I don’t know about you, but I thought Halloween was a bit of a bust this year. The month of October came and went so quickly for Anne and myself that we never quite managed to get into the spirit of things. Neither of us found the time to decorate our places, and when my favorite holiday arrived, it may as well have been any other sleepy Monday night in The SLC. We received a grand total of two trick-or-treaters at her apartment, a far cry from our remembered childhood times when the doorbells rang until well after the candy buckets were empty and the grown-ups were down to handing out Ritz crackers and the Tic-Tacs they scavenged from the car seats. Ah, well, c’est la vie, I guess. There’s always next year, when we’ll be sure to do something really cool.

Or maybe not. In my experience, making plans for holidays to come is often a recipe for disappointment. Allow me to illustrate…

Somewhere in the deep recesses of the Bennion Archives, there is a newspaper clipping, no doubt yellow and faded from age. It’s a big one, the cover from the weekly TV listings for a Halloween season long past. It seems like this ancient October came while I was in elementary school, but it may have been middle school. It may even have been before I started school. I no longer remember for sure when my mom clipped this particular scrap of newsprint. But I do recall that the clipping made an appearance every October for a long time, turning up year after year in the box of paper skeletons that Mom used to tape into the windows by the front door.

The clipping has a photo on it, a full-page, four-color image of an actor in some forgotten TV movie. He’s dressed as the Headless Horseman. He sits astride a white stallion, holding his own severed head — a rather obvious prop, even when I was a child — in one hand and the reins in the other. He wears a Revolutionary War-style outfit, and if you look closely at the white shirt with the frilly collar, you can see a vague impression of a man’s face. The actor’s face.

This photo was one of my first encounters with the magic of movie-making. What looked so frighteningly real with the proper stage lighting — aside from the fake head, of course — was nothing more than an actor peering out through a patch of sheer fabric in the front of his shirt. I remember being startled when I first spotted that face. Suddenly the costume lost all its power over me. It became terribly cheesy and unconvincing, but it was also fascinating. I used to stare at that photo, lost in wonder at how easily the illusion had been accomplished, as well as how easily it was revealed. That, however, is not why we kept that newspaper clipping all these years. We kept it because my father always intended to use that photo as a guide for making his own Headless Horseman costume.

We had a white stallion of our own, you see — well, a gelding, but close enough — and Dad was certain he could put together a costume just like the one the actor was wearing in the photo. He made a sketch of the rig he’d have to wear to raise the costume’s shoulders up above his head, and he was certain that he could make a reasonably realistic false head by stuffing a rubber fright mask with foam. If the fake head didn’t work out, there was always the Disney option, a traditional jack-o-lantern, maybe equipped with a battery-powered light instead of a candle, for safety’s sake. Dad’s plan was to set out just after nightfall, riding slowly up our street in his costume before turning west into the new subdivisions that even then were beginning to surround the tiny old houses like my own. He didn’t intend to chase down little kids or anything like that. He was just going to ride unobtrusively, silently, through the shadows — there weren’t a lot of streetlights in Riverton when I was a kid — and see what kinds of startled looks he received from trick-or-treaters and their parents.

Mom and I loved the idea. I think she even went shopping for the right kind of fabric for the shirt, thin enough to see through but not so thin that Dad could be easily seen in the dark. I couldn’t wait to see the finished outfit, and I tried to think of some reason to go along with him so I could experience people’s reactions, too. But there wasn’t enough time to put it together the first year; we’d found the clipping too close to the holiday. Next year, we all said. Sure, next year.

The second year we had the clipping, however, something came up that would’ve prevented him from riding on Halloween, a party or something. The following year for sure, Dad said. But he didn’t get around to it in the third year, either, because… well, I don’t remember what happened and it doesn’t really matter anyhow. You get the picture. Year after year, the clipping came out of the box of paper skeletons and Dad always said this was going to be the year he did it, but something always kept him from actually doing it. In time, I grew up, our white horse — Thunder was his name — grew too old to ride, and the newspaper clipping itself finally disappeared. (I’m certain it’s still in all my stuff somewhere, I just haven’t seen it in a long time.)

Dad has pulled off some pretty impressive Halloween stunts in recent years — someday I’ll tell you all about the year he transformed his vintage T-Bird into the Batmobile or, even more impressively, my Galaxie into the lost ocean liner Titanic — but he hasn’t talked about the Headless Horseman idea in forever. It’s an opportunity long lost, and it makes me sad to think of it. It would’ve been so glorious, one of those moments to tell your kids about. I have a lot of happy memories of Halloween, and of the crazy stuff my dad has done on Halloweens past (he loves this holiday, too, or at least he did before it started getting as commercialized as Christmas). But the strongest memory I have is of the one thing he never did…