Redtree Times

GC Myers- The Incantation, ca 1994

Be hole, be dust, be dream, be wind/Be night, be dark, be wish, be mind,/Now slip, now slide, now move unseen,/Above, beneath, betwixt, between

—Neil Gaiman, The Graveyard Book

When I was kid, we lived in a big old farmhouse house in the country. It was kind of a spooky place with a small old cemetery across the road at the edge of the woods. Some of the people buried there were the family of a coach driver killed in an Indian attack in the late 1700’s. The stacked stone chimney of their home still stands across the road from what was our home. I used to play around it quite often by myself back then.

The house had a creepy attic that inspired many nightmares for me. Opening the door to it was like a reverse Wizard of Oz effect. Instead of going from sepia to color as in the film, there you went from color to sepia, everything brown and dusty. There was a bunch of old wooden furniture belonging to our landlord and a ladder that went to the locked Widow’s Watch. Never made it up top there.

There was also a fairly large window that often caught my eye when playing ball in the yard below. Something would catch my eye and I would begin to believe that the silhouette of someone had briefly appeared in that window. I always found myself checking that window when I was out there.

For the last few years we lived there, I was the only one sleeping upstairs after my siblings had left. There was plenty there to keep a12-year old spooked. I would lay in bed and the whole spectrum of kid monsters would run through my head– Frankenstein, Dracula, the Werewolf, the Mummy, zombies and so on.

Oddly enough, I was afraid of ghosts. And I was never really too scared of Frankenstein or the Mummy. I figured I could outrun those guys. I mean, come on! Same with the zombies. Zombies hadn’t evolved in our imaginations yet and were still portrayed as slowly shuffling creatures in search of brains.

The Werewolf and Dracula were a different story. The Wolfman could run so I might be safe in my second story bedroom. But Dracula could transform into a bat and fly. He was what I perceived as my biggest threat at that time.

Little did I know then.

I was still naive enough to not yet understand the monstrous side of man which made my childhood fears based on monsters and the supernatural seem tame in comparison to the horrors we now witness on what seems to be every day.

Oh, the human horror show was still there then. Make no mistake about that. But it was easier to be shielded from it in a world of limited and slower access to information. But if I could, I would gladly trade for the nightmares inspired by monsters and the undead of my youth for the night terrors born of man.

Since we’re nearing Halloween, which is hopefully still a holiday of only kid monsters, here’s a spooky tune from the late great Nina Simone. It’s her version of I Put a Spell on You, written and performed originally by Screaming Jay Hawkins.