Somewhere around 1987, my dad decided that instead of taking my sister and I around for Halloween, he’d give out candy. He grew up one of 9, and wanted to make Halloween something for people to remember. He made a plaster cast of his face, donned a black woolen robe and stood on the porch with a scythe. In the bowl in front of him were full sized candy bars.
I doubt it was the first kid, but it wasn’t long before he was scaring people over the bushes in front of the house. He loved it. He built a spider web, he built some tombstones, and as the years went by, the props increased. The purchases increased. Eventually he built a coffin. Then he bought a coffin, and didn’t tell my mom. The scares increased mid-year when she saw it in the basement.
When I got out of college I joined in, as did a few of the cousins. So we wouldn’t decorate the same way two years in a row, I took videos.
Dad’s costume from last year always went on a dummy. I stuck to the shadows, slinking around, hoping to scare each kid three times. The cousins struggled to find their roles, but eventually one donned a ghillie suit and was the scariest bush in three counties. In 2011 we gave out 1300 candy bars. The full size candy bar, the scare and texting combined to bring far too many kids to effectively scare and we decided to take a year off. Nature took it off for us, as Sandy cancelled Halloween, but the next year I was out in an apartment and we took the props with us. I bought a house in April, had a kid last December, so I’m taking this year off, but next year, Frank is coming over and we’re going to ramp it back up.
2007: YouTube
2008: YouTube
