Batwings and Pumpkin Magic

Forgive my cliché’d opinion, but there really is something magical, almost otherworldly, about the Halloween season. Some people pin this on the changing leaves (which spell death for my sinuses once they fall to the ground and accumulate mold) or the license to throw on a costume and make a visual ass of yourself once a year, but for me there doesn’t seem to be one exact pinpoint. It could be personal nostalgia; I’ve hoarded in my memory bank everything from apple-picking and trick-or-treating to nearly shitting myself on a haunted hayride (more on that later). It could also possibly be a part of my character that identifies with the season. Whatever this unknown element is, it never fails to cast its eerie and captivating spell.
For starters, let’s just say I was not one of those kids you could easily scare the begeezus out of. If anything, I probably scared the begeezus out of everyone around me. Other kids had teddy bears; I dragged a black rubber bat dubbed Bat-O-Lantern everywhere I went. The other girls in my kindergarten class masqueraded as Disney princesses on October 31st; I showed up as a bat. Speaking of Disney, if there was one thing that frightened the living daylights out of me at that age it was The Little Mermaid, which had come out on video pretty recently. I’d immediately stuff my face in the sofa pillows whenever Ursula flashed on the screen. And Sleeping Beauty was something I couldn’t even bring myself to pop in the VCR (ah, the good old days) thanks to Malificent. Of course, now I’m entertaining the thought of being Malificent for Halloween one of these days.
As a kid I always got excited for Halloween way too early. I remember cutting out paper pumpkins as early as May or June and going spooky décor-shopping with my aunt in August, much to my horrified mother’s chagrin. I’d mark up the Halloween section of the OTC catalog when it came in the mail and beg for my catalog-phobic mom to order plastic skeletons and strings of pumpkin lights. I even had Halloween-themed dreams during the summer. The one that stands out the most is one from the third grade where I dreamt my teacher took the entire class to an underground Halloween party held beneath an ancient barn with pumpkin-faced scarecrows and rattling skeletons coming to life and square-dancing with us. Phantom farmers and townspeople also joined in. Unlike the smiling skulls, grinning ghosts and jolly jack-o-lanterns Hallmark conjures up every year, these images were eerily real. For the life of me I can’t remember the music exactly, but I can tell you that it was bizarre and haunting and resonated in my head the entire day. At the end of the dream, we emerged from a trapdoor onto a vast field studded with bales of hay and illuminated by the full moon, with the wind still carrying riffs of the faint music reeling in the distance.
Another trite-sounding but truly magical adventure for me while I was still learning long division and how to spell onomatopoeia (is that right?) was our annual apple-picking outing in Warwick. My best friend and I ran up the hills, chucked fallen apples like softballs and arranged them strategically on the road to hear the crrrrrunch from unwary cars. Basically it was an excuse for unbridled mayhem with no detention attached. Not to mention an excuse for scarfing so much fruit that you were guaranteed to be regular at least the next two weeks. And of course, after picking enough bags of apples to jam the trunk and devouring a tree’s worth apiece, we headed down the hill and gorged on cider and donuts. Dunkin’ Donuts might be a convenient one-stop shop for all your fried-and-frosted pastry needs, but they had nothing on these guys. You haven’t really had a donut till you’ve tasted a good old-fashioned homemade farm donut somewhere out in the boondocks. Same goes for apple cider. And just about anything else that came out of that kitchen. Of course, by the time we’d made it all the way back home to north Jersey we were starving again so we’d always go out to dinner at the end of the day. I still marvel at how I never vomited once.
Perhaps the crowning glory of all festivities leading up to Halloween was the haunted hayride. I went to quite a few at local farms that have long since been toppled for shopping centers and corporate buildings, but my favorite by far remains the one at Van Riper’s Farm in Chestnut Ridge, which eventually morphed into an enormous A&P. The line was eternal and stretched all the way into the barn, but I was so fascinated by the graveyard display in there I barely took note of that. Of course, if you ever got bored with the graveyard there were gigantic mounds of hay to jump into until you came out resembling a walking scarecrow. I guess when you pass the time wreaking havoc, the waiting period doesn’t seem that long. Anyway, when we got on the thing I wasn’t really expecting much, so you can imagine how high my rear end flew off the seat when some gnarly rubber-masked creature came lunging at me from outside. They kept jumping on with such random timing that you never really knew when the next one was going to fly in your face. Then the tractor stopped in a barren open field and let everyone off into what looked like another still-life of a graveyard display. At least it looked, pardon the pun, pretty stiff until someone touched something and sprinted off screaming when it leaped up. Of course, smartass that I was I was hellbent on proving that a certain witch in what appeared to be an old outhouse sawn in half was actually stuffed. She appeared completely inanimate; there wasn’t even a rustle from the wind that could have given me the slightest suspicion of life. So I tiptoed over there, determined to snatch one of the hag’s limp arms and wave it in front of everyone like “Look! You’re all chickenshit! It’s not alive!” when with a scream that could have deafened someone on a cliff in Mongolia, I took off. The thing hadn’t just moved, no, this thing sprang from the outhouse and would have toppled me over if I hadn’t sprinted for dear life in the opposite direction. Of course, I picked the wrong direction, because what did I nearly collide with but the telltale hockey-masked figure of Jason hoisting a blasting chainsaw in my face. I must have zoomed about a quarter-mile from the entire scene, afterwards panting in a cold sweat as I watched people laughing and daring others to touch seemingly stuffed creatures lodged against bales of hay. Apparently, they enjoyed being scared stupid. Meanwhile, I’d been scared completely senseless.
Flipping through this mental album I’ve realized I still can’t pinpoint the exact thing that makes Halloween so, bear with the pun, bewitching. Maybe it’s the eerie flicker of candles in all the jack ‘o lanterns that survived Cabbage Night; maybe the glow of the harvest moon and the smell of woodsmoke riding on the air; maybe the fleeting thought that there really might be some disembodied wraiths floating around, waiting suck your soul out (okay, that last one might not qualify). Whatever is responsible for my romance with October 31st is something elusive and intangible that lingers just long enough for the first frost to bleach everyone’s lawn white in the morning. I’ve tired to put a finger on it, but that’s come up inconclusive. Which leads me to another conclusion: it is the spirit of Halloween, after all. Maybe it doesn’t want to be seen.