THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Tuesday, October 31, 1995 TAG: 9510310035
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY ELIZABETH SIMPSON, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Long : 189 lines
Remember when no one ever complained about Halloween being pagan or satanic or downright evil?
When you could decorate your house with witches and ghouls and goblins and ghosts and not be accused of walking with the devil? When there were by-gosh Halloween parties instead of Harvest Festivals?
Remember when you didn't have to X-ray your trick-or-treat candy? When you could tramp across the whole town without fear?
OK, OK, so some of that Halloween spirit is still around, but it's just not the same as it used to be.
But Halloween still evokes more nostalgia than angst for a lot of people out there. We asked readers for their favorite Halloween memories. The stories came rolling in like fog on a dark and eerie night:
Jayne Paphites was 8 years old when she pulled off the best Halloween trick of all.
And got plenty of treats anyway.
She and her neighbor Donald, who was a year younger, were told by their parents they could only go trick-or-treating on their street in Long Island, N.Y.
Dismayed at the prospect of such a limited territory - there were only a dozen or so houses on the street - Jayne and Donald came up with a plan.
They put on their costumes, made the neighborhood circuit and returned to Donald's house, where there was a box full of his older brother's costumes stashed in the attic.
Donald and Jayne each donned a new costume and made another round of the neighborhood, returning again and again for another change of costume.
'Round and 'round they went, as pirates, witches, nurses, soldiers, cowboys, before calling it a night, their bags bulging with candy, their feet aching.
``No one was the wiser, at least we didn't think so,'' said Paphites, who now lives in Virginia Beach. ``We thought we had pulled off the greatest Halloween trick of all.''
We don't know whether to take Virginia Beach resident Mary Snead's story seriously or not. Is it truth? Is it family legend? Is it urban myth? Is it something out of an Edgar Allan Poe book? We don't know. But it's a heck of a good yarn, so we'll ask readers to suspend their disbelief a moment.
Snead's Halloween story is about a boy named Norman.
No, not Norman Bates, but he might as well be. His name was Norman Harp, and he was the 13th kid of the family, the youngest sibling of Snead's mother. One Halloween night when Norman was 4 years old, the family was getting ready to go trick-or-treating. Norman wanted to go, but while he was running around upstairs getting ready in his bedroom, the others left without him.
He ran down the steps dressed all in black in a knight's outfit. He was carrying a sword. But his mother told him he couldn't go. All the other children had already left. Norman angrily stomped upstairs.
He was never seen again.
What happened that night is the stuff of family lore. Some say he crawled into a hiding place that only he knew about it and was never found. Others say he took off on his bicycle and got hit by a car. ``Some people say he's still alive,'' Snead said.
When Snead went to visit her grandmother's house one Halloween, she could hear the sound of footsteps upstairs. Her grandmother said it was just the wind, but her mother told her it was the sound of Norman getting ready for Halloween night. And that every Halloween you can hear the sound of his footsteps racing across the floor trying to get ready in time.
Her mother also told her that anyone who looks toward Norman's bedroom window will disappear.
The house, which was in Louisville, Ky., has since burned down, but the family can't seem to sell the land, even though land all around it has sold. Could it be (scary music here) haunted?
To this day, Snead still thinks about Norman, especially on Halloween night.
``When a bag of candy rips, or a kid trips over his costume, it's Norman walking around with his long sword,'' she says.
Truth or fiction? You judge.
Halloween 1959 will always stand out in Lisa Cumbia's mind, but not because of a costume.
In fact, she doesn't even remember what she wore that year.
What she remembers is a special ending to a night of trick-or-treating.
The previous summer, Cumbia's father had had an accident in which a metal shard pierced his eye. He had two operations that summer and lost the vision in one eye. Doctors told him he probably would not see again out of the eye.
That Halloween, Lisa's parents took her and her cousin Mike trick-or-treating as usual through their Portsmouth neighborhood. She was 9; her cousin was 5.
They made the rounds of their neighborhood, then went to Lisa's grandmother's home. When they turned down Florida Avenue to go back home, Lisa and her cousin begged to go to one more house before going home.
``We wanted to get as much candy as we could,'' she remembers.
Her father sat in the car and waited for them, testing his hurt eye by covering his good eye with his hand, something he had gotten into the habit of doing over the months since the operation. Before Lisa and Mike could get back in the car, Lisa's father leapt out, saying, ``I can see those headlights!'' pointing to cars coming down the street.
His vision had returned.
``I always think about that on Halloween,'' said Lisa Cumbia, who's now 45. ``If it had happened on another night, we probably wouldn't remember it as well.''
Ruby Lassiter of Norfolk remembers the night she inadvertently scared away all the kids in her Norview neighborhood.
