The Vampire in the Basement

For some reason or another I was thinking about the times as a kid I was really, really scared. There weren’t many times. I don’t want to give the impression that I was always walking around in mortal danger. Most of the times I was truly frightened could probably be chalked up to an overactive imagination. After all, every week I was checking out library books on UFOs, bigfeet, sea monsters, traditional bogeymen like werewolves and vampires. I also clocked in countless hours in front of the tube, filling my susceptible mind with such fare as Hammer films, Japanese big monster movies, those bug-eyed aliens from those black-and-white 50s SF invasion flicks, Chariots of the Gods, the Twilight Zone, and, of course, In Search Of, with Leonard Nimoy’s creepy and hypnotic narration.

Recently I did a post on how spooky it was to stay in my parent’s weekend house in the partially secluded woods of upstate New York. But driving around earlier, my mind wandered to the scary parts of my youth, wondering what incident would take the prize. Almost immediately, the vampire in the basement episode came to mind.

Sometime in the fall of 1979 the miniseries Salem’s Lot, based on Stephen King’s second novel of a few years earlier, aired on regular TV. I don’t remember all the circumstances around it, but for some reason it seemed to be an event at my house. It probably aired over a couple of days, and I remember my father watching it, as well as my mother and possible an uncle or aunt. It wasn’t like me and my younger brother were allowed to watch it; more likely attention wasn’t focused on us, so we were able to sneak in big chunks of the show. Or maybe they just didn’t think it was too scary for us. I don’t recall.

What has stayed with me all these years is: That movie was scary as hell.

And, unfortunately, it coincided with our project – my brother and me, that is – to spend the night sleeping alone in the basement.

Mistake. Big mistake.

Our house wasn’t big; it wasn’t small, either, but as active boys we needed space to roam, especially in the fall and winter when the days shortened and it darkened earlier. So we spent a lot of time in our basement. It was unfinished more or less. Concrete floor because it flooded now and then, cinder block walls. Pipes along the walls. A couple of windows that tilted in and up to let in fresh air during the summer. Rafters in the ceiling. There was a section under the stairs where my parents had a sink and a couple of old cabinets and the cat’s litter box. Facing the stairs was my father’s domain: one full quarter of the basement cordoned off with what I think was a rug or something hanging from the rafters and wrapped around the metal columns that kept the house from collapsing downward. In this dark area was the furnace and water heater, my father’s workbench and cabinets where he kept fishing supplies. A pile of wood which attracted lots of spiders bordered this area. The other half of the basement was ours, and we filled it with toys, a red table for arts and crafts, and a round toy chest.

We got it in our heads to spend the night down there sleeping. Sort of a rite-of-passage, a bar mitzvah in courage for us Catholic boys. We couldn’t just sleep out in the open, though, and not just because of the bugs. Because of the dark, you see. So we overturned a reclining chair, threw a blanket over it, fortified it with some boxes and stuff, and created a secure club house. Now, the task of surviving the night down there seemed manageable. My mother gave us permission after inspecting this contraption.

Problem was, CBS decided to air Salem’s Lot.

Do you remember the vampire in that movie? For years and years and years we’ve been indoctrinated to think of vampires as suave, debonair, refined. Lady killers, no pun intended. To be honest, I think Bela Lugosi’s Dracula was the least-scary of all the monster movies I watched as a kid. But Salem’s Lot? It is one of the few books of King’s that I did not read, so I don’t know if it was his idea or the producers or directors of the miniseries. But the evil vampire, Barlow, was downright frightening. Do you know who Nosferatu was? That was a more authentic vision of the vampire. Scrawny, balding, yet intensely demonic, fanged, with intense eyes, and long sharp nails at the ends of long thin fingers.

Scary as hell for an impressionable kid.

But we could not go back on our plan. Manhood, approaching from just around the corner, it seemed, demanded we go forward. Let me tell you, going down those basement steps after having watched the end of Salem’s Lot, my younger brother behind me, took the strongest act of will I have ever had to summon up to that point. The light switch, you see, was at the top of the stairs. So we had to go down those steps in the dark to get to our fortress. Yikes.



By putting one foot in front of the other, I made it down to the bottom of the stairs. I recall light from somewhere, probably the kitchen upstairs, filtering down illuminating our way. However, I was prepared to keep us safe throughout the long hours until dawn. I stashed two pieces of wood, nailed in the rough shape of a cross, in our club house earlier in the day. Now, there remained only one last thing to do.

I don’t know if my brother understood what I was doing (nor did I, most likely), but I remember taking that makeshift cross and blessing it in the Name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. I made the sign of the cross. Now I knew we were safe, and would be safe. Still, though, it was one heck of a scary night. Those staccato noises that issue from a house only at night – every snap and creak was a vampire, sniffing its way up to that overturned recliners, smelling the food inside but sensing that it was guarded by a Power greater than its evil, nasty self. We survived.

Where did an eleven-year-old boy get the idea to sanctify two crude pieces of wood in the shape of a cross? From the vast catalogue of anti-vampire tactics stored in my noggin, from those hours and hours of research in front of the television set!

In any event, we survived. And we never did anything as reckless and stupid again as spending the night with the vampire in the basement.