Trick-or-Treating the Internet: 25 Links to Halloween

September 30, 2010 – The biggest difference between the Halloweens of my childhood and the Halloweens of my adulthood (besides the fact that back then Star Wars costumes came with a lot less baggage) is the Internet. Besides forcing me to capitalize words I don't really think should be capitalized, it has made the entire world more accessible, including Halloween.

That means no longer do I have to rely on television schedules, the Halloween inventory at local stores, or the weather to conjure up the Halloween spirit. It's online anytime I want to access it. What medium can promise that (SWIDT)? So here are 25 links to news, articles, and activities to help put you in the Halloween mood, just in case the fact that it's October tomorrow doesn't do that by itself.

1. 50 Years of Psycho collectibles.

2. NBC to resurrect The Munsters.

3. Generel Mills monster cereals back for a limited time. Still not sure why they keep insisting on box art that features super-close-ups of the monsters' faces. Definitely way cooler things they can do.

4. 1980s-era Canned Ghost, courtesy of the Ghostbusters marketing team.

5. Scared Shrekless airs on October 28. Hate Shrek. Like Halloween versions of non-Halloween properties.

6. How to make Dexter-inspired candy blood slides.

7. Rob Zombie to be on the Halloween episode of Extreme Makeover to help design a haunted house attraction for a deaf school fundraiser. Zombie quote: "It was a rare opportunity to put some evil to good use."

8. The trailor for the SyFy channel's 31 days of Halloween, which is better to watched compressed into 15 seconds than sitting through the actual programming. Was that Traci Morgan?

9. A firsthand recap of the 2010 Eyegore Awards, featuring Christopher Lloyd, Corey Feldman, and Sid Haig.

10. The schedule of October events for Sleepy Hollow, NY.

11. Pumpkinrot...probably the best Halloween blog out there. Actually, I'm going to take back that "probably."

12. The Turner Classic Movies blog offers the 1945 film, The Woman Who Came Back, as a suggestion for your Halloween enjoyment.

13. Elvira is back on TV. Because HD widescreen format was made for her.

14. Halloween is now bigger than Valentine's Day in the UK. Still gunning for Christmas. Best quote: "Halloween, considered by some to be a vulgar American import..."

15. ABC Family's "13 Nights of Halloween" is on for its 12th year. Includes schedule, which, looking through it, makes me long for the days when this channel was the Fox Family channel.

16. Ten major jack-o-lantern festivals. Check out the pic attribution for #5.

17. Haunted attractions across the country.

18. Horror movies headed for theaters this October.

19. Doc Mock's MonsterTime, a Halloween Flash game based on BurgerTime, except instead of building burgers, you're building classic Universal monsters, and instead of running from condiments, you're running from 1980s-era slasher villains. Will probably use up half my Halloween on this game.

20. Read about the "Halloween Capital of the World" and be surprised that it's Anoka, MN.

21. Latest live-action Scooby Doo movie debuts October 16. Will watch, but am digging the new cartoon series incarnation, Scooby Doo: Mystery Incorporated, more.

22. An Orlando Sentinal columnist reviews this year's Halloween Horror Nights at Universal Studios Orlando.

23. Atari re-releases its 30-year-old classic Haunted House with updated graphics for Windows PC.

24. The schedule of Haunted Happenings in Salem, MA.

25. McDonald's will be offering Mr. Potato Head Halloween pails this Halloween season. I've only ever used the word "pails" in the phrase "McDonald's Halloween pails."

Fall is for Wandering

September 28, 2010 – Fall is for wandering, and when it comes to road trips, I’ve found that the best way to wander is to have a destination goal (all the most valid ideas make no sense on the surface…you didn’t know?). In fact, this idea might also apply to life in general, but I’m not through testing it out yet. Once I’m done, I’ll let you know. From the grave.

