Katie Pumpkinhead’s Pumpkin Patch

 Let’s go on a journey today, back to Halloween season 1999. 1999 was an odd year for Yours Ghoul-ly. I was twelve years old and had just started middle school, and to say it was a hard transition would be an understatement. As someone who had few friends to begin with, being put in a larger, more bustling environment made me feel more alone than ever. Learning the ropes, both relating to the new school environment and being a “pre-teen” when I still felt very much like a child, was difficult. I lived for the weekends, and on Sunday nights, my stomach would tie itself in knots in the way only a scared child’s can. It was very difficult for me to think of anything else, because I knew my next school day was always looming right around the corner. Even the most important things to me tend to get lost in times of major transitions, as if I forget who I am for a bit. There was a Saturday afternoon that year, though, that would change everything, and become a very important part of my H...

 Does anyone else get a deeply sentimental fall feeling when they see cornstalks?  For me, they just radiate autumn energy. There’s nothing that says “autumn” to me quite like seeing cornstalks arranged among pumpkins and scarecrows and hay bales, signaling that my favorite time of year is on its way. To hear them rustle when a breeze hits them, immediately takes me to a corn maze in mid-October, anticipating Halloween while trying to find my way around.  However, I recently remembered  why cornstalks are such a prominent, essential part of autumn/Halloween for me, and to say it’s kind of a funny story would be an understatement!  Somewhere between the ages of about five and eight, I went somewhere with my Aunt Trish one weekend. On the way home, she decided to stop at one of the local farms. I can’t remember if this was her original intention or not, but she decided, while we were there, to pick up her cornstalks for the season for her outdoor decorating. Aunt ...

It was evident from the age of four that she wasn’t like the other children. Other children believed in things like fairies and unicorns and Santa Claus.  Other children’s favorite holiday was Christmas. At one point, in school, someone had decided to take a ‘favorite holidays’ survey to make a pie chart. It backfired in the poor child’s face; everyone chose Christmas. She did, too, not wanting to be the 1%. But it was a lie. It was always a lie. From the first time she trick-or-treated, she felt something. At first she wrote it off as the atmosphere of the evening. That was how you were supposed to feel on Halloween, was it not? Some kind of strange magic in the air? As if someone, or some thing, or some combination of the two, was watching you? Oddly enough, it didn’t scare her. She was afraid of many things, which is why it always baffled people as to why her favorite holiday was Halloween, if she chose to tell them so. But this presence that she felt, every Halloween night, was...