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Wet pants: How NOT to react when facing a fake Jason

Halloween is one of the most anticipated holidays in America—it’s the one night a year (I’m so Mean Girls today) when kids (or people) go crazy and do exactly what they're told not to do the other 364 days: take candy from complete strangers.

In many countries, this tradition is still weird. People don’t go around knocking on doors in costume asking for sugar handouts. But in the U.S.? It’s basically a national sport—the winner is whoever gets closer to diabetes. And of course, like all good American customs, Halloween didn’t stay put. It spread around the world faster than pumpkin spice lattes in October—the ones people count the days for. Nowadays, everyone wants to dress up—whether it’s as a blood-soaked zombie (seriously?), a sexy vampire (why?) or just their favorite TV character with absolutely no effort.

When I was 14, I didn’t expect that isolated places in faraway countries would treat Halloween like an Oscars-level commitment.

It was a pitch-black night. No stars. No moon. Just a bunch of kids sitting under a tree on a dimly lit street, swapping horror stories like it was our version of therapy. There were about 10 of us, sitting cross-legged on the sidewalk like a low-budget version of Stranger Things. Every story was more terrifying than the last: aliens, ghosts, haunted houses and even creatures from Brazilian folklore (because what’s scarier than something your grandma swears actually happened when she was 10?).

Fear does weird things to your brain. It's like your senses go full ninja mode—every rustle is a serial killer, every breeze is a whisper from beyond. And just as we were all leaning in to hear one last spooky tale, it happened …

We didn’t notice the man step into the street. He was wearing a Jason mask and had a fake chainsaw that sounded way too real—like it had been bought from a store that does not ask questions. I wonder if that was even from a costume store?

One second, we were telling ghost stories, and the next, it was The Purge: Neighborhood Edition.

We scattered like cockroaches when the lights came on—screaming, some even wetting themselves (I won’t mention names—mostly because I was one of them), and ran in completely different directions like it was a chaotic game of tag. One kid fell and scraped both knees. Another tried to climb a bush (a bush? Are you joking?).

And all the while, this dude—this Halloween psychopath wannabe—was just standing there, cackling like a Disney villain, clearly having the time of his life. And as he’d mysteriously appeared, he vanished into the darkness—probably to go scare another group of emotionally fragile kids or teenagers.

Eventually, after half an hour of mutual trauma counseling and group denial—or just 30 minutes—we mustered the courage to investigate. We crossed the street to the spot where “Jason” had popped out—only to find more masked people on the other side of the bridge, waiting like some twisted haunted welcoming committee.

Apparently, their goal was to scare us and anyone else they could find. And well… mission accomplished.

As I touched my pants and felt the unmistakable dampness, I realized: they didn’t just scare the pants off me—they just updated my trauma list.

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demeloa@miamioh.edu 

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