It makes sense in a practical way, though. You choose a destination, and then you stick the word “eventually” after it, as in “I’m going to the fair. Eventually.” You’re guaranteed to see something cool that way and helps you avoid the huge downsides that can often accompany pure wandering, such as boredom, lack of anticipation, missed opportunities, and frustration at being bored, having nothing to anticipate, and missing opportunities. Plus, getting there might be half the fun, but it’s still just half of it.

Last weekend, we spent Saturday wandering the roads of Maine and New Hampshire. Our goal? The tiny town of Wilton, ME. Eventually. The town is about three and a half hours north of where we live on the New Hampshire/Massachusetts border. We chose that map speck because we wanted to head north to see how the foliage was faring. Also, because it’s the final resting place of an almost eight-foot-tall 19th century giantess who toured with P.T. Barnum and then retired to speak with the dead. In other words, O.T.I.S. fodder.

The foliage in that area of Maine was still greener than an extremely green thing to be filled in later, but there were pumpkin stands all over the place, signs announcing upcoming harvest festivals, and front lawns decorated to the point of clutter for Halloween. We were definitely Falling.

The name of the giantess was Sylvia Hardy, and she’s buried in Lakeview Cemetery. I average about a cemetery a month in my life, but visiting the first one of the Fall season is special...except for when it’s not. Most of the cemetery was pretty new, with no sculpture work and zero trees. It didn’t even have a main gate. However, the older part of the cemetery, where Sylvia Hardy is buried, had a little bit more of the New England cemetery ambiance that makes me look forward to death. Plus it’s the burying place of a giantess. Did I mention that?

I swear I'm a very manly height.

There are a lot more details to cover with Sylvia Hardy, including our subsequent visit to the nearby museum that houses a life-sized replica of her along with an exhibit of her personal items, but like I said, O.T.I.S. fodder one day.

That accomplished, it was officially a successful trip, regardless of what else happened. We broke west, with the intent of crossing the border back into New Hampshire at the White Mountains region, and then heading south at some point. However, before we made it across the border, we discovered that there is a town in Maine called Mexico (apparently there is a Peru, ME, too, but we didn’t drive through that one) and then discovered our second giant of the day, a Paul Bunyan statue in the town of Rumford. At least, I assume it to be the famous lumberjack. He seemed too happy to be a famous axe murderer.

They had good Chinese food here.

Once we crossed over into New Hampshire, we found some serious pockets of Fall in those there White Mountains. The foliage might not have been peaking, but it was certainly more than peeking. Even if you were color blind, you could tell the area was a particular shade of beautiful that weekend by all the backpackers crossing the road at random places and all the camera-faced people pulled off to the side of the road photographing this or that piece of nature. It was like the mountains were having a block party, and we joined in with hot dog buns (somebody else had already brought the relish). I'm really going to regret that line when I read this tomorrow for spelling errors. 

Downtown was a counterpart
Babe the Blue Ox statue.

One notable location we passed by during the course of this meandering was Frankenstein Cliff, a rock face named for an artist whose parents adopted the name based on a castle from their homeland that may or may not have influenced Mary Shelley in her famous work. I wrote about it in the Grimpendium. That’s not a plug, just an excuse for why I’m not going deeper into a topic that cries out desperately for delving. It’s also a plug.

Whenever we find ourselves in the White Mountains region of the state, we often stop in the town of North Conway. North Conway is a lot of things, a tourist hub, a heavy commercial center, a ski town, a foliage stop-over, and frequently way too crowded for a place of that latitude. And, of course, we like it for all those reasons...and because it has a Christmas Loft.

I know, normally I wholeheartedly agree that out-of-season Christmas cheer is perverse, but this store literally creates its own context. You walk into it, and suddenly you’re out on winter’s night, with snow and a covered bridge, cozy storefronts, and a life-sized Santa Claus flying above your head in his reindeer-pulled sleigh. It’s actually an indoor Christmas Village, with each house a different store interconnected in a delightfully confusing warren of Christmas merchandise. I’m refraining from posting any pics of all that Christmas spirit (see above about perversity), but it does have a small Halloween room to balance out its universe.

