Mark Sampson

Adults in Costumes

On other islands, there is a Christmas tradition called ‘mummering,’ though for us this queer phenomenon happened during an entirely different season. It involved grown-ass adults showing up at your house in the late, last hours of Halloween dressed in full costume and refusing to identify themselves until you guessed who they were. What ten year old would not be unnerved by that? As a kid of the eighties, I believed that grownups were to exhibit that trademark “benign neglect” of theirs when it came to Halloween: they were background chaperones when you were still in single digits; they let you traipse the neighbourhood with your friends once you reached age ten; and they applied a partial, gentle communism to the divvying up of candy with your siblings at the end of the night. I had a problem with none of this. Our immediate family also had Halloween traditions that I loved: my father lighting our living room fireplace against the Island’s inevitably cold October night; my mother bringing my sisters and I a Saran-wrapped tray of witches’ fingers—those slender cookies with the almond sliver “finger nail” at the end—up from our basement deep freeze, where they’d lain hidden from my father’s marauding sweet tooth; and, best of all, staying up well past our usual bedtimes.
But this last treat always proved a trick in the end, because invariably, just as we were beginning to think about sleep, some huge lumbering shape—or, more often, a gang of them—would pass spookily across our living room windows as they clambered onto our front stoop. These phantoms would begin assaulting the doorbell and banging on the windows to be let in. “I wonder who that could be?” my mother would ask as she climbed to her feet to answer. She’d open the front door, and in would shamble a group of adults, decked out in full Halloween costumes that obscured their identities. These intruders would flail their arms and make strange ingressive moans as our guessing game began, and grow increasingly belligerent the longer we took.
I never knew what I, a scrawny, bookish, unathletic child, might be called to do if and when this prank went sideways. Surely I stood no chance against, say, my father’s six-foot hunting buddy Cal, dressed as a broader-shouldered Freddy Krueger in a waffle-like rubber mask, should he make an ungentlemanly grab at Mom or, worse, go for my candy.
So I didn’t know what my obligations were on the Halloween Night when I was ten and a pair of these “mummers” showed up while my parents were out of the room. Dad was down in our basement fetching another load of wood for the fireplace, and Mom, still wearing an elaborate Big Bird costume—which, to be fair, would’ve been a lot of work getting out of—was taking her sweet time in the bathroom.
While they were gone, and my siblings and I were still inventorying our piles of loot on the living room’s shag carpet, there came a BANG BANG BANG at the windows and then a DINGDONG DINGDONG DINGDONG at the door.
Startled, my sisters and I froze and stared at each other.
DINGDONG DINGDONG DINGDONG went the doorbell again, followed by another rap of impatient knocking.
Now, as the eldest of my siblings, I knew it should fall to me to deal with the situation. The look my sisters were giving me certainly indicated that was true. But I was paralyzed with fear. Really? I thought. This is my job? I could barely breathe, let alone climb to my feet, as Mom would, and go see what posse of apparitions had arrived at our house.
There was another incessant braying from the doorbell, and then a chilly silence.
“Are you going to answer that?” Kelly asked.
“No.”
“Kyle, go answer it,” she insisted. “You’re the boy.”
“No,” I repeated, but with less conviction. Through the windows, I could already hear the mummers talking amongst themselves on our stoop.
“Kyle!”
“Fine.”
I very slowly got up. Then, after another lengthy hesitation, in which I stared numbly at our living room windows, at the shadows moving beyond them, I shuffled over to the front entry in my pajamas and bare feet.
I paused again. My heart had quickened. My mouth had gone dry.
As I finally, finally reached out for the knob and turned it, I could hear those muffled voices beyond the door growing in intensity.
I yanked the door open and stuck my head out into the night.
And that’s when I saw Santa Claus and the witch from Snow White getting into a shouting match on my parents’ front stoop.

