had the lights on and the drapes open. Anyone who rang could look through a big oval window in the front door and see an old lady sitting in the parlor with her back to the door, not responding to the bell.

I remember another Halloween in that same Nebraska town when nobody let their kids out of sight due to rumors of a satanic sacrifice planned that night. A little girl was snatched off the street not long after that - scary times, Halloween or not.

I remember the monster blizzard over Halloween when I was a college freshman in Minnesota. It was scary to think people could get lost and die within steps of their door.

This Halloween in the heart of Missouri, other things scare me.

It scares me to drive some roads around here at night. The hills, the curves, and the shadow of the trees sometimes make it hard to see what might be only a few car lengths ahead.

There’s a high-tension line between driving fast enough to get through it sooner and taking extra care to make it home in one piece. Sometimes that tension keeps humming at me for sleepless hours afterward.

It scares me when I see impatient drivers gunning past lines of other vehicles on a two-lane road when someone is closing in from the other direction.

That’s especially scary during my morning commute, when kids are waiting for the school bus all along the roadside.

It scares me to think of the troubles in St. Louis, where I lived until just before things started to go wrong.

What’s really chilling about it is that I can probably say nothing, however well meant, without the risk of adding to the evil. It’s a disturbing time, and the disturbances are disturbingly close.

I’m scared for friends and loved ones who are ill in health, uneasy in mind, or facing legal and financial troubles.

Two families I know have been evicted from their homes because they couldn’t afford the rent. A dear friend’s father faces criminal charges that could ruin his whole family. Someone I love has been feeling down, perhaps far enough down to impact their physical health. And people living on my beat have suffered hurt or loss when some of the things I fear happened to them.

While I pray for them, I am reminded I’ve been at a scarier place in my own life, when my fortunes were so precarious that I too could have lost my health or my home.

But I am also thankful for the kindness and concern of good people who helped me get to this better place. I hope I will rise to the occasion when the chance appears to pay it forward.