It should come as no surprise for those of us who grew up in Poughkeepsie that our hometown is the fake spookiest or candy-sweetest or simply the best Halloween community in all of America.

Any October visitor might notice how many fly-by-night (erm, seasonal) costume stores appear along the Rt. 9 corridor every fall, or the large number of short-lived candy shops, or professionally run haunted houses, or the fact that there is a gigantic freaking (and real, not pretend) cemetery alongside miles and miles of the Rt. 9 corridor. For those visitors—business travelers and ghouls alike—this study makes plenty of sense.

The discovery that Poughkeepsie is the best Halloween city would have made a lot of sense to my sister and our elementary school friends and me if you’d told us this back in the 1970s. Like all suburban kids, we thought of Halloween as the ideal job: get paid—in candy!—for wearing different clothes. Why is this only once a year?

I was never a particularly enthusiastic trick-or-treater. To be honest, until I was a teenager, I was rarely enthusiastic, period. As a less-than-enthusiastic cub scout (also different clothes), I remember the task of selling items from the most boring scout catalog imaginable (two items that I remember are plastic campground dining gear and peanut brittle that most years lasted longer than the plastic camping gear). But that job taught me my way around the neighborhood, so I knew which houses were owned by people I did not like seeing in bright daylight, much less at dusk with a pumpkin basket in my hand.

The plastic shop-bought masks from that period—Fred Flintstone, Spiderman, Superman—were each identical except for the paint job on the front, they did not line up over my eyes much less my eyeglasses, and they were held in place by the flimsiest rubber band yet devised by human ingenuity. Oh! and I could not breathe in them. Each had a cape—even Fred Flintstone, I seem to recall, or perhaps this was an example of my mother’s ingenuity to keep me warm—and none earned me much candy. My less-than-enthusiastic cub scout side always beat out my slightly more enthusiastic begging-for-candy side.

Bordering our neighborhood, on two sides, was “The Woods.” (I have written about my memories there.) Google Maps will convince you that the wooded area between my childhood neighborhood and the Hudson River is not impressive, that it is merely undeveloped and unloved land left to rodents and deer and pricker bushes and some extraordinarily ordinary maples and oaks. The untrained eye will see, driving along the country road bordered on one side by The Woods, that one can clearly see to the Hudson River and unmistakably hear trains on the Metro-North line a few dozen yards away. I pity my 2018 eyes and ears for these facts, because I knew, I just knew, in 1977, that those trains sometimes came off their tracks and plunged howling into The Woods at night. And some of those rodents and deer had never before been seen by the eyes of scientists. Some of them (the animals, not the scientists) were feral and wild and wildly feral. (Never mind the many firepits one could stumble across in daytime walks through the woods, or the plastic forks and plastic knives on the ground, or … is that a piece of peanut brittle?)

One Halloween night, in 1979, I was allowed to venture on foot, in costume, and not accompanied by adults (hold that thought for a second, please, while I address my parents: What!?!) from my neighborhood to my best friend’s neighborhood, which was connected to mine by Barnegat Road. You may not know Poughkeepsie like I know Poughkeepsie, so please understand that The Woods, the scary woods I just mentioned, borders Barnegat Road. Do I need to repeat this? Do I need to color in the dots or connect the lines for you?

My best friend, Doug, loved to tell tall tales. I did not want to think of them as lies, but they were. “Tuesday” was a sufficient reason for him to reveal that he had a secret family in California and his absence from school yesterday was because he had been there and back in one day. Each time he hosted me for a sleepover, he would reveal to me that there had been a plane crash in The Woods the night before that no one was investigating (there had been no such incident) or a car had plunged down the embankment into The Woods the other night and exploded and the driver got out on fire (there had been no such accident) or his Polish grandmother had told him that there would be ghosts in 1979 that hadn’t been seen in many many years (he had no Polish grandmother). Halloween was when he turned pro.

Doug was and still is five days younger than me and creatively lazy and these two facts made him a respected authority in my eyes. (I hope he is someone’s parent nowadays.) We are both about to turn fifty in three weeks.

At just the perfectly wrong moment, while he and I walked from his neighborhood back to mine, loot in our identical plastic pumpkin pails, just as he was committing with his words some luckless fictional airplane pilot to a fiery death earlier that very day a mere few feet from where we were walking along Barnegat Road, just then, my flashlight went dark. We started to walk at a faster pace. Barnegat Road has very few streetlights along the stretch beside The Woods, and even fewer in my memory. The one we passed under with my newly dead flashlight sizzled and went dark. Night has never been so loud or so silent in all the years since for me.

I had never seen a night so dark or learned of a death so credible, thanks to Doug’s cheerful rendering. Just then, we heard a sound. A low, rasping scream of an anguished, crying creature—Doug had found his true calling as a storyteller, at least this one night, because he finally seemed to believe his own tall tale, and we both bolted from what was obviously the ghost-tortured mortal remains of his burned-up pilot or the hungry specter of a train engineer come to steal us from Poughkeepsie, New York, which for us was already and always will be the best Halloween city in the country.

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This is a re-write from 2013.

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