~

An Island tradition or not, this off-brand “mummering” had a long history, at least in our family.
My parents, in fact, once told me a tale set fifteen years before the story I’m telling here. It was October 31, 1970, a Saturday, and a rare free weekend for those two, who were unmarried students together at an agricultural college on the mainland, where they met. In a flare of spontaneity, they decided to drive all the way back to the Island that night to surprise my mother’s parents, and to do so by pulling the customary Halloween mummering. They did this with no forethought whatsoever: Mom and Dad left straight from the campus’s livestock barn, where they’d already put in a day’s work, without even bothering to change out of their smelly coveralls and befouled rubber boots before they left.
Somehow, my parents remembered to bring snacks for the road, to test the car’s tire pressure, to check the ferry schedule, but not to buy, or bring, or wear actual costumes.
It was only hours later, sitting in the shrouded parking lot of the little United Church across the road from my grandparents’ house, when Mom and Dad realized their mistake. By then, night had fallen and any shops where they might’ve bought a last-minute disguise were now closed.
What were they to do? How were they to surprise their victims now?
In the end, they opted to pull brown-paper lunch bags—taken from a sachet of them found in the car’s back seat—over their heads in lieu of masks, with eyeholes poked out with a pen. Yes, this would do, they thought. With their identities now concealed, they climbed out of the car and, in their stinking barn clothes and rubber boots, moved like half-blind shadows across that church parking lot and over the road to my grandparents’ small, crooked house. The property, at least back then, was surrounded on three sides by the vast, empty fields of our farming community, called Winsloe.
In any other part of the world, this would be the prologue to a home invasion. But when my parents mounted the front porch and began ringing the bell and banging on the windows, Grammie Floss just came to the door and welcomed them in. She actually seemed pleased, thrilled even, that some “mummers” had decided to pop by on such a chilly Halloween night. Grampie Clay was equally unperturbed by my parents’ arrival and poor excuse for costumes. As they came lumbering into his front entry, he just called out a friendly “Now who might you be?” from his place at the kitchen table.
Grammie Floss went so far as to invite them to sit at that table (did Mom and Dad even take off their muddy boots first?) and then proceeded to play a one-sided game akin to Twenty Questions as she tried to ascertain their identities. With each query, Mom and Dad just gave stony shakes of their heads, their makeshift masks crinkling as they did. At one point, Grammie Floss offered them each a piece of her neighbourhood-famous fudge and a cup of tea, in the hope of glimpsing the faces behind those brown-paper bags.
Eventually the masks did come off and there was much hooting and merriment. Even Grampie Clay, not prone to emotion, beamed a huge grin under his beak-like nose and got up to shake my father’s hand. Floss then ran off to make up my mom’s childhood bed and the pull-out couch for Dad.
While this story delighted me when I heard it, it also made me sad. With all the places I’ve lived over my career (as a middling, nomadic editor of travel magazines), I’ve never once acted on impulse and surprised my parents with an unexpected visit. I’ve never once brought them that kind of joy.
I’ve also never, come to think of it, welcomed a stranger so unreservedly into my home and offered them a place at my table.

