I would have never thought my best friend would summon the devil himself at an anti-Halloween “harvest party,” but then again, I didn’t ever think I’d be a Halloween denier. But here we were, two elementary school boys beating a makeshift drum and chanting for Satan in my bedroom with a Christian fundamentalist rager happening downstairs.

Let me back up and set the scene.

My parents actively worried about Satan-worshippers, which was a thing in the 1980s. The stories about secret seances and animal guttings seemed endless, and the evangelical crowd ate them up. They speculated about celebrities and other public figures, as well as people around town, especially those who seemed “off.” Like many Christian fundamentalist parents, mine were convinced that a cabal of devil-worshipping degenerates had infiltrated all levels of society and was on a mission to personally see to the eternal damnation of every child in America. My parents worried about who was teaching kids in school, and about the fictional Satan-worshipping students roaming the hallways between classes, looking for innocent peers to corrupt. Never mind that Satan worship wasn’t the biggest problem in the Reagan-era world: there was the cold war with the USSR, massive inflation, and a crack epidemic, but for some reason, the main concern for 80s parents seemed to be whether there were devil worshippers in their community.

As the minister of a church, my parents entertained a lot. On evenings my parents had dinner guests over, I would overhear the adults, who had retired to the living room after the meal. They talked late into the evening, telling stories of old buildings being broken into and vandalized with occult symbols, black sabbaths and orgies being held in cemeteries, or reports of gutted livestock being found in bizarre places, strung up in grotesque displays by members of Beelzebub’s fan club. All of this was incredibly intriguing, so I would eavesdrop as a sort of bedtime story, like my own personal R.L. Stine audiobook. Unfortunately, my snooping session would invariably be cut short by one of my parents who noticed me staring from behind a piece of furniture at the group of adults in rapt attention, their hushed voices no match for my curiosity and sharp young ears.

“Go to bed, Gary. This isn’t a suitable topic for children,” my dad would say. My mom would nod her head in agreement. Their response to my interest was always to send me to bed, so they and their friends could continue to regale each other with the wicked deeds of the damned. Being told something was off-limits only made me more obsessed. I would start to argue that I wasn’t tired but usually stopped myself. I knew better than to push it unless I wanted to take an ass-whooping and cry myself to sleep.

As it turns out, the aftereffect of those secretive conversations between my parents and their friends would have a lasting impact on me and my entire family. I didn’t know it then, but my childhood was about to get a lot weirder.

What made holidays special for me was the candy, mostly because having candy was such a rare occurrence. My parents always made sure to limit our sugar and artificial colors, especially mine, because I was already hyperactive. They also believed sugar and artificial colors (especially red food coloring) were also the reason I wet the bed regularly, which was a source of nearly constant embarrassment and worry for me as a kid. Any time I slept anywhere away from home, I would do my best not to drink anything or to fall asleep, for fear that my bladder would betray me. It sometimes worked.

Regular holidays are fun, but candy holidays were the best. Christmas, Valentine’s, Easter, and especially Halloween. Halloween was the most exciting. Not just because there is more candy on Halloween than on all the other holidays, but because it was magical and exciting in a way the others weren’t. Of course it’s spooky, but it also offers mystery, treasure, and the opportunity to be anything you want. That’s an irresistible combination for anyone, especially a six-year-old.

Every year, my older sister, little brother and I would dress up and collect candy, admiring wild costumes and spookily decorated houses. We loved it when people went all-out for Halloween. Some of the teenagers in our town would ride around in the back of a pickup truck, dressed as various scary creatures, yelling and brandishing fake weapons. One guy dressed in a plaid shirt revved a chainsaw (that upon my dad’s further inspection turned out to be disabled) as the truck approached. They laughed as the younger kids (including us) screamed. I loved it though.

