The Best Halloween Ever...

This was promising to be the best Halloween Jimmy had ever experienced. Already, he had more than half a bag of candy from just one side of the street; way better than last year. After inspecting his haul, he closed the pillow case bag stolen from his own bed and made his way back down the other side of the dark country side street, pulling the Spiderman mask back down over his face, he approached the next house.

His mother had told him repeatedly that she felt he was too old for trick-or-treating but, at age fifteen, he knew that there was still enough kid in him to get away with getting the free candy. After it's all done, I'll go home and watch my tape of G.I. Joe I recorded earlier (on betamax) while I eat most of this.

The wind whipped up a bit in the chilly evening air and stung his face behind the flimsy, ill-fitting mask. Newly-fallen leaves crunched under his feet in the grass as he didn't bother to walk up and down the driveways. Quicker to get done if I cut through the yards. He squeezed past some smaller children to the next illuminated doorstep to claim his next tiny prize. Doing his best to keep his changing voice as childlike as he could, he said the requisite “trick or treat” and claimed his single Reese's peanut butter cup.

As he neared the other end of the single road, he saw something was different. This year, there was something going on at the long, wooded driveway that led back to a distant, large, older house. He had seen some of the older neighborhood guys and some of their friends milling about there for the last few weeks, never quite caring what they were doing. Those weirdos were always doing geeky crap.

As he got nearer, he could see a small sign sticking up with a black light shining on it. He was too far away to read it yet, but he also noticed a long-haired guy standing next to it, beckoning to people. What are these idiots doing now? Probably something to do with their Dungeons and Dragons or something.

After a few more candy stops, he was close enough to read the sign. Scrawled in fluorescent marker, the cardboard sign read “The Haunted Hollow” and a long-haired zombie stood next to it, inviting people to risk the haunted woods to claim their desired treats. Well, I have to admit that's kinda cool.

I gotta check this out. Probably pretty lame, but what the heck?

As the zombie pointed down the darkened driveway, he could see some lights here and there amongst the trees and could hear the occasional startled scream in the darkness. His curiosity piqued, he made his way into the darkness, the loose dirt and gravel crunching under his feet.

Just a few feet in to the right, he saw a figure illuminated that seemed to be hanging... more like crucified on a large tree. With a smirk, he stepped forward and noticed that it seemed to be a decently-put-together dummy dressed as a werewolf. He was kind of amused at how they actually had a light on it. He had to take a moment to look. Was it a dummy? It kind of looked like a person in a costume, but the longer he stared at it, it never moved. Convinced that it was just a good piece of artwork, he started back up the gravel.

Almost directly across the narrow lane, there was a small illuminated clearing revealing what appeared to be a disturbed grave. As he stepped toward it for a better look, he noticed a half-buried face and hands sticking out of the fresh dirt. The face was frozen in an eternal scream of death and stared blankly from the newly-disturbed resting place that the tombstone revealed to be the (not quite) final resting place of the undead serial killer Jason Voorhees. Despite himself, Jimmy had to admit that it looked pretty cool. Still, that would not stop him from coming back later tonight and trashing it. That would fit in nicely with his plans of smashing all the neighborhood pumpk.....

THUMP! AARGH!

Jimmy was startled and jumped a bit as he spun around to see the not-quite-inanimate werewolf land on the road behind him with a growl. Alright, you got me, he thought, maybe this isn't gonna suck after all. He grinned a bit under his mask as the werewolf turned and disappeared into the darkness. The illuminated tree that he had leapt from was empty except for the wooden supports that it had been standing on. Where's that guy going?

Jimmy turned and glanced back at the zombie by the sign and noticed that no other trick-or-treaters were in sight yet and the long-haired figure just seemed to stare at him. Turning his gaze back up the road, he could see no sign of anyone ahead either, except for what appeared to be a dimly-lit table with a jack-o-lantern on it and some shadowy figures behind it. A fuzzy hint of what he thought could be heavy-metal music could be heard coming from an area ahead that was flashing like lightning. What have these guys built here? He tugged at part of his three-year-old, way-too-tight costume as he was sure the air was getting chillier. For just a brief second, he felt kind of alone.

He pressed forward, a bit more slowly, into a darkened area silhouetted by the dancing strobe light from up ahead. The music was getting a bit clearer and louder and he tried to decipher who the band playing might be. As he approached, he could see bits and pieces of a figure doing something in an overgrown thicket where the flashing light and music were coming from. He could only make out choppy movements of something in the staccato illumination. Wow, these guys have really....

