Ghostly greetings

I am an extremely anxious adult, so I find it a little odd, in retrospect, that Halloween and horror never really scared me that much as a kid. I loved Halloween as a holiday, and always found it fun, not scary. I liked dressing up, I liked candy. (My biggest terror, which usually came true, was that my mother would deem it too cold to go out trick-or-treating without a jacket, and would refuse to listen to any of my pleas about how Maid Marian did not wear a puffy coat and that would ruin things.)

The one Halloween sort of thing I remember being frightened by was when I was very young, we went to an amusement park type haunted house, and at some point they had done something to the floor. We were told it was a rattlesnake nest. I can still viscerally remember the way the floor squished under my foot. I thought I was going to die. We had to leave then.

But most of the traditionally scary Halloween things have never bothered me. Plus, as a kid, I had a much higher tolerance for horror than I do now. I could check out a stack of Stephen King paperbacks from the library and read my way through them with no problem. (Except for Pet Sematary, which absolutely terrified me.)