Spooky Fun

My earliest recollection of being scared and enjoying it was reading Little Red Riding Hood.  Just what was she doing in the woods when there was a girl-eating wolf on the loose?  It kick started a love affair with the Grimm's Brothers that lasted for years.  Children being fattened up to make them all the tastier is pretty nightmare-worthy but I soaked it all up!

I will never forget a particular night when I was eight years old.  Lying in bed, I stared for what seemed like hours at a shadowy figure on my door putting on and taking off his hat!  Considering that we lived on the eighth floor of an apartment building at the time it wasn't a shadow from the window.  Or was it?  My room was at the end of a hallway and if I peeked out of my door, the television was in clear view.  If I heard the opening tune of  The Twilight Zone I was out of bed in a shot and creeping my way to the doorway so I could watch all kinds of spooky things in black and white.  That could explain a lot.

My mother thought I was going to turn out to be really weird because at the age of ten, I read Dracula and Frankenstein over and over.  Babysitting as a teen was all about the scary movies.  Okay, chips and dip had quite a pull as well if I'm honest.  I could never sit on a sofa if my back was to an opening though.  Someone could sneak up and slit your throat or strangle you before you knew it!  Scared witless and pale with fright, do you think I would turn the channel...not on your life.  We girls would talk about calling up other friends when we knew they were babysitting just to give them a fright.  Call display put an end to that sort of fun.  I laugh at the memory of one friend, Karen, telling me that she heard glass break while looking after some children.  She went to investigate, taking a big...sharp...knife with her.  A black glove came through a small window in the kitchen door.  She raised the knife and the intruder ran off!  I'm wondering now if that was a load of codswallop but what does it matter...we were lapping it up with our eyes as huge as saucers! 

When I was twenty, a girlfriend and I went to see Terror in the Aisles.  It was a movie about scary movies, there was one slashing after another.  We watched most of it through our hands but oh how we laughed when we looked at each other.

Fast forward to adulthood and choosing the scariest London Walks to go on while abroad was huge fun.  There is nothing like standing in the middle of Hyde Park and being told that on some nights, ghostly images have risen from the ground causing people to faint or run like mad!  And it's not just females left weak at the knees, R felt a bit spooked when our Ripper tour guide announced the tour was over and we had to make our way to a tube station...in the dark...all by ourselves.  Did it put us off?  Not a chance, we were back for more ghostly tales the next evening.

Have I ever experiences a ghostly form?  There was one night when I was doing some machine-knitting in the basement.  The Heiress was just a baby and I heard crying.  Climbing the stairs I stopped to listen...nothing.  So back downstairs I went but after a few minutes I heard crying again.  Thinking I must have woken her up I trudged back up the stairs...again nothing.  This all was repeated a third time with the same result so I went all the way up two floors and there she was, sleeping peacefully.  No sign of any tears.  That did it for me, I never spent any time down in the basement if R wasn't home.

I like being scared witless when it's convenient for me!  What about you?