Halloween of Epic Porportion

Ask any of my friends, I love Halloween. With still-warm days giving way to cold evenings, trees maintaining an increasingly pathetic grip on the last few leaves hanging there, and a sudden proliferation of bare sticks and dead foliage scraping along the streets in the wind, it almost seems like Nature makes a decent attempt to make Halloween as creepy as possible. Every year my friend Chris Beyer and I do what we can to spice this time of year up a bit, mainly by finding the scariest movies we can manage to get our hands on. On Halloween we show our favorite pick to a bunch of friends and relish in the horror that follows. This year, however, was absolutely epic.

I spent a good 45 minutes watching YouTube instructional videos and trying repeatedly to tie a respectable turban on my head for our ward Halloween party. I donned full Indian dress robes strangely resembling silky lingerie, slapped on a beard which could easily be mistaken for a dead cat, and partied hearty for a while. We were sure happy Cousin Abdel (green shirt) could get work off at 7-11 and join us.

(same costume, different party -- I'm the moron blinking on the far right)

Later, my roommate Ricardo wanted to show a group of us friends a scene from a horror movie he found. We got sucked in and ended up watching the whole thing. Now we've watched a good number of these things over the years, but this was the first that left me tense like a two-day onset of rigamortis. We literally had to get up afterward and walk around to shake the lingering suspicion that something might be behind the couch waiting to eat our faces off. By this point we had a good-sized group of friends in our living room and decided it was Halloween, gosh dang it, and we're going to live it up! We slipped over the tall, spired fence around the city graveyard, with minimal injury (RIP Dara's hoodie), and played hide-and-go-seek among the tombstones and trees (bad luck in pretty much every culture, I'll bet).

After a satisfying couple of rounds, we headed up toward an abandoned hotel sitting all alone next to the insane asylum (mental health hospital, for those in need of a politically correct translation). We parked behind a dark warehouse and crept in the inky night up the hill to the shadowy, monolithic structure looming above. I'm not making this next part up--as we approached the hotel, the voices of inmates singing in the hospital wafted through the trees which were shuddering in the frigid breeze. Could it have been creepier? Someone had pulled a board off a window leading to the basement where we dropped in. Inside, every sound transformed itself into an echoing footstep, never failing to deliver petrifying results on the group. Rats scrambled through the walls as we crept up the winding, creaking wood staircases by light of cell phone. With every breath of wind from the mountains, ominous groans resounded throughout the catacombs of rooms through which we were cautiously moving. I should have checked my jacket sleeve for nail-marks where Melissa was hanging on for dear life.

Afterward, we shared scary stories in the bed of Ricardo's truck behind the warehouse before driving home and watching another Halloween favorite: "Coming Soon." Of course, like any gathering of friends with a computer, the night wasn't complete without sharing a few YouTube videos with millions of hits that none of us had heard of. Yes, this Halloween will go down in my memory as the best yet. Happy Halloween, everyone.