THIS IS HALLOWEEN.

On the neck-twisting racetrack of the never-ending calendar year, holidays are our rest stops. We get to park our big American butts at home for one whole day, eat a ton of food, and reunite with family and friends. For most of us, it’s mindless, it’s welcome, and it’s great. We need our holidays. They’re there for us to take a deep breath. And then there’s Halloween. The exhalation of the breath. Halloween: not quite a holiday, maybe a sinister holiday: the steeling of our summer nerves before the long, sunlight-less glinter of the cold, cold winter. We ransack our neighbors, ransacking our bodies with our neighbor’s candy. We do psychological play-terrorism on ourselves and each other, acting out fantasies of ax-murder, clown torture, and the sought-after company of ghosts. If the standard retinue of holidays is about the ritual as comfort, then Halloween is about the demonic ritual, the accelerating thrill of the transgressive. Here, reader, I have compiled for you just some of the wonky discomfort-traps that are available to you locally in association with this upcoming non-holiday. For optimum results, alternate your grotesque thrills with calm, maple-sunlit field trips to your local cider mills, apple orchards, and pumpkin patches. And of course, your local Star****’s for a pumpkin-spice drug and pumpkin-spice patty (yum yum!).

PEACHES AND CRIME MURDER MYSTERY Are you afraid of cabaret? Don’t be shy. It’s okay to be afraid of cabaret. It’s an antiquated form of song, dance, and storytelling performance popularized in the U.S. during the early nineteen hundreds and now, thanks to local 8-piece vaudevillians Peaches and Crime, it’s not just fateful: it’s deadly. In a choose-your-own-adventure-style murder mystery, The Man Who Died! is breaking down the fourth wall, and maybe breaking a man’s neck. There’s just no telling how this man will die. You may kill him! Wouldn’t that be scary? Whatever the case, and whoever the man is who dies, you’re bound to be implicated and he’s bound to go out in a brash pomp of velvety voices and theatrical ceremony. It’s going down at the Ti-Ahwaga Performing Arts Center at 42 Delphine St. in Owego, NY on Saturday, October 24th. Doors open at 7:30pm, showtime is at 8. The crime is real, and the peaches are smooth. Deadly smooth.

REAPER’S REVENGE With Reaper’s Revenge- a 60-acre-deep spelunking into abysmal fantasy-endangerment scenario after abysmal fantasy-endangerment scenario- survival is key. Not unlike life, you’re going to want to survive. And in this way, your grotesque voyage through Reaper’s Revenge can be thought of as an experiential lesson in life. You want to survive long enough to get to your next horrifying experience so that you can survive that experience, creating an opportunity for you to await the horrifying experience after that. We’re talking four courses here. A dark hayride through a nice, idyllic terrain populated by undead predators; followed by a stroll through the Lost Carnival- a clown prison?- followed by a pitch black labyrinth (also populated by predators); ending quaintly at Sector 13, a mutant-containment site designed to house the sub-human detritus of a massive bio-nuclear attack on the eastern half of the United States. This all occurs in less than 90 minutes. Can you imagine that? Your feelings of being assailed await you at 460 Green Grove Road, Scranton, PA on every Friday, Saturday, and Sunday through November. The hayride opens at dusk. Be on the property before 11pm on Fridays and Saturdays, and before 10pm Sundays. Punctuality is key if you’re going to knowingly participate in the intentional fabrication of your own fear and dread. ANIMAL ADVENTURE’S DAYTIME TRICK OR TREAT Most of us who have donned the trappings of falsehood in celebration of All Hallows’ Eve have posed as an animal at least once. You were probably very young: you were an adorable kangaroo with built in candy-carrying cavity; or you were an adorable bunny, hopping around, ho ho! Or later on: you were a sexy bunny. You were a sexy cat. You “hopped around.” You slunk. It’s all fun and games to us, pretending to be an animal for just one night. But what about the full-time animals, the actual kangaroos? While it may be scary, confronting the beings whose existences you’ve appropriated for short-lived pleasure through the privilege of being a human, at least there’s still candy to be had. October 17th from 10am to 3pm at 85 Martin Hill Rd. in Harpursville, NY, Animal Adventure is hosting a wild, wild trick-or-treat occasion where there will be themed stations, fall foods for sale, and a whole lot of animals and candy. Put on your costumes and bring your candy bags- this is your chance to make amends with your furry friends. You are not a cat.

