Frightful October

For me, growing up, Halloween lasted the whole month of October. It was a idyllic time to be a kid, back in the day when parents still thought nothing of sending their children out the door for hours on end to roam the nighttime streets and woods with their friends.

For me, the spooky season started with the smell of burning leaves. When my parents bought a house on Fremont Ave. in Bloomington in 1963, it was part of a brand new subdivision of three-bedroom ramblers plunked down in the middle of what had been farm fields just a couple years before. The road was still gravel those first few years and “the country” was no further than the end of the block, where the rows of houses gave way to cornfields and rolling hills of oak savannah.

We were the vanguard of the suburbs, but it took a few years before the urban bureaucrats got around to replacing our “country” rules with those of the city.

That meant the annual bonfire of freshly-raked leaves was a regular event, at least until the bureaucrats imposed a burning ban.

The bonfire, always after dark, was a kick-off of sorts for a season of imagination. To me, there was something in the cool humidity of an October dusk that made me shiver, but mostly from anticipation of scary things. With the leaves gone, the bare branches of the big bur oaks looked to my young eyes like the gnarled hands of evil witches.

By October, of course, darkness would come early and it was a rare evening that I didn’t rush through supper to get outside and play in the dark with my friends. While Halloween spookiness has become a retail extravaganza these days, back then we had our entire imaginations to fuel the fun.

And what imaginations we had. We had stories about everything. Like the old lady who lived in that farmhouse that had survived the latest housing development. We never saw her, and never wanted to because we heard she ate small children. And her husband, long dead, still roamed the property at night each October, a seven-foot tall ghost ready to grab any unsuspecting kid.

As we got a bit older and began roaming farther at night, we eventually came across the spookiest of all places: the home and property of the Bugensteins. This was a place that seemed so incongruous, so out of context, in the burgeoning late 1960s suburbs that our imaginations naturally ran wild. The Bugensteins lived barely a block away as the crow flew, but they may as well have lived in a different era. Their small, two-storied house, covered in old wood, stucco, and ivy was set along the edge of Nine Mile Creek, at the bottom of a deep hollow at the end of a winding, quarter mile-long gravel road. From there, they lived their mysterious lives in splendid isolation, surrounded by high bluffs covered in oak, silver maple, and ironwood.

The remains of an old mill, once powered by the creek, could also be found next to the house, and there were rumors that a young child had died a horrible death in the place. As little kids, the very idea of a trip to the Bugensteins would have left us paralyzed with fear. But over the years we grew bolder, and a trip down their driveway in the darkness became a regular test of courage come October.

Their name alone was cause for alarm, so eerily similar to the Frankensteins of lore. And this remote and mysterious house was home, no less, to a Dr. Bugenstein, which made it even scarier, at least when we ignored the fact that he was the pediatrician to just about every kid in the neighborhood.

Of course, that was the friendly Dr. Bugenstein who worked at the Oxboro Clinic, not the one who lived in Sleepy Hollow. And there, of course, were stories about other members of the family who were, well… a bit different. The most memorable was the older sister, who we rarely ever saw and was usually only spoken of by adults in hushed tones. We knew what that meant. Scary! At least in the month of October. We imagined the sister, hidden away upstairs, peering malevolently down at us whenever we went near the place.

Years later, as a teenager, I got to know the Bugensteins quite well and familiarity certainly didn’t quell the stories, it just made them funnier, or sadder, depending on who was involved.

These days, Halloween just isn’t the same. Halloween parties and helicopter parents don’t foster imagination in kids. And, unfortunately, I no longer see the twisted hands of witches in the bare branches of trees.

Yet when the darkness sets in this time of year, I still enjoy an occasional shiver down my spine, even though these days it may just be that the temperature’s dropping. But at least on this weekend, with Halloween in the late October air, I’ll be paying a little more attention out here on the edge of the Lost Lake Swamp, for things that go bump in the night. Who knows what a little imagination might still conjure up?