Halloweens past

— We called him Old Mr. Crabapple because he didn’t look at all like the kind of elderly gentleman a child would want to befriend.

His face is lost to me, but I grew up with this lingering impression of a sour, wrinkled old man whose countenance, like his bent old body, reflected the loneliness and disillusionment that years spent in an empty house surely nurture.

It was the house, of course, that held for us such fascination. If ever a body dwelled in a haunted house, that body was Old Mr. Crabapple.

We hardly thought of him at all except at Halloween. His house was down the street from the one at which I spent so many childhood moments surrounded by a flock of cousins, my surrogate siblings to this day.

That house was like none other that I had ever seen. It was weatherbeaten, dilapidated and neglected, with prickly weeds and shrubbery gnarled across every inch, or so it seemed then. Recently, my cousin Carol reminded me about the beautiful flowers-day lilies, I think she said-that flourished along the perimeter of this stunning wilderness and how Mr. Crabapple would fuss when children came within a foot of plucking a few.

Every year on the afternoon of All Hallows Eve, my mother would pack me and my inflammable costume into the car and we would drive the few blocks to my cousins’ house. There we young’uns, especially Johnny and I, the youngest, would wait impatiently for the sun to go down. As we donned our disguises, Sharon would begin spinning her spooky yarns about things that go bump in the night, especially on Halloween.

Each year we vowed to visit Old Mr. Crabapple’s house to catch him in the act of boiling young children alive, but we always planned that for the finale. There was important business to take care of first.

Armed with paper bags and chunks of soap, dutifully supplied by my mother, we would head out into the streets of North Heights to take a circuitous route that always led us into the shadows that fell across the street from Mr. Crabapple’s shrubbery.

The next-to-last stop was Tackett’s house. It was the real highlight of the evening because he always had a giant candy bar for each of us. Only then did our pace slow to a crawl as we meandered down the road toward Old Mr. Crabapple’s unlighted house, our excited voices hushed to whispers as we anticipated the horrors that awaited us should we be discovered peeking through his window.

Each year it was the same. I swear the autumn wind would begin to swell and howl at the very moment we approached that spooky old house. By far the most suggestible of the group, I would feel such breathlessness that I would lag behind. But then, the othersweren’t exactly tripping the light fantastic on their way up the street.

No, we never made it to Mr. Crabapple’s house. The temperature would drop, it would start to rain or, as it always did, my bag of candy would break and I would start to cry, so we would traipse home and vow to snoop on him next year.

The house and Mr. Crabapple are long since gone, but never a Halloween goes by that I don’t think of them. Such a mystery we made of him. Such outrageous intrigue we concocted about who he was and what he did.

For many years I secretly hoped that he hadn’t sat alone in that dark old house, a bowl of fruit or candy at the ready, waiting for little hobgoblins who never came. Now I wonder whether he paid any attention to Halloween at all.

It’s been many years since I first recounted these memories in this space, and equally as long since the mystery we’d made of Old Mr. Crabapple was solved by his grandniece, Jean Ivy. She’d known immediately about whom I’d written, even though the “sour, wrinkled old man” of my recollection had been instead a lovely, loving and very much loved fellow named Charles August Pagels.

Born in Germany in 1879, he came to this country with his family at the age of 3. He never married, but he was never lonely, not with a host of grandnieces and grandnephews who adored their Uncle Charlie. He, in turn, adored them. He loved children, Jean said, and if we’d dared to knock on his door, he probably would have offered us peanut butter. He loved peanut butter, too.

A few years ago, at a welcomehome party for a long-time friend visiting from overseas, a delightful lady came up to me and challenged me to guess who she was. She offered a clue: Halloween. I didn’t need a second one. Old Mr. Crabapple! Here was the grandniece who had solved the mystery for me all those years ago. And she wasn’t the only Pagels descendent in the crowd.

I learned so much more about her Uncle Charlie that night that I’ve started thinking of him as Uncle Charlie, too-an affable Uncle Charlie who maybe wouldn’t mind donning the costume and the mask of Old Mr. Crabapple on the one spook-filled night of the year.

Associate Editor Meredith Oakley is editor of the Voices page. The original version of this column ran in 1979.

Editorial, Pages 19 on 10/29/2010

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