Last week many usually quiet streets around Parkes were transformed into a spooky labyrinth of cobwebs and pumpkins, and were overrun by diminutive witches, pint-sized skeletons and creepy clowns as locals made their own Halloween fun. Halloween has been a popular celebration in the northern hemisphere for hundreds of years, but the freakish festival is slowly catching on down under.
In Parkes, this year’s Halloween celebrations were shared between small pockets of communities, where participating households decorated their homes with spookythemed props, or placed an orange balloon on their mailbox, and then waited for the trick-or-treaters (and guardians) to come knocking. By evening the streets were swarming with gangs of happy little terrors, eagerly clutching their loot as they skipped to their next target.
There were plenty of treats, but one or two tricks as well. The usually charming Andrew Cusack transformed himself into a ghastly ghoul and jumped out at any unsuspecting trick-or-treaters who ventured too close. Some neighbourhoods opted to stage their “trick or treating” on Saturday night, while others were overrun with ghoulish fun last Monday, as Halloween is observed on the 31st of October.
Joanne, Owen, and Hannah Strom were eagerly awaiting trick-or-treaters on Saturday. They’d begun decorating for Halloween two days earlier, and had transformed their idyllic acreage into a spooky spectacle to delight the little demons who came knocking. Trick-or-treaters had to brave the long driveway which they’d lined with cobwebs, and ghosts. Prop-skeletons, gravestones, and hand-carved jacko’lanterns, completed the look. While Joanne’s love
of Halloween was imported from her native Canada, she said the neighbourhood had been trick-or-treating together for at least ten years.
If the hordes of trick-or-treaters were anything to go by, it seems that there are a lot of little locals who have also been bitten by the Halloween bug.