The Ghost of Halloween Past

When the children in my rural neighborhood would don white sheets, witch hats and fairy wings, I always watched out the window with some envy, and some fear. "Halloween" was forbidden, and the scarier for it. These few kids were my friends, and I was filled with terror for them as I watched them "invite evil" into their lives by participating in the pagan celebration.

Except the one year.

Sonja lived in a real neighborhood in town. You know, the kind with adjacent driveways neatly lining the cul de sac, matching mailboxes standing like rows of inert sentinals, and identical streets flanking each other into infinity. Dummys hung in perpetual effigy from robust trees, jack-o-lanterns winked skitterishly from retaining walls and doorsteps, and bats, witches and mummies littered the landscaping at nearly regular intervals. Oh! It was alarming, and I knew it was wrong... yet, I was inexorably drawn.

Camouflaged as an innocent playdate, our plan faced its first difficulty: a costume. What was needed was a total disguise, yet it had to fit inside a backpack already brimming with books. The agony gripped me for days. How to be cool, completely unrecognizable, and undetected?

The day arrived. Sitting on the backseat of Sonja's mom's Buick, I recall shuddery fear mingling with the intoxicant of impending success. First we would "play" for awhile to anesthetize her mom; then, we would wind our way down the street to Celeste's house, a sort of Swizterland to our "von Trapp Family" escapade. My skin prickled as I passed the gravestone in Celeste's lawn bearing the letters "R.I.P" leaning drunkenly against a faux-wooden casket. The cobwebs strung across the front porch lent authenticity to the sound effects looping endlessly from a cassette recorder half-hidden beneath a rocking chair.

Then we were in Celeste's room festooned with posters of Parker Stevenson and Shaun Cassidy, people I'd never heard of but must certainly be dangerous. Celeste's mother knocked and asked if she could do anything to help us with our costumes. WHAT? How could any adult be so non-chalant about the evil we were courting?? It served only to confirm that I really had left the protection of my upbringing and was smack-dab in enemy territory. How else to explain her willingness to be an accessory to our demise?

Joining the throngs of hobgoblins on the sidewalks, we careened from house to house like rabid bats collecting candy in amounts I didn't know existed. Incredible!

As with all highs though, there was a crash. Back in the rock-n-roll sanctum, we doffed our finery and inventoried the evening's take. The other girls seemed easy with the process of negotiating: Babe Ruths for Snickers, Milky Ways for Musketeers. I huddled closer to my own pile, the tentacles of remorse reaching into my heart. What had seemed the pathway to Paradise now looked like a pillowcase-full of poison. I selected a Reese's cup to re-ignite the fires of rebellion, but it tasted like sawdust. I pushed my bounty toward the others who were so busy in trade they hardly noticed. When I reached Sonja's house, I almost forgot to be stealthy. I listened to Disney stories on the turn-table in the rec-room, played aimlessly with various toys and games, and waited for Sonja to return. She burst in the door, exuberant and flushed. She was everything I wanted to be that night - cunning, brave and victorious. Everything I was not.

Riding home I tried to answer my parents' polite queries about my day with enthusiasm, but I didn't have much of a stomach for lying. I pled tummy ache and turned my face into the cold vinyl of the back seat. The costume in my backpack seared my conscience and I couldn't wait to unload it in the dumpster at churchschool the next day. In my misery I failed to notice the snowflakes wending their way to the ground, so when I awoke in the cold light of November it was a miracle to see the blanket of white. It seemed to me a mercy, a tangible forgiveness and offer of clemency; a clean slate, a do-over.

Each year now as I bundle my own little hobgoblins into their costumes, I think back to that Halloween. And I mourn the time spent in futile loyalty to that fear. Ghosts such as this are real.