October Fog
Visibilty was zero on my drive this morning. As I got out of my car to walk across the dark, deserted and foggy parking lot I heard a coyote howl in the distance. Spooky!
Halloween has never been a particularly favorite for me. My grandpa died on October 31 when I was pretty young and I always thought that was kind of creepy. But I never really got into the frightful part of the holiday; I mostly just participated for the candy. As a teenager I would go to the local haunted mansion and wait for hours in a line that was at least two miles long. I didn’t really enjoy the thought of people trying to scare me but I endured it because it was the thing to do. My actual fears came more from walking home in the dark on our dead end road and imagining someone was behind me. I’m pretty sure there never was but I would very often, easily let that thought provoke fear and a much faster pace to get home. A real thing that happened to me was seeing someone in the mirror who was looking at me through a window. That was some real fear.
(fast forward to boring adulthood)
Surprisingly I have discovered that I thoroughly love to scare people. I would have never known this if I hadn’t been asked to help with a neighbor’s haunted trail. At first I was not a bit interested in walking around the woods at night. I shouldn’t say luckily, but I felt at the time lucky that the first night Jackie, who was very young, got sick. I stayed home with her but I could see the steady stream of headlights going down our little rural roads until nearly midnight. That sparked my curiosity. Then I heard all the stories from other family members about the joys they had spooking. Jackie felt better on night number two so away I went to discover a whole new side of me.
Being a spook can be a little spooky even when you know the trails and when you know who’s a dummy and who isn’t. One year I was in a witch scene with three dummy witches. It was towards the back of the trail which meant I was alone back there until other spooks finished their first jobs and ran back to do their next scene. I would stand there in the dark with no sounds or light except what came from the nearby crackling fire. My full mask didn’t allow much for vision except my dummy sister witches who stood beside me. (this would have been the perfect time to scare me into oblivion) Occasionally there would be the sound of something snapping in the woods. Sometimes leaves blowing on the path and bare branches rubbing against each other would sound very sinister. Probably one of my least favorite years was when I was in a coffin leaning up against a tree. Again a full mask makes for poor visibility but it also makes for a lot of breathe and breathing sounds when you’re closed up in a coffin. It’s just not a good feeling.
As the haunting nights grew later we could hear the packs of coyotes howling from all directions. These were real life sound effects. Late October seems to always bring in fog as the nights get cooler. Even if nature didn’t provide the fog, the small fire barrels along the trails would provide just enough smoke to lay low among the trees. While the nights with little or no moon made maneuvering through the trails a little more challenging, they made it much easier to execute a perfect scare.
People who have known me a while might find it odd that I get the pleasure that I’m admitting to from horrifying people. I just can’t express how surprisingly much fun it is for me. The best ones to spook are the big, tough acting guys who are usually trailing behind their group. Hearing one of these guys scream like an 8 year old girl is priceless. It’s always a plus when you get the inside scoop ahead of time as to who within the group is the target. The intermittent screams as the group get closer is thrilling. And the icing on the haunted trail cake is following each group to the end, which freaks them out, and seeing them run for their lives, sometimes quoting Bible verses as a chainsaw wielding clown chases them out of the woods.
The trail is quiet these days so I can’t recommend coming out here so we can scare the tee-waddens out of you. But I would encourage you to visit something scary. If not for yourself then do it for a spook!
