Impossible! But That's What I Saw

I haven't been to a Halloween party since I was a kid, but I still enjoy the holiday. Partly because of the decorations some folks in town put up, like inflatable spiders.

This week's wind storm left Loonfoot Falls alone, apart from a few downed trees: and radically rearranged inflatable Halloween displays.

The spider that had graced a neighborhood roof is missing: it may be in another county by now. A sort of pint-size pirate ship with a skeleton (literally) crew from the 'spider house' yard found anchorage at their mailbox.

I shouldn't joke, I suppose. Quite a few folks in this part of the state didn't have power for hours: a definitely unfunny situation with temperatures below freezing.

Then there was my experience Tuesday afternoon, on my way home from work. There was a brisk west wind: around 45 miles an hour, the radio said, with gusts to 60.

The neighborhood roof spider had already disappeared when I turned down the street where I live, the inflated skeleton crew were moshing at the mailbox, and somebody's garbage can sprinted past my car on the passenger side.

Just then somebody shot past me on the left and jumped onto the windshield. I was hitting the brakes when the lunatic jumped off, disappeared, and slapped the roof.

Sure: people can't do that. But that's what my eyes and ears were telling me.

I'd stopped the car by then: just in time for somebody's inflatable Dracula to whip back over the windshield.

A Halloween Story

Most days this week were damply gray, with headlights shimmering on rain-polished pavement in mid-afternoon.

A week of watching rain run like cold sweat down the window might have inspired me to write about room 313 of the Belvedere Union Grand Hotel downtown. Instead, I found myself remembering a story my father told, about a college prank.

It happened in the late fifties, in a town near Chicago. One of the local points of interest was the old Seely place. Old Amos Seely had inherited the place, along with a small fortune, back in the twenties, and had managed to hold ownership of the massive collection of Victorian towers and brickwork through the Depression.

Amos Seely led a solitary and frugal life in the huge old place, and died a year after Eisenhower was elected. He had never married, and had no close relatives. The house wound up in the hands of some distant cousins, who found it impossible to sell and difficult to rent.

The old Seely place sat empty for almost five years by the time this particular Halloween rolled around.

By then, a story had grown that old Amos Seely was haunting the place. Hanging on to his wealth and house had, the story said, become so much of a habit that he couldn't let go: even in death.

Like a new-world Jacob Marley, he walked the halls in chains, crying for someone to release him.

Whoops. I've run out of room. I'll finish this next week.