All Hallow's Eve

An annual display at a big old house on Mayfield Road in Cleveland Hts. Fog, booming narration, colored lights, strobes, a heart-stopping emergency horn sounding at random and zombified attendants. Skeletons everywhere, climbing the house, leaning on the fence, playing cards. Headstones with hands clawing up through the earth. The devil in a blaze of red fan-driven tissue-paper flame. A hanged man wrapped head to foot in a sheet, a strobe light imparting a twitching life to him. They spend over a week putting it up. In the daylight, it looks rather wan and incoherent. It's the nighttime effects that knit the presentation together. While we were visiting, a boy about eight or nine years old walked in bravely with his father, but it wasn't long before we heard the cry, "Dad, let's go!"

Even with a monopod and an ISO setting of 1600, it was difficult to capture these without some sort of camera shake, exposures ranging from a half second to over two seconds. "And no photographs taken with the aid of a flashlight either, if only out of respect for the actual light -- even when there isn't any of it." -- HCB