Tales of Halloween Mischief Part 3 (The exciting conclusion.)

As we headed back into town, we decided to go through some of the back streets and look for the darkest houses with the most stuff. We found quite a few houses that were dark and ripe for the picking. It was at this time that we seemed to be running into some, well, problems with pumpkins.

At one house we stopped and 3 or 4 jumped from the bed of the truck and over a fence into a yard filled with Halloween goodies. Cornstalks were taken, hay bales were taken, and of course pumpkins were taken. Unfortunately one of the pumpkin takers had a little trouble stopping as he got to the truck. I am not sure exactly what happened, whether he slipped or just couldn’t stop himself, but one cousin ended up smashing a pumpkin between the truck and himself. It didn’t help matters that the pumpkin was a little rotten. He had pumpkin innards all over his jacket and shirt. That wasn’t the only somewhat aged pumpkin we handled that night.

At another house, the crazy one of the group ran to a porch to nab a huge pumpkin. It looked as though it could have been about a 40 to 50 pounder. It was sitting on the end of the porch and the porch was about thigh high. He bent down and thrust his arms under the pumpkin expecting to clean and jerk that sucker into his arms and run it back to a waiting truck. The pumpkin had other plans. Apparently this pumpkin had been waiting in the sun for many, many days and was very rotten on the bottom. At least it was rotten enough to ingest our friend’s arms up to his elbows into its stomach. Our crazy friend, not to be defeated went ahead and lugged it to the truck regardless of the slippery pumpkin guts and threw it into the truck.

There was one more unruly pumpkin we had to deal with on this night. We were in a subdivision and found some nice houses to confiscate decorations from and the cousin who smashed a pumpkin between himself and the truck was on the trail of another pumpkin. I guess he got spooked by something because he came running for the truck looking as if he were about to make a dive into the bed.

The main problem with this form of entry is that the truck we were in was a four wheel drive, red monster. The bed of it was at least five feet off the ground. Pumpkin or no pumpkin, he was not going to jump over the side of the bed into the truck. He realized this and tossed the pumpkin to another cousin so he would have a little easier time climbing in the truck. The pumpkin must have been pretty ripe because as my cousin caught it, it exploded on to him as if he had been hit with a water balloon filled with pumpkin guts. We got everything together and moved on to our most creative vandalism of the night.

We were driving through the back streets of BD and we saw a house with a huge Halloween display lit up by spotlights in the ground. There was something odd about this house. It seemed as though no one was living there. It was too new. There were no signs of life. After a few drive bys to check things out, we hit it. It had all kinds of good decorations, plastic skeletons, ghosts, pumpkins and a rather shoddy, but cool homemade coffin.

We grabbed up everything we could get and took off down the road. By this time we had a huge amount of stuff and we were thinking of something to do with it. Someone came up with the great idea to take the decorations from the last house to the Taylor place and set it up. The Taylor place is basically a farm with an old farm house that was usually rented out to, let’s say less fortunate people (quite often a bootlegger). The owners are great people and for a pretty big farmhouse, the rent was always really cheap.

We thought we would spread some Halloween cheer and give this family a big Halloween spread. The farm house sits way off the road, though it can be seen from the road and there is a long driveway to the house. We decided to set up the decorations right at the beginning of the drive so that everyone who drove by would see it.

We went all out. We used everything we took from the last house and even some other things we had laid claim to during the night. Coffin, check. Skeleton, check. Pumpkins, ghosts, cornstalks, check, check, check. As the kids say in the streets, we hooked them up. It was not the greatest Halloween display of all time, but it was pretty good. We were glad our thieving ways could help a less fortunate family. We felt doubly good.

As we left the Taylor place, it was around 11 pm, we had gotten a lot of stuff done in about 3 or 4 hours and we were ready to return to base. As we were taking the back roads back to the house, the crazy one gets a wild hair and launches a pumpkin from the bed of the truck and obliterates a mailbox. We usually never destroyed anything, unless you count the destruction of Halloween dreams by stealing decorations. I really had mixed emotions about it later on in the week when I learned it was a cousin’s mailbox. A distant cousin, so it didn’t bother me too much. It’s all in good fun.

As for the family that we played Great Pumpkin too, I never knew what they thought. I can only imagine the looks on their faces as they reached the end of their drive and saw a huge Halloween wonderland. We did this about two weeks before Halloween, so they had plenty of time to enjoy their decorations. That is until some no good, low down, thieving vandals stole every bit of it the day before Halloween. There really ought to be a law.