Halloween Creepiness

Listen to this …

This afternoon, the wife and I took our two daughters to a farm about an hour away to pick up some pumpkins, navigate a corn maze, take a hay ride. The traffic was horrendous, the girls constantly acted up, I had a day-long headache, but, overall, we all had fun.

On the way back we stopped for some groceries and for some cheap Chinese food since the hour was getting late. A lot of stuff packed into the car trunk. We pulled in to our driveway at 7 and the wife ushered the little ones inside. I unloaded the food, which included a pumpkin pie bought at the farm, hauling it all inside a handful at a time, and then I opened the trunk to get at our three pumpkins and set them up on the stoop.

The creepiness hit me as I lifted up the largest pumpkin, a ten-pounder about a foot in diameter. As I lifted it out of the trunk – something moved inside it!

Shocked, I almost dropped it. The thought of something alive inside the pumpkin – the first thought in my mind – freaked me out a bit. Then I paused as the rational part of my brain kicked in. Was the pumpkin rotted? Did a part of it fall out? No, and no. I turned it over in my hands, even gave it a small shake – nothing. I shrugged and brought it over to the cement stairs of our front porch, and laid in gently against the house.

I backed up a few steps and examined the thing in the twilight, my eye focusing on movement, like a tyrannosaurus rex, to exclusion of everything else.

It sat there, silent and motionless, but I was not satisfied. It was if the damned thing was mocking me.

All during our steamed chicken and broccoli dinner I thought about that movement. Then an image occurred to me, one I nearly forgot. After our hayride, we disembarked on a wooden platform into a pumpkin patch. This was the first time this suburban lad was ever in one. Up till them my only experience with pumpkin patches was Charlie Brown Halloween. As the girls all ran among the vines, I stood back and surveyed the landscape. By golly, but it did remind me of the Alien and Aliens scenes of the egg rooms. Big, fat, orange pumpkins immediately called to my mind the disgusting alien eggs from those two classic SF flicks.

So is it any wonder I imagined something moving inside the big, fat, orange pumpkin we bought and brought back to our home?

(At least, I hope it was just my imagination … )