I really, really wanted a lot of candy (confession: I am addicted to chocolate). So we walked and walked and walked for hours, all over my Midwestern town, until we started getting to the outskirts of the town.

We saw this large grey/white building with no windows on the first floor but many on the other two floors. We assumed it was an apartment building or perhaps an office building and since we could see lights on inside, I rang the doorbell and used the giant creepy knocker on the door. My mom was curious and started walking around looking at this weird building, she didn’t know about and walked a bit away from my sisters and I. No one answered.

I pressed my ear to the giant white pristine oak doors and I could hear faint organ music playing inside, but the windows on the door had thick curtains and I couldn’t see anything.

My mom came back and told us to get away and dragged us away from the door and yelled it was time to head home, she was in a foul mood. I asked what was wrong and she pointed to a stone sign on the other side of the building, it was a funeral home.

I read the sign and the place was closed since seven but I told her about the creepy music playing inside and she didn’t want to know.

I have figured two things: the workers thought it was funny to scare us kids with a creepy soundtrack or someone was playing on an organ inside a closed funeral home on Halloween night.

This wasn’t exactly ON Halloween, but it was close enough. It was only a week, or two, before, when report cards were sent home from school.

My daughters’ father was often a hard man to please. If they received a B+ in a subject, he had to know why it wasn’t an A. Yes, he could be a difficult father.

Anyway, report cards had come out and when he came home from work, he looked and them and, as usual, was not pleased. The girls were watching TV and they knew from experience that a tirade was probably on its way. It was …

After half an hour, or so, the TV suddenly went crazy. The channel dial started running through all of the channels with a fast “click-click-click-click”, all by itself. When it got to the end, it reversed direction and raced all the way in the other direction.