Next on our docket was to drop by Harry and David, a gourmet food and candy store. We go there every season to see what new Fall martini mixes they’ve unveiled. In the past, they’ve had had stuff like pumpkin martini and caramel apple. This year, they have a Halloween concoction called Witch’s Brew, flavored with chocolate, orange, and cognac. You just add the vodka. And you know what that means: The Halloween blog is now destined for a drunken Fall cocktail post.

At that point it started getting dark, so we found the nearest highway and made for home, where we arrived 12 and a half hours after leaving. Even though I know the major stops, I’m not exactly sure what route we took. My road trips are always 50% wrong turns and 50% blind allegiance to the GPS unit (which, somehow are not two mutually exclusive things). But, like I said, Fall is for wandering...and giants...and cemeteries...and Mexico...and Frankenstein...and Christmas...and cocktails.

Exeter UFO Festival

September 27, 2010 — You know what’s a funny phrase? Tinfoil hat. And when I tell you that I recently attended a UFO festival, that might be the exact phrase that pops into your head.

The festival took place earlier this month in Exeter, NH, a town of about 14,000 near the New Hampshire seacoast. And while the fact that New Hampshire has a seacoast might be tons more surprising than the fact that a town in New Hampshire would celebrate EBEs, ETIs, UFOs, and ALFs, this article is about the latter. Sorry.

Exeter is famous in UFO lore for the so-called “Exeter Incident,” in which some strange celestial lights freaked out a teenage hitchhiker and a couple of police officers back in September of 1965 a few miles outside of town. I actually visited the site of this occurrence last year and wrote about it in slightly more detail at the end of a two-part article on Betty and Barney Hill, the most famous alien abductees this side of Elijah the Prophet. In fact, the Hills actually lived in Exeter at the time of their own personal too-close-for-comfort encounter.

So Exeter has plenty of legitimate reasons to throw a UFO festival. Actually multiple festivals. This year’s Exeter UFO Festival is the second annual one.

The festival has a huge community event component. The town was decorated here and there with life-sized (word choice?) X-Files-green inflatable aliens lashed to various street architecture or displayed in shop windows. And the whole thing was an excuse for shop and restaurant owners to shove the descriptor “out of this world” in front of the usual advertisements for their wares. Local clubs sold food, posters, and T-shirts, and various kid-centered activities such as face painting, sidewalk chalk drawing, and crafts were scheduled, in addition to an evening ball for adults. Maps were also available for self-guided tours of the Exeter Incident site. I even heard a rumor about an alien pet costume contest.

Now, I am not what you’d call a participator (why do you call it that?), so most of that stuff didn’t appeal to me. Or, more accurately, it appealed to me from afar. However, there was still some solid stuff for us passive sorts. In fact, we somehow managed to hang out there for three hours after allotting like only 15 minutes for the event. It helped that the downtown area had a surprising number of unique shops to poke our heads into, and people watching becomes a whole different sport when said people are wearing antennas on their heads.

The epicenter of all this space oddity was the town hall, were various UFO-relevant speakers and authors were scheduled all day, making the festival a conference of sorts, as well. This year’s speakers included the director of New England MUFON (Mutual UFO Network), a podcast host with a show dedicated to the paranormal, a career-long UFO researcher, and two nuclear physicists, one of whom was Stanton Friedman.

I dropped in for some of Friedman’s talk since he’s pretty famous in those circles, with ties going all the way back to Roswell. I’d also read Captured! last year, a book on Betty and Barney Hill that he co-authored with Betty Hill’s niece, Kathleen Marden. It was standing-room-only for his presentation, with hundreds of people showing up to hear him speak. He was pushing a new book that he’d written, again with Marden, entitled Science Was Wrong, a book that’s not a UFO book, but the subject matter of which is easily adaptable to a UFO festival crowd.

