Halloween is just around the corner. In the spirit of the season, KUNR Youth Media Reporter, Isabella Wolf, interviewed her mother, Norma, about a spooky experience from her childhood.
Isabella Wolf: Can you tell me about a memorable Halloween you had as a child?
Norma Wolf: There was one evening where my oldest sister, Missy, was having a sleepover with some of her friends. She was probably a junior in high school and I guess word got out in the school that she was going to have the sleepover. On the same night my parents were having a dinner party.
Isabella: How old were you at the time?
Norma: I was probably about 12 or 13, somewhere in there. So, we were in the back room and we heard this knock on the window and we thought, well, that’s strange. Then all of a sudden, this mask just appeared out of nowhere and it freaked us out and we all fell back on the bed, and we pulled the blinds down, and we were screaming. We ran out to my dad and we were just ready to tell him what we saw. He thought, well, I’m going to go check it out.
Isabella: What did you think he was going to do when you told him what had happened?
Norma: I pretty much thought he was going to go to the back room and look out the window, but he didn’t do that at all. He actually went into the garage and he snuck out the back door of the garage and he had a broom that he saw in the corner. He grabbed [the broom] and then he came around the back and he could hear talking and he could hear multiple people. So he thought, you know, this is a few people, this isn’t just one person.
He crouched down and he kept on looking and waiting for them to walk around. He noticed that there were three silhouettes and he decided to just charge them. He hit the center guy, who was really tall, and he fell down. Then he hit one kid with a broom and then hit the other one. Then he came down on top of the kid in the middle. Basically, it was major shell shock for those boys and they were pretty freaked out. Two of them ran away.
What my dad remembers is his knuckles touching the grass, but the middle boy’s neck was in between the broomstick and the ground. The kid screamed out, “Mr. Guajardo! It’s me CW!” He could barely get those words out, but my dad heard him, and my dad got up and he helped CW up and he said, "Hey, what's going on?” CW said, “Oh, we’re so sorry, Mr. Guajardo. We knew that Missy had some friends over and we were just trying to scare them.” The other two boys had run off, but my dad basically said, you go and you chase those other two boys down and bring them back to apologize to the girls.
Isabella: What did you think when you found out it was your sister’s friends?
Norma: It was such a scary thing. Back in the eighties, you had movies like Friday the 13th and you had movies like Freddy Krueger, and so those things were frightening. Masks were frightening in the 80s. Having somebody in a mask, that was pretty shocking. When we saw them, it was such a relief to know that it was just a prank.
KUNR’s Youth Media program is a special partnership with the Washoe County School District to train the next generation of journalists.
