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'Twas the night before Halloween and all through the haunted house...
posted Monday, 30 October 2006
My father started his education in a one-room schoolhouse in Ohio back in the '30s, but before he made it all the way through a larger centralized school replaced the one-room schoolhouse and it was from Thompson School that he graduated. The school stood less than two miles from the house in which I grew up, but I never attended it because sometime in the late '70s or early '80s it was decided that the school should be consolidated into the nearby town's school system (along with a number of other rural schools in the area). In the process of consolidating, some of these formerly-independent schools became elementary schools while others were closed. Or maybe it was just Thompson, I'm not sure. I do know that a lot of people in our area weren't happy about it, but that was the way it fell out. Both that building and the one I ultimately attended for elementary school needed repairs, so they only kept one.
While I was growing up, the school was owned by a community group. Besides hosting annual dinners for Thompson alumni, the building hosted some community center types of things--I remember a youth basketball league, but not much else. As it grew more difficult to keep up with the heating bills and maintainence costs, a new idea was tried that kept the place afloat as a community resource for a few more years: in the weeks leading up to Halloween, the old Thompson School became The Thompson Haunted Schoolhouse. People from all over our community pitched in to help out with this, from designing and building the scenes to running a concession stand, "acting" in the haunted house, and guiding visitors through. I must have been in late elementary school and/or junior high in the years that this was in full swing. I served as a "rear guide." Visitors to the haunted house were taken through by an adult guide who spun the stories and led the way while many of us kids were rear guides who accompanied the group and made sure they kept moving. One really frightened person can really bottleneck a group, and even though we were a haunted house and those people were our raison d'etre, we couldn't really indulge them too much if we wanted to get all the groups through in a given night. Terrified is fine, but frozen in terror is not. Get a move on.
I worked for the several years of the Haunted Schoolhouse's existence with a friend of the family, a woman my mother taught with, the wife of our family's lawyer, and the mother of two boys a few years younger than me who took piano lessons from the same teacher (come to think of it, it was just last Christmas that we spent the holiday with this family). The schoolhouse brought together a wide range of adults and kids and it was the best kind of work: fun work. No one got paid (except in some free concessions), but we had fun, we worked together to save the community center, and we scared the bejesus out of a lot of people.
I don't have a lot of really definite memories of the Haunted Schoolhouse, mostly just impressions. The one distinct memory I have is of a woman who was a guide, who dressed as a witch. She rarely broke character and she was creepy as hell. Each week she'd bring in something creepy, for instance: a ziplock bag of eyeballs. Not fake ones, either--real honest-to-goodness eyeballs. In real life, she was a farmer and I guess pig eyeballs aren't all that hard to get when you know the people down at the meat packer's. Creepy, disgusting, and perfect. It's those little touches that make the different between hokey and spooky, I think. I mean, when you stop and think about it, it's amazing that anyone is scared by a haunted house. You know going in that it's just a bunch of folks in costumes in the dark; at worst, you'll be startled here and there by a well-placed surprise. Nonetheless, people routinely suspend their routine expectations and willingly give up disbelief: for that time inside the haunted house, people are willing to expect their own imminent demise in some gruesome fashion and pay for the privilege. If the actors make the right moves, if they get into the right mood, they can help that suspension of disbelief, but ultimately the visitors have to be "willing" participants, and by and large they are--even when they're frozen in terror--and they sometimes were--it's a willing terror.
Ultimately it's about choices on both sides. People make of haunted houses--and everything else--what they want. If they're too cool to suspend their disbelief, too busy sneering at the obvious fakeness of the whole thing, well, maybe they get some kind of satisfaction out of that. If they want to get into it and enjoy the experience, then they'll have a hell of a lot of fun. Given the holiday we're talking about, that seems appropriate, doesn't it?
Happy Halloween.
While I was growing up, the school was owned by a community group. Besides hosting annual dinners for Thompson alumni, the building hosted some community center types of things--I remember a youth basketball league, but not much else. As it grew more difficult to keep up with the heating bills and maintainence costs, a new idea was tried that kept the place afloat as a community resource for a few more years: in the weeks leading up to Halloween, the old Thompson School became The Thompson Haunted Schoolhouse. People from all over our community pitched in to help out with this, from designing and building the scenes to running a concession stand, "acting" in the haunted house, and guiding visitors through. I must have been in late elementary school and/or junior high in the years that this was in full swing. I served as a "rear guide." Visitors to the haunted house were taken through by an adult guide who spun the stories and led the way while many of us kids were rear guides who accompanied the group and made sure they kept moving. One really frightened person can really bottleneck a group, and even though we were a haunted house and those people were our raison d'etre, we couldn't really indulge them too much if we wanted to get all the groups through in a given night. Terrified is fine, but frozen in terror is not. Get a move on.
I worked for the several years of the Haunted Schoolhouse's existence with a friend of the family, a woman my mother taught with, the wife of our family's lawyer, and the mother of two boys a few years younger than me who took piano lessons from the same teacher (come to think of it, it was just last Christmas that we spent the holiday with this family). The schoolhouse brought together a wide range of adults and kids and it was the best kind of work: fun work. No one got paid (except in some free concessions), but we had fun, we worked together to save the community center, and we scared the bejesus out of a lot of people.
I don't have a lot of really definite memories of the Haunted Schoolhouse, mostly just impressions. The one distinct memory I have is of a woman who was a guide, who dressed as a witch. She rarely broke character and she was creepy as hell. Each week she'd bring in something creepy, for instance: a ziplock bag of eyeballs. Not fake ones, either--real honest-to-goodness eyeballs. In real life, she was a farmer and I guess pig eyeballs aren't all that hard to get when you know the people down at the meat packer's. Creepy, disgusting, and perfect. It's those little touches that make the different between hokey and spooky, I think. I mean, when you stop and think about it, it's amazing that anyone is scared by a haunted house. You know going in that it's just a bunch of folks in costumes in the dark; at worst, you'll be startled here and there by a well-placed surprise. Nonetheless, people routinely suspend their routine expectations and willingly give up disbelief: for that time inside the haunted house, people are willing to expect their own imminent demise in some gruesome fashion and pay for the privilege. If the actors make the right moves, if they get into the right mood, they can help that suspension of disbelief, but ultimately the visitors have to be "willing" participants, and by and large they are--even when they're frozen in terror--and they sometimes were--it's a willing terror.
Ultimately it's about choices on both sides. People make of haunted houses--and everything else--what they want. If they're too cool to suspend their disbelief, too busy sneering at the obvious fakeness of the whole thing, well, maybe they get some kind of satisfaction out of that. If they want to get into it and enjoy the experience, then they'll have a hell of a lot of fun. Given the holiday we're talking about, that seems appropriate, doesn't it?
Happy Halloween.
Your comments, as always, are most welcome. (6)