Something that always strikes me, as I read through back issues of the Journal from long ago, is how fraught an event Halloween (or Hallowe’en, as it was spelled in the paper until the 1970s) used to be. Every October, going back to the 1890s and carrying on for decades, there are pieces in advance of Oct. 31 where the writer hopes there will not be too much damage done by mischievous children on the night; eggs are often mentioned as a source of trouble.
“Egging” seems to have died out as a Halloween tradition, which is just as well given the price of eggs. A new tradition is “trunk or treating”, which seems to have started in rural areas where homes are few and far between, as well as in some urban areas where parents are leery about having their children go door-to-door.
I love seeing the children come to the door on Halloween, one of my favourite nights of the year. That’s perhaps hardly surprising, given that my mother was reading me Edgar Allan Poe tales when I was six, and I was fascinated by any stories I came across that featured ghosties and ghoulies and long-legged beasties and things that go bump in the night.
For this reason, I loved the haunted house which was an annual attraction of the PNE midway. It was run by the CKNW Orphans’ Fund, which has since been renamed, and its haunted house is long since gone. In my memory it is a dim and foreboding place, with strange noises and sounds, and always the sneaking suspicion that someone — or something — not of this world was following close behind. Years later, when I first read Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”, I found that Coleridge had, in 1798, had anticipated this feeling:
Like one that on a lonesome road
Doth walk in fear and dread,
And having once turn’d round, walks on,
And turns no more his head;
Because he knows a frightful fiend
Doth close behind him tread.
The way through the haunted house snaked past various spooky displays and set-pieces. I don’t remember anyone jumping out at us, and while it was scary to me as a child, it was undoubtedly very tame by today’s standards. I cannot even reliably confirm what it looked like or contained, as no photos of it seem to exist. Perhaps, in a Rod Serling-esque twist, I only imagined it. . .
That haunted house was, for me, a place where anything could happen, far removed from the noise and clatter and glare of the midway. Every year I looked forward to it; and every year I loved it, for its endless promise of something . . . else; something not of this world.
On one visit to the PNE with my father and brother in about 1972, we stopped by the CKNW radio booth on the midway. My father — who seemed to know everyone who was anyone in Vancouver media in those days — knew Merv Meadows, the broadcaster on duty, and after chatting with him for a bit during an ad break he brought me into the booth, where Meadows proceed to put me live on air.
We chatted for a few moments about the fair. “What was your favourite part?” I remember him asking, and I blurted out “The haunted house!” It was an easy answer to give, and absolutely true.
Halloween is, to me, a night when — as with the CKNW haunted house — anything can happen; a night when we once more approach that twilight zone where, if you look behind you, you might well see something that causes you to hasten your step and keep your eyes firmly forward. Ghost story writer M.R. James spoke of the “pleasing terror” engendered by reading a good ghost story, but the term applies equally to Halloween night. Pleasant terrors to all, and please, no eggs.
