Once again it's fall, and you know what that brings. In me, unreasonable depressions and a definite lack of sleep. But in you it probably brings thoughts of warm fires, football games, and yes, the title spoiled it, Halloween.

Halloween is the eve of All Saint's Day. In 610 AD, Pope Boniface IV changed the heathen Pantheon to a Christian one and dedicated May 1st to the martyrs, making them all saints (very nice of him, I'm sure). The festival was changed to November 1st in 834 AD because of problems booking the band and the balloon artist.

And now most people celebrate Halloween by dressing up like Batman or Barney the Dinosaur, propositioning the hostess at some swanky party, and ralphing tremendously in the shrubbery. Of course, not everyone celebrates Halloween this way, some people participate in an insidious plot to fatten up all the kids in the world. Probably in past times it was to plump them up before eating them, now it's just to give them low self-esteem and cavities. Kind of sad when we forget our roots, isn't it?

Nonetheless, Halloween is right next to Christmas as my favorite childhood holiday. I always looked forward to it, planning my costume weeks in advance. One year I went as Superman. I had a cool red cape that my mother had sewn for me, a superman T-shirt (left over from the superman Underoos) and for some unknown reason, a moneybag. Presumably, I was supposed to have taken this straight from the hands of a bank robber, more realistically I was probably subconsciously reflecting the buckets of money that all the merchandising has made over the years.

Over the course of years, I dressed up as all the Halloween classics: a mummy, a vampire, a clown, a homeless person, and certain characters from horrendously popular sci-fi movies.

At home, my parents would answer the door to the sound of ghosts from an old Halloween sound effects album, while I, their only son, went door to door, sacrificing all pride begging for candy, forsaking the perfectly good bowl of it sitting at home to give to other kids. When I got back home I would always scare myself to sleep watching horrible movies about Ichabod Crane and the Headless Horseman, or some psycho dressed up like a scarecrow hacking people to death with farm implements.

Even though I didn't really buy into the ghouls and ghosts things, there were always certain places that I had trouble going to in my neighborhood. There were dark, scary streets surrounded by trees that no promise of wonderful candy would drag me to. There would always be some kids saying, "Yeah, you've gotta go there, they're giving out whole candy bars." (Whole candy bars were the big jackpot in those days. Two or three of these were enough to sustain a good day's sugar high.)

But, if the peer pressure was strong enough . . . "Come on, Rob. Whole candy bars." And if my will was strong enough . . . "Nothing will happen to us." We would go to the scary parts of the neighborhood. We would go to those houses with the 1/2 mile pathway and the single-watt bulb hanging over the dilapidated old door.

There was one house in particular, on one fateful year, that I remember well. We were convinced to go to the House On The End Of The Road by some friends whose eyes were gleaming with thoughts of the whole candy bars in their bags. "They were really nice, gave us tons of candy," they assured us as they climbed back into the safety of their parent's car. Oh sure, they were nice to them, of course they wouldn't abduct kids and eat them with parents watching. But we didn't have our parents with us that year, we were older, had more meat on us, and were in far greater peril.

I was dressed as a robot that year. The costume was this elaborate affair with a huge silver box covering my chest and lots of tin foil wrapped around my legs. And of course, I couldn't run in it.

Our sucrose-greed overtook our fear as we approached the house. We walked carefully down the long, dark path, getting ever closer to the captured firefly that served as illumination over the dark, dark door. We exchanged wary looks and walked those few last feet to our doom. As we looked to our left, we gazed through the glass of a patio slider that looked onto the corpses of many of our friends. That's right, the corpses of our friends. We could imagine them screaming as the plastic (for that's all we could see, the lumpy plastic covering shapeless blobs) cut off the air to their lungs.

We forged ahead anyway. I wasn't brave enough, so my friend raised his hand to rap bare knuckles on the hideously gnarled doorway. He knocked once, twice, and no answer.

We turned, about to go home, our fears unjustified, unsatisfied. Then we saw him, he was standing between us and the path home. Hideously old and ugly, he snarled at us and feinted with the giant meat hook in his hand. My vocal cards taut with fear, the only sound I could produce was a loud, defiant, "Nurk!" My friend ran, and I soon followed. We didn't stop until we reached home. We wondered on the miracle of having escaped the meat-hook man.

I've never gone back to that house. I imagine if I went now I would probably see only a pool cover through the slider window. A kindly old man instead of the gnarled, bent figure we saw that night. A bucket of candy instead of a meat-hook. But that's the magic of Halloween, maybe I wouldn't.

Copyright © 1993 by Robert T. Bakie