Hello Internet!
I hope everyone is doing well and staying healthy! The world is still on fire, but hey, we’ve made it to Spooky Month! October is here and we can just focus on all the fall leaves and Halloween decorations and not anything else. We get to focus on scary movies instead of scary world events…wooh. Anyway, we’re going to talk about some spooks but first let’s quickly talk about all the pieces I published in the past week. Last Wednesday I published a Poem titled “Still Awake.” You ever have a night where you lay awake thinking of someone just wishing you could talk to them or be with them? Well if you said yes, I have a Poem for you! Then, last Friday, I published a Writing Prompt Piece titled “Final Destination.” A little while ago there was a trend on r/WritingPrompts (the subreddit where I get like 95% of my Writing Prompts) where people would die but there would be a twist. Death made a mistake. Death wants you to take over the position. Death needs your help. This prompt was posted to counteract those. Sometimes people just die and there isn’t a reason. This past Wednesday, I published a Poem titled “Hallowed Night.” It’s spooky season and this is a perfect Poem to read after you watch a scary movie or carve a pumpkin. Finally, this past Friday, I published the latest chapter of my Dungeons and Dragons inspired series “A Risky Gambit.” The group has found themselves thrown in jail for interfering with city guard business while their friend, Riffen, is still missing. If the group is going to find their friend, they are going to have to take drastic measures.
Sorry for that but when I don’t write a Weekly Blog for a week, which is totally my fault, I have a lot to say. I just want to make sure that people new and old see all the pieces I write and don’t want anyone to miss anything. Now, let’s talk about some spooky stuff. I want to use this week’s Weekly Blog to talk about Haunted Houses. And not “haunted houses” as in “this house is haunted” but more so haunted houses as haunted events you might attend. These could be literal houses or woods or theme parks or caves or whatever. These are events you go to so you can walk through a haunted corn maze or series of rooms where people jump scare you and chase you with leaf blowers and chainsaws (without the actual chain part). Does that make sense? I hope it does so we are all on the same page.
My earliest memories of haunted houses comes in two parts. 1st was that I remember going to a local apple orchard/pumpkin patch when I was really little and they had this mini haunted house set up for kids to walk through. Now this thing was really just a large shed full of some fake cobwebs, and Halloween decorations meant to spook, but not scare. As a real little kid I did find this place scary, but after a few times going through it, it wasn’t really a big deal. I had conquered those fears and came out the other side more resilient. This also wasn’t a big deal because I dealt with scarier at a younger age. When I was between the ages of 4 and 6 (maybe 7), my family’s church owned a nearby park and put on an Haunted Woods event in their woods to raise money for mission trips. My family helped set up everything up and worked on the weekends scaring guests. I got to see a lot of behind the scenes stuff on how the different scary stuff was built and assembled. This was technically a church sponsored event, but there was still plenty of scares and gore and even witches (scandalous, I know). My most vivid memory of it was one attraction near the end of the walk through the woods. It was a skeleton in an electric chair that would shake and scream after a motion sensor was set off. I was so scared of the skeleton in the chair, that every time it would go off, I would cry. So since it was at the end of the walk, I would be lead my family backwards from the exit, so when the motion sensor went off, the skeleton would be behind me and I could just run away from the scary skeleton.
Of course that was when I was a little kid. Surely as I grew up, I became less scared of such things….. HAHAHAHA No. I was a big baby when I was a baby and continued to be so for many many years. I don’t like scary stuff. I don’t like horror movies, horror video games, or horror anything. I don’t like haunted houses or anything like that. I remember when I was a teenager, me and a group of friends went to a haunted cave. It’s what it sounds like. Take all the spooky stuff and shove it into a cave. Now these caves were normally open for non-spooky walking tours and stuff like that, but during Halloween they became spooky. Not like claustrophobia scary. Just like people with fake blood knives and leaf blowers scary. I remember we had to wait in a long line before getting into the cave so we stood in line and rocked out to Lady Gaga. That was a lot of fun. Then once we got into caves it was a lot of scares. Some of them really got me while others were just kind of lame. When I got really scared, I would talk a lot and would usually talk to the people trying to scare us. I was hoping the friendly banter would make it less scary and it worked a little bit. Because let’s be honest, most of the scary stuff is just people jump scaring you or grabbing your ankle as you walked or whatever. There’s never really any real danger so people shouldn’t be afraid, but these type of things really work. Logically I shouldn’t be afraid, but if you would ask me to go to a haunted house, I’d say no and that it is too scary for me.
October and Halloween are definitely a lot of fun and I enjoy most of the seasonal traditions. You want to go carve some pumpkins, go on a hayride, and eat some candy corn? I’m all for it! You want to go to a scary haunted house and then binge a bunch of horror movies. Uh…I’ll pass. It’s just not my thing. I’m a big scaredy-cat but I think I’m justified. I actually have a good comparison for people who might think I’m overreacting. You know when you ride a rollercoaster, there is a mix of fear/anxiety with excitement/adrenaline. Well rollercoasters give me a nice mix of those but in the end I feel a lot more excitement and fun when I’m done. When it comes to scary movies or horror game or haunted houses, I get mostly fear if not entirely fear. Some people get the fun and excitement but I don’t like it. I’ve only seen a few scary movies but most of them were either closer to thrillers or psychological horrors. Spooky ghosts or serial killers with seven sequels? Nope. No. Nada. Not having it. I’d rather watch It’s The Great Pumpkin Charlie Brown or The Nightmare Before Christmas. And when it comes to Haunted Houses, we can just listen to Lady Gaga at home!
Thank you so much for reading that Weekly Blog! I hope you liked it. To be honest, I was kind of struggling with a topic this week, but I think it really came together. If you liked this Weekly Blog, feel free to give it a like. You can also comment down below about your haunted house experience. Do you like haunted places or would you rather just stay home and watch a non-scary Halloween movie? Let me know. If you really like the stuff I write, I highly encourage you to Follow me here on WordPress. I’m trying to build a positive and creative environment on the internet and I’d love it if you were a part of it. I’m nearing 600 Followers and would love to hit it before the end of the year!
Thank you again and I hope you have a wonderful week!
-Allen_The_Writer
Header Photo Credit to New Hampshire Magazine
https://www.nhmagazine.com/halloween-events-and-haunted-houses-in-new-hampshire/
Allen The Writer 