Halloween Scare

As much as I love Spring, I love this time of year around here.

Sweatshirts, cool breezes, and mid-80's weather during the warmest part of the day really improve the mood. We don't get the foliage change I had growing up in New England, so I miss that, and the BoSox didn't even make the post-season so baseball is over, but beyond that it's just a good time of year.

I really dig Halloween, too. Especially now that there's monkies involved. Princess is forgoing her normal Princess theme and going as a Pirate. She actually found one on Amazon and fell in love with it, but when it came down to it it was too "skimpy" for me. We went (much to her chagrin) with one from a store here.

I am seriously not looking forward to her teenage years.

When I was 13 we moved from the city out into the suburbs. This was back when the developments you see today that go up in a week was unheard of. Each house in our development was built to completion, one at a time. Ours was the first one there. So, when we moved in in August of 1985, everything outside was very, very, dark. No streetlights. No traffic. No other people.

Around halloween I spent a Saturday watching the entire trilogy of the Amityville Horror. Spooky stuff. If you have seen it, Jody is an imaginary friend of the little girl who lives in the house. In reality, Jody is the devil in the form of a pig demon-thing. In one scene you see two glowing eyes outside the window of the little girl's room on the second floor.

I was reading in my room late that night. We had just gotten our first real family pet, a black mutt named Pepper. She had her dog tags on and made a quiet jingle whenever she waddled around. I had my bedside light on and was actually reading a scary book late at night. I heard a jingle-jingle from the hallway outside my door and looked up. Nothing.

I flipped through a couple of more pages and heard the noise again from the hallway. I nervously called out to the dog, thinking she was out there. Since she was jet-black, I couldn't see her in the dark outside my door. Just then she opened her eyes. The light from my bedisde table caught her just right so that her eyes did that animal thing where the insides light up in relfection. That's all I saw.

I almost fell out of my bed.

I slept with the lights on that night.

family