Jimmy actually yelped a bit as a large, dirty figure leapt out from behind some thick brush wearing the all-too-familiar hockey mask from Friday the 13^th. Jason Voorhees stood in the road, blocking his path and wielding a large butcher knife. This guy was pretty large and stood motionless in the darkness. In the flickering light, Jimmy was a bit creeped despite himself. This guy is still just standing here looking at me. He should have moved or done something by now. Maybe I'll try to walk around him.

He was relieved when he stepped around Jason and the killer's only response was to slowly and silently spin around to watch him. As he neared the music and strobe light area, he glanced behind him. Jason was still silently staring at him from the same position. I know that's just a guy in a costume, but he's just a bit eerie just standing there like that. It's definitely getting colder out here.

Jimmy eased forward and could now make out a figure moving like an old movie in the strobing light. He was sitting in a half-sphere made of brush and was chopping at something with a hatchet in time to the now-blaring crescendo of metal music coming from somewhere just behind him. Jimmy turned around to look back down the road, and Jason was gone.

Now THAT is cool, Jimmy thought as he watched the large, barrel-chested, longer-haired maniac driving his little axe into a large stump full of body parts, each blow spraying blood on his stained, butchers' apron. The man grinned maniacally at him from his cocoon of steady lightning and started head-banging to the music... an effect that looked pretty cool in the strobe ligh....

BLAM! BANG! AAAAHHHHH!

Jimmy jumped again as he whirled around to see two crazed soldiers in full battle gear leap from behind an earthen-walled trench, firing their guns rapid-fire at him. Startled, Jimmy backpedaled away from the previously-unseen infantrymen as they charged across the road and into the darkness past the big butcher's thicket. There had better be some good candy after all this, he thought, that's three times they've actually got me.

He was near to the table now. It must be over. He could see two figures; one seated at the table and one standing just to his left behind it. The standing one appeared to be older and Jimmy could see a satisfied expression on his face in the jack-o-lantern candle light. On the table was a large bowl half-full of candy with a rather normal-looking guy in a hat sitting at it.

Jimmy jumped again, despite himself, as a female scream rang out behind him. He grinned under his mask as he realized that the werewolf had just claimed another unwitting“victim.” Okay, these guys did a pretty decent job on this thing, but I'm still gonna trash it later. As he approached the table, he could hear the rustling of leaves in the distance as the werewolf ran off somewhere again.

The guy at the table gave him his allotment of sugary goodness and he turned to walk back down the driveway. “No...this way,” the man said in a gruff voice revealing vampire fangs and pointing a gnarled stick in the direction of a rope-lined pathway into the woods. Okay, I guess they want me to cut directly to the neighbor's house. That's cool. Makes it easier on me.

Just at the beginning of the path, Jimmy noticed something that actually made him chuckle. There was an upended BMX bicycle where some unfortunate “rider” had hit a tree at high speed. The unfortunate cyclist had his arms outstretched around the tree and only a large stain of blood remained where his head once was. Unable to contain himself, he lifted his mask and gave the men at the table his approval for the comic bike accident. That whole thing was pretty cool, he thought.

He wound his way down the short path and could see the illuminated porch light of the neighbors' house just ahead. He pulled his mask back down and was setting himself in for his next childlike performance when the werewolf leapt out of a pile of leaves at the end of the trail and the world went black...

...but only because the neighbor's porch light switched off due to trick-or-treat hours now being over. Jimmy went home with his sack of sweets.

Ok, so that was my highly-stylized account of what I think it was probably like to go up Todd's driveway that Halloween night back in 1985. We all hoped that would be the effect on people and we all hoped it would be memorable. For all of us, it still resonates to this day.

Back in that time of Rubik's Cubes, checkered Van's sneakers, and the ever-present A-Team reruns, I was a junior in high-school (yes, I am old). I wasn't even able to drive at that time (my grades weren't good enough for Mom to allow me to take the tests... probably because I spent my time building Halloween attractions instead of studying), but Dave was.

Dave and his twin-brother Will were two of my closest friends from high school. Our senses of humor meshed perfectly (but mostly not with the rest of the world, which we unleashed it on as often as possible), as we were (and still apparently are) pretty demented when it comes down to it.

