Minnesota Prairie Roots

SHE LOOKED SWEET ENOUGH, the big blue-eyed doll with cascading blonde curls clutching a teddy bear. But something about the wax doll creeped me out. Maybe I’d seen too many media reports about the annual Creepy Dolls contest at the History Center of Olmsted County, this October upped to a “Creepy Dolls: Murder at the Masquerade Event!”. Whatever the reason, I felt unsettled, as if that doll for sale at Audre’s Attic in Lonsdale was watching me. Any other time of year, I likely would have passed her without a wary thought.

But this close to Halloween, the imagination leans toward the frightful. Scary stuff, depending on your definition of scary, is everywhere. Mostly, it’s all in good fun…unless you decide otherwise.

It’s interesting how just the sight of something ghoulish can trigger a memory. Like the pirate skeleton curling his bony hands around a photo of grapes in the produce section of a local grocery store. The skeleton didn’t frighten me. Rather, it was the grapes that rattled me. I flashed back to a 1960s Halloween party. I was an impressionable kid then, blindfolded and instructed to stick my hand inside a container holding something decidedly cold, wet and roundish. “Cows’ eyeballs,” enthused the older girls hosting the party. I shrieked. Why wouldn’t I? We were in the basement of the local veterinarian’s house. It made total sense to me that I was touching cows’ eyes. I wasn’t. I was fingering cold, wet grapes.

The eyes apparently have it for me in the terror department. I’ve always been vexed by Edgar Alan Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart,” his one short horror story that I remember above all others. An old man’s vulture eye, Evil Eye, led the narrator to commit murder and then confess to the crime after being taunted by an endless ringing in his ears. It’s a macabre story as is Poe’s writing in general.

Screenwriter and filmmaker Alfred Hitchcock matches Poe’s talent in the horror genre. I can’t watch “The Birds” (starring Lafayette, Minnesota native Tippi Hedren) without freaking out. To this day when I hear the raucous caw caw caw of crows, I feel unnerved, as if the birds are waiting to descend upon me.

Black things with wings, including bats and gigantic bugs with pinchers, fit my definition of frightening. Not skeletons. Not spiders. Not Big Foot. Not zombies. But dark winged things, plus mice, centipedes and memories of cold grapes scare me.

Aside from the scary, I appreciate the fun side of Halloween, especially the excitement kids feel in dressing as favorite characters, imagining they are someone they are not. A superhero. A Disney character. An animal. Maybe even Batman, distinctly different than a bat. Wherever their imaginations take them, they race in their costumes—door-to-door and to Halloween events (not held in veterinarians’ basements) to gather bags full of candy.

The little witches, dinosaurs, Spider Men and more skirt doorstep jack-o-lanterns, guts pulled out in strings of seeds and pulp. Unpleasant in an Edgar Alan Poe sort of way. Only painted pumpkins are spared disembowelment.

Halloween mixes fun and fright. Over-sized bugs and skeletons. Candy. Creepy dolls. Cute princesses. Horror stories. Parties. And, if the mind (or the eye) wanders far enough, cold grapes persuasively re-imagined as cows’ eyeballs.

© Copyright 2023 Audrey Kletscher Helbling