Spooky season brings back favorite memories

By Alonzo Weston

My favorite month is ending and my top holiday is fast approaching.

I love everything October, yes even the pumpkin spice. My granddaughter Asia was born on Oct. 1, and Halloween was my mom and I’s favorite holiday.

My family history is steeped in supernatural folklore and tradition. My mother and aunts told of my great-grandmother Ella holding dining room table seances when they were kids. My childhood was enriched by family ghost stories around the coal stove on chilly October nights. Tales of long-dead relatives coming back in the form of big black dogs with eyes of fire and chairs rocking by themselves fueled my childhood imagination and nightmares.

I’ve seen a few unexplainable things myself. Walking to my paper route early one morning I passed an abandoned house where an old woman once lived. I never saw the woman when she was alive but this particular morning I saw an illuminated figure of an old woman in an apron standing in the doorway of the house. When I asked my aunt, who was a neighbor of the woman, what she looked like, she said the woman always wore an apron. The old woman had been dead for years.

Another time a couple of friends and I were walking past a mutual friend’s house when we saw him run out his front door, wave to us and vanish into thin air! This friend is alive today and living and working in Kansas City as a radiologist. That all three of us saw this apparition or whatever let us know it wasn’t a dream!

My mother enjoyed Halloween. She would buy decorations every year and would dress up herself as she passed out candy. My mother passed a year ago and I still have some of her decorations I put out at my house.

I enjoy seeing kids coming to our door on Halloween night to trick or treat. The little ones get the most candy.

It reminds me of my childhood trick-or-treating. My mom and grandmother bought those flame-retardant costumes off the rack at Katz Drug Store for us to wear every year. Like kids today we wore the popular cartoon character costumes of the time.

I bought boxed sets of the old Universal horror monsters like Dracula, Frankenstein and the Wolfman. That Michael Myers and Freddy Kruger slasher stuff is not real horror to me. The old black-and-white Universal picture stuff had a creepy atmosphere and plot which to me made them even more nightmarish.

So you know where I’ll be on the 31st. Home with my popcorn and treats for the kiddies and watching old horror movies. I’ll enjoy myself immensely during this creepy time. It’s in my blood.