Halloween Season

Halloween has probably been my favorite holiday for as long as I can remember. Sure Christmas is great but there's something about Halloween. When I was younger I would start counting the days after school started until Halloween, I would start thinking of costumes and what I was going to be.

But the real fun started when I got older and got my own place. We lived in a big old house just outside Pittsburgh, (in Shadyside for all you western Pennsylvanians), that had been converted into a bunch of apartments. My roomates and I lived on the top floor, and we got together with the kids who lived below us, it was a college area, and did up the house like you wouldn't believe.

I got the idea from my childhood days, one of our neighbors was as fanatical as I was about Halloween. They would set up their whole house like a haunted house. I mean the entire house, outside, upstairs, downstairs. They got the whole family involved. It was unbelievable.

So my roomates and I did up our place like a huge walk through haunted house. Kids would come from all over. I had my stereo system set up with the speakers in the windows and all through the place with the scary sounds playing, dry ice in containers so the whole place was fogged in, we had people dressed up hiding all through the place. We set up a coffin and had someone laying down in there with a small hose from a compressor in his hand, and the coffin was filled with candy. He was just laying there like a corpse with his hands crossed on his chest, the air compressor nozzle was palmed in his hand. The kids had to reach in and grab a piece if they wanted it, and when they would reach in he would shoot them with a blast of air from the compressor.

We were trying to keep from touching the kids as we didn't want to scare them to badly or start up any kind of problems. It would get bigger and bigger each year. We got to the point where we started getting the house ready a month or more before Halloween. It started getting pretty involved. We did have a few complaints from some of the older neighbors who called the cops on one or two occasions. Luckily the police were used to dealing with college kids and all in all considered our stuff harmless, and the kids in the neighborhood loved it! We would get people traveling a pretty good distance to come and check it out as word of mouth got around over the years. We were even made it onto the evening news one year, traffic was lined up for quite a ways from people coming to see what all the fuss was about.

Unfortunately all good things must come to an end, I moved from PA way down yonder to New Orleans. I was living in the French Quarter down there and although we still had a good time at Halloween it was nothing like the good old days in Shadyside. But I did move back up to PA after about 8 years...but that's for another day, gotta get going here, kids need chauffered around as usual....