It basically relates anecdotes where various scientists were really, really wrong in a very public fashion about what’s possible and impossible according to the laws of nature. The title’s more annoying than the topic, honestly, and Friedman explained first thing in his speech that the title was supposed to be the much less grating It’s Impossible…Isn’t It?, but that his publisher changed it to make it much more attention-getting. I’d of gone with Sometimes We Didn’t Know Everything. That's a pretty boring anecdote I just told.

Probably my favorite part of the whole festival had nothing to do with the official program, though. Along the Exeter River that flows through the town is a thin strip of grass and benches called Founder’s Park, where most of the aforementioned kid’s activities were centered. Right across the street from the park was a private house that had created their own UFO diorama on their front lawn composed of three life-sized (word-choice?) Styrofoam aliens with pressure gauge antennae and a spacecraft made out of an upturned satellite dish…the old 1980s kind of dish, the kind that was barely smaller than the SETI Arecibo Observatory itself and gave you hope that you could contact alien intelligences on your own TV...or at the very least tick off your neighbors with its sheer ostentatiousness. Nobody daydreams any of that with a tiny DirecTV dish. Anyway, seeing this lawn display made me jealous that I don’t have this holiday to decorate for.

I’m not sure where the best place to insert my own feelings on our eventual alien overlords is. Probably nowhere near this article. Still, my stance on extraterrestrial Earth visitors is pretty much my stance on ghosts. Way dig stories about them. Am slightly annoyed and sometimes hate when people try to drag them into real life. I wish I believed in more stuff.

Besides, when the aliens do come, we’re all going to know.

Overall, the festival itself is a relatively humble, but enjoyable affair. In fact, it could probably do with a little more crazy, to be honest. But it’s only in its second year. I’m sure it’ll continue to grow until before you know it they’ll have erected a 20-foot-tall Gort in the town square, will offer re-enactments of famous UFO events in the sky with high-powered lasers, and have coaxed Robin Williams out of Mork retirement…and then we’ll all owe Exeter big-time.

Back to tinfoil hats, walking around the downtown area of Exeter reminded me who else besides crazy people dig wearing tinfoil hats. Kids. Because they like to have fun with whatever is at hand. Which is exactly what the people of Exeter, NH, and the organizers of the UFO festival seem to be doing with their little celebration. Nanu Nanu.

The Price of Invisibility

September 26, 2010  — I limit myself rather extremely on some of my favorite things in the world. In this particular case, I'm talking about Vincent Price movies, although it applies just as easily to Edgar Allan Poe stories and Pop Tarts flavors. You see, I don't want to live in a world where I've seen every single Vincent Price movie. I always want to be able to anticipate that one more new experience with his work. Unfortunately, it's not Halloween without him, so each year that passes gets me closer to that anti-goal. Granted, I'm actively pacing myself, but it'll only work if I'm dead by 45.

The other night, that one movie closer was Universal Picture's The Invisible Man Returns.

Released in 1940 as a sequel to the 1933 film, The Invisible Man, Vincent Price takes on the mantle of invisibility and inevitable insanity previously and masterfully borne by Claude Rains in the original.

And, if you're going to film a sequel, Price seems a perfect choice to follow up the maniacal, sadistic, and hilariously petty character that Rains gave horror cinema, a character that more than holds its own among the other famous Universal monsters, even though later allusions to him forget just how monstrous the Invisible Man is. I’ve never done an official body count, but I’m pretty sure he killed more than all the other growling, shuffling, leering, lurking Universal monsters mashed together. His is, after all, the only mass murderer in the bunch.

Anyway, we all know that Price could out-maniac the worst screen fiend with a mere twitch of his razor-thin mustache, so why not let him fill the empty shoes of Claude Rain's transparent terror.

However, truth is, Price wasn't a horror icon in 1940. The Invisible Man Returns was actually Price's first horror movie, and he wouldn't become identified with the genre until 13 years later after his performance as Professor Henry Jarrod in the 1953 film House of Wax.

