By Seán Malone and John Sweetman
Our assignment this month from The Loop editors was to write a “spooky” Halloween story. Now normally we do not take story “assignments,” but this seemed a quite reasonable request since we were running low on story ideas, and a little additional “direction” came just in time to forestall our usual spirited debate over what to write about.
So over a fire blazing in my backyard on a warm September night, we came up with an idea, only slightly influenced by the 25-year-old bottle of wine Seán brought over and shared.
Seán and I shared many of the same Halloween trick-or-treating adventures, including the classic “flaming paper sack” on the porch trick, but his trick was much more successful than mine in that he managed to actually light the bag on fire.
My trick of this nature merely produced puzzled annoyance to the intended recipient as they only found a wet stinky, slightly charred bag on the porch that could have been dragged in by a raccoon. In retrospect, I should not have used fresh cow manure, but what does a nine-year-old know?
Perhaps in belated penance for our youthful naughtiness on Halloween, we have always been generous to our trick-or-treaters, reverting back to the old custom of creating treats at home to dole out, although the number of visitors has dropped off since we changed from offering baked cookies to deep-fried kale and chocolate-covered Brussels sprouts. You never can tell on Vashon when a vegan might show up.
In my case, I now have to hand-deliver full-size Snickers bars to the few neighborhood kids, who maybe are now a bit skeptical of how healthy my treats are.
Seán describes his early Vashon trick-or-treating adventures well, although I suspect he has purged some of his real naughty deeds in the interest of The Loop being a much better publication than the “National Enquirer.”
Treat or trick has been around since the 1500s or earlier. Our favorite house was the Willhight’s, who lived just down the road towards Cove. Mr. Willhight worked at a large bakery in Seattle and would bring day-old bread home to feed their pigs. At times, the pickup load also included old cinnamon rolls and all sorts of sweet rolls, doughnuts, and too-old cookies. At our request for a treat, Mr. Willhight would back his pickup out of the garage and let Kit, Mike, Molly and Dale Bates, and myself take whatever we wanted, but not too much.
A retired coast guardsman who lived right across the road was a different story. He never left his porchlight on or answered his door. One year, we tried to get the coast guardsman to answer his door, and he wouldn’t do it. We had never “tricked” anyone before because we didn’t have to. Every Vashon family gave cakes, cookies, or possibly a drink of cider. We prepared a response to the coast guardsman by filling a paper bag half-full of dog manure, and lit it on fire.
He opened his door to our knock, and stomped on the bag, to put out the fire. You can imagine how fast we cleared his yard as he yelled epithets at us, including, “Get the hell off my property and never come back.”
We ran out to the road to plan our escape to Cove, where we found ample people with their front door lights on and gates open to encourage the young people to “trick or treat,” because of their costumes or just because they hadn’t been seen for awhile.
The Secors were the next family to trick-or-treat at on the Cove Road. The Secors always prepared a haunted house for us. The lights went out one Halloween which made the haunted house even more scary. You were told to stick your hands through a plastic sheet to feel the brains of a cow. They were damp and scary, whatever it was. Sister Molly thought that was just a bowl of wet spaghetti.
Ed Secor was just a few years older and was training to be an opera singer. His voice would carry for a quarter-mile, and hidden in the tent, it became scary because he sung in Italian, which none of us could understand.
We continued toward Cove and were almost to Bruner’s when we heard a profound scream from the top of the ridge to the east. It sounded like babies screaming. The screaming turned out to be a cougar. We almost dropped our bags of cookies and candy. We would walk to Cove to trick or treat some other year, and we ran like Billy Blew for home.