Every year she threw a Halloween party for the kids in the neighborhood. Halloween 1958 was no different, except for one thing.
A friend who worked for an undertaker happened to stop at their home en route to the North Carolina funeral home where he worked.
He happened to have a dead body in the hearse. When Lassiter told the kids about it, they fled.
``I thought it was such an opportune time to have a dead body in the driveway,'' said Lassiter, who's now 72. ``But everyone left!''
Norfolk resident Barbara Lake dressed her 2-year-old daughter, Susan, in a child's-size wedding dress for a Halloween party about 24 years ago.
But the trick was on Lake when her daughter visited Lake's mother soon afterward. Susan saw Lake's wedding photo sitting on a dresser, and said, ``Look, there's Mommy in her Halloween costume!''
Laney Mervis never let adulthood stop her from celebrating her favorite holiday.
Each fall she would fret about her costume, always wanting something out of the ordinary.
With the help of friends and family, she always came up with something unusual. A Pac Man, a Crayola, the Pillsbury dough boy, a Hershey's kiss, the Domino's Noid, a California raisin, the scarecrow from ``The Wizard of Oz,'' a flower in a flower pot. The list goes on.
But she didn't just wear these costumes to parties. She worked as a runner in Hampton Roads delivering documents to law firms and other offices, and each year she'd blithely walked into offices dressed in costume, effectively stopping all conversation and work.
She also made stops at schools, where she worked part time, and the homes of friends and neighbors.
``She didn't want the day to end,'' said her sister, Jo Ann Hofheimer, of Norfolk.
After Mervis was diagnosed with ``scleroderma,'' a disease that damages the connective tissues, she found it increasingly hard to make her usual Halloween effort. But her fans wouldn't let her give up her annual tradition.
Last year, fearing forced retirement, she dressed as Michael Jordon.
Mervis died in April at age 41. But her childlike joy in designing a Halloween costume every year will forever define the holiday to the people who knew her best.
Ronda Woods grew up in Delaware City, Del., and every Halloween the town had a parade in which any one could enter a float.
Each year Ronda and her sister and brother would star in a float concocted by their parents. Ronda's mother would dream up an idea, and her father, a construction worker, would put it together. ``My dad could make anything in the world,'' said Ronda, who's now 34 and a resident of Chesapeake.
One year, the three kids climbed into a wash tub to star as a ``Rub-a-Dub-Dub, Three Men in a Tub'' float. Their father made the tub with cardboard and a can of silver spray-paint, and their mother topped it all off with whipped cream, making it look like the children, naked from the waist up, were sitting in bubbles.
Another year, they put together a ``Little Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe'' float. Another year, Ronda went as a Christmas tree and her brother as a tomato.
``We won a prize every year,'' she remembers.
Go back to the 1930s for the right setting for Margaret W. Beers' most memorable Halloween.
It was at the height of the Depression. ``We had to have fun any way we could,'' said Beers, who now lives in Virginia Beach.
Beer's grandfather was a farmer in what was then Norfolk County. ``He decided it was time to have a party for me. I was the oldest granddaughter,'' she said.
So Beers and her parents invited all their friends. When everyone arrived on Halloween night, her uncle gave a tour of the farm, telling a spooky story about their dead ancestors as they walked around.
Beers' aunts and uncles played characters in the story. One uncle was in an abandoned blacksmith shop, banging on an anvil, playing a long-dead relative who was a blacksmith.
Her aunt was dressed as a witch, cackling over a cast-iron pot in the middle of a pasture. She threw flour in the air to make it look like smoke and told everyone she was cooking up veins of dead ancestors. Then she handed everyone a handful of half-cooked, cold spaghetti.
Another aunt handed out peeled grapes and said they were eyeballs.
``I remember it all very vividly,'' said Beers, who's now 81. ``It was a wonderful day in a wonderful setting, and a very gruesome story.''
Jo Anne Brausewetter remembers a Halloween more than 30 years ago when she went trick-or-treating dressed as a gypsy.
One of her friends was dressed in the same costume, so Brausewetter went home mid-trick-or-treat. Her mother had gone to the store to buy more candy. So Brausewetter changed costumes, went back out trick-or-treating and arrived back at her door at the end of the evening. Her mother gave her some candy, told her what a sweet costume she had and started to close the door.
``But Mama, it's me, let me in!''
Brausewetter doesn't remember what her second costume was that night. ``It must have been a good one, though, because my own mother didn't recognize me.'' ILLUSTRATION: MARTIN SMITH-RODDEN AND JOHN CORBITT/STAFF ILLUSTRATION
KEYWORDS: HALLOWEEN STORIES by CNB