A Hallowe'en Trio

This evening, we journeyed up to Palmerston to have dinner with our friends Dana and Bowe. Once dinner--a not-entirely-compatible-with-the-diet stew--was over with, we walked half a block to the Palmerston Legion, which was putting on a haunted house.

I like haunted houses. The fair-day ones, I mean; I've never, to my knowledge, been in a real one. (Well, there was that one experience in Ailsa Craig...but I'm not going to tell you about it. I'd like to get some sleep tonight.)

I mean it.

Okay, fine. Damn you.

My parents had this obsession: looking at houses. It didn't matter if we'd just moved, they were always touring open houses, looking for the perfect place. Some of them were newly built, but most of them were older. They had a real fondness for Victorian farmhouses, and so many of the places we looked at were either rural or in small towns surrounding London.

The Ailsa Craig home was an anomaly. For one thing, it was further out of town that anything we'd hitherto looked at. For another, it was bloody huge...the kind of house which, if plopped down in the city, would immediately be converted into at least a duplex if not a triplex. It was also, I suspect, well out of our price range. Despite all this (or knowing my parents, because of it), one very warm June day we found ourselves touring this almost-mansion.
I wish I could describe this place to you. I only remember bits and pieces, the way you'd remember an old nightmare.
I remember the acoustics were weird in there. I was upstairs exploring what seemed to be about seventy-umpty bedrooms and no matter where I went I could still hear Mom and John muttering downstairs.
I remember the wallpaper. It was uniformly faded and peeling, and in some of the rooms the walls seemed almost to bulge. My stepfather, who never met a home repair issue he couldn't diagnose and fix, would have noted water damage. I, however, much less prosaic and cursed with a hellishly virile imagination, began to speculate about other sorts of damage...
I remember the "secret" passageway. It was anything but secret, really, but to a twelve or thirteen or whatever-I-was-year-old, it was still way cool. I opened up the closet door in one bedroom and found a hallway, about ten feet long and quite narrow, leading to the closet of another bedroom. While traversing those ten feet I got the fright of my young life.
I've always hated and feared closets. For some kids, the boogeyman is under the bed; for some kids he lurks behind the dresser; for me, he was always just behind the closet door, ready to shamble out the instant I closed my eyes or turned my back. Well into my teens, long after I stopped believing in boogeymen, I couldn't go to bed without making triple-sure that the closet door was well and firmly shut. To this day, I sometimes wake up in the middle of the night staring directly into the maw of some hideous beast from beyond, a Lovecraftian night-screamer that threatens to devour me whole.
But this was daylight and the house was vacant. There weren't even curtains on the windows..anything skulking about inside would have attracted attention.
There were no windows in this passageway. And vacant it may have been, but it sure as hell wasn't empty.
About halfway through the temperature plummeted. I don't mean I felt a sudden cold breeze, or that I stepped into air conditioning: I mean I froze solid. Or seemed to, anyway. My breath caught in my throat and the sweat congealed on my body. I forced my hand to my head, exerting considerable effort against some unknown force, and thought I felt frost in my hair.
The sensation only lasted a second because I didn't allow it to last any longer than that: I boogeyed myself right the fuck out of that hallway. Any kid napping in the bedroom into which I emerged would surely have screamed his fool head off. I shot out into the central hallway, pell-melled myself down the front staircase, and fairly flew out into the June sunlight. The dandelions lining both sides of the driveway nodded sagely at each other as I ran by: look, George, we got another one, ha-ha. My parents were gazing up at the house from the street, visions of ownership no doubt dancing in their eyes.
"Where were you? We were just going to come in and get you."
"Upstairs..."
And that was all I'd say about that. At that age, I knew better than to start raving about freezing to death in deserted hallways. Besides, out here in the sunshine, the back of my neck feeling warm again, it was easy to convince myself I'd imagined the whole thing. Look, George, we got another one. I didn't see anything, after all: no headless spectres or wispy presences. Beyond bone-chilling cold, I didn't feel anything, either. It wasn't until a couple of years later that I read real ghost stories, the ones that often mentioned cold spots, and I wondered...

*************
We take a wee vacation every year in October, if we can afford it, to commemorate our anniversary. Our first anniversary found us in Niagara Falls, Ontario, touring the neon and glaze of Clifton Hill.
There are three haunted houses along this stretch: the House of Frankenstein, Area 51, and the Dracula's Castle.
Frankenstein's place was really quite lame: dimly lit, with skeletons and clanking chains and yawn. Eva and I plodded through it without incident, regretting handing over the admission fee the whole way through. Area 51 was better: scuttling beasties slithering out to grab your pantsleg when you least expected it and at least some effort made at creating an atmosphere of foreboding. I think it actually unnerved Eva in a few places.
The day's allotment of money was running out when we got to Dracula's Castle. Surely that, and not the lingering residue of Area 51, was why I found myself entering this one alone.
I went in twenty nine years old. Somewhere in there I was reduced to a gibbering three-year-old, and the damnedest thing is I can't even tell you why.
I can say this: it was DARK. The darkness was just short of absolute: I was reduced to feeling my way along the walls. Occasionally I'd actually walk right into a wall, unseeing. And it didn't take long before I got the distinct impression somebody was following me. The adult mind tried to make light of the situation--it's a haunted house, you doofus, of course somebody's following you, any minute now they're going to leap out and yell BOO! Yes, I tried to make light of it, but there was no light to make: the darkness first subdued the adult mind and then overcame it entirely, regressing me to a toddler toddling through the dark.
Once, my hand crept its way into a wet spot on the wall and I jerked away, only to rush into the arms of a ghoul suddenly illuminated and going for my neck. Or something would reach out and tickle the back of my knees. It creeped me right out: a couple of times I damn near screamed.
With palpable relief I got out of there and rejoined my wife, who said I looked as white as a sheet.
If you can walk through this joint without feeling anything, buddy, you are one tough hombre.
*************
So tonight we went to the Palmerston Legion's haunted house. It would be an overstatement to say I had low expectations. Let me tell you, I was pleasantly surprised...shocked, actually. A ton of effort went into creating this (very extensive!) haunted house. Many props were used to fantastic and chilling effect: some of the set pieces looked every bit as good as something you'd find in a movie. And yes, there were volunteers there jumping out of the shadows and growling...but I was impressed most of all by the Reaper that just sort of fell in behind me, displacing a bunch of kids, gliding silently. I looked back and thought it was just another customer, dressed up for the occasion...but then looked again and was actually a little spooked. He/it just moved so stealthily, almost as if it was on wheels. And it never made a sound, which was much more frightening than a predictable yell.
The floors were spongy in places: they had a "bottomless well", a big graveyard, some kind of projected flapping green ghost that looked real: all in all, extremely well done. If there weren't so many people both ahead and behind us, it could have been truly scary.

Well, now I have to go to bed. Sweet dreams, everyone.