Salon.com > Julie Klam

Halloween 2012: What’s scary?

Wed, 31 Oct 2012 22:11:00 +0000

Halloween is the strangest of holidays, the day we actually invite the creepy, the spooky, the downright scary into our lives — as if we aren't surrounded by enough horror, with many of us just now emerging from the very real, unwanted terror of Hurricane Sandy. But there is something strangely alluring about having control over your own fear, to make it into a fantasy, whether it involves walking through a haunted house, or dressing up for a costume party, or watching horror films, knowing that you can hide under your coat, run out of the theater, or hit STOP.

We've asked six of our favorite writers to open up and tell us what freaked them out when they were younger — and what scares them now.

The essays include (click on the title to read each piece):

"Real-Life Body-Snatchers," by Peter Trachtenberg

The author of "The Book of Calamities" sees body-snatchers. All the time.

"The Horrors of Aging," by Kate Christensen

The PEN/Faulkner Award-winning novelist used to love Halloween. But now every dangling skeleton and rotting pumpkin in the neighborhood is reminding her of her own mortality.

My lifelong pursuit of ghosts

Wed, 31 Oct 2012 21:00:00 +0000

I really want to see a ghost. It wasn’t always that way. Growing up in a very large, over 200-year-old house in Katonah, N.Y., I spent my childhood running through dark rooms praying I wouldn’t see — or hear — a ghost. For the 20 years my family lived there, things were fairly quiet. We had radiators in our room and in those very rare occasions when the heat came on, the sound of it was not unlike a poltergeist or an exorcism. And it was a very messy house so there was no telling if things had been moved or were missing, stuff got lost all the time, but it hardly felt any different than losing the one sock in the dryer. Katonah Woods, near our home, was supposedly haunted by the ghosts of Native American Chief Katonah and his wife, Mustato, who had been killed along with their child in a very bad storm. I knew this because when I was in kindergarten, I was sleeping over at my friend Patricia’s house (she lived on the still-dirt Katonah’s Wood Road). She told me in a very haunting voice that Mustato and the baby were in the teepee and the high winds of a thunderstorm blew them down a hill and Chief Katonah, in despair, threw himself after them … but on the full moon, they would walk … among the trees of Katonah Woods. I got up from her room, told her mother to call my mother to come get me. I was going home. And I would never walk to her house again, not even when I was in high school. (She tried backpedaling and saying the ghosts wouldn’t let people see them. Too. Late.)

Your wife is the worst

Fri, 26 Oct 2012 23:30:00 +0000

When I was about eight or nine, at the age you begin to have a consciousness that the tall people in your life exist for reasons other than to give you stuff or take your stuff away, my parents’ friends started splitting up. It seemed to come in like a slow tide, the news of a divorce. I’d hear my mom on her morning calls to her mother and three sisters, alternately expressing shock and admitting, “I can’t believe they were together this long.” Either way her attention would turn to the matter of custody. Not the couple’s children, mind you, but which person in the relationship my parents would “get.” According to my mother — and so, as far as I knew — every couple had a good person whom you liked and who brought wine and almond torte and laughed when they came to dinner, and a bad person who brought conversations to a screeching halt and invaded your personal space and talked about their bowels. Frequently, according to my mother, my parents got stuck with the stinker. Mainly because the good one was usually the one who had done the bad thing.