I decided to stack the plastic skulls in a laundry basket because I didn’t know where else to put them. This is a problem I never imagined having. Before I married Melanie my Halloween decorations included one strand of orange lights and window clings of cute black cats. Now my living room, bedroom, and front yard are strewn with bones, zombies, and drooling spiders.
My wife loves to haunt. She’s alive and everything. She’s not an actual ghost. By day she is a zoologist who works with reptiles. Technically that makes her a herpetologist, but when I say “My wife is a herpetologist,” people immediately think that her job involves herpes. But from September to October every year for the last 18 years, she has gotten off work, changed into blood-stained clothing, and scared the pants off of people at The Mortuary.
This is funny because she’s married to me and I’m a total weenie. Ask anyone. One Halloween when I was in the sixth grade, I bailed on my cousin Danny literally outside the door of the St. Rita Elementary School haunted house because I heard a growl. Danny and I had been waiting in line to get in for almost an hour. But when we got to the door and I heard that growl, I said, “I can’t do this,” and ran. The last thing I heard as I fled in terror was Danny saying, “Seriously?” He had a point. It was a grade school haunted house in a gym. Most likely the person who was growling was a cafeteria lady with plastic vampire teeth saying, “Rawr.”
Years later, when I was a senior in high school, my friends convinced me to go with them to Sheriff Foti’s Haunted House in City Park. I thought, “I’m older. I can do this.” Not 30 seconds into the place, someone jumped out at me, claws bared, and I grabbed the 10-year-old boy in front of me and used him as a shield.
And now I’m married to a person who wears “Night of the Living Dead” T-shirts any time of the year. Her love of everything horror both fascinates and confuses me. When she was a kid, her dad took her on a photoshoot that he was doing for a funeral home. She decided to climb into one of the open caskets to see what it was like to lie inside of one. Her dad, also a fan of the macabre, took a picture of her in mock repose. I’ve never seen this picture, and I’m glad. Because I have a fear of death and would never sleep again.
But she loves the adrenaline rush of fear. Hence her love of jumping out at people at the Mortuary.
“What do you like about working at the haunted house?” I asked her once.
“I love scaring people,” she said.
“So, what’s the difference between scaring people and being a bully?”
“The people who come into the house want to be scared. I’m giving them what they’ve paid for.”
Since I’ve only been dragged kicking and screaming into them, I forget that people go into haunted houses willingly. Their nervous systems understand the thing that mine clearly doesn’t – that it’s all acting and make believe. The haunter and the haunted play pretend together.
Of course, one could argue that working in a den of venomous snakes is also a way to terrify people. In either case whoever walks into the reptile house or the haunted house does so by their own volition. It just depends on whether or not you’d like Melanie to hand you a cobra or come at you with a chainsaw.
But over the years, I have discovered an interesting flipside to her dark side. She has a sweet spot for the underdog, and that includes poor souls that people usually fear; both human and animal.
One time she came home from work and said that a goose bit her (because these are the situations she gets herself into). It wasn’t bad, just a small red mark on her hand. When I asked what happened she said, “Well, I provoked him.” She explained that geese like to feel tough. So, she approached him, called him a few names or something, and in her words, “let him bite me a couple of times and then I threw up my hands and yelled ‘ahhh’ and ran away. Geese like to know they can scare you. He walked away feeling good about himself.”
“But why?” I said.
“Those small critters so seldom get to feel tough,” she said. “He needed to feel like he did a good job.”
I still don’t understand why he couldn’t have just muttered positive affirmations in the mirror like the rest of us, but I’m not a zoologist. She said that geese, like snakes and lizards, are just misunderstood.
This sympathy crosses over into monsters. When she moved in with me, she hung a wooden plaque of Frankenstein’s face on the wall. I said he looked grim. She said he looked sad because he was misunderstood.
“And he’s called Frankenstein’s monster, baby, not Frankenstein,” she said, the way that a someone would correct you at Comicon if you called Batman a Marvel superhero.
Halloween is her absolute favorite holiday because it’s the time of year when the underdogs own the night.
And so, after four years of marriage the thing that I thought would never happen has happened – I’m less afraid. You could say that exposure to all the creepy things has desensitized me, and I’m sure there’s some truth in that, but you still won’t find me in a haunted house. I’m too jumpy. I think it has more to do with the concept of the misunderstood monster. I also have a soft spot for an underdog. Melanie is my sweet monster, delighting in playing pretend in the dark.
This brings us back to the basket of skulls. She makes her own horror props and she’s a scientist, which means that some of the skulls lying around our house are real and some are for fun but all are for display. This begs the question: can one have too many skulls? (yes)
She’s talked about corpsing them and scattering them in our front yard cemetery (note: “corpsing” is a process by which you take a plain plastic skeleton and give it fake rotting flesh), but we’ve both been so busy that, so far, they’ve just sat in the basket as if waiting for the wash. Personally, I think they’ve got their own charm hanging out in there as if we’re ogres and this is just another day where we’ve let the bones pile up like so much laundry.
So, if you have any ideas about what to do with piles of skulls let me know. And if you’re looking for something to do on Halloween and love a good fright, let Melanie know. She will happily jump out and scare you. I’ll be inside with all the lights on.
