Goblins need not apply

The last documented haunting occurred on Aug. 17 in Perryton, Conn. in the home of Mavis Bitterman. "Robert," as she called him, had for five years terrified Mavis by reenacting "Charles in Charge" episodes upon the stroke of midnight.

For months she hired paranormal psychologists, ghost hunters and TV critics to rid her home of Robert. Finally one night she left the television airing a CNN special on the war in Iraq. Out of habit, she woke up at midnight and found that Robert had hired an exorcist to get rid of her.

Up until the last four years or so, I was easily spooked. In grade school, the commercial for "The Exorcist" left me lying awake at night urging my brain to think of anything but that movie. At the time, it was the "go-cart" I always went to. It was going to be the coolest go-cart in the world, and when I laid awake at night afraid of the boogieman, I would urge my brain to think about the cool way I’d build that go-cart.

I would never, ever go into one of those Halloween haunted houses. I clearly remember an occasion (this really happened) when I took about 10 steps into a Church-sponsored haunted house fund raising event, turned, shoved my way past a monster who fell into a cardboard coffin, and ran like a frightened Wildebeest out the entrance (much to the delight of the staff).

I remember waking up one night when I was in grade school. The moonlight coming from in between the drawn curtains formed a necktie, which I naturally assumed belonged to Frankenstein’s monster, ready for a night of frights. Why he was so dressed up I didn’t know. I began to scream, and just seconds later Dad came galloping down the stairs to save his son one more time from the ol’ boogieman.

Later on, when I was too old to keep making up excuses for not going into a haunted house, it was the movies that left me shivering. "The Shining" still gives me goose pimples when I think of those creepy twins saying, "Come play with us, Danny." Yikes. If that were me, I’d have been gone before they completed the sentence. In fact, I’d have been gone so fast, they would have said, "Come play with us … Danny?…Danny?"

And more recently? It was the last night before I moved out of my home deep in the Pike National Forest in Colorado. As I lay on the floor in the nearly empty house, the forest just outside my glass patio doors, I decided to watch "The Blair Witch Project," a movie that will freak out anyone who has ever spent time camping or back-packing in the woods. A movie about kids being lost and tormented in the woods is not one to watch while alone in a nearly empty house deep in the mountains. By the way, is it just me, or have modern scary movies become all too sinister? Give me Boris Karloff or give me the Food Network.

Apart from the creaks, groans and occasional 19th Century poetry recitations that emanate from the walls of my 105-year-old house, I’m rarely spooked any more. I figure that most goblins have called it quits, the world having gotten a bit too violent. The ghosts and goblins are in the unemployment line, the real horrors having become far more frightening than any that Hollywood can come up with. I mean, what fun is haunting when those you haunt are scarier than you?

But just because the goblins aren’t standing behind creaking doors, and ghosts have vacated their hiding places under your bed, it doesn’t mean the boogieman doesn’t exist.

When "Robert" watched the news that night, he didn’t just see people dying in war, he saw stories and images about thousands who have died or have been displaced in catastrophic natural disasters. He saw startling abuses of power and incomprehensible incompetence that has led to death and destruction. He heard about bird flu making the rounds. A "pandemic" they call it. And the moment he began to wonder, "What next?" came the information that we only have seven — no, eight — doses of vaccine available.

It begs you to wonder, what is there left to fear?

And therein lies the good news. Franklin Delano Roosevelt once said, "There is nothing to fear, but fear itself." Fear, I think, is the real boogieman.