Things that go BUMP in the night

10.28.07

My boyfriend and I have a Halloween tradition of going someplace supposedly haunted and exploring. This is interesting, considering I am the most paranoid and psychotic person when it comes to the occult. Not to mention the fact that I am scared of basically everything. Our first Halloween, we went to the Moonville Tunnel, an abandoned railroad tunnel in the middle of nowhere. I ran through it with a digital camera, trying to get those balls of light ghost hunters say are the ghosts. No such luck, but it was scary anyways, despite it being the middle of the day. Our inner Christopher Columbus got the best of us, though, and we proceeded to get lost, find a bar in the woods, and nearly run out of gas. On our second Halloween we went to the Mansfield Reformatory, where the people doing the scaring thought I was hyperventilating. The guards kept asking Dom if I was okay. To give me some credit, you can feel people breathing on you, it’s pitch black, and there are terrifying sound effects. Nevertheless, I cried and kept my eyes closed the entire time—this made for an interesting walking experience. This year, we went back to Moonville to find the cemetery, also supposedly haunted. We drove up a tightly winding path, where, at the top, we found ourselves facing the cemetery. We looked at the piles of tombstones, then at each other, and left. On the way home, Dom said, “we really don’t to prove anything to each other anymore. I don’t really like cemeteries.” I agreed.
I never cared about Halloween until we started this tradition. The whole holiday just seemed pointless to me. I have never donned a Playboy Bunny costume and I hated trick-or-treat when I was little. Now that I’m older, and opportunities to live in a different world for a while are becoming increasingly rare, Halloween has started to grow on me. And though I’ve never completely understood why people enjoy being scared, I’m obviously one of those people because I keep going back for more. The suspension of disbelief encapsulates me every time—at Mansfield, I really was convinced an executed inmate was going to kill me. It sounds silly now, but it certainly didn’t then. I don’t think it’s just me, either. The people around me seemed to be feeling the same way.
While our cultural fascination with the hauntings that arise from murders, executions, and suicides is a bit disturbing, we all want to feel like we’re braving something—the night, the dark, the ghosts, our own inherent fear of the unknown. On some level, there’s a sense of accomplishment after walking through a haunted house, and I’m sure we’ll all go searching for that same experience next year. As for me, I’m ready for Christmas- throw out the pumpkins and bring on the snowmen.