As for sharing with the world, we had done so frequently and theatrically on many occasions. We would sometimes stage horrific bicycle accidents in our yards (performing all the stunts ourselves) as cars passed, behave strangely in shopping malls for comedic effect, and nearly getting ourselves (or more to the point, me... but that's another story for another day) arrested for “inciting a panic” in front of an old Best Products store around Christmas time. Who knew the old professional wrestling moves looked that convincing to a gas-station employee in the distance?

I lived (and do again) on a rural street at the southernmost end of our medium-sized suburb. Toward one end of the road lived a younger fellow named Todd. His home was set back from the street nestled behind about an eighth of a mile of wooded, gavel driveway. The ages of the kids in our neighborhood varied and I was a bit older than most, but Todd was only a few years younger and we got along quite well. His sense of humor was also similar to mine and he became fast friends with Will and Dave once they had met.

To look at him, Todd seemed to fit the 80's stereotype of the “heavy-metal” kid. He had long, straight, dark hair and constantly wore his faded jean jacket. Frequently, Iron Maiden could be heard blaring from whatever “boom box” that would be near. We were the kids who hid out in the vast array of wooded areas around our street and smoked cigarettes, terrified of being caught by parents. Sometimes, we would get together with the guys that lived over on the next road, disappear deep into the woods a little further away, and drink little kings around fires. Have I set up the 80's rural teen scene enough for everyone to follow along?

Right around Todd's age were the other guys we would party with. Tommy and Jerry were cousins who happened to live together, and Jack lived a further road away but often we would hang out, smoke, and listen to the heavy-metal. I even bought myself a jean jacket to try and fit in with this younger crowd.

During school, however, I hung out a lot with Will and Dave. They were a grade above me and more fit into the “preppy” or “academic” stereotypes. Behind the scenes, though, they were simply demented in what they thought was funny and I seemed to fit in well with that. Once Dave got his drivers' license, the two worlds met and everyone seemed to get along, despite the rigid 80s roles were were expected to fit into (again, see “The Breakfast Club” for reference material for what it was like to be a teen in that decade).

Halloween 1984 found Todd and I attempting to have some fun during trick-or-treat. To the best of my memory, I think I dressed up as a dummy and laid on the side of the driveway scaring people while Todd handed out candy from a strap lawn chair about a quarter of the way up the drive. It goes without saying that it was lackluster at best. We kept saying how cool it would be to set up something better next year. Normally, those plans would have been long forgotten in twelve months.

However, planting some seeds with Will and Dave at school, the idea germinated for a year and lofty plans were made. It took some amount of creativity to plan out just exactly what we could get away with doing with the zero amount of money we had to throw at this thing. Countless hours were spent going through my dad's barn, trying to find “props” for our production.

Memory fails me on where we got the idea, but several prop faces were created by pressing aluminum foil over our faces and then carefully covering the foil with paper mache. Then, we would paint them with model-car paints and felt-tip markers. The best of which came from Todd, who did the wide-mouth death grimace face that we placed, half-buried in Jason's grave. I used the same technique to make myself a pretty good replica of Jason's hockey mask by freeze-framing one of the movies and copying all the details with paint and marker. In that respect, mine was far better looking than the plain hockey masks that they sold in the stores. Cleverly, I grabbed one of Mom's old nylon stockings (with her permission) and put it over my head, bank-robber style and cut the part of the face out that would be hidden by the mask. I could breathe better but still looked kind of decomposed and inhuman (more so than I normally do). Accented with my jean jacket (zipped up for once), a pair of old and ratty jeans, boots and electricians' gloves, I made a pretty fair Jason Voorhees. Completing the ensemble was my famous rubber butcher knife. Famous because I had police looking for me in a local haunted house because I pulled it on Freddy Krueger. You would do the same.

We worked for at least a month and a half in Todd's driveway, suffering through his parents' lack of approval but letting us do it anyway. Every day after school, Dave and/or Dave and Will would come over to my house and we would meet up with Todd (and frequently the other guys) to set up. We cleared and moved pounds and pounds of brush to make the clearing for the grave and set up the wall of brambles I was to jump out from behind. Shovels and shovels of dirt were dug for Dave and Jack's bunker where they would be armed with countless red rings of caps for the toy guns. We constructed a semi-circle of brush for Tommy to sit within, and labored to move a very large tree stump into his area.

We strung hundreds of feet of extension cord (everything our parents had) from Todd's house to the various lamps and trouble-lights that we cannibalized to illuminate the various “events” we had been setting up. My parents had a strobe light that they allowed us to use, despite not quite understanding why we were putting in this much work on something stupid. They had, however, grown accustomed to my strange flights of fancy and just shook their heads. At least I was outside doing something instead of watching TV and getting fatter.

