Make Halloween scary again

It was the early evening of 31 October and I was three years old, sitting in the living room with Mum, on the brink of bedtime, when I turned to the corner and a decorative wicker armchair. (It was the 1980s.) ‘Mum,’ I enquired sweetly, ‘who’s that man sitting there?’ Mum, suitably unnerved, asked me for details about the invisible guest, whereupon I outlined a farmer resembling every description Mum had heard of her great-grandfather. Her great-grandfather was a 19th-century ploughman who worked the fields where our home would later be built. My parents had never spoken of him in my presence.

I have no recollection of that night beyond maternal retellings, but I like to think I was getting into the Halloween spirit at an early age, trying to scare the bejesus out of Mum and just got lucky with the great-grandfather thing. That is what Halloween is about after all: scariness.