Haunt

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In honor of the season, that being October first, please enjoy my favorite goofy-scary song, Creature Feature's "A Gorey Demise."

I've always loved mysteries and horror, ever since I first read a book called In a Dark, Dark, Room and other scary stories. I didn't know it,then, but a lot of those were fairly faithful re-tellings of old urban legends. That book was my first exposure to "the vanishing hitch-hiker", and I think "The hook", too? It's been a really long time. I keep trying to dig the book up every now and then, but can never seem to find it. 

The one where the guy married a girl with a green ribbon around her neck and, oddly, the one where a kid kept meeting unsettling strangers with longer and longer teeth were stand-outs to my childhood self. I read them enough that I could probably recount them as stories all their own to this very day. 

My other childhood favorite was the iconic Scary Stories collections, I still remember sitting in the back of my father's car, driving somewhere in the dark, staring at those pictures with complete fascination. That series in particular scared me so badly my mother attempted to cut me off from horror there for a while. Something-something stories about spiders bursting out of peoples faces are bad for children something-something. 

I didn't know it at the time, In a Dark, Dark Room and Scary Stories were both written by the same author, Alvin Schwartz! 

Talking about scary books of my youth, I of course can't forget the Goosebumps series, some of which honestly scared me more than any of the Scary Stories collections. The one where the entire neighborhood was secretly dead really got to me for some reason. 

While I'm too old to do that whole trick-or-treating thing, I still love giving candy out and watching the kids in costumes running up and down the street. Because I live in such a rural area, all the trick-or-treating gets concentrated onto one street in the middle of town, all the kids go there, and quite a few adults will drive in to help with celebrations and add to the candy-giving. There's this one guy with animatronics, fog bubbles, and sound effects in his yard that's just killer. 

When I can't manage to get out, my family and I will sit down together and watch scary movies, which is much more low-key, but very fun. I've successfully gotten them to watch both Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Halloween. I'm thinking the original Friday the 13th would be good to go with, next, or maybe the original saw? We're currently trying to work our way through the classics.