....for me to realize it's been almost two months since i last posted. sorry about that. i think my muse may have gotten lost in the woods during my last hike.
in all honesty, i was going to cheat and just put up a link to the post i wrote a while back about how my sibling and i, in our younger years in baltimore, used to scare the bejeesus out of my dad with our basement haunted house.
i could've sworn i wrote a post like that. i mean, i've told that story over and over again, to the point that i've actually had friends chime in to fill in the gaps when i skip the part about the glow in the dark ghosts or vincent price's rapping. however, after searching this blog for "voncent price", "thriller", and "haunted basement", i've concluded that it must've been a phantom post....sort of like when i think i've said something out loud, and it turns out i didn't actually get past the "thinking" stage. (damn this short attention span of mine!)
growing up in baltimore, the only "haunted" attraction we knew of was the "haunted school"- woodlawn elementary school, down the hill from our house.
most of the year, the school (which, rumor has it, was actually torn down some time after we moved, but i digress...) was opened up for roller skating on wednesday nights only. (i went weekly for a couple of years, and even after all these years, i'm pretty sure i could still get under the limbo stick, though some light stretching might be necessary first.)
however, during the weeks leading up to halloween, the school (which was closed around the time we moved to maryland- due to structural instability, or something like that) was transformed into a fairly low-budget (at least compared to the masterpieces in kansas city) haunted house.
up the hill, at our house, sibling and i pretty regularly turned our basement into a mini-haunted house, employing the use of glow in the dark ghosts (i'm sure sibling's gotten rid of them since, which is a bummer, because i coveted those things for years), glow in the dark jelly bracelets, glow in the dark shoelaces and, most importantly, a copy of michael jackson's "thriller" album on tape.
we'd make a trail with the bracelets and shoelaces, rewind the tape to the beginning of track 4 on side 1, turn out all the lights, and call daddy downstairs. while michael sang (the basement was small, so we rarely made it to vincent's rap), one of us would lead daddy around the basement while the other would jump out, throw the glow in the dark ghosts, and shout "boo".
daddy was appropriately scared.....in fact, i'm pretty sure it was the most we were able to scare him until we hit high school and he tried to teach us to drive.
looking back, it's interesting to think that we figured flying plastic ghosts were scary, yet the morning we woke up (maybe a year or two before we moved to missouri) and saw that a bunch of our neighbors' cars had been torched overnight, it didn't really faze us. (on the other hand, i'm pretty the effect it had on our parents was probably akin to seeing a zombified michael jackson beating down the front door in the middle of the night.)
the halloween before we moved, i finally went to the haunted school. i can't remember for sure whether sibling went with me or not. in fact, i don't remember much of that night at all, aside from older kids in make up jumping out from dark corners, and i may or may not have spent a significant amount of time trying to get a younger boy i liked to kiss me. (i was so incredibly successful that my first kiss (not counting joey galford trying to kiss me on the bus in kindergarten) wasn't until i was 15. this sort of retardation when it comes to courtship continued into my 20s. i think i might finally have outgrown it. maybe.)
digressing again- sorry.
long story short, the haunted school wasn't really all that spectacular. perhaps if they'd hired someone to play "thriller" over and over again, while someone else threw little plastic ghosts at the hauntees (that's the right term for "those who are haunted", right?), even my dad would have been scared.