Upon returning home, we combed over the loot in our pails. We picked out duds like circus peanuts, and dental hazards like hard taffy, then ditched the candy apples to avoid eating glass or razor blades. Then we swapped with each other for our favorites. We were only allowed to keep about 30 pieces of candy for fear we might get cavities. So, after we had optimized our stashes, we handed over what was left to our parents, who probably ate it themselves. Their reasoning was rooted in dental health, but it felt like a taste of what it’s like to pay taxes.

My mom and dad would often point out people in town who had bad teeth. “Looks like someone had too much candy,” my dad would say, gesturing to some random person. It always seemed to be either a skinny 30-something guy with tobacco-stained teeth or a disheveled-looking middle-aged woman with worn-down black stubs sitting on top of angry pink and red gums. Once, observing a skinny strung-out-looking white guy with a meth mouth walking out of a gas station with a soda, my dad shook his head, “That’s why we don’t eat sugar very often.” That, plus it seemed like everything with sugar also had red food coloring in it. Piss city.

But for a moment, on Halloween and a few days that followed, we had a reprieve from the commentary and speculation over the oral hygiene of strangers.

Once Halloween was over and our 30 pieces of candy had run out, it was time to start thinking about Thanksgiving. Pies, sweet potatoes, and homemade cranberry sauce (my favorite). See you next year, Halloween! Or so I thought. The following year, when I was seven, my family stopped celebrating Halloween.

It was mid-October, and as the rest of the world was getting ready for another candy-filled holiday, our parents sat us down at the table. Their faces were somber as they broke the news that there would be no Halloween this year. Or any other year, for that matter.

I immediately assumed it was because we had done something wrong. I could see Heather and Daniel thinking the same thing. Heather was furious, and Daniel and I were stunned.

 “Why can’t we go trick-or-treating anymore?” she asked somewhat defiantly, ever the one to challenge my parents, which they hated. “Is it because of candy apples with razor blades? Because we always throw them away.”

My dad was ready. Clearly, he and Mom had thought through how this conversation would go.

“Halloween is based on a pagan holiday of human sacrifice,” Dad launched into his dissertation. “People celebrating would burn their kids alive as an act of worship to a false god. Usually around the same age as you are.” He looked pointedly at me, as if to say, “would you rather skip Halloween or be sacrificed?”

Burned alive? My eyes were as wide as they could get, ready to jump out of my head at the slightest noise. I was both terrified and intrigued. A few months before, I had seen a renaissance depiction of the ancient Roman god Saturn devouring his own son in the pages of one of my dad’s books. That was the false god that came to mind, so I asked my dad if that was what he was talking about. I wasn’t far off as it turns out that Saturn is thought of as Greek mythology’s depiction of Satan. “Something like that,” my dad said. “Except they didn’t eat the children after they sacrificed them, or at least the scholars don’t think that they did. The thing is, not only is Halloween based on that holiday, but people like to dress up and scare each other with gory costumes and stories about murder. When people celebrate blood and gore on Halloween, they are really celebrating the devil. But we know better now.”

The very next Sunday, my father delivered a sermon detailing the history of Halloween, condemning it as a Satanic high holiday to celebrate the ancient Canaanite god Moloch. He explained the process in which Moloch’s followers would sacrifice their own children, lining them up one after the other as they were fed into a furnace in the belly of a huge bronze sculpture of the bull-headed god, whose hands were outstretched as if beckoning the children. The high priest would beat a drum during the ceremony, less for religious theater than to cover the screams of the children being burned alive, lest the parents overhear and change their minds about letting the children be consumed by the hungry horned god.

“You shall not give any of your children to devote them by fire to Moloch, and so profane the name of your God.” My dad banged his fist on the pulpit for emphasis before letting a pregnant silence hang in the air before the citation. “Leviticus 18:21.”

My dad didn’t stop there, he drew parallels to Samhain, the Gaelic festival of harvest that predates Halloween, and traced the lineage of the Jack-O-Lantern directly to the human sacrifice previously described. According to him, they were one and the same.

