CREEPY TALES || true Stories

22. Halloween

When I was about thirteen, I lived in a big house that was only about a mile removed from civilization but surrounded by thick forest. It felt more remote than it was. There were no sidewalks and no streetlights, so it was never what you would call trick-or-treat friendly; it was too far of a walk on winding, hilly, pitch-black roads between homes. Most kids from our neighborhood went into the crowded downtown on Halloween, and we were so rarely bothered by outsiders that many of our neighbors didn’t even bother buying candy. A ringing doorbell came as a genuine surprise.

It did ring, though, a couple of times. Mostly early in the night by neighbor kids who wanted us to see their costumes before they headed off to town. We’d hand out treats and admire their ingenuity and then lock up and settle in for the night. On this Halloween, we went through the process of turning off lights and making sure everything was secure. It was somewhere between eleven PM and midnight, long after trick-or-treating hours. Our cocker spaniel was whining, so we opened the front door to let him out one last time.

The door swung open and a full-grown man in a clown costume, complete with grotesque mask, was standing silently on the front porch.

The dog saw the enormous clown shoes first. As his head slowly raised to take in the baggy striped pants, the cartoonish necktie and finally the hideous face, his haunches slowly lowered and he peed a giant puddle on the floor.

Terror-stricken, my parents slammed and locked the door. They raced through the house, making sure every door and window was locked, then peeped out from behind the living room curtains for several agonizing minutes until the clown turned and walked into the darkness. I honestly can’t remember if they called the police. If I had been in their place, I would have.

Why was he there? He was too old for trick-or-treat. He hadn’t rung the doorbell, he hadn’t knocked, he had just stood on our porch without a word, staring at the door. We’d only seen him by chance when we let the dog out. What were his plans? He’d arrived on foot, in full costume, and never made a sound.

We never saw if he had a weapon. Why would he do that? If he were some teenager getting an ill-advised thrill out of frightening the literal piss out of the locals, would he have been so patient as to wait in utter silence in front of a door that might not open? He was undoubtedly menacing, but the fact that it was happening on Halloween night introduced a dangerous level of self-doubt to our reactions. Were we overreacting? Is it normal for a man in a clown suit to stand staring at your front door on the off chance that you’ll open it during the night?

It would be years before I saw a few horror movies in which an unsuspecting family was stalked and tortured by people who arrived unannounced and masked at their homes in the dead of night. My experience with The Clown added a rich dimension of recognition and horror that I’d have been much happier without. Those films gave me nightmares for months. And last winter, long after Halloween, we were returning home from a trip, driving along dark and utterly desolate country roads, when suddenly the headlights illuminated a man standing in a ditch. He was facing us, and waved at us as if he had been expecting us all along. He had almost cartoonish hair and makeup. He looked like the character Robbie Rotten, from Lazytown

He had a guitar slung across his back. A guitar! And he was dressed in a country-western costume. You’d almost think that he was returning home from a gig and his car was broken-down. The trouble with that explanation was that there only soybean fields for miles, no little towns, no bars. We hadn’t passed any stranded vehicles, and wouldn’t pass another car, operational or otherwise, until we got to the next town twenty miles away. Still, that self-doubt kicks in. Was he hitchhiking? Was he signaling for help?

No. That’s the thing. He was standing in the ditch, pointed toward us as if he had known all the time we were coming, with a wide smile of greeting spread across his heavily made-up face and a leisurely wave to us as we passed. It was a friendly hello wave, not a call for help, I am absolutely sure of that. There was no urgency in his demeanor at all. In a ditch. In the pitch-black night. In a soybean field so far in the middle of nowhere that there was no other car for miles.

It was so unsettling we sped off, because we had a young child in the car to protect. The scene was so bizarre that we began to think we’d hallucinated it. When I got home, I told a friend of mine about it, a news director for a radio station in the area. He quickly sent me a screencap of a dispatch report: two motorists advising police of a heavily made-up man with a guitar, jumping from a ditch into the road and running at the cars. So apparently we didn’t hallucinate him.

It terrifies me beyond reason to think that, not only do people wander in the darkness like this and no one knows their true intentions or whether or not they’re harmless, but there are apparently so many of them out there that one person (me) has had two late-night run-ins. Who else is out there? What are their plans? Do they rely on that Halloween second-guessing to take advantage of our split-second indecision?

The poor cocker spaniel, the one who urinated helplessly all over the floor, remained an ardent coulrophobe for the rest of his life.

...............