Forget ghosts and vampires. I’ve survived squirrels, teens, and suburban America.

I love Halloween. Not the American suburban attempt to display enough strings of orange lights and animated monsters from Costco to rival the power consumption of small countries. Not the latest scary movie where teens go into basements and get chopped into tomato soup. Not even the memes of small dogs dressed up as crustaceans. (Okay, I’m not a monster: I do love those a little.)

I mean, of course, that I love the excuse Halloween gives me to buy massive bags of candy bars in make-it-through-the-zombie-apocalypse quantities, and not in those little wuss-bar sizes either. Cause I’m ALL about the leftovers kids.

When we first moved to Scotland, I consulted the brain trust: unsuspecting strangers who talk to me at the park. I know what you’re thinking. It’s the UK. When you see someone you know, you are required to turn around and walk immediately in the other direction on the off-chance that they might want to talk to you. On a public street. It has absolutely nothing to do with whether or not you like each other. You probably do. But that still doesn’t mean you can talk in anywhere in public except for a pub.

The one exception to that rule was my secret weapon. My little dog. There is absolutely no card-carrying resident of the British Isles who won’t stop to tell me that she’s a fine wee doggie. And then they’re mine for as long as it takes me to ask my question. In this case it was about local Halloween customs. To my surprise, I found that in Scotland and Ireland, the tradition of “guising” (as in dis-guise) predates American trick-or-treat. Children dressed as witches or ghouls are expected to recite some song or poem in return for treats and money. Excellent.

[Update: last year, 100% of the children who came to our door performed the song from Frozen. Do kids even know any other songs?]

It’s not that I haven’t lived through actual horrors. I’ve had my garden attempt to murder me. I’ve been attacked by a squirrel using a dog as its weapon of choice. And I once lived next door to a woman whose idea of neighborhood watch involved actual weapons. Compared to that, a twelve-foot inflatable skeleton from Costco seems positively reassuring. And it probably won’t take out your landscaping.

As Halloween 2026 approaches, I find myself looking back on an incident from a few years back, when I discovered that man’s best friend might actually be working for the squirrels.

It was actually the squirrel’s fault.

The dog and I were walking down a street in Glasgow. I was checking trees for autumn color. The dog was checking trees for pee-mail. The next few seconds unfolded like a low-budget action movie, only without the stunt doubles, special effects, or attractive people.

FLASH! A squirrel darted in front of us.

FLASH! The dog launched herself after it, ignoring the fact that she was attached to a leash, which was attached to me.

FLASH! The leash wrapped around my legs, and I became intimately acquainted with the pavement. I lay there spreadeagled, considering my options. If I stayed perfectly still, perhaps nobody would notice. Maybe I could quietly die of embarrassment. Maybe the squirrel would come back and finish the job.

Then a small voice announced: “Mummy, why is that lady bleeding all over the pavement? Could I stroke her doggie?”

I looked up to discover I’d attracted an audience. A kind woman unwound a paper napkin from her ice cream cone and handed it to me. I pressed it against my drippier bits while assuring everyone that I was absolutely fine. As one does following an unscheduled public faceplant. The dog, forcibly reminded of the finer points of leash physics versus squirrel pursuit, let me know she blamed me for the squirrel’s escape.

 

I limped home, dragging the reluctant dog, whose To-Do list now included “Wait at the foot of the squirrel’s escape tree until spring at least.” As I covered the variously oozing bits with approximately a box of Band-Aids (plasters for my UK friends), I realized that typing was not going to feature prominently in my immediate future.

So while I settled in for the world’s longest bath for the second time in a matter of weeks—the previous incident involving my garden trying to kill me—I began to consider a disturbing pattern. First the garden. Now the dog.

Was this a conspiracy? Had the squirrel been hired? Was there a woodland branch of organized crime? Was everything in my neighborhood trying to kill me? I still don’t have answers. But the incident reminded me of another time I discovered that the greatest threat to my continued existence might be lurking right outside my front door.

The Halloween house that didn’t need decorations

“There’s a Situation, Ma’am.”

My daughter and I were heading home from the movies (cinema, for readers of British persuasion) when a polite police officer stopped us at the street leading to our little slice of Seattle McBurbia.

