In this episode, Aaron recalls the Halloween his fifth-grade classroom transformed into a haunted house nightmare. What began as a fun escape became a journey through fear, as he found himself trapped in darkness, facing more than just jump scares.
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Story created & performed by: Aaron Calafato
Senior Audio Engineer: Ken Wendt
Additional vocals: Cori Birce
Art: Pete Whitehead
Original Music: thomas j. duke
Transcript
Aaron Calafato:
I found myself lying in the fetal position in a haunted house, absolutely terrified. And the only question was, would I open my eyes to see the potential way out? Find out right after the music.
I love Halloween because it's part of my favorite season, and that is fall. But here's the thing: I hate haunted houses. And even if you disagree, I think you'll at least see where I'm coming from. Now, I love Halloween, but I like a PG version of Halloween. I don't like the gory, terrifying nature of some haunted houses and some of the movies out there.
Here's my thesis in life. There's a lot of good stuff, but as we know on this planet, there's a lot of bad stuff.
You might be going through a bad time in your life right now. Like Rocky Balboa said, “Hey, yo. It's not all sunshine and rainbows.” You might know someone who's going through something right now. Look at it from a global scale. There's a lot of terrible horrors occurring in real life.
That's nothing to glorify, okay? Next, let's say in the best-case scenario, you live in a safe environment. Like me. I'm in the suburbs. I go out onto my back porch just the other day. We have a deer problem.
They used to be majestic to me. I have to be honest. I loved the movie The Deer Hunter. Sometimes I would just watch it or even look outside and have that same experience that Robert De Niro had when he was just looking out at the mountaintop and this beautiful deer, and you're stunned by its majestic nature.
I used to feel that way. We’ve got thousands running around here, and they've kind of taken the magic out of it. You know, it's like someone who overstays their welcome. Seen you for the last three weeks; it's time for some space. But what I'm saying is I go out in my backyard, and there is like a buck with huge antlers going about 60 miles per hour, just a few feet away from my back porch.
Now, think about it. If I'm in the wrong spot at the wrong time, and that deer is feeling a certain way, it could gore us to death. So even when things are safe, there's a lot of risk.
So my question is, if that's the case, why are we putting ourselves in terrifying situations in haunted houses? And to an extreme, why are we going into haunted houses that get even weirder and trap you and terrify you? I mean, aren’t you scared enough in life? And doesn't that say something to you about your life, that you're feeling and doing pretty good if you need a jolt of terror just to wake you up? I'm just saying.
But I didn't always feel that way. In fact, I didn't know what to think about haunted houses and all that kind of stuff. As a fifth grader at Sidney Fenn Elementary School, there was a really cool event that would happen every Halloween.
It wasn't my classroom; I think her name was Mrs. Stennett, and her class would create a haunted house.
I mean, they transformed this classroom into a theatrical event: smoke, mirrors, sound, blinking lights, characters performing as monsters and terrors and ghouls and stuff.
And the best part was you could buy tickets. And you could buy as many tickets as you wanted. So technically, you could almost miss the whole day because they would run this show, and you could go into this classroom and run through it a bunch of times. I remember asking several of my friends, “Hey, did you guys get your tickets?”
They're like, “Yeah, we got a couple.” I was like, a couple? I broke the piggy bank on this one. I didn’t want to go to school that day. As I'm standing in line – it was a long line; it was a big draw – I started hearing the music getting louder and louder, and then the sounds and the screams of the soundtrack that they were playing, and then the sounds of my friends going into this haunted house. They were coming out different people.
They were really scared, some of them. Some of you who are listening right now are probably like, “I wasn't scared.” Well, guess what? Some of you were. And as I got closer to that door, Mrs. Stennett's classroom wasn't Mrs. Stennett's classroom anymore. It was a pathway to hell.
And I didn’t want to chicken out. So I gave my first ticket over, and I started walking into the darkness. And I gotta be honest, right away, I knew this wasn't going to be good. It got darker and darker, and there was a jump scare here, a jump scare there, and someone reached out and grabbed my arm, and I was like, “Ah, get away!”
Then you would have to go into like this crawl space. They made it almost like a maze. And I noticed that when I was going through the maze-like odyssey, I was starting to feel really weird. And as I started crawling through one portion of it, I don't know what happened; I started freaking out.
Now, I know what this is now, 30 years later. It was a panic attack. I didn't know what it was then, and we really weren't using that kind of language. I was just having a freak out. I couldn’t breathe. I knew in my mind that this wasn’t real, but the transformation of this room and all the elements and being stuck – I think that’s what it was.
I felt like I couldn't get out because there were people behind me, and there were people in front of me, and I didn’t want to cry, and I didn’t know what to do. I was paralyzed, and I literally fell onto the ground in this darkness. I could smell the sulfur from the dry ice or whatever that stuff is. That's what I remember the most.
And I started crying and shaking. And all of a sudden, I felt this hand grab my wrist, and I was about to swing and punch whoever it was, but something told me to open my eyes. And I could see they had like a monster suit on, but they had taken their mask off, and it was this pleasant face.
A friendly face – it was my friend Mike. And he was looking at me, and he said, “Are you okay?” And I looked at him and just shook my head, no. I couldn’t even say the words. And he reached his hand out, and he walked me through. I was cowering in embarrassment. He walked me back through the entire haunted house and back out to the hallway.
And I told him, “Thank you.” That’s all I could mutter. And he went back in to do his job because he had to scare people. But I will never forget Mike's act of kindness to me. So, what did I learn?
I learned that haunted houses might be right for you, but they are not right for me. It's just not my thing, and I will not go to a haunted house, and I haven’t since that day.
Number two: sometimes stuff like this is a metaphor for darkness, and you can go through things where you feel like it’s endless and that you’re trapped.
Or it's so dark, you just want to wither away. But I was glad that I took an opportunity to open my eyes one time. And sometimes, if you do that, even in the darkness, a gleam of light will always find a way to shine through, and you just have to take that hand and follow it back home.
