The Midwest is Great at Celebrating the Spooky Season

'Tis the season for contemplating mortality, also pumpkin spice

The days are getting shorter, the nights crisper. There is something delicious to me about this time of year, the leaning into the spookiness of it all. I love to be scared. More specifically, I love having a choice in being scared (by visiting a haunted house, watching a scary movie, reading a horror novel), vs. being scared of things outside of my control (my workload, middle-aged health woes, the general unsettling despair of an election year). Years ago when I read it IT by Stephen King, a scene scared me so much that I hurled the paperback across the room to keep Pennywise from crawling off the page to get me; this is still one of my favorite reading experiences of all time. I love to make a Halloween costume, though sometimes I get too clever for my own good and pick a reference so niche that nobody gets what I am. (One year I went as a girl from a flashback scene in the first season of Twin Peaks. “You remember our first room, Ben? Me on the top bunk, you on the bottom bunk. Louise Dombrowski, dancing on the hooked rug with a flashlight...” I went to a Twin Peaks-themed event and nobody got it.)

Late fall is a difficult time of year for me to travel due to the nature of my job revolving around year-end deadlines, but holing up in the Midwest is not a bad way to spend one’s autumn. I look forward to the annual Wisconsin Travel Bureau’s Fall Color Report the way other people anticipate the NFL Draft. 

Earlier this month, I managed to get away for a quick weekend trip to Wisconsin Dells. Most people associate Wisconsin Dells with water parks, and they’re not wrong. In my early thirties I visited the Dells with my roller derby team, who in addition to grueling practices, intense conditioning, and hitting other women while on roller skates, also loved a day at a waterpark. While my obsession with theme parks and rollercoasters is well documented, I was initially skeptical about a full day of water slides and wave pools. Water parks seemed…poopy? Perhaps I was still traumatized by a childhood visit to a suburban water park when three out of five pools had to be closed because of fecal matter. 

What I quickly learned was that the giant slides of Noah’s Ark Waterpark are just as intense as rollercoasters, perhaps even more so. Without the reliability of a safety harness, your body plummets down 100-foot tall water slides all loosey goosey like an air pod in the washing machine. Multi-story water slides are both amazing fun and something it feels like should not be allowed to exist?! I made the mistake of wearing a two-piece swimsuit and spent most of the day retrieving sopping wet nylon from the deepest crevices of my body while I prayed that I didn’t just flash a Mennonite family. I will never forget the expression of terror on my friend’s face as we sat facing each other on a raft that sped toward the edge of a water-filled halfpipe, the whites of her eyes popping like Wiley Coyote as we simultaneously processed our potential impending death by splatter-on-concrete.

In October, the outdoor water parks are closed, the roller coasters of Mt. Olympus in silent repose. The main drag is quiet, devoid of traffic. Kids are back in school; it is the off-season for pool poopers. But the surrounding forests have stepped up to the plate, their colors bursting along the limestone bluffs. The skies are still that early fall vibrant blue, peeking out from behind the pop of fiery red orange leaves in a way that makes your heart hurt over how beautiful and temporary it all is.

I love hiking in the fall. I love to freak myself out with a spooky little story I tell myself. Perhaps I am forever chasing the high of the Girl Scout fall camping trips of my middle school years, when we’d hike to the grave of Old Oliver (in my memory a deflated volleyball served as Old Oliver’s head). In the modern world, we have answers for everything; we carry tiny computers in our pockets and can pull up any answer with the quickest of Google searches. But to immerse oneself in the wildness of nature, all of those primal, unanswerable questions return. Does the veil between the living and the dead really grow thin at this time of year? What happens to our souls when we die? What made that noise over there? 

Into the woods to get the thing, that makes it worth the journeying

In the Dells, my friends and I went on a little hike along the river. The trail began in a field, then led into the mouth of a thick forest through an entrance straight out of a Grimms fairy tale. Mushrooms grew thick on the forest floor, conjuring visions of delicious, goopy stews and casseroles ladled out of slow cookers. The trail meandered alongside the woodsy bluff, eventually leading to a rocky slope down to the water’s edge with an open view of the river. I can never get enough of the limestone bluffs of Wisconsin; in the Midwest we are starved for any sort of geological texture. Beautiful woodsy scenery is one of the many things Wisconsin does well, along with cheese curds and a bourbon Old Fashioned. I spent a lot of time that weekend sitting on the Airbnb condo balcony overlooking Lake Delton, drinking in the view alongside hot coffee in the morning and red wine in the evening. 

Can I live here please

It’s basically a requirement to do at least one tourist trappy thing while in the Dells, and ‘tis the season to ride the Ghost Boat, a haunted house experience in the Witches Gulch area of the river. After waiting in a holding room across the street from the Showboat Saloon, our group was loaded into a tour boat with an open upper deck, the prime spot for enjoying a spooky boat ride through the pitch black night into the canyon. 

The nighttime boat ride is my favorite part of the experience, seeing the bluffs in shadow beneath the inky black October sky. We then embarked on a mile-long walk on a hiking trail populated with haunted house props, actors, and fog machines. Witches Gulch is one of only a few slot canyons in the Midwest, and part of the trail takes you along the wooden boardwalks where the sandstone walls begin to close in on you, Nature’s version of the Death Star trash compactor. At the end of the loop, there was a brief interlude in which a spectral creature was projected on the rock walls, warning us to leave with our lives while we still could. The crowd was thick with teenagers doing their teenage thing: putting on false bravado, flirting, shrieking at anything that moved. We shuffled our way back toward the boat, navigating strobe lights, community theater actors, and jump scares, while just beyond, I could smell the lush moss and rainwater, my skin prickling in the pockets of canyon where the air temperature dropped dramatically, cool and eerie as the thought of a ghost approaching just behind you.

What I’m reading/watching this Spooky season:

• Looking Glass Sound by Catriona Ward: one of my new favorite horror writers, Ward’s books keeping me guessing—and terrified—through the final page.

• My Heart is a Chainsaw by Stephen Graham Jones: an ode to slasher movies and Final Girls, a must for any horror movie aficionados.

• The Secret History by Donna Tartt: THEE dark academia novel. One of my top 5 favorite books of all time, every reread breaks my heart again.

• Longlegs (2024): Killer Nicholas Cage performance, killer needle drops.

• Agatha All Along on Disney+: Witchy, Easter eggy, super fun, surprisingly gut-punchingly emotional. The Ballad of the Witches Road is a new staple on my Halloween playlists.

BTW have you voted yet? Get out there and VOTE!!! Be sure to vote all the way down the ticket because local elections matter!