Spooked!

This week, millions of small children and children at heart will take to the streets in celebration of Halloween.  They'll dress up in lots of different costumes and say "trick or treat" for candy bars ranging from Twix to Almond Joy, and maybe even get a popcorn ball laced with lead (I'm only kidding).  It's a lot of fun, and a small part of me longs for the days when my family would walk around the Thunderbird Mall in Virginia and get candy from the store employees.  Of course this was back before about half of that mall shut down.

But there is one thing about Halloween that I don't like, and it technically applies to the rest of the year too.  It's the part that the little kids don't see because their parents would rather they not be exposed to it, and some adults and older children don't even spend time watching it either.

If you haven't guessed already, I'm talking about the art of scaring people and watching horror movies, maybe even haunted houses a little bit as well.  Some say that there's nothing wrong with a good scare here and there, but I can't stand it and never will be able to.  There's few things worse to me than just minding my own business on a regular day, only to have someone creep up behind me and touch my shoulder or say something as simple as "boo".  I don't know why I still find this freaky so many years into my life, but maybe I'm just a jumpy person that can't handle a good spook or something like that.  Maybe by talking about some of my past experiences, you'll better understand what I'm trying to get at.

Little me at the Cotton School (now Old School Lives for those who don't know), I would tread through the haunted house in the small gym with my fireman or skeleton costume, and the high schoolers would be having perhaps a little too much fun with it all and scare the crap out of me.  I'd try to make it through and "tough it out like a man", but there was a time or two where I'd end up running the wrong way out the front entrance.  This pretty much set my experience with haunted houses, and I've never really gone through one since. 

Ten years ago my sister and the neighbor kids caught onto this and would hide behind doors and various places in my home waiting for me to unsuspectedly step around the corner and be greeted with a fright followed by a scream so loud the whole Central Lakes neighborhood probably heard it.  That was never any fun.  In 2013 during my first year of counseling at StoryBook Lodge my campers found out that I could be pretty easily frightened and for two years I was that counselor that would be up until 1:00am letting the kids scare the living daylights out of me and keeping me from sleep.  Lastly, Cherry kids caught onto this and gave me so many "jumper cables" (pokes in the rib cage) that I had purple sides for almost a whole month my Sophomore year because of how rough some of them were with it.  But those were probably some of the better times of my high school career, which is sad but true.

I have jump scares in my nightmares too.  Those are the worst, when you dream you're dying in your sleep or falling from a high place.  I know that dreams aren't reality, but it stinks when you're just trying to sleep in peace and then your dream gets interrupted by death and/or despair for a fleeting second and then you wake up in a cold sweat with a panic attack of some sort.

Horror movies.  Where do I even begin with those?  It was a few weeks before my father passed when I first saw the Stephen King telenovel Rose Red about a group of people who inhabit a haunted house for a weekend trying to learn it's secrets.  That wasn't a full horror movie, but it was still pretty scary.  In the years that followed, I sat through titles with my family such as Revelation, White Noise, and even The Ring.  To make a long story short, I realized I didn't like horror movies at all, and sitting through It last October with a friend drove home that point for me even more.  I could barely handle the jump scares in Harry Potter & The Deathly Hallows Part One either.  Why was I suddenly such a scaredy cat that couldn't handle these little things?

I think we all go through different times in our lives that make us able to handle different things.  For me, losing my father was a shock and ever since I haven't been able to handle getting scared point blank.  Maybe I'm just a scaredy cat, but I'll never be able to go into a haunted house or feel good after giving someone such a fright.  It's not in my DNA right now.

So this year, I'll just pass out some candy to some trick or treaters, and maybe play a slightly scary (but not too scary) video game or something like that.  And if this blog post sounds like I'm hating on Halloween, that's not my intention and that's not how I feel.  I enjoy this holiday and always will, except for that creepy skeleton in some random person's front yard.