Dear Sir:

An Open Letter to the Chainsaw-Wielding Homicidal Maniac at the Haunted Trail,

You’ve just leaped unexpectedly from behind a hay bale, revving your chainsaw motor like a monster truck engine and dripping blood like a soaker hose. And admittedly, I was startled enough to swallow the last half of my fun-sized Snicker bar without chewing.

But I’ve raised two boys to adulthood and have played the “Close Your Eyes and Hold Out Your Hands” game so many times I’m never really surprised by anything. Over the years children have jumped out from behind closed doors, hidden under piles of laundry, and shadowed me down the hall on my midnight trips to the bathroom just for the chance to scream “Boo” and test my bladder control.

I have two kids with cars of their own; one of them, Speed Racer, could make you drop your weapon and go all white around your bloody eye sockets just by offering to chauffer you to the corner for milk. He learned to drive on Crazy Taxi.

My Labrador is the only one in the house who can open the childproof top on the aspirin bottle, and my cat could star in “One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest” if he hadn’t already stalked and eaten the cuckoo. I’ve had a stray ferret follow me home, and a there’s a spider the color of hungry who likes to stop by for a bite when the weather gets cold.

So, I’m sorry if the sight of you didn’t send me into a screaming frenzy, frantically searching for another way out. I’m trying to decide how your mother is going to get those rusty bloodstains out of your best jeans and whether you asked your dad for permission to wear that shirt before you cut the bottom off in the trendy ragged design.

And if you run at me again like you’re gonna give me a permanent bad hair day, let me tell you one thing. The only tidbit I remember from my Senior Women’s Self Defense class is how to stop an attacker from taking my virtue, my purse, or my shopping bags from Discount Day at the mall. So if you’re not wearing an athletic supporter, the only thing you have to protect yourself with is that impotent chainsaw.

But don’t worry. Speed Racer will be glad to take you to the hospital. Be sure to buckle up and keep your bloody hands and feet inside the vehicle until it comes to a screeching halt. And take notes.

You’ll get some great ideas for next year’s Haunted Trail.

Out to Launch

I would rather let my teenaged sons select my spring wardrobe than go through a Halloween haunted house. I may be taking the risk of being seen next May in a stunning camo and chained wallet ensemble, but somehow I’d rather take that risk. It seems like raising two boys would have dulled my susceptibility to the undead wearing mismatched clothes and bearing chain saws long ago, but somehow a grown man chasing me like I’d recovered a fumble and making revving noises until the spit flies frightens me beyond consciousness. Perhaps it’s because I’ve lived long enough to know just what grown men are capable of.

For instance, I know of a man who, with one ill-timed twirl of his office chair, ripped the pull-out drawer of his desk (which he had unfortunately forgotten to un-pull) from its moorings sending thousands of helpless paperclips, ballpoint pens, and TicTacs skittering to their deaths across the floor of his cubicle. Because the drawer had not acted properly according to function and stubbornly refused to recede into the desk upon contact with the chair, he was able to claim that the accident was not his own fault but was, in fact, a hardware problem. The scary part of the story? This man is an employee of the world’s largest defense contractor.

Another example, eerily personal in nature, is this. I have daily contact with, and often wash the underwear of, a man who once worked diligently to create a working tabletop model of a medieval-style trebuchet, for the sole purpose of launching toy farm animals across the kitchen at the dog. Sure, he said he was helping the kids with a school project, but to this day the Labrador looks for flying cows before he’ll set one paw on the linoleum. I couldn’t housebreak the poor animal without setting up training runs through plastic livestock, and he can’t see the movie Twister without going all white around the whiskers.

It is not news that there are men who favor bungee jumping as a form of self expression. Recently, I received a video by e-mail, a form of information transference which upholds the laws of truth, that revealed a victim, er volunteer, dangling by harness from a high horizontal wire. The fact that the scene took place in a large cow pasture and the, um, volunteer was also attached to a team of flannel-shirted engineers atop a John Deere lawn tractor by a long bungee cord gave me pause, especially when the tractor headed downfield at speeds normally associated with phrases such as “Mach 1” and “boom.” The fellow in the harness didn’t pause though, because when the ground crew let go of the tether, he hurtled through space like a cow pie meteor, completed a full somersault with a half twist and landed with gusto in a flourishing maple tree. After that, of course, everybody wanted a turn.

Any one of these guys might be the maniac in the Halloween haunted house you visit. If he’s wielding a chain saw, you can probably make it out alive. But if he’s after you with a bungee cord, you won’t see your family again until you’re starring in a You Tube video with “Fly Like an Eagle” playing in the background.