Spooky Things 2: Spooky Boogaloo
An alley at night. Screams in the dark. Your card is declined at the register. Thunder in the distance. The mother carrying the baby who had been wailing nonstop boards your plane. Getting an MRI scan. You return home and the door is already unlocked. Farting in public. The video on your iPhone of all the different sounds Mario makes starts playing at full volume in public. Your boss calls you to his office. A black cat crosses your path. Your partner snores.
The spooky season is upon us once again, and it’s time to revel in all things spooky. I think it’s a good opportunity to look back on the scary experiences I’ve had in my life—or the experiences I consider to be scary. I’m sure everyone has an experience with a show or movie that they saw as a kid and got scared by. There were a few of those for me, but the one that stands out is from the kids show Wishbone.
The episode was called Halloween Hound: The Legend of Creepy Collars. While I liked the episode in general for being spooky, the thing that stood out to me was at the end when a pair of eyes in the dark could be seen up a flight of stairs in a spooky house. The eyes are “explained” by a cat that runs down the stairs, but then the eyes reappear. That mystery got me good.
Two other spooky things come to mind when I think of shows or movies that scared me. A show that I saw maybe too young and that creeped me out was Buffy the Vampire Slayer. There was an episode in season 1 called Witch which was about a witch. To skip the details, the witch who’s the antagonist of the episode winds up trapped in a cheerleader trophy and at the end there’s a shot of the trophy’s eyes opening and looking around alongside a distressed, muffled voice. The trophy is referenced later in the show which is also creepy, but that shot scaaaared me. The last of the spookies I got as a kid watching stuff was the movie Gremlins. The movie in general was creepy, but the thing that freaked me out was the woman who flew out the second floor of her house on the stairlift. That was one of my first (if not the first) times seeing death represented on screen, and though nowadays it’s more comedic than scary I still get unsettled.
All right, outside of entertainment there were definitely some real life spookies that happened to me. In the traditional sense, I got scared (in a good way) by haunted houses and Halloween-themed parks. Some worker at such a park was wearing some camouflage that had them blend in with a fence overgrown with leaves; they then jumped toward me and shouted. There were plenty of other similar jump-scare things. In the non-traditional sense, I got scared (in a bad way) by a phone call with someone who was harassing and threatening my family when I was 6 or so. For context, I was with my brother and father when my father received the call, and I was told nothing about what the call was for or who was calling. For some reason or another (I never really clarified the experience with them, now I just assume it was my father being foolhardy) my father handed the phone to my brother and instructed him to insult the people on the other end before handing me the phone for me to then make fun of the people on the other end. Now, at that age I was a bit simple-minded and ignorant and so I didn’t really understand much of anything about the phone call. Naturally, when I took the phone I told whoever was on the other end that they were ugly and smelly. Then I said I would give the phone back to my brother… but instead of saying “my brother” I used my brother’s name. My father grabbed the phone and quickly ended the call before my brother got mad at me and started saying now that they knew his name he’d be tracked down and kidnapped or killed or some such and that he might have to move out of the country. I freaked out and told them I had no idea who they were or why they told me to talk to them and began imagining all sorts of things happening to me and my family. My father didn’t really do much in the way of reassuring me, and I went on that night to imagine even more dreadful things. Nothing really came of it, or at least I never heard anything else about those people who had been threatening my family.
Hmm… Yeah, there are some other spooky things I’ve experienced, but those are for another time. Happy Halloween!
