Furniture that Goes Bump in the Night

There is a company in Columbus, OH that creates scary animated characters and creations that elevate from beds or fly out of television sets for amusement parks, movies, etc. The fridge with a family (of moving body parts) inside it, complete with an inside blood-streaked door is truly inspired and truly creepy. But even though I am not normally so inclined, there is something about Halloween that awakens the ghoulish prankster inside of me. If I had the budget and space, I would adorn the hallway in front of my apartment door in a heartbeat with a hearse drawn by an invisible horse or the angel of death animated figure.

Looking back on my personal Halloween adventures, I must admit that they were pretty tame. One year I took everything out of the toy box, hid in it just before I knew my sister would be coming and jumped out, scaring the heck out her and making her scream pretty loudly. Over the ensuing years, my sister took her revenge by yelling “boo” when I least expected it, popping out from around corners when I walked into the living room and playing other harmless pranks that involved pot lids, talcum powder and the occasional water balloon. It was never malignant or vengeful; just a little sibling rib-poking.

By far, the best Halloween stunt my sister pulled was the time she put honey on the back of my chair. The chairs in our dining room were ladderbacks, and somehow she must have noticed that I always pulled my chair out by grabbing hold of the middle rung. That Halloween night when I was called to dinner, I pulled my chair out as usual and sat down. But something was in the way and blocking my knees. When I lifted the tablecloth up to investigate, I came face to face with a coiled snake (albeit a rubber one). That didn’t matter; I was terrified of snakes of any ilk. I reared back. I had long hair at the time, so I’m sure you can guess what happened next when I leaned back in the chair. What my mother had to say about honey on her good dining chair is another story for another day.

One of my best friends, Barbara, and I no longer live in the same city. We first met at the restaurant where she was a shift supervisor. The owners of the restaurant where we worked always decorated the place for all the seasonal holidays – Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, Valentine’s Day and Easter. Since Barbara was supervisor of the evening shift, most of the actual decorating fell to her. All of us on her shift had to help. While she would use most of the same decorations from year to year, somehow she always managed to make it look different.

But at Halloween Barbara would really outdo herself. Skeletons dangled from light fixtures; spiders hovered overhead in the stalls of the women’s washroom; the huge front window was one big tangled web. I didn’t give it much thought until a few years later I had stopped by her place on Oct. 31st for a quick visit and discovered that her house resembled the restaurant almost exactly. Except the pumpkins – the ones at the restaurant were made of plastic and the ones that decorated Barbara’s front steps were real and meticulously hand-carved. And yes, in true Martha Stewart fashion, the seeds had been toasted and the pulp magically transformed into pies. Barbara loved Halloween.

In her household, it is the adults, (well mostly her) and not the kids who play Halloween pranks on each other. When her daughter was four, Barbara rigged the armoire door in the hallway outside of her bedroom with fishing line so that when her daughter walked by, one of the doors opened slowly and Casper the Ghost floated out. After her daughter screamed appropriately, Barbara showed her how the trick was done. The way Barbara described the incident to me in one of our lengthy phone calls (by this time I had moved away), it was almost as if I had been there in person.

After seeing the movie “Jack the Bear” for the first time, I hurried to the phone and called Barbara. Based on the book by Dan McCall, Danny DeVito plays a TV horror-movie host. As the father of two sons, he tries to keep his family and himself from falling apart after his wife’s death. Of course, as someone who’s in the business of the macabre, John Leary (DeVito’s character) loves Halloween and the way he decorated the front yard and the house instantly brought Barbara and her similar passion to mind. But Barbara has never seen the movie and every time I ask her, she admits, that even though other people have mentioned it to her as well, she still hasn’t seen it.

I guess she doesn’t need any help with Halloween decorating ideas. All Barbara needs is some pumpkins, a few cardboard skeletons, a piece of fishing line, an old white pillow case and some scary furniture.

Happy Halloween!