You ever think about how many people are dead? How many animals? How many bugs have lived and died and lived and died, even just today?
There’s a small cemetery behind my house, and it is sinking into the hillside as the hillside sinks toward our houses. The idea that some of the bones have migrated under the houses themselves is not unfathomable, given how many have actually made their way to the creek. And the creek is far, far below these houses, at least in terms of bone travel.
The headstones that remain tilt like a child propped them up, willy nilly and drunk. The trees have grown through and around them, cracking marble into puzzle pieces, swallowing the forgotten. When the wind blows, which it does constantly here, you can tempt yourself into hearing the groan of roots under stone. Behind you, and for whatever reason it is always behind you, two roped swings sway amidst the new aspens and the old graves. It is creepy, and it is delightful.
Every year, right around when the light shifts and the air thins, something in us wants to be spooked. Not terrified—just unsettled. Making eyes at death from across the room with the ring of life on our finger. We crave creaking doors, flickering candles, and ghost stories told in shadow. We want to watch fog curl around our ankles and feel the small shiver that says: something else is here. Spooky season is about skeleton décor and candy corn, but it’s older than that. It’s older than Halloween, older than the word “spooky” itself. For all the LEDs and cities that never sleep, we’re still organisms that move quickly through dusk to be sheltered by night.
A bit of history, long before skulls at HomeGoods and polyester costumes from Spirit Halloween stores, some of my ancestors celebrated Samhain—celebrating the end of the harvest season and the beginning of winter. They believed the line between living and spirit blurred, and so they made offerings to keep peace between the two. In Mexico, families still welcome loved ones home with marigolds and sugar skulls for Día de los Muertos. In Europe, church bells still toll on All Souls’ Day. In China, lanterns float down rivers to guide wandering ghosts. Across continents, the instinct is the same: when the light fades, we reach for what lingers. We don’t light candles to banish the dark. We light them so we can sit beside it.
There’s something deeply regulating about safe fear. Horror psychologists call it controlled exposure: a way to process anxiety without real danger. When we watch scary movies, carve skulls into pumpkins, or wander haunted houses, our brains rehearse courage. We practice managing adrenaline. We learn, in miniature, that we can survive uncertainty. But it’s more than chemistry. “Spooky” is just another word for shadowed. And after the big and mandatory joy of summer, spooky gives us permission to explore our dark side—to admit that endings are real, that decay can be sexy, that in all our sweat and toil and strife, we are temporary.
This season has always been about thresholds: between light and dark, between harvest and frost. The air smells like endings and damp soil, and yet everything that dies here feeds something else. The trees behind my house prove it every year. Their roots lift headstones, crack them, hold them. The living and the dead are in conversation, even if the living can’t hear it.
Something I like to practice in this season that moves beyond decor, is noticing what unsettles me. Not the obvious things—like car crashes or diagnoses—but the shit that hums in my ribs.
There was fear in my childhood, and that fear is very separate from my day-to-day life now. I can roll it in my hands, consider it as something I can wield and shape. My therapist asked me to let one of those memories knock at my door last week, and she asked if I ever felt like it would win. I shook my head. No, I didn’t. But I’ve spent a lot of time rehearsing that memory. I know the exits, both in real life and in my mind.
When I was a child I had a recurring dream that it was night, and I was alone in a play room filled with windows. Outside each window, I could see skeletons approaching, slowly loping toward me through the mist. There was a backdoor in the room, and I couldn’t get the lock to click. When I got older, and we got AOL on the family computer, I asked in a chat room what you could do about recurring dreams. Someone told me to try going out the door, going to the skeletons instead of letting them come to me.
It feels unfathomable, that over 20 years ago, this was my approach: to ask the void, to ask the skeletons in the computer, how to manage the skeletons in my head. But I followed their advice, and the skeletons began to dance.
It is safe here to walk in the dark. There is no one out there but the ghouls that line your own veins. The mountain lions and the black bears want nothing of their predator. But the night and I have not seen each other in some time. I am wrapped around a baby, the sound of crackling fire playing on the noise machine. Still, I can close my eyes and feel the world thrumming around me, decay feasting before the ice comes.
October isn’t about ghosts. It’s about communion, a conversation between the seen and unseen, the past and the present, the body and the spirit. It allows us to feel the crack between worlds and stand in it without running away.
That’s why it feels good to get into it. It’s honest! For all our light switches and screens, something inside us still wants to sit in the dark and wonder. So light those candles. Walk into the cemetery. Tell that one ghost story. Wear a costume and hang the garlic—not because you believe in monsters, but because you believe in thresholds. Because between autumn and winter, between life and rest, between the headstones and the roots, there is a flicker where you can meet the dark and still come back.
In my youth I spent a summer on a remote, L-4 shack, Forest Service lookout which was a 7 mile, 4,000 ft elevation gain hike from the nearest dirt road. On the dirt road it was another 45 miles to the nearest town. At night the light from my Coleman lantern would reflect back from the 360 degree windows rendering the outside of the lookout an impenetrable darkness to me while becoming a beacon of light on me for anything that may be outside. On those nights I was glad that I was raised without television exposure to imagined monsters and that I had never (and still have never) seen a horror movie. At night I could relax with my dime store novels and trusty German Shepard by my side and with my "non horror exposed" imagination focused on the novel and not any imagined horrors lurking outside. I felt safer there than I ever have in a populated environment.
I think this time of year can be such a perfect opportunity to examine the backrooms and dark attic recesses of our minds and memories and, as you said, turn the old trinkets over in our hands and ask questions about them. Separate ourselves from our experiences and actions and reactions (when we feel safe to, ofc) and look at it with curiosity. What is this old hellraiser contraption and how has it shaped my life? How do I feel about it now versus then? Can I put it away or do we need to let it sit out on the old haunted dresser for a bit longer? (I may have just watched “the cabin in the woods” last night, so monsters are on my mind.)