Halloween

Halloween. The best holiday of the year. Better than Dougmas. It's all about sugar fed fear. It's also the only time of year you can wear a mask. And like it says in the first book of Doug "if they can't see the face, they can't use the mace".

First, the sugar.
I go to http://www.candydirect.com/ for my stocks. I mean just look at the crap they have in stores these days. I used to be able to go out and pick up a six pack or better of Snickers and other candy bars and then at Halloween they'd put out what they call "fun sized" bars. But now it's "fun sized" all year round and for Halloween they sell stuff that's even smaller than that. How lame is that? What candy bar executive thought people would like candy bars that can be fitted nasally? There's something very wrong when your candy bar is a choking hazard.
If you want a candy bar you have to look in the impulse items as you check out. But you can't go there to stock up for Halloween. That's why I go to the internet. I buy the boxes that are stuffed in the impulse item lane.

Next, the fear.
As a kid I had a neighbor that kind of freaked me out. Mom and the kids were alright. The dad however almost never spoke and always seemed to be the grizzled guy sitting in the shadows drinking beer and watching the game. Sometimes he'd go out back and shoot at the trash/burn barrel. So on one Halloween as I went over to their house for the first of the evening's candy I saw a body on the front porch with a knife in it's chest. I had a conflict. It was Halloween and that was probably fake, but it looked soooo real... to a little kid anyway. So I stopped and watched it. I came a bit closer, but I was really expecting the dad to come out any second and move the body. Finally, I ran back to my Mom and Dad who were still just strolling across our yard and warned them that the neighbor had killed someone.

If you've played Thief 2 then you know the room of which I'm about to write. The Haunted Library.
My parrot loves the Thief games. She'll ignore the screen most of the time for most games, but for Thief she's perched on my shoulder watching intently and making the occasional odd comment. So we were working our way through hidden passages when we started hearing the strangest sound ahead. Voices... but, not. You couldn't make out what they were saying. So we approached the door and listened. Whispering and ... something. We opened the door. A dark room. More whispering on the wind. Row after row of bookshelves. That's row after row of blind corners from which anything could step and come after us. We start down the carpeted row so that nothing can hear our footsteps. We move slowly. Watching. Listening. As we reach the first shelves, instead of stepping out, something materializes about a foot in front of us. Gandolf screams and flaps across the room. I scream and leap from my chair. By the time we look back at the screen the figure is gone and my character is fine.
So last Halloween I ran that level up to that room, stuck my character down a row of shelves where he could hear the best sound without the killer ghost getting him and threw the speakers out the window. Then I put a squat candelabra over the door. That's all. Candles and a good soundtrack. Kids who didn't know who lived here didn't want to walk up the sidewalk. One kid, about 5, froze half way up the sidewalk and wouldn't move. Some high school girls argued about which of them would lead the way up the sidewalk. For the next week I'd have people I never saw before coming by and complimenting my Halloween setup.
This year I have a good microphone and some adequate audio editing software. I did some web searches to get some good audio clips. Fire and brimstone preachers, shortwave radio broadcasts, and recorded clips from some radio programs that I couldn't tweek with software because they were RealAudio. I have about 9 minutes of audio that was able to get people in their nice comfortable cubicles to take a step back from their computer. I'm putting this on CD and leaving it on loop.

Here's the audio clip.
http://www.randalljennings.com/halloween_sounds.mp3
Proper adjustment of the volume is important, but you should be able to appreciate it even if you have it loud enough to hear clearly.

Halloween: when fear is fun.