A LONG-AGO HALLOWEEN

One Halloween, more than 40 years ago when we were living in Gulfport, Miss. while my husband was going to Communications school at Keesler Air Force Base, we heard a knock at the front door of our upstairs apartment, long after the other “trick or treaters” had been there. We opened the door to find a lady whose son, a young boy about 12, was sitting down on the bottom step, gasping for breath. His mother told us she needed a ride to get her son home to give him his medicine. As we drove them home, which was quite a distance from the apartment complex, his mother told us what had happened to bring on his attack.

Two young men in our complex (we assumed other young lieutenants as most of the tenants were Air Force personnel) had fixed their apartment so that it was lit only with candles, with both of them in scarey costumes and with one of them sitting in a far corner, holding the candy bowl while the other manned the door. A child had to walk across the dark room to get his treat. It had scared this one boy so much that by the time he walked away and got to our apartment, he was too sick to go any farther.

We didn’t know which apartment the boy had been to so the young men, who had obviously had such a grand time scaring the little kids, never knew how dangerous a game they were playing.