As the days loom ever nearer to Halloween, the guide on my cable TV boasts a host of spooky and eerie offerings. Sometimes I will tune in to the Food Network’s Halloween Baking Championship, so I can scorn the ridiculous amounts of royal-icing-and-rice-crispy-treat sculptures that contestants try to pass off as “baking”. This kind of stuff is not scary, except for imagining how that much sugar would hurt my teeth. The real scary Halloween shows and movies? I limit it to an annual viewing of It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown.

When I was a kiddo there was no such thing as cable TV in our house, but around Halloween the usual suspects still showed up: reruns of Carrie, The Exorcist and The Little Girl Who Lived Down the Lane. I watched all of those – and others – at least once and they all gave me the heebie-jeebies. But it was a movie of a name I can’t remember that bamboozled me the most. Let’s call it: The One With The Scary Basement.

Although I can’t put an exact date stamp on it, I remember watching it situationally: we were still living on the home farm before moving to the new house my parents built in 1981 near town. The farmhouse was circa 1950 so the basement was the typical partly finished one. The innocuous finished part was where the boys’ bedroom was, a large-ish room populated with beds, bureaus and bookshelves. (And boys – there were four in our family.) The unfinished part of the basement was the one that gave me pause. In the light of day, it wasn’t that scary: the cement walls were lined with jars of pickles and peaches, the old woodstove gave off a pleasant warmth in the winter when my mom would stoke it so she could wash clothes or run the cream separator comfortably down there. But it was also the domain of spiders (you know how I feel about them) and a dirt cellar and where I remember a hog getting butchered on a bloody table. (Real or not real?)

At night, or in the hours of the wee morning, this part of the basement gave off a whole different vibe. Sometimes I had to go down there to fetch something or to use the only shower in the house. The problem was that dispelling the dark wasn’t a matter of flicking on a light switch located just inside the door. This part of the basement was lit up by a single incandescent bulb with a string hanging down from it that turned the light off and on by pulling on it. This meant I had to walk into the darkness, flailing around wildly, searching for the elusive string until I inevitably walked into it, thus conjuring up thoughts of spiders descending on my head.

So, it probably wasn’t the best idea to watch a movie about A Scary Basement. With tiny people who nabbed you when you went down there. (Stupid, stupid, stupid.) But who REALLY knows what you’re getting into when you’re 12 years old alone on a Saturday night and the only other thing to watch was the CTV National News with Lloyd Robertson.

I don’t really remember exactly when I watched this show, but it probably either confirmed or exacerbated what I believed about my basement for most of my growing up years or until we moved out of that house: that unless the situation was dire (like rescuing a forgotten toy or book) or just a dire matter of hygiene (starting with grade seven I HAD to shower every day), the basement was better avoided. Because: You. Just. Never. Know.

These days I’m not that afraid of the dark but I also have a well-lit basement (with conveniently located light switches) and if all else fails, a flashlight on my cell phone. And I now pretty much avoid most scary movies – because you never really know where it’s gonna take you. Even if it’s just to the basement.