And, honestly, there probably was a reason he wasn't typecast after Returns. It’s just not that great of a movie, and only intermittently creepy. Besides a lack of imagination in the story, Price's character is a bit more limited than Rains. In the original Invisible Man, Rains not only created the monocane serum (for some reason changed to “duocane” in Returns), but was the only man who could find the cure. In Returns, which takes place nine years after the first one, Price takes the serum from the scientist brother of Rain's original character to escape a hanging sentence for a murder he didn't commit. As a result, the invisibility is a bit more incidental to what drives Price’s character. He still goes insane, though, making for a chilling/funny little dinner scene, depending on your mood.

In addition, the invisible Price (strangely enough, a synonym for “hidden fees”) himself doesn't get any face-time until the end of the movie, so up to that point you have to recognize him by his voice, which again you'd think would be easy. This is Vincent Price, after all. But, like I said, this was pre-horror icon price. So the voice we get wasn't Thriller Vincent Price...not even The 13 Ghosts of Scooby Doo Vincent Price. It was a pretty straightforward, sometimes even pedestrian vocal performance...except when he started going crazy. In those scenes, you can almost read the future of Vincent Price by the number of goose bumps his laughs conjured in the flesh on the back of your neck.

And all of that becomes clearly evident when we finally see Price at the end of the movie. When he rematerializes, we see the young, fresh-faced, unmustached Price that, in an alternative universe, became the romantic lead he was supposed to be in this one. Our own is a better one just for that fact. And because in ours we invented corncob holders.

As to the main conceit of the movie, the invisibility, there surprisingly aren't a whole lot of gags that weren't used in the first film. Plenty of shots of disembodied clothes being taken off/put on, the still-eerie image of empty eyes inside a head covered in bandages, people being abruptly “pushed” out of the way, a few floating objects. The one exception is the invisible guinea pig harness, a phrase that for some odd reason, Universal Pictures never trademarked.

As you can tell, it's not the best Vincent Price movie. Like many others on his resume, Price is the saving feature. However, you could do much worse on a nice Fall night. And there are other, more minor reasons to watch it, of course. For instance, you get to see Alan Napier, who will always be Alfred to Adam West’s Batman for me, play a drunken degenerate. You get to live for 80 minutes in a now-fantasy world of By Jove’s and cigar smoke. You even get to receive the eternal wisdom, “Under no circumstances allow him to take off his clothes.” I have the feeling that’s going to come in handy in my life now that I have it in my arsenal.

At the very least, The Invisible Man Returns laid the foundation for the later Abbot and Costello Meet Frankenstein cameo by Vincent Price. That’s certainly worth a whole movie.

Read about my visit to the grave of the original Invisible Man, Claude Rains.

Been on Fire with Sally Field

September 24, 2010  — Here in southern New Hampshire, we're starting to see a little bit of color in the foliage. Or I have a brain tumor. I'm told that some of the trees that flash too early are often the unhealthy ones. Trees are like the rest of us in that way, the ones that aren't able to get the best nutrients or are too badly diseased basically go first, while the healthy ones, unless they get plowed into by a bus, get a longer life and go more in their time. Except that we humans (if you'll let me be so presumptuous) don't get to do it all over again a few seasons later, because God is either very cruel or very kind. Let me know if you find out first.

Eventually, over the coming weeks, the rest of the trees will finally get together and go out in in a grandly choreographed stage show of conflagrating colors, and a lot of us will feel strange bursts of happiness and euphoria as a result. Which is another way that Autumn trees are not like dying people. When human beings go out en masse, we don’t get those special feelings. I could probably revisit the bus comment here.

Wait. This was supposed to be a sweetly intended meditation on a newly entered Fall. It's getting away from me.

I honestly don’t have a segue from the previous paragraphs to this one, but if you follow O.T.I.S., then you know that my wife takes most of the pictures that I use. And that's been true of this site so far as well, with the big exception being the Halloween candy post. She has her standards, I guess, and Cap'n Crunch just doesn't meet them.

