We moved from a small town in Michigan to our family’s farm in Kansas in the summer of 1947. Things were quite primitive as there was no electricity, running water, or indoor plumbing of any kind. By day, my twin brother, Steve, and I felt like two ducks in a chicken yard, but at night, we turned into chickens.—Yes, we two fourth-graders were terrified of the dark. Steve and I were not happy campers in that far away time. One particular object of our revulsion was the outhouse. It looked like a refugee from a ghost town and the sight of it appalled us even in daylight. The structure was drafty, smelly, and God only knows what creepy-crawlies lurked just beneath the slivery seat. Bad as it was in the day time, it was an absolute horror in the middle of the night. Only the most desperate need would drive us from our warm bed, down the steep stairway, out the house, across the lawn to stand peering into the dark, trying to screw up the courage to walk down the path to the outhouse. It sat in splendid isolation at the far edge of what had once been part orchard and part shelterbelt. All the trees that had survived the droughts of the Thirties looked more like the mummified remains of tree corpses. Many boney looking branches lay bare to the sky. It was a spooky place with an air of unkempt desolation about it, even in daylight. We rarely played there. By mid-October, the place looked even more skeletal as the leaves started dropping in earnest. It did not help that we had discovered a whole library of literature classics, which we spent the summer reading. One of the stories was Washington Irving’s “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.” We should have never read it. The path to the outhouse passed between two gnarled trees at the edge of the lawn, past a bunch of eerie-looking plum thickets to the outhouse, which was surrounded by more twisted and unfriendly-looking trees. The crude door gaped partially open, its rusty hinges creaking as it swung in the wind; like a portal into Hell. It was enough to make one seriously consider taking a dump right there at the edge of the lawn. Our fertile imaginations had turned that short path into a very long Sleepy Hollow of our own. Finally, necessity would force us to take one slow step after another toward our doom. Sometimes, we would even imagine that we saw a glow behind the door; and we knew the headless guy was waiting. Eventually, we would arrive and take care of our business as quickly as possible. The trip back to the house was a lot faster! Happy Halloween! Jeremy CREDITS: Figure: DAZ's Luke; StephanieBT's "Alexander" skinmat; AprilYSH's Reivel Hair. Weeds: Modualz (RDNA).