October Stories - Trying and Failing to Scare People (The Haunted Stairway)
When Halloween came around each year, I would be bursting to get into the spirit any way I could. I cannot convey how pumped I would be when my elementary school teacher would have us work on Halloween crafts during October. With paper plates, toothpicks, yarn, and Elmer’s glue, I could craft a friendly/scary piece of art to hang from the ceiling tiles. This was usually a Friday event, and the excitement of that activity would carry over into my weekend. Once my cereal was eaten and the Saturday morning cartoons were over, I would be looking for another outlet for my unquenchable desire to immerse myself in Halloween culture.
My friend Georgie and I would try to come up with different ways to celebrate the season. One year, we made cookies and bought candy to share with friends, along with a rolled-up marker drawing of something scary. Although that was a fun project, the ultimate would be to create and operate a haunted house that we could guide people through and maybe even charge money, but where do we start?
The first step in these endeavors is to get out some paper and draw up plans plotting out the path that would wind through individual rooms of terror and the attractions that would highlight each space. Next, we needed to secure a site central to our target demographic that could also double as a workshop. My parent's garage would be perfect. My mom and dad seemed willing to encourage us and agreed to leave their cars outside for the weekend so we could transform the inside.
A garage without cars is big - like, too big to fill up with scary rooms and features. We had Saturday to build and Sunday to have people go through the haunted house. We managed to make a grand total of one attraction - a coffin that would slowly open and a giant stake that would drop from the rafters to pierce the body that slowly sat up. This complicated device was operated by kite strings. One to open the coffin, another to coax the body to rise, and one more to cause a stake to fall from the sky and hit the body…or next to the body…or maybe get stuck and not drop at all. We just couldn’t get the fucking thing to function correctly. It was fun to attempt this, but it just wasn’t working out. The next year we would downsize the whole operation.
Georgie and I came up with a better idea that was scaled back and focused. We would build a stage and put on a scary show. Our house had a cement stairwell that led down to our basement door. On top of the walls on either side were tall railings my dad built to stop kids from flipping over and falling into the well. We took wood planks from behind the garage and laid them across the railings to make a roof. Next, we leaned plywood against the sides to enclose the rest, and just like that, we had a little theater with the stage at the bottom and room for two or three kids to sit on the top step to serve as the audience.
Georgie would operate the props and set pieces, while I would be the performer, emerging from a box with a mask on and telling a scary story. Georgie would sit on the “roof” and dangle props down to illustrate and punctuate my chilling tale. These props included a rubber skeleton, rubber bat, plastic rhinoceros, and whatever else we could find in the toy box, all secured with our trusty kite string. When the tale was over, I would close the lid of the box upon myself, and Georgie would lead the audience away, thrilled and changed forever.
Eventually, we were able to get our older brothers and a much older neighbor kid to attend one of the performances. Yes, this was the Big Time. We discovered very quickly that this was not going to go as planned - they pretended to fall asleep. I assumed it was because of my lackluster performance, but more likely because our older brothers did what they do best - they shit on our dreams. After a while, I became so embarrassed, that I slowly crouched back down in my box and shut the lid. Georgie did not realize how badly the performance was going and being the consummate professional, continued bouncing bats and rhinos around - clicking together and knocking at the top of my box, mocking my shame.
Overall, we had fun. The joy is in the planning and anticipation. Spending time making crafts, putting together a costume, carving the pumpkins, eating the roasted pumpkin seeds, watching It’s the Great Pumpkin Charlie Brown, and yes, even failing miserably at our haunted house and stage show - that is where the fun lies. When Halloween finally arrived each year, it never measured up to the hype. It was fun, don’t get me wrong, just not the insane, out-of-control event that I always pictured. The long build-up was over and the excitement was gone. However, the candy always made up for it and managed to fill up the places inside that felt empty on November 1st.