My curiosity got the best of me, and I had to look around to see people’s reactions. The faces in the pews were frozen. My dad is a very enthusiastic storyteller, and he delivered his lesson with passion and conviction. Anyone who had thought they’d come to Sunday service to sing a few songs and say a few prayers, then beat the Baptists to lunch, had gotten more than they bargained for. I must admit, I was oddly entertained in the most morbid of ways.

My dad announced that the entire was invited church to a “Harvest Party” at our house that Friday evening, which happened to be on the same night as Halloween. There would be no creatures of darkness, no blood and gore, and no slutty outfits, but Christian-friendly costumes like pilgrims and policemen were welcomed. So basically, it was Samhain but for Jesus.

That week, my siblings and I made a piñata out of old newspapers (as a homeschool art project, of course) and filled it with candy. As a busy 1980s homeschooler parent of three kids, my mom was always coming up with creative ways to pretend we were getting a real education. “It’ll be your art class,” my mom said. “What public school kids get to make a piñata in class?” Without a frame of reference, I imagined a boring classroom full of dusty old books, the teacher reading a romance novel at her desk as the light of knowledge went out in the eyes of the students. Their dumb eyes glazed over as their IQs plummeted and they began to drool on themselves like babies.

“Yeah, they’re missing out,” I agreed wholeheartedly, having convinced myself that public schools were a vacuum for creativity.

Once completed, we hung the piñata in the garage, which we had decorated with streamers and balloons. A ping-pong table was set up on one end of the garage, and a table for refreshments. Mom threw sheets and tablecloths over the pile of unpacked boxes sitting in the corner, left over from our move last year.

The harvest party was a smash hit, including the devotional and sing-along that kicked it off. We sang all the usual youth devotional songs with titles like, “A Common Love,” and “As the Deer Panteth for the Water.” Toward the end of the party, some of the adults decided to have an encore sing-along, filling the garage with mostly-on-key Acappella music. The harvest party was a smash hit, which undoubtedly made my parents very happy with their decision to cancel Halloween. Nobody had to sacrifice their children to Moloch, and all the kids got candy. Everybody was a winner.

Nathan, my best friend from church, had been particularly taken with my dad’s sermon, especially the gory details of human sacrifice and satanic rituals.

As soon as he arrived at the party, my dad’s sermon was all he could talk about. He may have missed the part where my dad said that Halloween shouldn’t be celebrated, but he retained the minutiae of human sacrifice like a museum docent.

“Hey Gary, what if that piñata was filled with children?” He mused. “And we were accidentally sacrificing them to Moloch when we hit it with the bat.”

I laughed. Nathan was hilarious. But then I imagined God seeing me laugh, disappointment painted over His face, which according to the Bible, mortals can’t actually see, but I imagined it anyway.

“I hope we wouldn’t go to hell for it because it was an accident,” I said loudly because God hears literally everything, including farts. As soon as I said it, I realized how silly that was, since God sees everything and would know we didn’t know about the children being sacrificed in the piñata. It’s a lot to keep up with that stuff sometimes.

Nathan was over it and was now across the room looking at the boxes covered in sheets. I quickly said a silent prayer to ask God’s forgiveness for doubting his omniscience before following Nathan to tell him about the unopened boxes full of this and that.

At some point, Nathan and I were hanging out in the bedroom that my brother and I shared, discussing Moloch and human sacrifice (like you do when you’re 7 years old).

“I wonder if they put the children in one at a time, or if they just stack them all in there together and start the fire,” Nathan mused.

“Yeah,” I also pondered, “If they do it one at a time, do you think the next kid would hear the one being burned alive and try to escape? Maybe they keep the kids somewhere else, though.”

“No, they don’t hear, remember the priest is beating a drum really loud to cover up the screaming,” he said, looking around the room. He was always entertained by random things, making funny comments, or using them as props for a goofy bit.

“Oh yeah,” I replied. I had completely forgotten the mechanics of human sacrifice, but Nathan had apparently taken notes. Impressed at the cleverness of the Moloch priest and my friend’s apparently photographic memory, I mused, “That’s pretty smart of them.”

