My mother traced my interest in the theatre to my first Halloween. I was three years old and I went as a pumpkin. From then on I wanted to live Halloween year round––loving the idea of ghosts and goblins and haunted houses. This obsession lessened after I found theatre at age eight, so clearly the theatrics of Halloween was a precursor to the theatrics of the stage. On my second Halloween I was a clown and on my third I was a “Dancing Donkey.” This idea came from a pattern in the McCall's Magazine, which was later modified to allow me to be Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer in my kindergarten Christmas play. After that point I picked my own costumes, which ranged from vampires to super heroes to characters like Peter Pan and Charlie Chaplin. Usually my costume would have something to do with my current obsessions, but I always liked returning to spooks. At age seven we took our first family trip to Disneyland where my favorite ride was the Haunted Mansion and I rode it twice.
Small town Halloweens are naturally wonderful, for there is a great community spirit for the holiday. In Placerville, everyone would decorate for Halloween and there were plenty of lit jack-o-lanterns on the front porches. We would band together with a group of kids, chaperoned by the fathers and hit the neighborhood for trick-or-treating while the mothers stayed home to answer the doors. After a few hours of running from door to door my brother and I ended up at home in front of the TV laying out all of our loot, which seemed like treasure.
Halloween had a kind of full October build up. The season was prime Apple Hill time, when a series of out of town friends might visit so we could tour all the apple barns, or pick pumpkins. Every few years some association or another would sponsor a haunted house. I might have been five when we visited my first haunted house. My brother was too scared to go in, so he waited outside with my dad and my mother and I went in together. The event was staged in some old victorian house that was completely transformed. Each room had a different haunted scene and there were plenty of spooks roaming the halls. The scene I remember most vividly was a dining room where there was a head on a platter in the center of the table. All of a sudden the eyes of the head opened and the table sprung up off the floor with the head screaming. This was such a simple trick, but most unexpected. I was scared in a delighted sort of way and it all made a great impression on me. What I really wanted to do was to be a part of it. This was theatre, though I didn’t know it yet. Upon exiting the house there were barrels of golden delicious apples for our parting treat.
A later haunted house that I loved was staged in an old unused train station building. The finale had Frankenstein’s monster coming to life and it came rushing towards me, flailing its arms about and nearly getting me in its clutches––or so I believed. The exit included barrels of apples as usual. That Halloween also had several parties, so I got to get dressed up in my costume for several occasions. One of the parties was a great big neighborhood affair down the street, filled with games like bobbing for apples, Halloween themed food (I’ve tried to recreate the black widow shaped cake many times since) and a back yard ghost walk.
When I was fifteen I participated as an actor in my first haunted house, this time put on by the Parks and Recreation department. It was held in the Town Hall building and wasn’t nearly as elaborate as some of the others of my childhood and no one ever really put on a good one again while I lived in Placerville. My last trick-or-treat run was at age 13. My parents felt that after you left junior high you should be cut off, but I didn’t want to cut out Halloweening all together. So, after the Parks and Recreation haunted house I figured I could do one myself that was as good as that and for my junior and senior years in high school my brother, a few friends and I transformed our garage into a marvelous haunted house to serve the trick-or-treaters. Now you didn’t just ring our doorbell and admire our carved pumpkin, but you had to go through our haunted house to get your treat.
The experience started with Kristin Sullivan in spooky garb, standing guard at the garage door. She regulated the traffic if there started to be a line up. Dressed somewhat as Lurch from the Adams Family, I would lead the guests around the house to a back door that lead down a hall to the garage. The walls of the haunted house were created by floor to ceiling curtains of black plastic that formed a square trail, making four corners to turn. This created mystery as you couldn’t see what was around the bend. Kim Sullivan was in the central control area to work the various effects and manage the spooky sound recordings. Our fright for the first leg was a ghost flying right at the guests and then turning off through a passage way to disappear. This was handled by a wire form supporting the flowing white shrouds of the ghost, arms outstretched and a skull head. My brother, dressed in black, simply ran down the corridor with the ghost over his head and all you saw in the blue light was the apparition flying right at you. A good first scare!
Turning the corner, we had rubber bats flapping about, spiders crawling up the walls and a scene of a murder in progress that suddenly popped into view through a screen when it was lighted from the rear. The next leg had the good old fashioned standby of reaching your hand into jars labeled bats eyes, spiders eggs, brains and other slimy things that were really made out of food sources. This area was before a window, which was rigged with a dummy outside. When I would direct the guests to look out the window, I would pull a string that rang a bell that signaled Kristin to release the dummy and it came slamming down against the window with a hideous dead face of horror. This always made the guests jump out of their costumes and it was so easy to accomplish.
The last leg happened to have a wall of cupboards and we rigged them with monster dummies that seemed to be trying to get out of the cupboards. Kim was within the central work area pulling the strings that made the effect work. The finale was a small table with a box on it and “Thing” from the Adams Family popped out with treat in hand for each guest. This made for a nice laugh and satisfying conclusion to our little haunted house.
My brother continued the haunted house tradition when I went off to college, but the neighborhood was seeing fewer and fewer kids on Halloween. My parents haven’t had a Halloween door bell ring in the past decade and don’t even bother putting a pumpkin out anymore. I’m told that the Halloween experience in Placerville is much more reserved now and that the kids stay in at private parties or trick-or-treat from shop to shop on Main Street. That’s not a bad way to do it, but it doesn’t beat wandering through the woods of your own neighborhood in the dark with flashlights and approaching all those jack-o-lanterns on the porches, no sir!
Good story.
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