She's currently posting a series of her own pictures from Autumns past and present on her Tumblr page, With Love and Squalor, featuring all the Fall foliage, orange gourds, and spooky stuff that she can fit into her camera lens. So for those of you, like me, who are getting impatient for Mother Nature to come out of her dressing room, or if your state tree tends to the palm, cactus, or evergreen, then you have every reason to check it out. If you have a Tumblr account, feel free to follow her.

Anyway, here's some more Fall, courtesy of my wife. Or Autumn, I guess. I never know which one of those words to use. No other season has a synonym. Speaking of confusing, I just spent 10 minutes on Google and still can't figure out conclusively if a cactus is a tree...and for some reason I really don't want to take Joni Mitchell's word for it.

Last Year’s Halloween Treats Are Not Stale

"Ghosts Turn Milk Green!"...as God intended.

September 21, 2010 — Even though I wasn’t blogging Halloween last year, the power of Christ still compelled me to document on my TwitPic stream some of the special edition Halloween-themed treats that I bought as an investment into my future obesity. It’s not that I’m gluttonous or lack will power, it’s just that one time I had a visit from my future self who insisted that being fat at some point in my future would save my life, make me rich, and bring peace to the world. He was wearing a silver Lycra unitard, so I believed him. He was also a black man, but he insisted that didn’t matter because time travel is full of paradoxes.

Anyway, I’m not sure why I kept taking pictures of black and orange product packaging just to clog up miles of underground fiber optics. I was new to Twitter at the time, sure…but, honestly, a year later I still haven’t figured out a better use for Twitter than posting pictures of Halloween-themed Oreos and blood-orange-flavored DOTS. I rounded up all those pics from last Halloween and have decided to recycle them here. Because I want to do my part to save the planet, too.

So here you go, the ultimate testament to the absolutely frivolous endeavors that digital cameras make possible. Wait. I forgot about shots of oneself in the mirror. What’s the word for second-to-ultimate?

"Chill to Thrill! Ghosts Change Color!"

The marriage of this product and this monster make me

take more seriously the claims of online dating sites.

The right bodily fluid. The right color.

Blood Orange has to be the perfect Hallowen flavor, right?

The DOTS Bats are blood-orange-flavored.

The magic of Halloween is that even generic candy can be cool (toy not included).

Last year I didn't know whether to eat these or hang them on my wall. This year,

I can tell you that they accent my study decor well (Fun-Size Snickers for size comparison).

Still Chilling, Still Thrilling, Ghosts Still Changing Color.

When companies go all out and change both the packaging and their product

to celebrate the season, it's pretty much the closest thing we have to a Halloween miracle.

For some reason Chips Ahoy! couldn't muster the spirit

for orange chocolate chips. Vampire cookie is cool, though.

At one point in time, Willy Wonka marketed

the purple ones as "Witch's Warts."

My brand image of this particular Willy Wonka candy
is always tainted by Ogre.

All right. Not exactly edible. But I don't believe anybody

would judge if you gave them a try.

Dazed and Corn-Mazed

Not all those who wander are lost...
but a heckuva lot of us are.

September 20, 2010 — Humanity has done some pretty awesome things. Skyscrapers. Organ transplants. Space missions. And some God Damn Swollen Genius invented the corn maze.

Somewhere along the way, that GDSG figured out that everybody who has ever seen a corn field has fantasized about running through it, getting lost in it, settling down and starting a family in it.

As a result, we now have the chance every Fall to tear off through a large swathe of our local farmer’s soluble assets. This past weekend, we took advantage of the tradition and went to two different corn mazes…because making generalizations about corn mazes is a much more legitimate enterprise when you’ve visited two.

If one’s never done a corn maze, I can understand how they might be slightly intimidating. Really, I get it. There’s always that little Ernest Borgnine on your shoulder (or however you personify your own self-doubt) whispering about how embarrassing it would be to not be able to solve something that’s ostensibly meant for children.

