Haunted

2:00 a.m...

My favorite part of the haunted house and hayride-with-no-hay in Elmira was when my youngest, now 15, had me by the coat (ouch! pulled out my hair) and said in a slightly high-pitched voice and various intonations: Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear, oh dear, oh dear!

Spooky-wise my favorite things were the shadowy man who leaped down from the ceiling and kept appearing in my peripheral vision and the two little girls dressed as dolls who never spoke but drifted around their weird nursery. Lots of female victims out of slasher films, the dental victim particularly apt and summing up how I feel about going to my dentist. She's going to have laryngitis very soon. Favorite effects: the quicksand floor (shades of Wilkie Collins and the quivering sands) and the sucking claustrophobic tunnel. Bad night vision: evidently I missed all the rats in the luminous swamp. The guys at the hayless hayride seemed to be having a great deal of fun racing about in the night, setting fires, and harassing girls they knew from high school. There was a strong thread of danger from men running through the night, and lots of movie references.

Nevertheless, glad to see that my daughter at 21 is not too old to love Halloween antics . . . I slept without dreams all the way home and arrived looking like an ancient child--that is, a grown woman with her hair wildly askew, slantdicular, on end.

G'night!