The scariest thing about all of this might be that there is a think tank that measures metrics that assess such assessments, but whatever. According to itself, the Martin Prosperity Institute "is the world’s leading think-tank on the role of location, place and city-regions in global economic prosperity." The Institute is based in the Rotman School of Management in Toronto, Canada, and it took some looking to find that this little-known school has an actual campus with real, newly renovated buildings, and that my visit to its website did not earn me any credit-hours or a degree. (Visit some of those online-only universities sometime and see how quickly you start getting recruiters calling. Perhaps I should use a fake email address next time.)
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| Poughkeepsie has the biggest pumpkin |
The study, titled "Trick or Treat? The 2013 Halloween Index," measures "five variables that are integral to a successful Halloween: candy stores (per 10 thousand), costume rental stores (per 10 thousand), children aged 5–14 (share of metro population), population density, and median income." Poughkeepsie does not rank number one in any one of these five categories, but it ranks so high across the board that it beats second-place Chicago, Illinois (last year's winner), and ... well, every other metro area in the entire country for its sheer Halloweeniness. Jackson, Tennessee, has the greatest number of costume stores per capita. Ocean City, New Jersey, has the most candy stores. But Poughkeepsie's high average income and large number of costume stores sent us to number one.
It should come as no surprise, but judging from the articles written by pundits across the country this press release came as a plenty big surprise ("Is Poughkeepsie, NY, the best place to trick-or-treat?"); it should come as no surprise for those of us who grew up in Poughkeepsie that our hometown is the fake spookiest or candy-sweetest or the best Halloween town in America.
If you have noticed how many costume stores spring up along the Rt. 9 corridor every fall, or the large number of short-lived candy shops, or haunted houses, or the fact that there is a gigantic freaking cemetery smack in the middle of the whole darn Rt. 9 corridor, then of course this study makes a lot of sense.
It would have made a lot of sense to my sister and me and our elementary school friends if you'd told us this back in the 1970s. I was never a particularly enthusiastic trick-or-treater. As a less than enthusiastic cub scout, tasked with selling items from the most boring scout catalog ever printed (plastic campground dining gear and peanut brittle that outlasted the plastic dining gear are two that I remember), I already knew my way around the neighborhood and knew which houses were owned by people I did not like seeing in bright daylight, much less at dusk. The plastic masks--Fred Flintstone, Spiderman, Superman--were each identical except for the paint job, did not line up over my eyes, much less my eyeglasses, and were held in place by the flimsiest rubber band yet devised by human ingenuity. I could not breathe. Each had a cape--even Fred Flinstone, I am sure, or perhaps that was my mother's ingenuity--and none earned me much candy. My less than enthusiastic cub scout side always trumped my slightly more enthusiastic begging-for-candy side.
But bordering my neighborhood, on two sides, was "The Woods." Google Maps will convince you that the wooded area between my neighborhood and the Hudson River was not impressive, was merely undeveloped and undevelopable land left to rodents and deer and scrub brush and some ordinary maples and oaks. The untrained eye will see, driving along the country road bordered on one side by The Woods, that one can clearly see to the Hudson River and unmistakably hear trains on the Metro-North line a few hundred yards away. I pity my 2013 eyes and ears. Because I knew by 1977 that those trains came off their tracks and plunged howling into The Woods at night. And some of those rodents and deer had never before been seen by the eyes of man. They were feral and wild and wildly feral. (Never mind those firepits or the plastic forks or ... is that peanut brittle?)
One Halloween Night, in 1979, I was allowed to venture on foot, not accompanied by adults and in costume (hold that thought for a second while I address my parents: What!?!) from my neighborhood to my best friend's neighborhood, which was connected to mine by Barnegat Road. The Woods borders Barnegat Road. Do I need to repeat this?
The best friend, Doug, loved to tell tall tales. There had been a plane crash in the woods that night (there had been no such thing) or a car had plunged down the embankment into the woods last night and exploded and the driver got out on fire (there had been no such thing) or his Polish grandmother had told him that there would be ghosts in 1979 that hadn't been seen in many many years (he had no Polish grandmother). Doug was five days younger than me and cheerfully lazy and this made him a respected authority in my eyes.
At just the perfectly wrong moment, while he and I walked from his neighborhood back to mine, loot in our identical plastic pumpkin pails, just as he was committing with his words some luckless fictional airplane pilot to a fiery death earlier that very day a mere few feet from where we were walking, just then, my flashlight went dark. We started to walk at a faster pace. There truly are few streetlights on that road, and even fewer in memory. I had never seen a night so dark or learned of a death so imaginable. Just then, we heard a sound. A low, rasping scream of an anguished creature--Doug had found his true calling as a storyteller, at least this one night, and both of us bolted from what was obviously the ghost-tortured mortal remains of his burned-up pilot or train engineer come to take us from Poughkeepsie, the best Halloween city in the country.
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