Column: Growing up in a scary world, one that no longer exists

Of all the major holidays and observances in the calendrical year, Halloween is the one that is meant for children to enjoy the most.

Oh, you could make a case for Christmas — and its cousin, Easter — but there’s so much theological baggage attached to those special days that something gets lost amid Santa and the trees, the Bunny and the chocolate eggs.

Halloween, to lift a line from an old Trix commercial, is for kids.

Or at least it used to be.

These days, with fear in the air everywhere and people quick to make snap judgments, trick-or-treating has become an endangered species, so much so that what used to be an annual nighttime excursion into the fun and fantasy of growing up is now a restricted activity, usually reserved for super-safe daytime hours.

You’ve doubtless heard about things like trunk-or-treat, wherein folks park their cars in secured lots and hand out candy as children make a circuit on the asphalt, again, mostly in the light of the sun.

I’m all for keeping kids safe and fully understand why a lot of parents prefer that kind of antiseptic environment to the spooky neighborhood crawls my siblings and I used to make, but something thrilling has been lost, that delicious frisson of fright.

Way back in the early 1960s, when we lived in a bedroom suburban community just outside the capital city, there was a Friday night TV show called “Chiller Theater,” which aired just after the local news had signed off for the night. It featured monster movies, classics such as “Frankenstein,” “Dracula,” “The Wolfman,” “The Mummy,” “Godzilla,” “The Hunchback of Notre Dame” and “The Creature from the Black Lagoon.”

My best friend lived right across the street, and we used to have sleep-overs at each other’s houses, savoring Canada Dry bottles of pop — mostly grape soda — and feasting on Jiffy Pop popcorn.

His folks, just like mine, left us alone, which was cool of them.

He and I used to collect magazines like “Famous Monsters of Filmland,” and for birthdays, we’d ask for Aurora model kits so we could glue together our favorite scary-movie characters. Somewhere, down here outside my cellar office, I still have a few of them, and one of these nights, I ought to unbox them.

After all, it’s nearly Halloween, and they should be on display.

When our family moved to this little town a few years later, I discovered another Friday night TV treasure called “Ghoulardi.”

Starring a man named Ernie Anderson, it took the fright-movie concept to another stratosphere, one filled with inside jokes, exploding frogs, satirical sketches, odd lighting and lots and lots of sight gags and catch phrases like “Pop Your Magic Twanger.” Ghoulardi wore a fright wig, a goatee, shades, a lab coat festooned with “Turn Blue” and “Knif” buttons and was always ad-libbing.

I fell in love with it almost immediately, joining the ranks of my fifth-grade friends who turned me onto it after I’d moved to town.

Later on, it morphed into “Houlihan and Big Chuck,” then “Big Chuck and Little John,” but the thrill was gone. Without Ghoulardi, the Friday night slot became a parody of itself, a real TV graveyard.

When I was in high school, a guy named Ron Swede resurrected the Ghoulardi idea with a character called, simply, “The Ghoul,” and I liked it, even ordering a sweatshirt, which is down here somewhere, but I was older then, and the humor wasn’t for me.

After college, I fell into a crowd that was filled with creative, artistic folks who enjoyed bands like Talking Heads and U2, the kind of people who held parties for lunar eclipses and once invited me to a Halloween-themed soiree that was as novel as they were.

They called it “Come As Your Favorite Dead Celebrity” and my girlfriend and I had a lot of fun scouring thrift shops, looking for Depression-era clothing, stylish hats and plastic Tommy guns.

Our appearance as Bonnie and Clyde was a big hit with everyone.

Halloween and costumes never really go out of style, do they?

Several more years passed before my fiancée (now my wife) and I were invited to another seasonal fete during which we were urged to learn how to dance the Time-Warp from “The Rocky Horror Picture Show,” an invitation that fell on deaf ears. She and I have danced exactly once, and that was at our wedding back in 2007.

Don’t blame her … she’d have been great. It’s my phobia, not hers.

As Halloween approaches once more, I’ve been looking for older movies on HBO that have the reputation of being super-scary, but so far, I’ve been gravely disappointed. If you’re a fan of “The Amityville Horror” or “Children of the Corn” or “The House on Haunted Hill,” I mean no disrespect. I found them juvenile, silly and utterly devoid of the key ingredient, that being shock value.

I’m saving “The Exorcist,” “The Shining” and “Night of the Living Dead” for later in the month. Those films ARE scary.

Until then, I have a complete set of “Dark Shadows” VCR tapes down here somewhere, and even though it’s campy and filled with mistakes, it’s authentic and takes me back to grade school again.

As I said way back at the outset, Halloween is for kids of all ages.

Mike Dewey can be reached at Carolinamiked@aol.com or 1317 Troy Road, Ashland, OH 44805. He invites you to join him on his Facebook page, where haunted houses, witches and ghosts are very real.