Halloween is everyone’s long-awaited holiday to have a hauntingly good time, but I am a class A scaredy (black) cat. Don’t get me wrong, I LOVE this fall season and all it entails, but I prefer to run with my tail between my legs around spooky season. Read on if you’d like to enlightened on everything that frightens me about October 31st.
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Scary movies: This one seems like a no-brainer, but I am not a fan. At all. I GENUINELY do not understand how people like to sit in suspended fear for hours at a time, especially at the theaters where you have no control over volume and cannot lay cocooned with weapons on hand in case something goes bump during the flick. My sister is a huge fan and while I would probably (definitely) run screaming from the room if I had to endure a Paranormal Activity movie, her and her friends sit cackling at how artificial the “horror” is. I think the farthest I would go for this category is psychological thrillers/dramas, like Psycho, A Quiet Place, and When A Stranger Calls… I prefer to mentally be creeped out than in the form of jump scares.
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Clown epidemic: And no, I do not think it’s melodramatic to call that an epidemic… this was a whole-ass nightmare of mine. How did 2016 become the year everyone went batsh*t and decided to don clown costumes to stalk people? Or just lurk in plain sight, which was almost creepier somehow. They’d be Penny-WISE to stay away from me before they got sucker-punched.
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Target aisle: Target is usually an oasis of mine, but I hate walking through the gloomy, gauzy, hanging grim reaper door decorations and those DAMN candy bowls that snatch at your hand when you go in for a Halloween treat. All I’m trying to do is search through the Halloween sock dollar bin and there that aisle is, making my skin crawl (the gif, however, is just scarily cute).
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The Purge: Do I know that this is primarily a movie premise? Yes. Do I still find the idea of a 24-hour window when whack-jobs are allowed to loot, murder, and become their darkest versions of themselves without consequences terrifying? Yes (and so should you). Plus the masks… just horrifying.
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Overtly sexual costumes: This one is me just being more scared of people’s minds and how they decide which innocent childhood characters (including, but not limited to, Bert and Ernie and Pikachu) would be suitable for a sexified costume. P.S., the GIF is Keith from the Try Guys in a video where they wore sexy Halloween costumes—you’re welcome.
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Darkness: Sure, I may be too old to have a bit of trepidation when traversing through pitch black places. But on Halloween, you never know what could be lurking where you can’t see… like a clown, for example.
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Working at Lourdes pool: This year I started working at Lourdes Pool on West Campus. There is long-standing lore of three separate ghosts who inhabit that residence hall. Legend has it that when that area used to be a nunnery and chapel, a priest and a nun had an inappropriate relationship that resulted in a baby. The nurse threw the baby down the elevator shaft, hurled herself down the staircase, and the priest in the now-pool-used-to-be-chapel hanged himself from the rafters. They say that the priest is vengeful of the nun and “pulls” people under the water to drown them, thinking the swimmers are the nurse who jeopardized his reputation. I have also heard that if you’re quiet enough in the elevator, you can faintly hear the baby’s cries. Now I’m not a huge believer in ghosts, but I definitely am wary around the stairs and elevator and do stay on guard (hehe) when I’m alone.
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Friends: Now, I love my friends. But there are times when in our room when I plug my ears because they could be waiting around a corner or a door to scare the daylights out of me. They think it’s funny; I think it’s fuel for sleeping with one eye open.
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How fast the year is going: Halloween (October 31st) is the marker for 62 days left in 2018. That is CRAZY. We go from “Wake Me Up When September Ends” by Green Day to “New Year’s Day” by Taylor Swift in the blink of an eye.
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Candy corn: It’s just scary to me how people can enjoy that weird, candle-wax, sorry excuse for candy.
Those are just ten of the things that help me turn into my fully-fledged scaredy cat during this spooky season. Hope everyone has a scary good time this October 31st, as long as your good times don’t come from scaring me! BOO!
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