I hope your Halloween was a fruitful one (or a candy-ful one).
Whether you overstuffed your bags with sweets, sweated through your last-minute costume at a party, or watched some horror film classics over a plate of reheated leftovers, I trust you enjoyed yourselves.
Halloween has always been one of my favourite times of the year. Autumn is the best season (it’s not even open for debate) and Halloween is the final hurrah before winter forces through our doorway and settles in for an overlong stay.
As a kid, I loved Halloween because I got to extort my neighbours for free candy, all while dressed as a cannibal or a pirate or a cannibal pirate. As an adult, I love Halloween because it’s an excuse to watch loads of scary movies and to carve gruesome jack-o’-lanterns. It’s a stellar holiday.
But this year, I experience a rare Halloween disappointment. So nurse your sugar-high hangovers and gather ‘round as I regal you with the Tale of the Convulted Corn Maze (feel free to add dramatic music).
On a dark, mild night, I piled into a car with an assortment of theatre people. We drove to Canora. After winding through a series of increasingly bumpy roads, and suffering through a busted tire (which is a story for another day), we arrived at our destination: The corn maze.
The parking lot was filled to the brim with cars. Vendors sold bottled water and snacks. A projector played an endless loop of trailers for the movie “It.”
We paid our entrance fees and marched into a haunted trailer. We were confronted by ghoulish children, shrieking ghosts, and rotting zombies. Grim lighting barely showed us the way forward. We were off to a good start.
We burst out of the trailer and came to the corn maze entrance. We could hear other visitors’ screams in the distance. We huddled in a tight group, stepped forward, and turned left.
We moved at a snail’s pace, checking around every corner for hidden clowns or chainsaw-wielding maniacs. To calm our frayed nerves, we sang a rousing rendition of Billy Joel’s “The Longest Time.” We were ready to be scared.
But nothing happened.
We didn’t see anything scary. No monsters leapt out at us. No lunatics chased us. No spectres yelled at us. Our bones were not chilled, our spines left untingled. We were just walking through corn
We darted around the maze for 40 minutes, double-checking previous routes, running in circles, and scratching our heads. Anxiety was replaced with frustration. I was ready to tear through the corn stalks and not stop until I hit the parking lot.
We stumbled across two corn maze employees holding masks. They told us the maze was closed and most of the workers had gone home. Not only that, but we were in the wrong section. It was just a regular maze. The scary part was on the other end of the property.
It turns out that we’d gone the wrong way. A piece of yellow tape was supposed to block off the incorrect left turn, but someone had torn it down. So we’d stumbled into the wrong corn maze. I went home, thoroughly dejected.
So let my story be a warning to you: Never turn left. It only ends in confusion.
