Sally Breslin: My Life: IT'S NEARLY HALLOWEEN

The other night, I happened to come across a rerun of an old TV show called, “Are You Afraid of the Dark?” The show was about a bunch of junior-high kids who gathered around a campfire in the woods once a week at midnight (I guess their parents weren’t into the whole curfew thing) and told scary stories. Each week, the kids would try to outdo each other with a new tale of terror.

Watching the show made me think back to my own junior-high days when my friends and I used to do the same thing…sort of. The only difference was we lived in the middle of the city where there were no woods or campfires, so we had to tell our scary stories while gathered around the furnace in the basement of the tenement building where I lived. We also did our storytelling closer to 7 p.m. than midnight.

One of our favorite scary storytelling methods was based on a game called “Pass the Guts.” To play this game, everyone (except the storyteller) wore blindfolds and sat in a straight line. Then, as the storyteller wove his tale, he would pass “props” down the line to emphasize his point. The rule was that each blindfolded person had to thoroughly feel each prop or be eliminated from the game.

The goal of the storyteller was to make sure his props were so gross and disgusting, everyone would be eliminated before the end of the story.

I’ll never forget the night it was my turn to be the storyteller. For years, my mother referred to it as the night I ruined a week’s worth of perfectly good groceries (when, according to her, there were starving children in China who never would have shown such blatant disrespect for food).

Being grounded, however, was a small price to pay for winning the coveted “Pass the Guts” crown. I wanted my props to make even the most die-hard horror fans in our group quiver in their Keds.

In my tale, I began by describing a man-eating zombie whose eyeballs fell out, then I passed down the “eyeballs” (black olives) to my blindfolded listeners. When I described the zombie as having a problem with worms crawling all over him and living in his rotted flesh, I passed down both cooked spaghetti and rice.

And, in a sinister move to make everyone quit the game so I could win the title of “the grossest of the gross,” I described the zombie tearing out and then feasting on a guy’s innards…then I passed down a container of calves’ liver. Of course, my reason for using the liver was twofold. By sneaking it out of the fridge, it also prevented me from having to choke down another one of my mother’s famous “eat it because you need your iron” gag-inducing liver dinners.

The only drawback of playing “Pass the Guts” indoors was cleaning up all of the food that ended up on the floor, the walls and the ceiling after everyone screamed and flung it. For days after my turn as the storyteller, whenever the furnace kicked on, the smell of rotting liver wafted up from the basement and through all the vents in the apartments.

And speaking of storytelling, it’s funny how some of the most popular horror stories I heard back when I was a kid (and believed were the absolute truth) still are circulating today. Now, however, they are called urban legends.

I remember one story about a woman who wore her hair in an elaborate beehive hairstyle. Apparently, she ran out of hairspray one day, so in a pinch, she used a mixture of sugar and water (an early form of starch) to keep her hair stiff. According to the story, the sugar attracted a swarm of bees that built a REAL beehive in her hair and then stung her to death.

Over the years, storytellers have substituted everything from black-widow spiders to rattlesnakes for the bees, but the end result is always the same: the poor lady with the stiff, sugar-coated hair suffers an agonizingly painful death.

One of the most popular stories I remember from back when I was a kid was the one about the teenage couple who went parking on a dark, wooded road late one night. As the story went, the guy and girl were doing some serious making out in the car and listening to the radio when they suddenly heard a special news bulletin about a mass-murderer who had just escaped from prison. The murderer was described as a giant of a man who had a very prominent feature…a hook for one hand.

Well, the girl in the car immediately panicked, said she was frightened and begged her boyfriend to take her home. He, raging hormone-factory that he was, told her not to be silly, that the murderer probably was already halfway to the Mexican border by then.

But the girl, feeling more and more uneasy in the silent darkness, insisted that they leave right then. Frustrated and muttering under his breath, the guy started the car and stomped on the accelerator.

When he pulled the car up to the curb in front of the girl’s house, she jumped out and then let out a blood-curdling scream. There, hanging on the car’s door handle, was a bloody hook!

For years, that story gave me the shivers, mainly because I believed it was based on absolute fact. So not long ago, when the 11-year-old grandson of one of my friends asked me if I knew any good scary stories, I eagerly related my tale of the hook-handed murderer. The boy listened intently to my every word, but not once did he appear to be even remotely frightened.

When I finally delivered the shocking final line about the bloody hook on the car’s door handle, I eagerly awaited his inevitable gasp of horror.

Instead, he just calmly sat there and shook his head. “I don’t believe a word of it,” he said. “I mean, the murderer never would have been trying to open the car door with his hook. He would have used his good hand. And why did the hook have blood on it? Was it supposed to have been torn out of his arm? Hooks don’t attach that way!”

The trouble with kids nowadays is they think too much.

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