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A troll walked past, turned to us and said, "Hey – check out the house at the top of the hill! ^[1] It's really cool!" The little vampire next to him chipped in, "yeah!"
 

I looked over to my brother. He shrugged, a gesture meaning "mmm…sure?" ^[2] There was time. We had already pillaged sufficient sugar to last the long months (our parents refused to buy sugary things during the holiday season, so we were forced to rely on our hoard). ^[3]
 

Normally, we would skip that house because the hill was pretty steep. But tonight, it was apparently the hip place to be. Maybe they were giving out full-sized candybars, the good ones. Or possibly even money. I'd heard rumors of a house on the top of a steep hill in Blackhawk that gave $20 bills to each supplicant; while that was almost certainly urban folklore myth spun outside the gates of that obscenely wealthy community, maybe, just maybe… ^[4]
 

The target home had great decorations: big tombstones that were not painfully fake, dozens of flickering candles, a single red light, and a really creepy zombie statue, dressed in diaphanous fabric wearing a mournful expression. It reminded me of a freshly exhumed suicide; I was impressed. ^[5]
 

Decorations tend to go hand-in-hand with abundant loot, so I fairly ran ran into the yard. The front door was on the side of the house, behind a gate spanned by a giant cobweb. When we pushed open the (creaking) door, we found ourselves in a courtyard that had been transformed into an amazing spectacle of Halloween, complete with a multitude of pumpkins, ghosts in the trees, and another full-sized statue, this one a werewolf. My brother turned to close the gate and paused.
 

"Uhm… is something different?"
 

The zombie, still motionless, was now on the path leading to the gate. I turned around and saw that the werewolf, too, had materialized few steps closer, with his arms upraised. The effect of these human statues was uncanny and deliciously spooky. I didn't think it was scary until someone hiding in the bushes and dressed in black grabbed my leg.
 

That Halloween night opened my eyes to the greatness of performance and presentation. Up to that point in my life, I knew that I enjoyed acting out various roles in Halloween costumes, in school plays, or in real life, such as hamming up The Martyred Little Brother Who is Attacked by His Viscous Siblings, but I hadn't thought of "acting" as something that real people do. ^[6] Actors were either self-indulgent weirdos or "stars" who, as the word implies, orbit outside the plane of the everyday. When I acted in a school play, it was done with the smug knowledge that I was acting like an actor instead of being one. But this Halloween presentation was inspired; a bunch of ordinary Joe bored college kids had organized a simple haunting for the sake of community fun (and scaring the shit out of cocky kids by grabbing their ankles when their attention was diverted by the human statues). ^[7] Anyone can do this sort of thing, and everyone should do that sort of thing.
 

The next Halloween, my best friend Matt and I set out to create our own haunted front yard. While we lacked the costumes, dramatic skills and budget of the college kids from the previous Halloween, we did have tape, string, and an entire afternoon. As it turns out, you can do an awful lot with tape, string, and time. Did you ever notice how McGyver is never given tape, string, and time to escape a particular trap? It would be just too easy. We lacked dry ice, which is a damn shame, but we were too disorganized and I doubt we could have afforded it, and even if we could have, our parents wouldn't have permitted it (dad, yes; mom, no, Matt's parents, certainly not).
 

The first thing we did was to create a huge number of basic decorations. Kleenex bundled and tied off at one end, then hung in a tree resemble a swarm of ghosts. Cardboard gravestones with witty inscriptions (e.g. "I told him so" or "Let me out!") grew from the lawn. Cotton cobwebs hung at adult head-level.
 

We then added a few simple string-controlled embellishments, the little details that show that we care. ^[8] We could raise and lower spiders, cause bushes to rustle, and drag branches across the ground towards the door. A dozen fishing lines ran to my bedroom window, and by pulling on marked strings the front yard would come alive. We considered the 'ol "tie a piece of string to a dollar bill and make them run" trick, but decided that we didn't want to risk losing a dollar.
 

The centerpiece of our haunted yard was the boozy alien. By stuffing newspaper into old clothes topped with a horror-mask alien head, we assembled a dummy. We sat him in a lawn chair with a beer taped to his newspaper-stiffened hand. To make the eyes glow red from malice and drink, we shoved a bicycle rear light inside the mask. Via an intricate series of strings and levers, we could raise and lower his arm and make him "drink" when least expected. ^[9]
 

We finished our labors just as the sun was setting. We gobbled down dinner as fast as our stomachs could take it, and ran back to my bedroom to wait and see the fruits of our demonic creativity flourish.
 

Little kids loved the show. Little kids love anything that reacts to them. Drop a spider on their heads and they scream bloody murder, run away, and then come running back for a repeat performance. ^[10] Shake a bush and they gasp. Raise the dummy's arm and they ask, "is it real?"
 

Teenagers suck. With dull apathy, they ignore the carefully sculpted experience and demand to be fed. This one girl had the audacity to scorn everything. "Those ghosts are lame. Oooh! The bush moved – I'm scared of the plant! And what the hell is that," she said walking closer, "a dummy?" Matt pulled the 'arm' string. "Oh, so the arm moves. Great."
 

Outraged, I pulled the "head" string. There was too much resistance, so I tugged, hard. The dummy's head vigorously rolled off and flew into the sneering girl, simultaneously spraying over-stuffed paper blood up into the air. She screamed, not because it was gruesome, but because it was the last thing she had expected. The timing was impeccable.
 

I will cherish that scream for the rest of my days.
 

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