Frighteningly Good

Ray Bradbury recalls his family’s zeal for Halloween.

- Ray Bradbury

 I HAVE ALWAYS CONSIDERED Halloweens wilder and richer and more important than even Christmas morning. The dark and lovely memories leap back at me as I recall my ghostly relatives, and the things that creaked stairs or sang softly in the hinges when you opened a door.

For I have been most fortunate in the selection of my aunts and uncles and midnight minded cousins. My grandma gave me her old black-velvet opera cape to cut into bat wings when I was eight. My aunt gave me some white candy fangs to stick in my mouth to make the most terrible smiles. A great-aunt encouraged me in my witchcrafts by painting my face into a skull and stashing me in closets to induce cardiac arrest in passing relatives or upstairs boarders. My mother corrupted me completely by introducing me to Lon Chaney in The Hunchback of Notre Dame when I was three.

In sum, Halloween has always been the celebration for me and mine. And those Halloweens in the late 1920s and early ’30s come back to me now at the least scent of candle wax or aroma of pumpkin pies.

AUTUMNS WERE A combination of that dread moment when you see whole windows of dime stores full of nickel pads and yellow pencils meaning School Is Here and also the bright promise of October, that stirring stuff that lurks in the blood and makes children break out in joyful sweats, planning ahead.

For we did plan ahead in the Bradbury houses. We were three families on one single block in Waukegan, Ill. My grandma and, until he died in 1926, grandpa lived in the corner house; my mom and dad, and my brother Skip and I, in the house next door to that; and around the block my Uncle Bion.

One of the prime Halloween years was 1928. Everything that was grandest came to a special climax that autumn.