He explained that there was a Situation.

I explained that I absolutely had to get home or, in approximately nine months, there was going to be a much bigger Situation.

My teenage son and his girlfriend had left the theater before us and were undoubtedly already back at the house. You could practically see the hormone clouds rising from the bottom of the hill. In fact, I could look uphill and see that the only lights on at our house were in the spa room. You know, the one with the hot tub that I’d tried to get the previous owners to take with them because we were from the Midwest.

We do hot dish. Not hot tub.

I tried explaining to the nice officer that I wasn’t ready to be a grandmother. He seemed unmoved by the possibility that the Seattle Police Department was about to become directly responsible for the next generation of my family.

Almost two hours went by. The spa room lighting dimmed, as though the only lights remaining were the ones beneath the water in the hot tub. I started picking out baby names.

When we finally made it back to the house, two innocent (but suspiciously damp) teenagers insisted they’d just been sitting around wondering what had kept us. And hey, wasn’t it weird that neither of their mobiles had registered any incoming calls? Or texts. SO many texts.

Meanwhile, next door…

The following day, I discovered what led to the lockdown.

Our next-door neighbor had met some process servers at her door with a display of the weapons her gun-dealing current gentleman caller kept around the house. This had resulted in a police response that, as far as I could tell, was only slightly smaller than the invasion of Normandy.

Now, you have to understand something about our neighborhood. It was the Walt Disney version of ultimate suburbia, where everyone joined the neighborhood association, voted in school board elections, and knew the names of everybody’s dog and most of their children. Lawns were maintained. Recycling bins were properly sorted. People had strong opinions about acceptable mailbox colors.

But our neighbor was a bit… different.

On the day we moved in, she came over to make sure we weren’t anything undesirable, like Asians or Jews. I told her she’d hit paydirt. We were both, and were thinking of renting the basement to a Black and Hispanic gay couple.

In my defense, I didn’t know she kept an arsenal in her house. In retrospect, perhaps the neighborhood welcome basket should have contained body armor.

A week later, we met again when we arrived home to discover her cutting down the last of our row of beautiful old trees along one side of our yard. She did not, she told us, have time to be asking permission for every little safety precaution when she needed to be able to keep an eye on us. Apparently she scorned the time-honored creepy neighbor practice of curtain-peering or binoculars.

Still, I suppose it was thoughtful of her to make sure the sightlines were clear for the SWAT team.

The neighbourly visit

A few weeks passed after the incident with the process servers/potential grandchild production. I was over in the next town picking up my daughter when the Hub called and casually suggested that perhaps we should stop somewhere and grab a latte.

Could this possibly be the same man who would stand in Burger King’s interminable queue for a crap cup of coffee rather than pander to my addiction to overpriced caffeinated beverages with fake Italian names? Clearly the pod people had mastered the telephone system.

“Who is this really?” I asked.

Just then my phone buzzed with a text from my son. He said that people with automatic weapons and POLICE signs on their backs were pouring through our bushes towards the neighbor’s house. He wanted me to tell his father—who was standing in our picture window, drinking a cup of awful coffee and watching the show—that maybe he should get down. I passed along the message. 

Sadly, they took my poor neighbor away. Some accountants moved in instead. The only suspicious activity from that point on was probably somebody claiming an excessive home-office deduction. There went the neighborhood.

Halloween 2026: I’m not afraid of ghosts. It’s the living who worry me.

These days, Halloween comes with elaborate decorations, animatronic monsters, and doorbells that record every trick-or-treater who approaches.

But after everything I’ve survived, I’m not especially concerned about things that go bump in the night. I’m more concerned about things that go SPLAT in the afternoon. Or neighbors who arrive bearing automatic weapons instead of banana bread. Or husbands who think the appropriate response to an armed police operation is to stand in the picture window and enjoy the entertainment.

So this Halloween, I’m not bothering with a costume. I’ll just put on some old clothes, wrap myself in a few Band-Aids, and walk the dog.  Assuming the squirrel doesn’t get me first.

What about you? Who was your scariest neighbour ever—the one who lived in THAT house nobody ever went to? Or has your supposedly loving pet ever attempted to collect on your life insurance?

Happy Halloween!