The Halloween people

This piece was featured first on Oct 29 for One Good Thing, a weekly newsletter brought to you by Alexis Madrigal about his take on Bay Area art, culture & nature. Subscribe today.

In our neighborhood, here on the Oakland-Berkeley border, some people are very into Halloween. Woolsey Street has long been a hotbed of Halloween activity. Hordes of children descend and the people in the houses do not disappoint.

When I say that people here are into Halloween, I do not mean that they give away full-size candy bars, which was my understanding of what it was to be into Halloween. No, people decorate. The words that occur to, as I pass by the houses, year after year, “They went all out.” (Though maybe “They emptied the tank,” should be my new summary, per Valkyries coach Natalie Nakase.)

One house does this whole Betelgeuse thing, a very precise kind of Halloween tableau, and they rig up this massive chute for the candy that extends to their second floor. The key actress in the scene stands up there, FULLY in character, and delivers candy silently and scarily through the chute. It’s awesome. (See pic.) I have never seen her break character, nor met her out on the street. It is, I think, an art form.

A couple blocks away, another house rigs up the craziest contraptions. They’re known for the body that hangs in a tree, waiting to be dropped on the (un)suspecting trick or treaters. But each year, they do a full interactive theater thing. One year, they employed people dressed entirely in black, like even their faces covered, and those people waited in the shadows. One jumped out at one of my kids and she proclaimed, “That scared the living soul out of me.” It was legit terrifying, in the best way. Another year they had someone who appeared to have been bitten in half, who bantered with the kids. It must take a dozen people to stage their whole thing! A production!

When our oldest kid was very tiny—three? It’s getting hard to remember—I could not wait to get them out there into all the Halloween! We came back in minutes, both of us slightly shaken. We learned, as the kids got older, that the little ones should go very early and preferably in a pack shepherded by two, three, even four parents. It was surprisingly easy to lose a mermaid or a superhero in the tumult.

Now, you see, one dynamic that drives Halloween, I have come to realize, is interstreet competition. Though Woolsey-adjacent, our block of Colby was kind of an empty zone fifteen years ago. Our first Halloween in the neighborhood, we (kidless) sat out on the porch with our upstairs neighbor Joyce and awaited the hordes, but it was more of a trickle, and we were reduced to tossing the few kids who came by many extra pieces of candy to avoid getting stuck with the Mounds and Mr. Goodbars.

Things really started to change when our neighbors Ben and Heather moved in. They eased into their Halloween thing. Heather is the creative mastermind, adding more bits and pieces year by year: spiders crawling up the house, someone seemingly buried in the yard, nods to different horrors here and there. Ben, an engineer, can seemingly rig up anything. There can be electronic elements, pulley systems, an infinity mirror (how does that work anyway). One year, he built a whole PVC structure. The two of them are an incredible team, and also, it is insane!

Slowly, Colby started to change. Once somebody goes all in, the pressure is on for other people to up their games. I wouldn’t say that we’ve ever reached true Woolsey status, but the houses that empty the tank draw enough kids to make it worth it for everyone to be prepared and at least put up some obligatory spider webs or skeletons.

Though this competitive dynamic is real, it would be a mistake to think that the Halloween traditions are a version of Keeping Up with the Jones’s. That’s not it. Nobody puts in all this work to best their neighbors, but rather to join with them. There’s an infectious, non-denominational quality to the Halloween spirit. Zombies, vampires, werewolves, skeletons, demons, backrooms creations… All are welcome.

And at the very center of it, the beating heart, the radioactive core is… children having fun. This isn’t literacy or STEM training. There is nothing do-goodery about it. Halloween is just about making kids happy, decorating their memories with the night they headed out as Zelda or a smoky-eyed witch or a tiger and had the living soul scared out of them and the candy stuffed into them.

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Alexis Madrigal, Co-Host, Forum

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I’m doing a talk thing at Stanford about … being a public intellectual. Yeah, I don’t know what I’m going to say either, but it should be fun. (It’s November 12!)
FRIDAY: Asteroids and Astronauts at the top of The Great Tower of San Francisco! What a dream event.
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