I miss the happy side of Halloween. Baking cookies, picking pumpkins and making costumes have been replaced with horror movies and creepy things, and honestly, I am a scaredy-cat.
Halloween has seriously lost its novelty for me. Lately it has just been feeding my paranoia.
Last Halloween season I was sitting in my room one night and decided it would be a brilliant idea to watch some television. Oh boy, was that a mistake. I wound up curled in a ball on my bed. Get this: It was only a Halloween episode of “Dawson’s Creek.”
Then the really creepy things started happening.
Someone started knocking on my bedroom window, and since I was already a tad spooked, I literally jumped five feet in the air. I did not respond to the mysterious knocking, which stopped suddenly. Then the wind started howling which only added to the hair-raising ambiance.
“I’m just paranoid,” I thought. “I need to forget the creepy show and go to sleep.” I shut off the lights, and as soon as I did, there was a banging on the front door. I tiptoed over and looked through the peephole, but no one was there.
“I must be hearing things,” I decided, and I went back to my room. But again, as soon as I shut off the lights, I heard an irritating, persistent pounding that seemed to rattle the whole doorframe. I started to walk back to the front door until, halfway there, I decided against it, spun around and ran as fast as I could into my bed.
Come on you guys, you know the situation I’m talking about.
It’s like when you go downstairs in the middle of the night while your whole family is sleeping and you feel that eerie presence behind you. So you run like an Olympian back up the stairs.
In my haste I accidentally left my bedroom door open a crack. I went to shut it when suddenly it slammed closed on its own. My mind filled with ghost stories and even more terrifying news stories of what happens when someone is home alone.
I spent the rest of the night sitting on my bed with a comforter over my head like a six-year-old who’s afraid of thunder. At some point I turned on the TV again, thinking I could block out the unnerving shadows and noises. I popped in a “Friends” DVD and stayed up all night, forcing myself to laugh along with the sitcom.
For me, Halloween has lost its sugar-coated aspect, revealing its dark, twisted underbelly. As for this year, who knows what bizarre things will happen? I, for one, do not aim to freak myself out again.