Jerry had shown us his werewolf costume and we were suitably impressed. While it didn't really make sense that a werewolf would be “crucified,” the costume was cool and he was willing to repeatedly leap off the wooden supports we nailed three feet off the ground to the large tree. His running off and giving one last scare at the end was sort of an afterthought. As I recall, we raked up his pile of leaves the afternoon before trick-or-treat.

Things were coming together nicely. We had managed to collect tons of McDonald's ketchup packets and came up with some body parts, including some other paper-mache faces, for Tommy's stump. In a move you could never get away with today, he used my dad's real hatchet to smack the ketchup packets. An effect that actually looked really cool in the strobe light. For that matter, you could not get away with the cap guns that Dave and Jack used either. They were gun-colored and had no safety-orange on them anywhere. I miss those days sometimes.

One effect that was planned for and, unfortunately, never came to pass was going to be the coolest visual effect that one could pull off with no money or resources: the “flying beerball ghost.” Back in the 80s, as some of you may recall, beer could be purchased in large, plastic spheres that were similar to small kegs and were tapped as such. They were called beerballs and they seemed quite popular. I had, sensibly, kept an empty one from one of my parents parties (always on the lookout for things to use as props in later escapades). We designed a system where we would put glowsticks inside the beerball, screw an eyelet into the top, put a white sheet over it, run fishing line over a high branch of a tree, and set up a second line to pull up and down. This was to be controlled by Will, who would be sitting at the candy table.

We found the perfect, thick, very high branch that jutted out over the driveway. We didn't realize how high this branch was until we tried to throw the roll of fishing line over it. None of us could lob anything that high. Scratching our heads, we had to come up with a new plan.

It was Todd, resplendent with a quite-sensible orange camouflage hunting hat which accented his normal denim attire quite well (I am, of course, laughing while I type this) that came up with the brilliant idea that he would climb the tree and run the line himself. I'm pretty sure the rest of us were unanimous that this was the worst idea ever. I'm not exaggerating that the branch was at least fifty to sixty feet above the gravel. Todd was not deterred and declared that he would now transform into “Cheetaman.” Apparently, the hat provided him with that super power.

Have you ever been sure...and I mean sure... not just concerned or nervous that your friend might get hurt? Not hurt... he was going to die! We stood, looking up at Todd and I clearly remember hearing Dave say “we're going to watch Todd die right here... today. There's no doubt in my mind.” I was completely in agreement, and my legs started shaking.

“ALL HAIL CHEETAMAN,” he was shouting down at us amid our pleading with him to get the hell back down out of the tree. The ghost gag was become less and less important to me.

“What the fuck is Atahualpa doing up there?!”, I heard Dave exclaim in a nervous voice, “Todd, you're going to DIE while we all watch!” It was around that time that we determined that the fishing line was not going to work at all as Todd tested and found that it wouldn't slide over the branch easily.

“I don't care about that damned ghost any more,” I yelled up at him, “just get the hell back down here! None of us want to see you splattered on the gravel!” Everyone else seemed to back me up on this so Atahualpa slowly climbed back down. Once he was low enough that the fall would likely not kill him, I finally looked away and found something constructive to do.

The weeks passed and we were finally ready. The Haunted Hollow was an immediate success. I know we had people passing through multiple times and everyone told us how cool it was. Even Todd's dad came out and hung out by the table with Will, smiling at what we had done. I guess he understood, at least for a little while, why we had put so much of ourselves into this labor of love.

Unfortunately, tired from the evening, we all went home and left most of our handiwork outside and some “Jimmys” in the neighborhood smashed our paper-mache faces and so they are lost forever. It was a bummer, but we all have the memories.

The street hasn't changed that much since then, but Todd and his family have all moved on. Cheetaman is now a doctor (but, hopefully still has the hat) and a new family has cut down tons of trees and landscaped the driveway, tearing out all our good hiding places. The years have ticked away but the recollections of some of the people involved have sparked my interest in chronicling this story for the ages. Remember, you're reading this on the internet... so it has to be true! I assure you that it is, to the best of my recollection and some of the involved parties can back me up on it.

I still hear the occasional story from neighbors of how we made that Halloween memorable for them and their (now grown) kids.

I would do it all again in a second. Does anyone have a long, wooded, gravel driveway that they need haunted?