The Fine Art of Scaring Kids
From 2011
Okay, okay, I’ll admit it. It was all my fault. I know that because my wife, Bun, told me. But it was so much fun, scaring my four little home-raised urchins.
For several years, we lived in an old house with a damp, creepy cellar. We stored canned goods and fresh fruit and vegetables down there. I would be in my office hunched over a typewriter when I would hear Bun yell, “I need someone to go down to the cellar and get me an onion!” I would immediately leap up and race down to the cellar. No, silly, not to get an onion, but to scare the dickens out of the kid finally selected for the errand. After a while I would detect sounds of the selected victim cautiously coming down the steps. “I know you’re down here, Dad, and you better not try to scare me!”You can see what a challenge it got to be. Even if they knew I was there, my Hunchback of Notre Dame routine, in which I came shuffling out of a dark corner, still produced satisfying screeches and set the kid flying up the stairs. I’d grab an onion and haul it up to the kitchen. Eventually, of course, the kids got on to all my routines and the fun went out of it. They all knew I would be hiding in the cellar. They would stand at the top of the stairs and yell down, “Dad, bring up an onion when you come.”
Eventually, the children reversed the routine on me. Rushing off to work, I’d open a closet door to grab my coat and a little arm would reach out from among the hanging garb, silent, just a small white arm with wiggling fingers heading right for me. I tell you, it was downright evil! I don’t know where kids pick up that sort of thing.
Flash forward until the time our youngest, Erin, is a teenager. We have just climbed aboard a narrow craft at the carnival in Seattle Center and are about to float through a shadowy tunnel somehow connected to The Haunted House. Daughters Erin and Peggy are in the seat just ahead of Bun and me. I know Erin will be suspicious if I try to pull anything scary on them. As we go bumping along through the tunnel, ghastly scenes appear on each side of us in lighted sections. I slip off a shoe and sock. As we enter a darkened area again, I reach up with my leg and wiggle my toes along the back of Erin’s neck. She turned around, grinning, and said, “I know that’s you, Dad!”
“What?” I said. Then I held up both hands so she could see all my fingers, the toes of my right foot still tickling the back of her neck. The loud wavering scream this produced lifted our fellow passengers a good six inches off their seats. They certainly got their money’s worth from that haunted house!
A WORD OF WARNING: Do not play this trick on one of your offspring unless you are willing to go around with a massive charley horse in one leg for the better part of a month.
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