MY HALLOWEEN ADVENTURE

Happy Halloween!

Tonight, kids all over America get to have fun in silly costumes going to their neighbors to get candy for a major sugar high.  It’s a wonderful tradition that we all have fond memories of when we were young, and if you’re lucky enough to have young children or grandchildren to take trick-or-treating, you can relive tonight.

I have those childhood memories just like you.  One Halloween, however, was particularly memorable.  It was so off the wall that I never told any of my friends (nor my parents) what I had done as I was sure no one would believe me.  It was a secret adventure that I kept just to myself.

So I thought it would be fun to tell you about it.  I wonder, if you share the story with kids or grandkids you may have, they’ll try and replicate my adventure.  Let me know.

I grew up in a leafy suburb of Los Angeles called Glendale in the 1950s.  That was when California was the Golden State paradise that everyone is yearningly nostalgic about today.

Every Halloween was trick-or-treating giddiness.  A few blocks from our home was a walled graveyard, Grandview Cemetery (now called Grandview Memorial Park pictured above), which I and my friends would always steer clear of during neighborhood trick-or-treating as it gave us the creeps.

Yet by the time I was 12, I began to have my doubts about this creepiness.  Were there really such things as ghosts? I wondered.  One way to find out, I decided.  It was Halloween, 1956.  I with a group of friends went trick-or-treating, then back home and pretended to go to bed.

I waited until my family was sound asleep, got up and dressed, grabbed my Boy Scout sleeping bag and a Bowie knife from my father’s study (if any ghosts showed up I was going to fight them off), snuck out of the house, and walked to Grandview Cemetery.

My watch said it was a few minutes before midnight.  The concrete block wall surrounding the cemetery was seven feet high.  I tossed my sleeping bag over it, tucked the Bowie knife in my pants, gave the wall a running jump to haul myself over it to land amidst gravestones on the other side.

It was dark as the cemetery had no lights, but the night was clear with enough moonlight to see.  I rolled out the bag on a grave-free patch of grass, crawled into it and with that big knife in my hand, waited for anything spooky supernatural – ghosts, goblins, demons, witches, whatever – to show up.

Nothing did.  It was completely quiet, I was completely alone.  No one in the world knew I was here.  I waited and waited until finally… I fell asleep.

I slept like a rock.  Nothing woke me up, no nightmares or strange dreams.  It was dawn’s early light that awakened me, disappointed and mumbling to myself, “Well, so much for any ghosts.”  Wrapping up my bag, tossing it back over the wall and scrambling after it, I was back home and in bed a little after 6am with everyone still asleep.

Got up like normal, said nothing at breakfast, said nothing to anyone at school that morning nor ever afterwards.  What I had done was so weird the other kids would’ve thought it unbelievable and laughed at me for making it up.  I kept quiet.

I’ve always laughed at myself for taking that Bowie knife.  But I was 12 – and while ghosts might not care about a huge knife, who knew what might be prowling around a cemetery at night for real and I wanted some protection.  That knife was comforting.

Also comforting is that I’ve never had to worry about ghosts or the scary supernatural ever since.  Sleeping all alone in a cemetery all night long on Halloween can do that to you.

So that’s my Halloween Adventure.  Hope you found it entertaining.  And I hope that whatever you do tonight, it’s fun.  Have a Fun Halloween!