I was never one of those kids who were crazy about Halloween. Perhaps it’s because I’ve always had a strong startle response. Sudden loud noises can trigger it, and someone sneaking up on me and going “Boo!” can get my heart pounding as well. Running around on Halloween night begging neighbors for treats, most of which end up getting thrown away, was something I only did when forced into it by peer pressure. By the time I was twelve, I had given up on the whole trick-or-treat thing.

Flash forward a couple of decades, and I found myself escorting my eight-year-old son and six-year-old daughter around our neighborhood. Things were going okay for the first hour or so. I was hoping my goblin and witch were growing tired, and their bags were almost full, but they insisted on going to the Abbott’s house. The Abbotts are one of those families who start putting up their increasingly complex Christmas decorations in mid-November and don’t take them down until February. For the last few years, they had turned their garage and part of their driveway into a mini haunted house. Nothing too extreme, no Halloween Horror Nights zombies or ghouls, it was intended more for the younger kids.

Reluctantly, I took my kids there and led them through the Disney-level “frights”. No problems; it was more humorous than frightening. However, just as we exited, we came around a corner when a fan kicked on and blew some threads across our faces, and a big, plastic spider dropped down in front of us. I screamed and panicked. I think I did some serious damage to some of the Abbotts’ decorations in my haste to get myself and my kids out of there, but I didn’t stick around to find out. My kids, of course, were freaking out. They probably thought that good old dad had lost his marbles, but I had a good reason for reacting like that.

I had just started my junior year of college. I had lived on campus for the first two years, but wanted more privacy and quiet. I found a rooming house about a mile from campus. It was an older three-story building, owned by Mrs. Nalon, a widow who lived on the first floor. The upper floors had been subdivided into six studio apartments. They were small, but at least I had my own bathroom, which was a big improvement over the busy dorm I had been living in. Mrs. Nalon (“call me Gladys”) had a lot of rules and regulations, but I didn’t mind any of them. All I wanted was a comfortable, quiet place where I could study and get a good night’s sleep. My partying days were over.

A few days after I moved in, I ran into one of my new neighbors, an attractive young woman named Carol. She was a business major, like I was. I had seen her around campus a few times, but hadn’t been bold enough to try to talk to her. Even at 20, I was still painfully shy. We had one class together, Business Law, but it was a lecture class with about a hundred students in one huge room, which made it hard for me to meet her. I had never found the right time to introduce myself. Now, there she was, right across the hall.

Despite my shyness, we formed a bond right away. We were both serious students who had grown tired of living on campus. It only took us a few brief conversations to get our budding relationship going. We weren’t really a couple, not much more than friends with a few things in common: our majors, a love of campy horror movies, and corny puns. Carol and I would occasionally go out to our favorite pizza place, not really a date since we went Dutch. She cooked dinner for me once—a surprisingly good Korean meal. She told me her mother was Korean, which explained her jet-black hair and almond-shaped eyes. We went to a few football games together, and I considered us to be a couple, at least in my imagination. I was trying my best to be patient when it came to sex. Carol had told me that she was still recovering from a breakup with an abusive boyfriend, which only made me want to be even more careful. I felt like we had something special developing, and didn’t want to let my horniness interfere with that.

Then the spiders showed up.

I hadn’t seen Carol for a couple of days. We both had full class schedules and part-time jobs on campus. Carol was working in the campus bookstore, and I was tutoring some dumbass athletes. Then one night, a little after midnight, my phone buzzed, and I found myself facing a big test of my commitment. I saw Carol’s number and knew it had to be important for her to be calling that late. “What’s wrong?” I asked.

“Just get over here now!” she shouted. Carol wasn’t a shouter, which was another hint that this was an emergency. Several scenarios ran through my mind as I threw on some shorts and sprinted across the hall: someone had broken into her room; there was a major leak in her shower, which had been dripping for a few days; there was a small fire - all kinds of disasters, but it was nothing as simple as that.

I reached out to knock on her door, but it flew open before my fist could connect. Carol motioned me into her room, then pointed up to a corner, and there it was—the biggest spider I had ever seen, and I grew up in a house with a serious arachnid problem. We both stood there gawking at it. “That’s huge,” I finally said.

“No shit,” she said. Carol very rarely cursed, so I knew she was upset.

“If that thing had hairy legs, I’d think it was a tarantula.”

“I don’t care if it’s an orangutan,” she snapped. “Kill it. I can’t sleep with that thing in my room.”

And there was my conundrum. If anything, I was even more frightened of spiders than she seemed to be, but I didn’t want to appear weak to a girl I was trying to seduce. I had to man up. Carol handed me a broom, and I tried to use it to knock the creature down. Instead, the damned thing just scrunched up tighter in the corner. My would-be girlfriend slid a chair over to me, and I stood on it, trying not to fall, and took a few more pokes at our enemy. I finally got a good lick in, and the spider fell onto the floor. I jumped off the chair, while Carol jumped up on her bed.