In this upside-down time, when few kids will probably get to trick or treat, when masks are worn every day instead of once a year, I find myself thinking back to the Halloweens of my past.
The holiday was still mostly for kids back in the late 60s and early 70s — it hadn’t become the rather bloated thing it is now. Only the smallest children went with a parent, the rest of us paired up with older brothers and younger sisters and groups of friends. We were free spirits roaming the night, unsupervised and giddy with excitement, more than a little scared although we wouldn’t admit it. The fear was delicious, far better than the candy we collected.
Costumes were cobbled together from the ragbag or bought from Zayres or Caldors. Decorations consisted of carved pumpkins and homemade scarecrows slumped in lawn chairs or sheet ghosts hung from trees.
It was the first time we truly understood how different the world is in the dark. The familiar streets were black and strange. Shadowed figures, half-seen, vanished in the dark. The neighborhood that we knew so well was strange new territory. The driveways seemed longer and the distance between houses immense. The front steps and porches were welcome pools of light. We hung onto our younger siblings hands and told ourselves it was so they wouldn’t be scared.
Everyone talked about the kid who got a razor blade in an apple but no one knew whether the story was true. We gorged on Sugar Babies and Milk Duds while we walked, and no one checked our candy bags when we got home.
One year, right before Halloween, my best friend and I staged a haunted walk in the woods behind her house. We made the neighborhood kids stick their hands in a bowl of SpaghettiOs, and called it eyeball soup. We concocted a tale of a family buried alive, while we stood over a roughened patch of dirt we had dug up that morning. Everyone was terrified and gratifyingly, one girl cried.
Another time, while trick or treating at the end of our street, a friend and I dared each other to go up the back stairs of a house after no one answered the front door. It was pitch black. The steps were steep and narrow. We got to the top, clinging to each other, and knocked on the storm door. There was a scuffling noise and out of nowhere, a cat screamed down on top of us. We nearly fell down the stairs in terror, the cat plunging through the darkness with us. Candy spilling everywhere, we sprinted away, shrieking with fear and laughter.
But something happened late one Halloween afternoon that I still can’t explain, even 45 years later. I had been riding by myself at the old farm where I stabled my horse and the ancient barn was empty when I get back. Everything was quiet, and the only sounds were the horses moving in the paddock. I called out but there were no answering voices.
The sun was low in the sky and the air was cool. I shivered in my thin jacket. Where was everyone? Suddenly panicked, I got on my horse, bareback this time, and rode out again. I had never ridden so late in the day and my heart was hammering. My horse was uneasy, reluctant to leave his stall. Shadows were gathering beneath the trees and the fields were nearly dark. I shouted but still no one answered. It seemed, for one impossible moment, that I was the only person alive.
It was almost dark as I headed back to the barn, trembling. And now there were lights and people — my sister and the barn workers. “We were here, what are you talking about?” they said, when I slide off, crying, demanding to know where everyone was. “We were right here all the time!”
Spirits roaming free, indeed.
Marilyn Archibald (archie4618@aol.com, blog malibu93.webnode.com) lives and writes in West Newbury.
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