In the bedroom I shared with my brother, there was a short, oval-shaped metal trash can with a hyper-realistic prehistoric vignette on the sides. On one side was a T-rex, jaws open wide, obviously preparing to kill and eat the triceratops on the opposite side of the trash can, whose mouth-beak open, bellowing defiantly. Nathan picked up the trash can and turned it over and thumped the bottom of the trash-can-turned-tribal-drum rhythmically, impersonating Moloch’s high priest, who was actually Satan’s high priest.

“Doe mi doe, doe mi so, praising our lord Satan,” he sang melodically, repeating the invocation to Lucifer several times, growing louder and louder. A deep belly laugh that bubbled up and almost made me hyperventilate. When I think something is funny, it’s like my whole body is possessed.

As funny as it was, I was also worried my dad would come upstairs and see my good friend worshipping the devil, with me laughing at him. I imagined his stupid Moloch priest song accidentally opening a vortex to hell, and our souls being sucked straight down to the fiery underworld. Dad would have been so pissed that somehow hell would have seemed like a better place to be than in the room with him.

Luckily, my dad didn’t bust our newly formed occultist coven. There was a possibility my little brother had been spying on us, which meant that he may snitch on me to my parents later. He tended to keep a tally sheet of his siblings’ tattle-worthy deeds and drop a bomb to get out of a spanking for something he did. I didn’t trust that he wouldn’t dime on me later, but for now, I was safe.

Before you draw any conclusions about me, you should know that I internalized my dad’s teachings. I wasn’t a rebel or a troublemaker, I just had a sense of humor that got me in trouble sometimes. After learning about the history of Halloween, alarm bells would go off in my head when other kids would mention their Halloween plans. When asked about mine, I would calmly explain the origins of Halloween and introduce them to the millennia-old concept of ritualistic child sacrifice. Let’s just say it didn’t make me popular. But every night when I got under the covers, I knew that even if tonight was one of those nights where I wet the bed, at least I’d go to heaven if I died in my sleep.

I went to a few homeschooling group “harvest parties” during my teenage years, which were awkward affairs with the usual junk food that boomer parents always associated with teenagers -- pizza, soda, and Oreos. We didn’t eat processed food at our house, so the most exciting thing about homeschool or church functions was the opportunity to feel normal by eating what normal people ate. When you eat things like cream of wheat topped with a tiny bit of raw honey for breakfast, a PB&J made with natural peanut butter on my mom’s stone-ground whole wheat bread for lunch, and squeaky steamed green beans with rice and seared tofu steaks for dinner, things like cheese puffs and Fanta are a luxury. Our parents would drop us off, since the parties were chaperoned by other homeschool parents, and go do whatever it was they wanted to. The harvest parties were never fun because we didn’t really know anyone there. Homeschool support groups are less about the kids than you would think. Mostly, they are loose groups of families whose parents meet once a month or so and swap ideas about how to educate (or for some, isolate, brainwash and infantilize) their children.

I’m not sure why my parents thought bringing their shy, sheltered children to a random unstructured event full of random people we rarely saw would help us thrive socially. We would mostly sit by ourselves, drowning our bummed-out awkwardness in processed carbs as we watched people who already knew each other have a good time. For the time being, Halloween and its variants were over for Heather, Daniel, and me.

I would be fully grown and living on my own before celebrating Halloween again. As an adult, it was more about going to a show and then a cool party than it was about candy and spookiness. Still fun, but different. One such party was called “Crunk-O-Ween” where I would see the most hilarious Jack-O-Lantern, which had a dick and balls carved into it instead of a face. I remember thinking that was the funniest thing I had ever seen and talked about it all night long.

But even while laughing about the pornographic Jack-O-Lantern that night with my friends, I remembered the origins of Halloween. I knew at that moment, mid-laugh, that I’ll never be able to look at a Jack-O-Lantern without wondering if the parents loaded all the kids into Moloch’s belly at once or if they did it one by one, beating a drum so the parents’ hearts wouldn’t be softened by their children’s dying screams.