Halloween, Northglenn, Colo – 1966 (P.2)

 

This Halloween evening landed on a Monday, a school night that did not discourage 100's of children from hitting the streets for their treats and minimal requests for tricks. I recall perhaps only one instance, standing at the door yelling, “Trick or Treat, that an older man answered with “Trick.” The three of us stood their stupefied, never having been given that option. Seeing our shock, the old man smiled, handing out various candy forms into our treat bags. On this particular Halloween in 1966, my father had devised a new plan. To receive your treat, you had to enter his makeshift haunted house.

Digging into memory, I don't recall what got my father to become so creative on a celebration that, at the time, mostly celebrated in the United States. Father was born on the border of NSW's and Victoria, Australia. The family soon moved to Sydney, where he spent the first twelve years of his life.

One day my grandfather announced that the family was moving to Melbourne. This move left my father with an irremovable psychological scar for life. Although he attended Swinburne Tech and soon later met my mother at a local town hall dance, he never stopped complaining about Melbourne, how he hated the weather and the “snooty people.”

At the age of 23, he moved to Montreal, Canada, to seek his first job as a technical draftsman. After a cajoling year, he convinced my mother to join him in Canada, where he would marry her. What is surprising to many, my father seemed to always be an American. He played baseball in Melbourne as a kid and followed the films and politics. Although my mother, through the years, retained her distinctive Australian accent, my father lost his once stepping on North American soil, and it never left him. So really, in hindsight, building a haunted house in our home on that Monday in 1966 is not all that unusual.

First drawing the plan on paper, he grabbed all the bedsheets to borrow more from our neighbors. In the end, the construction included short and semi-long hallways and a few small rooms. In two of the rooms were mannequins, one dressed like a nasty ghoul, and the other, a scarecrow, resembling the one in the film, The Wizard of OZ, however, this one, had a psychotic grin. In the third room, my sister, dressed as a gypsy, was there to read your palms – if you dared.

In the first room, behind the mannequin, sat a cheap walkie-talkie, so when the people entered the room, through the constant static, my father would talk in an ominous voice or just let out a blood curdling scream. This antic had the desired effect.

Once you exited the make-shift haunted house, a bowl of candy lay on the step waiting for adventurous and brave.

As the night grew late, and fewer and fewer children fronted up to the house; my father was just about to announce to call it quits. I remember my sister had left the scene and the static from the walkie-talkie had been turned off.

Alone and entering one of the rooms, suddenly I felt dizzy, and that “night-terror” feeling became overwhelming. The bedsheets had changed color to a light shade of purple. Looking in the corner, the scarecrow was no more a scarecrow, but sitting with her legs crossed, as pretty as ever, sat my 4th-grade teacher, Ms. Shuburg.

“Don't be afraid, Craig. But I'm here to tell you something important.”