One of the highlights of the elementary school year was the annual Halloween carnival each fall. It was a big deal to all of us kids.
There were booths with fun activities: bottle ring toss, a dunking booth, a weight guesser, hole in one golf, bobbing for apples, and a bingo game in a cafeteria with a chili supper. But the big highlight was a scary spook house.
You see, Amelia Elementary had once been an independent school district five miles west of Beaumont, Texas. As such, it had a gym that was built with dressing rooms located under the bleachers below ground. It was dark and spooky down there - on a regular day much less at night. One year the spook house took on a whole new dimension. Instead of a couple of ghosts rattling chains and a few people howling like banshees, there was an added attraction of a homemade casket. The casket looked real. It was sitting on a platform. When you came into the dressing room, a ghost invited you to get into the casket. My friends and I looked at each other. No one wanted to do it. We dared each other, double dog-dared and even triple dog-dared one another until I got into the casket. Everything was fine for about two seconds.
You see, I was not alone in the casket. All of a sudden, two big arms came up from below my body squeezing me tight. Honestly, I yelled loud enough to wake the dead. I was so scared, kicking my feet and struggling. My friends, who were standing about three feet away, were scared to the point of screaming and turning around to run. The way we came in was blocked by a very big man made up to look like Frankenstein. More screaming, and then the panicked herd turned around to run out the other end. Meanwhile I was released from the death grip in the casket to join the stampede outside.
After a few minutes of gulping down air, we started telling each other how scared we looked and then laughing. About then we heard the next group behind us screaming their heads off. Of course, we thought that that was so funny. After a minute or two we went over to the chili supper for safety in numbers.
By the way, we avoided the spook house the next year.
