Scare Me To Death

What is it about scary stories? Since it is Halloween today I’ve been thinking about that. When I was a kid I loved ghost stories. My Gram Werner was a great one for telling them, too. She had grown up on stories from the “old country”, Bavaria, and some of the scariest stories she told came from Der Schwarze Wald, the Black Forest, where her parents had been raised. She told tales about “hexes”, old women who could pet your cow and make it stop giving milk or scare the b’jesus out of kids playing outside too late in the evening.

My Grandfather Werner had a complete set of The Collected Works of Edgar Allen Poe and my brother Jack and I would crawl under the bed in my grandmother’s spare bedroom and read the scary ones to each other. I liked “The Black Cat”. He was partial to “The Pit and the Pendulum”.

When I was in high school scary movies were very popular. I remember being terrified by Whatever Happened to Baby Jane and Hush, Hush Sweet Charlotte but movies never scared me the way books did.

I remember well the first book I read as an adult that really scared me - I couldn’t put it down. It was The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson and I thought Eleanor Vance, the lead character, was creepy. I went on to read all of Jackson’s. Though not as sensational, We Have Always Lived in the Castle proved to be one of the scariest books I ever read. I re-read it a few years ago to see if it still had the same power and was delightfully surprised to find it did. Merricat still gives me the chills.

Jackson was a very psychological writer. She knew that the scariest thing in all the world is the human mind and where it can take you. Her short story “The Lottery” still rings true with that horrible sense that "it could happen". In college I read Arthur Miller's The Crucibleand the psychological horror of that play is all the more terrifying because of the political climate in which it was written - one we would do well to pay attention to these days.

Later I discovered other great, terrifying reads - Rosemary’s Baby by Ira Levin and Ghost Story by Peter Straub. The movies never did them justice. And then along came Stephen King with Carrie and Salem’s Lot both of which made my skin crawl. I loved every page. Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes still lurks in the dark corners of my brain.

I don’t know what it is about being frightened that is so delicious. Maybe it is the illusion that we have some level of control over the scary stuff if it is contained between the pages of a book. Even while we are being terrified we know that “it’s just a book” and when we put it down everything will be alright again. Now, as an adult, I find the scariest things to be those things I know are, sadly, real. I loved Daphne DuMaurier’s Rebecca and it scared me but in my heart I knew there really wasn’t a Mrs. Danvers in my life. But when I read Denis Lehane’s Gone Baby Gone and King’s Rose Madder they haunted me for days. They were too real and too far from anything I would ever have control over.

Halloween is a special time for me. I’m not one of those who dresses up and parties but I love the sense of mystery I feel at this time of the year. Years ago in Mexico I attended a Dios del Muerte celebration in a small village and I really understood, probably for the very first time, that the walls between the worlds is far thinner than we know. It is only our mindset that keeps that wall in place. And with that knowledge I realized there is very little there to fear. They are not the scary ones --- we are.

Happy Halloween.

Thanks for reading.