With Halloween coming up, I’m reminded of a story Jay wrote 10+ years ago about Trick or Treating on Bacon Street, and it’s still relevant, other than tiny Marilyn Monroe is now a senior in college.
2024: Trick or Treating on Bacon Street is still something that kids in Westminster look forward to–this year it’s Thursday, October 31 from 5pm – 7pm. Bacon and Pleasant Streets are closed to traffic. There is also Trunk or Treat in the Meetinghouse School parking lot. You can also stop by my office (Keller Williams Realty at 107 Main Street, to the right of Vincent’s Country Store) for goodies and nice cold bottled water, which has become an odd tradition in that I’ve been doing it long enough that kids come in knowing they can also get water! After trick or treating, head on over to the Fire Station on South Street for the costume contest and bonfire, starting at 7pm.
JAY’S STORY FROM 2012
I’m still recovering from Halloween, and I don’t even eat candy. We decided to head for Bacon Street and the town bonfire, as we have been doing for a few years. This particular year we had our three youngest (Michael Jackson, a Warlock and Marilyn Monroe) and one of the neighbor kids (a not very scary Monster). I figured this would be like any other Halloween adventure…Jen would take pictures for upcoming Vine stories, talk to virtually everyone, and watch the kids, while I would provide moral support and occasionally say, “take a picture of this”. It didn’t quite work out that way this year.
First it started to rain, and then both Jen and my middle daughter (Michael Jackson) decided that they did not feel well enough to make the trek to the center of town. My daughter had missed school with some kind of stomach bug and managed to give it to Jen. We turned around, dropped a disappointed daughter off (she’d spent hours making the Michael Jackson costume), and then I headed once again to Bacon Street with three kids in the back seat, two of my own and a neighbors’ son who had recently moved to Westminster.
Arriving at the center of town, it was quite crowded, so I parked over past the library, lugged out the camera, put on a hat because of the rain, and headed towards the pharmacy. There were a bunch of people waiting in line to enter the pharmacy for trick or treat, and to cross the street, so I fumbled around with the camera, tried to take a picture with the lens cap still on, then realized I had to turn on the camera, and finally got a good picture. Then I put the lens cap back on, tucked the camera inside my jacket out of the rain, looked around, and realized all three of the kids were gone. It had only taken about two minutes and I’d managed to lose all of them, including my youngest, just seven years old, and the neighbor’s son as well.
I panicked a second, looking around, and sure enough, they were gone, nowhere to be seen. There were, however, plenty of other people, all dressed in strange and elaborate costumes, milling up and down Bacon Street. Estimates of the crowd size, based on the scientific method of how much candy was given out over the course of the night, plus a few ‘wags’, came up with a number of around 700 people. That seemed about right to me—in fact, given that I’d lost the kids in a sea of costumed children and teenagers, I’d have guessed there were a few thousand people on the street.
Thinking a second, I realized they’d probably headed for the big attraction from prior years, our babysitters’ house–the D’Onfro’s haunted barn at 12 Bacon Street. That’s where I found Erin, the youngest, all dressed up in her fox fur coat, high heels and sequined outfit, as a movie star, in the rain.
She was standing there alone in the midst of the crowd, afraid to enter the barn. Turns out her attentive and cautious older brother had just abandoned her there since she was afraid to enter the barn, and they weren’t waiting. I told her not to leave me again, and waited for the boys to emerge. When they didn’t, Erin and I headed in, her clinging to my arm like we were entering the gates of Hades rather than a barn on Bacon Street.
I saw the boys inside, and told them, “you guys run off like that again, and we’re going straight home.” Then Erin and I proceeded through the little barn of horrors, and I’m sure it’s an experience she’ll remember a long time. The barn is always well done.
We emerged a few minutes later, I gathered all the boys together, gave them the speech again, and we headed down the street, Erin still clinging tightly. I stopped to take more pictures, not my favorite pastime as I felt like people were wondering what I was doing, taking pictures of other people’s kids dressed up all sorts of strange ways. After about five pictures, I started to walk again down Bacon Street, and to my surprise, sort of, the boys were already missing again. Now I was mad.
Erin and I walked back up Bacon Street to the Westminster Pharmacy, got a bag of treats, but didn’t see the boys. So, we headed back down to the next ‘haunted barn’ after the D’Onfro’s place. After asking around awhile (nobody had seen them, but they weren’t recognizable anyway in their costumes), the boys emerged from the second barn. This time they got the picture more clearly and stuck with me the rest of the evening. Together, the four of us walked down Bacon Street and then along Elliot Street, where I had to constantly remind the kids to stay out of the road, since although Bacon Street was blocked off, Elliot Street wasn’t.
Not being a professional photographer, many of the pictures didn’t come out. The Vincent’s Country Store/Food Pantry shopping cart was a big success, but the pictures of it weren’t, for instance. At the far end of Elliot Street there was quite a Halloween display of a skeleton riding in an old car, complete with a moving body and smoke billowing out. That picture didn’t come out either.
About this time, at the far end of the trick or treat route, Erin got a blister from her movie star shoes, so we headed back to the car for sneakers and the bonfire, her walking barefoot (Jen wouldn’t have liked that and is probably mad at me as she’s proofreading this), but the bags were full of goodies.
The bonfire was great too, as usual, except it was raining, but the best part was when Jen showed up later and I didn’t have to keep track of the kids by myself any longer, and could hang the camera strap around someone else’s neck. For some reason, probably the lighting, the pictures at the bonfire came out better than the ones I took.
Later that evening I dropped the neighbor kid off at his house. His parents came out to say hello, so I got out and was talking with them. Eventually I noticed that their son had not yet gotten out of the car. Great, I thought. I probably left him at the bonfire. No, I hadn’t done that –they were all still in the car, counting and trading candy. Trading candy, and then fighting over it, tends to be a Halloween ritual for us. On the way out our neighbors’ kid said to me, “that was the weirdest Halloween I ever had.” I asked him if that meant it was good or bad. “It’s the best Halloween I ever had,” he replied.