And Ernest Borgnine is right. That would be embarrassing. Except for two things. One, getting lost (or more accurate, experiencing the illusion that you’re lost…these are rows of corn after all, not three-foot-thick stone walls set in a Peruvian jungle) is actually part of the fun. Wandering through 10-foot-tall stalks of corn on a cool Fall day is a pleasant activity regardless of whether you’re heading directly for an exit or not. In fact, more often than not, finding the exit is the disappointing part.

The second thing is that you won’t be lost for more than minutes at a stretch. You see, placed at regular intervals and at all major cross-rows (see what I did there?) are usually some sort of sign or placard. These signs feature multiple choice questions, usually about farm life or, if the maze is themed, related to that theme. Each answer also features a direction. The right answer sends you in the right direction. A wrong answer, well that often takes you in the right direction, too. They don’t want you to actually get lost in their corn field. They want to harvest that stuff at some point, and bleached human skeletons really mess up their harvesting machinery.

Also, you should know that most American corn mazes don’t employ booby traps, and whoever finds David Bowie first is the winner.

On Saturday, we visited Coppal House Farm in Lee, NH. Their maze was shaped like an owl, or so their web site told me. I’m not tall enough to have seen the pattern, and shaped corn mazes always just look like rows of corn from the side. From what I know, most mazes pull this move. I’m thinking that the companies that they outsource this maze-building to throw it in at very little extra charge, and I’m pretty sure it’s just so they can have that cool picture for their web site. However, they did continue the owl theme throughout, with hands stamps in the shape of owls, owl merchandise in their farmstead store, and all the questions in the maze being owl-related.

It turns out me, my wife, and my infant child really suck at owls, but at least it’s good to learn stuff like that about ourselves. We got like 8 out of 10 answers wrong, yet we were still out in about half an hour. And most of that time was spent just trying to avoid everybody else who was in the maze. As always, everything is more enjoyable without everybody else.

After we exited the owl, we went back to the farmstead store and barn to pet the farm animals, resist the temptation to buy pumpkins too early, and leer at whatever atrocities of gourd that they’d tortured into existence this year.

Sunday found us in Haverhill, MA, at Kimball Farm. This time, we met up with some friends who had four- and five-year-old boys. Consequently, we did that maze at the speed of children, and ended up sweaty and exhausted for it. It also didn’t help that it was a larger maze, and on the side of a hill. Although that’s pretty cool, otherwise. This time, the maze was shaped like a buffalo, and the questions were all related to farm animals. A nice little added touch close to the end of the maze was the option of exiting on all fours through a long black plastic tube.

For this maze, instead of whipping out our cell phones to find the answers to the questions like we should have done the day previous, we let the four-year-old make every one of the path decisions. And, naturally, we still made it out without coming even close to that lost-and-possibly-never-found panic I feel every time I leave the GPS unit at home.

Kimball had a few things to do as well, including barn animals, face painting, a pumpkin catapult. They even had buffalo, which explains the maze shape. Apparently sometimes buffalos are farm animals.

Now, in all this fun-for-the-family maze talk, there is something that I’ve completely left out about corn mazes. Truth is, there’s something sinister about corn fields. They hide too much. That’s why people got wished there in The Twilight Zone, that’s why Stephen King had children there. And then there are the scarecrows. I assume no elaboration is needed there. In addition, there’s also something sinister about mazes, whether they are made of corn or not, which is why we populate them with minotaurs and axe-wielding men with writer’s block.

Of course, terror is somehow fun, too. In general, these types of farms, including the two abovementioned, take advantage of this aspect of corn mazes, and open their mazes after dark. At Coppal House Farm, it’s so you can do the maze by flashlight and imagine somebody is stalking you (see what I did…nevermind). At Kimball, it’s so they can turn it into a haunted attraction and you can know for sure that somebody’s after you. Because the only thing better than being lost is being lost and having people in gruesome costumes jump out at you. Shut up, Ernest Borgnine.

"Are you sure? Last time I listened to you
the cat wouldn't come out of the basement for weeks."