“What scares you?” I asked my colleagues at The Banner.
Julie Bykowicz: “Teeth things.”
Hallie Miller: “Large bugs.”
Journalists are brave people. They ask questions while others remain silent, sometimes risking their personal safety.
We fret the big things, often with a closer view than is comfortable. Making sense of politics, climate change, gun violence, public health and the never-ending search for truth keeps some of us awake at night. Then there’s the presidency of Donald Trump.
But we’re as human as you. Little things scare us, odd things. We each have a personal collection of heebie-jeebies.
Halloween is the day to take them out and examine them, to laugh at what gives us the willies. Dress them up in silly costumes, throw candy at them and hope they don’t get angry.
Jasmine Vaughn-Hall: “Clowns, dressed-up characters in general, including mascots and Santa, the laughter of children, if I can’t physically see them. Oh, and possums!”
I get being afraid of an opossum. One moved into my trash can once and refused to move out.
I watched it slyly from a distance until Sunday night, and then walked out the back door with the week’s trash bags in one hand and a broom in the other. There it was, playing possum, as possums often do.
I gave it a brush off and it hissed, needle-sharp teeth bared in a gesture that was anything but playful.
Possum stayed put. I bought another trash can.
Patrick McCaslin: “If we’re being honest, the dark still scares me.”
Vampire-lurking-in-the-shadows dark is scary, but I like walking-my-dog-after-sunset darkness.
The light on my corner in Annapolis was out for months, and I liked it so much that I resisted calling BGE for repairs. Spring light stretched into long summer days and then the bats came, slicing figure eights through the humid twilight in search of an insect supper on the wing.
As fall reclaimed its hours with darkness, I passed neighbors out for an evening walk in the gloom.
“Is that you, Rick?
“Yeah, streetlight’s out still.”
“Wow, it’s really dark.”
“I kinda like it. Brings out the bats.”
“Uh, OK. Bye.”
Someone called it in the next day, and the lights are back on.
Cody Boteler: “Bats. Because rabies. To clarify: I love and respect bats. They’re great. But I’m so scared of them.”
I love them so much, I installed a bat box 18 feet up a sweet gum tree in our yard. I climbed to the top ladder rung, then stretched my arms out to screw in the hooks.
My wife won’t let me go up on our roof to clean the gutters, hang Christmas lights or check out the view, rightly afraid I might fall. As you get older, balance and the consequences of gravity become questions you don’t want to answer.
Nothing was mentioned about bat boxes.
Alas, no bats. Now, with the streetlights back on, I doubt they will ever come.
Maya Lora: “Birds”
A crow’s raspy call, the “gekkering” of lonely foxes — nature makes worrisome noise. On fall nights, the foxes sit outside my window, calling to my dog.
“Ring-ding-ding-ding-dingeringeding!" as the oddball song says, Come out and play.
On our long-ago first night in this house, we slept with the windows open to let out some late summer heat.
An incessant creak-creak flowed over us, at first enrapturing us with the crickets’ grand parliament discussing the day. Then it became an annoying, then unbearable and finally a terrifying trill — one long syllable of sound.
Sahana Jayaraman: “Cockroaches!!! I love a spider, but a cockroach scares the living daylights out of me.”
We find crickets inside this time of year, but no roaches. A family of orb weaver spiders lived by our back door for years, casting generations of web nightly to catch the dew, then rolling them up for a morning sip.
Caitlin Moore: “Sharks and animatronic characters (‘Jaws’ is my worst nightmare).”
Clara Longo de Freitas: “Everything about ‘The Texas Chainsaw Massacre’ (1974). The idea of an asteroid hitting the earth and there’s nothing you can do about it.”
I don’t like scary movies, either, and yet my family has talked me into watching “Sinners,” “Midnight Mass” and “The Ring.” They wait for the jump scare to see what I do.
I am fascinated by interstellar asteroids taking shortcuts through our solar system. 31/ATLAS reached its closest point to the Earth on Thursday night, 130 million miles. Close enough, yes?
None of my colleagues’ fears equaled Michael Hughes’ list:
“Fascism, camel crickets, climate catastrophe, brown recluse spiders, flesh-eating bacteria, the financial collapse when the AI bubble pops, brain rot and slop, decline in literacy, people who don’t read books, my lost attention span. Thanks, iPhone.”
It’s easy to be frightened by the world.
I’m not sure which I fear more, a hurricane like Melissa, or another round of American adventurism. Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, Chile, Guatemala, the Dominican Republic, Grenada and, at any moment, Venezuela.
President Donald Trump orders killings at sea and moves an aircraft carrier group into the Caribbean just as a Category 5 storm smashes across Jamaica, Cuba, Haiti, the Bahamas and Bermuda.
This is where we once tripped to the edge of nuclear holocaust.
President John F. Kennedy pulled the plug on the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, and then dictator Fidel Castro asked the old Soviet Union for missiles. Kennedy went to the brink to block them in 1962, but pulled the world back from oblivion.
Maybe it will be a trick-or-treat moment, and the USS Gerald R. Ford will help with the hurricane response.
Alas, Trump is no Kennedy, and a president amok is the bugaboo of my dreams.
As you head out to parties or fill that bowl full of candy, here’s a Halloween question for you. The sun sets at 6:06 p.m. on this night of all-scares.
What’s the little hobgoblin in your mind going to do when it comes out to play?
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