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| This guy was a mainstay in the stable of my pre-pubescent |
Mixed up in my young mind with the devil worshiping scare were the scary stories my dad would tell his scout troop when we went out camping. One night they were over at our house and I was supposed to be asleep in my bed, but I was actually hiding underneath a china hutch so I could listen in. In the interest in my long-term mental stability, I should have stayed in bed, but I stayed to hear the horrifying tales.
The kid's stories were malformed and fell stillborn from their unsubtle minds. My dad, in great storyteller fashion, stole his story whole cloth from Washington Irving. He told about the Hessian soldier who had his head shot off by a cannon ball and thereafter spent his eternity riding down travelers to take their heads.
Definitely cozy bedtime stuff for a high strung and anxious kid like myself. I loved my head and was always concerned for its safety. For years, every time I was in a dark place at night I fantasized about being decapitated by the headless horseman. I couldn't enjoy a walk in the woods for years after and was too terrified to sleep outside. Even in my own bed at home I would wake up panicked in a cold sweat from a headless horseman related dream.
In a few years, when I outgrew this terror, I went as the headless horseman for Halloween. I thought it would be most effective, terror-wise, to put an actual pumpkin on my head. This was not the case and I ended up looking like a ten-year-old with half a pumpkin on his head. Kids from the neighborhood thought it was so funny that they called me pumpkin-head for years afterward. In a strange way the headless horseman still haunted me, he had just shifted from preying on my fear of decapitation to my fear of pre-pubescent social awkwardness.
