For the 5 or 6 of you who read these articles, you know I took a break when the scare season hit so that I could focus on coverage and also recover from an injury that ironically occurred filming mazes. I’m getting around much better now, and I’ve spoken to many of you the last week with one common underlying theme woven somewhere in the conversation, post Halloween depression.  

Back in the day many years ago I attributed it to coming down from the candy rush.  It was the time when the bottom of the plastic orange pumpkin was beginning to show, or worse when Mom made us put the remaining few pieces of candy in a plastic bag so that the beloved and essential trick-or-treat candy collecting magic chalice with the wide jack-o-lantern grin could go safely again in the attic for 11 months.

Now it’s actually harder.  Halloween has become the second biggest decorating holiday.  Can you believe that?  We’re number two now behind the day that is already taking over the theme-parks and shopping malls at a contagion rate that would scare the daylights out of the CDC.

And for those of us who have found ways to stay connected to the haunts and haunt makers, who are a part of this newly growing and evolving community that keep the scares in their hearts all year long, its amazing to see people embrace the spider webs and hanging bats more exponentially each year.  Seriously, if you visited Home Depot this year in September you saw the whole Christmas decoration filled with decor and largely overshadowed by a huge inflatable black dragon who had fully flapping wings!  Jack Skellington must be grinning his bony grin in Halloweentown as we speak.

So as the season wound down this year, and I was largely sidelined, AND as that dark feeling descended.  Not the dark feeling we enjoy about the whole season, but the heavier that gravity pull of melancholy that comes as the fog machines in Knott’s Ghost Town are retired for the year, and the maze walls rapidly disappear everywhere.  I asked myself what was I actually going to miss the most.

I thought about my friends and fellow writers here most of all.  I remember us gathering several times over the summer to figure out coverage, and target what we wanted to cover for the season.  If you are a regular reader you know this was never where I imagined I’d be,  I’m someone who set out to be a regular writing contributor to the site.  I wanted to bring VR video to the site, and have been able to build out a small but active YouTube.com channel for it.   But there was a lot to cover, so here we are, and about a year ago I started writing the things I loved from childhood that I believe feed into the voracious appetite I seem to have for jump scares and prerecorded shrieks of terror in the night.  (And believe me there is still a lot more 70’s and 80’s weirdness in my head to spill out here.) 

And thinking about the amazing group of people I have met through the site, the writers, TV and movie makers, haunt designers, marketing people, alternative theatre creators, and all around horror fans that we swim with from late summer until the turkeys are filling the freezer section of the local stores, I realize just how incredible each and every one of you really are.

And I realize that the depression that always seemed to fall all those years ago, had nothing to do with the candy, but with missing the laughter and joy of the costumes, and the dark wanderings with neighborhood friends collecting that treasure-trove of sugar treats.  So I raise a glass of pumpkin spice coffee (with some Baileys in it of course) to all of you who discovered this years haunt and horror treasures with me (even if its not supposed to be spooky anymore and is supposed to be all harvest-y THIS week)

Friends, Family, fellow Scary Bee’s thank you for being my peeps and the most “killer” part of my life.  AND for keeping the childlike love of Halloween alive in my heart each year.  Hopefully when our lungs have recovered from the artificial smoke and fog we’ve been inhaling the past two, and we get cleared again (By Jon and Jon at Knott’s) for Zombie patrol  (Yes Infected was still my personal favorite this year) I’ll see you all out there again next year…orange plastic pumpkins and all.