I love Halloween. More than Christmas. More than Thanksgiving. More than Disneyland or sunny weather or adorable baby kittens.

I have so many wonderful Halloween memories. So many that it’s kind of hard to count them.

When I looked at my calendar today and realized that there’s only six days to Halloween, I couldn’t believe it!

There are so many wonderful memories. So many amazing costumes. I’m sure the rest of the Midnight Society gang will have plenty of fun to share for our Halloween Traditions week!

Today I wanted to share with you my top three memories of Halloween from my childhood.

My Top Three Halloween Memories

#1

My parents loved Halloween. I’m sure they’re responsible for my infatuation. My father is a carpenter, so he’d build a haunted house into the front of our house every year. He’d spend weeks and weeks building, laying out tarps, spray painting fluorescent paint on items to pop under black lights. A neighbor of ours worked in Hollywood on movie sets. One year he loaned us his industrial fog machine. It was huge and worth thousands of dollars, something we would have NEVER been able to afford. We turned on the fog machine, cranked the music, and flipped on the black lights.

The fog rolled out, spilling into neighboring blocks, luring people to our street and to our house. The fog was so thick that we couldn’t even see below our waists. Before long, our entire block was something out of nightmares or a creepy zombie movie. When the Haleys are near, Halloween will appear!

#2

When I was in first grade, I moved to the mountains. We lived at the tip top of a road, at the tip of a peak. We didn’t have many neighbors, especially neighbors with children. That house was haunted, by the way. You can read about that here.

Anywho, Halloween came around. It was cold. Colder than cold. Our parents wanted to drive us from house to house but my brother and I insisted on walking because HELLO. Trick or Treating! It’s not as fun if you don’t walk from house to house and freeze to death.

The first house we knocked on, the people were shocked. They hadn’t gotten a trick-or-treater in twenty years! They had no candy (six-year-old me died a little inside when I heard that).

“Hold on dear,” the old woman said, and scuttled back into her house. She emerged a few minutes later as the air turned the tips of our noses red. She proudly plopped two pennies into my pillow case and two into my brother’s pillow case. I stared down at the shiny copper. Pennies? I couldn’t eat that. And there was no way that pennies could even buy me ONE piece of candy.

The next house was the same story.

“Trick-or-treaters?” the old man exclaimed. “We haven’t gotten trick-or-treaters in twenty years!” He scurried away from the door and came back with a piece of string. One for me, one for my brother. A. Piece. Of. String.

It went on like this all night as my brother and I received a jambalaya of strange coins, objects, and items from homes across the mountain. We may not have received candy, but looking back, it’s one of my most memorable Halloweens and by far, my most interesting bounty yet.

#3

Jolene Halloween may be my Twitter user name during October, but actually, it was never a name that I’d made up for myself. It was a name that I was given. As I mentioned in #1, my father loved to create haunted houses.

When we lived in the mountains, he volunteered to create a haunted house in my elementary school’s gymnasium. There were coffins, werewolves, black lights, spiders, and we even casted the big kids from the local middle school. The big kids would help scare people or act as witches on the main stage, stirring cauldrons of dry ice and goo. But since my father brought Halloween to my school, I was a Halloween fiend. I helped create. I wanted to have a hand in it. I begged to be a witch on stage. If I couldn’t witch, I’d scare. If I couldn’t scare, I’d pass out candy. It was a dream.

And when the kids started to whisper about how scary the haunted house gymnasium was, I beamed. When they asked me if I was scared of it, and my honest answer was no, I felt a sense of pride. Before long, I was known as the girl who loved ghouls and monsters, witches and werewolves, and all things Halloween.

The kids started to call me Jolene Halloween.

To this day, it’s one of the best gifts I have ever been given.

What’s your favorite Halloween memory? Tell me in the comments below! I’d love to hear!

*All GIFs courtesy of Google images. Thanks Google!