YMCA TRUNK OR TREAT Candy is scary. How many people’s lives, do you think, have been reduced to a powerless scuttling from vending machine to vending machine, just to get that serotonin high? If you’re like me, you know what it’s like when the Reese’s Pieces fall apart. It’s horrifying. And the YMCA is celebrating this Halloween season by providing, for the newly addicted and veterans alike, an epicenter of sugar-fueled entropy in their parking lot. This will happen in the light of day, when the spectral canopy of denial (i.e. the dark) won’t be there to save you from your M&M-chugging shame. The candy will be in trunks (they need more trunks!- call Jen at (607) 770-9622 ext. 414 if you’re able to provide one); and inside, something that is called Pumpkin in the Pool will be taking place, for which you need different trunks. There will also be face painting. This way, when your skin breaks out, at least you’ll look like a zombie with pimples and not just a sad, lonely person with pimples. Get to the West Family Y at 740 Main St., Johnson City, NY on October 24th between 5 and 8pm for the fun. Bring your kids, bring your trunks, and maybe bring cab fare for when you lose your motor skills after your fifteenth miniature Hershey’s bar. HAUNTED HALLS OF HORROR Forget about haunted houses- houses in and of themselves are creepy enough. They are the places where, as though by hypnosis, we eat our meals at the same time every day and fall to our mattresses at the end of the night, passing the hours in a motionless, drool-filled stupor. Houses- all houses- have us under their voodoo control. Be afraid. And get ready to amp up your fear by about five times, because while the standard house’s square fright-age is about 2,400 feet (according to the Census Bureau), the Haunted Halls of Horror boasts 12,000 square feet of terror. And we’re not just talking toasters, ovens, lamps, and beds. It’s an even more bizarre hell than that. We’re talking clowns, light blue humanoids, people who appear to have suffered motley untreated facial accidents, and dead people. That’s right, dead people. There are going to be skeletons, man! Fridays and Saturdays, October 9th through the 31st from 7 to 10pm at 135 E. Frederick St. in Binghamton, NY, the Haunted Halls of Horror are inviting you over to their place for a change. Dinner will be mushed up brains. PUMPKIN HOUSE Have you ever wanted to be, or go, out of this world? Because this year, Pumpkin House- a walk-through featuring over 350 creatively carved pumpkins with warm food, drinks, and soda floats to boot- has the theme (and suggested dress code) of “Out of This World.” Just what world are we leaving this one for, you ask? Well. Imagine: you’re a NASA astronaut- and you’re a vampire, too! Or a cheerleader, whatever- and you’re traveling at the speed of spooky light in your pumpkin-shaped aircraft. Your pumpkin-shaped aircraft is orange and has giant facial-feature shaped holes in it. You sit on a mound of delicious, ready-to-be-baked pumpkin seeds and the cushy, stringy mush that conglomerates pumpkin seeds, anxiously awaiting the moment when you will touch down at Creek Side Gardens at 4 Village Lane, Tunkhannock, Pennsylvania on October 23rd, 24th, or 25th between 6 and 9pm. The autumn air is crisp. Your journey is safe. Finally your pumpkin-craft lands and you see: some local school groups are selling s’mores ingredients for you to combine and toast by the campfire. You’ve finally made it. You’ve made it home, to your pumpkin house.

SLAVA’S ZOMBIE CIRCUS Are you at least ten years old? If you are, then you’re ready: it’s time to come of age. That means shooting human beings who are dressed and made up to look like zombies with a paintball gun! At Slava’s Zombie Circus, there are three different ways for you to breach the strange, uncomfortable threshold to adulthood, and they all involve minor firearms. First: the Zombie Infested Paintball trail. People dressed like zombies surround you on each side. You scramble through the dark with nothing to guide you but a flashlight- and your paintball gun. What can you do? Shoot the zombies with your paintball gun! Then: Zombie Paintball Shooting Gallery. Here you are again, in an unusual situation, with a paintball gun. Only this time, rather than being threatened in an unfamiliar setting, you’re at a place of leisure: a shooting range! See how many of the zombies you can shoot. They’re there for your pleasure, after all! So you can shoot them! And, finally: something out of the ordinary. A daintier, more measured test of your maturity. Can you carve a pumpkin with an Airsoft gun? See if you can carve the pumpkin with your gun so that it looks like the horror-stricken face of a person dressed like a zombie whom you have just shot with a paintball gun. This is just more training, and soon, you’ll be a fully-developed, self-sustaining adult- once you’ve defeated all of your fears surrounding shooting a person dressed like a zombie. It all happens at 445 Miller Beach Rd. in Owego, the last three Fridays and Saturdays in October, from 7pm to 11pm.

ANY COLLEGE FRAT PARTY THAT IS TAKING PLACE ON HALLOWEEN They’re zombies, all of them, and they’re young and disillusioned of the self-improvement paradigm of higher education. I’m talking about the college students. The real party monsters. If you like noise pollution, pumpkin-spiced vodka punch, vomiting pumpkin-spiced vodka punch, or the inanity of a room full of sexed youths stumbling over one other with nothing in their heads except the blackness of exorcising collegiate stress, and drugs, then… What’s wrong with you? Are you depressed? You’re probably just a college student, or you wish you were- and that’s scary, but it’s okay. There’s a time and a place to be scary, and the stock Halloween frat party is certainly that time and place. So go… just, go… out into the streets of Binghamton on pretty much any given night on or surrounding Halloween and you’re bound to stumble into a Halloween-themed frat party. When you get there, it’ll be just like when you were a kid. You can over-consume substances, fall asleep on the carpet, and have dreams whose soundtrack is the bass from today’s popular hip hop. Just feel it, rattling your skull.