~

When I say the witch from Snow White, I don’t mean the hunched, cloaked, apple-offering old lady with asymmetrical eyes and a nose like a rotten turnip. I mean her alter ego, the slimmer, icier Evil Stepmom who, despite her narcissistic body-image issues, looks like she might be into a bit of S&M on the side. I suppose she’s not a witch; she’s “the Queen.” Indeed, as I stood in the doorway before my parents’ cement stoop, I took a lengthy, frightened gander at this woman and her ensemble. The black-cape-and-cowl-over-purple-dress combination, while clearly homemade, was well done, yet her mask was a cheap plastic thing, a Zellers’ bargain-bin find intended for children. At first I thought this trespasser might be one of my mother’s hockey teammates. (A jock’s jock, Mom played hockey and broomball every winter back in those days, plus softball in the summer.) But then I thought, no. Most of my mom’s hockey teammates were chunky, sweet-natured lesbians who were always calling me over to tell them a story, because they knew I was good at telling stories. I would sometimes come down from the stands after a game and visit these half-dressed gals in their humid changing room, the air already rich with their bawdy jokes and sweat and swearing, the rubber-matted floor overrun with their gaping hockey bags. The room had an almost party atmosphere as the ladies passed around packs of cigarettes and bottles of beer to “celebrate” getting through another evening of physical exercise. No, this woman was not one of them. She was altogether slinkier, perkier, and in an absolute rage. Santa Claus, meanwhile, was just Santa Claus: some guy in a red suit obviously stuffed with throw pillows, and with a huge cotton beard and red hat pulled low to hide his identity.
My ten-year-old brain couldn’t quite process what these two were fighting about. It managed to sound both deeply domestic and utterly abstract. Did it have something to do with the squat clay statue of Happy, one of the dwarves from Snow White, who stood ornamentally on the outer-most corner of our stoop? Was the Queen somehow upset by his presence there? No, I thought, probably not. He was an inanimate object, after all, and didn’t even much look like Happy anymore. The weather had stripped off the majority of his paint and he was now mostly the colour of bird droppings.
In the end, it didn’t matter what they were fighting about. A great gust of courage swirled up in me then, and I thought: this nonsense cannot stand. I was sick and tired of these grown-ass adults disguising themselves and showing up in the late hours of Halloween to frighten little kids. And who did these two think they were, getting into such a personal, such an intimate row, right there on our front stoop?
I had to do something about this insanity.
I looked over at the side of our house. There, snaking along the gravel trough running the length of its foundation, just below our kitchen-window shutters with their big wooden butterflies nailed to them, was the garden hose. The garden hose, with its plastic sprayer still attached. My father had forgotten to put it away the last time he used it.
I hopped off the stoop and crept like a ninja along the side of the house, the gravel hurting my bare feet, until I reached the outdoor faucet. I cranked it on, the connector hissing and leaking a little, and then hurried back to the sprayer. Yes, I thought. This would do. In fact, the water would be extra cold this late in October.
Taking up my weapon, I climbed back onto the stoop. As I did, I caught one snippet of their argument that did lend some clue as to their identities. “But I can’t do that now, can I?” the Queen weep-shrieked at Santa, her slobbery voice muffled by her mask. “Because I didn’t spend the last twenty years investing in me, you JACKASS. I spent it investing in us!”
“Get off our property!” I yelled, and then gave them a great good squirt with the hose. “Demons, I cast you out!” I added, caught up in the spirit of the evening, and sprayed them a second time.
Just then, our front door flew open and my mom, still half-dressed in her Big Bird costume, came flapping out. With one hand she seized me by the wrist and with the other she pried the sprayer from my grasp. “Kyle, go back in the house,” she ordered, twisting me toward the door. “Go back in the house!”
I obeyed, because I was that kind of son, but still. I gathered at the living room windows with my sisters, and eventually my dad, to snoop on Mom as she took the Queen from Snow White and Santa Claus down into our driveway, out of earshot, so she could play peacemaker in their fracas.
I of course learned later who they were. It was my mom’s older sister, Aunt Donna, and her soon-to-be ex-husband, Uncle Ted. Apparently, they’d had a huge fight earlier in the day about their crumbling marriage, about a secret of Ted’s that had finally come to light. Though brawling all afternoon, they had achieved enough of a détente by evening, they thought, to still do this planned “mummering” at our place. But they were wrong. The argument reanimated itself on the drive over from their house in Cornwall, and then again on our front stoop, because I had taken so long, so terribly long, to answer the door.
As it turned out, the time Mom had spent with those gals on her hockey team had prepared her well for mediating this kind of marital collapse. Ironically, Aunt Donna and Uncle Ted’s relationship much improved after their divorce. In fact, Donna would come to rank Ted among her best friends—both him and his new husband, Gerry.
Indeed, word was that Uncle Ted seemed much happier after all that dust had settled, no longer having to don the “costume” he had worn, day in and day out, for decades.

~

Nearly forty years have passed since that night. Mom is gone now, and so too is that crooked little house she grew up in. The family sold it after Flossy and Clay had passed, and then it got sold again, to a developer. The developer eventually tore down the house but left the land itself to sit vacant for years, to grow into a small, almost spooky field of timothy grass and Queen Anne’s lace. It stayed like that even as the Island around it changed. The United Church across the road, for example, is no longer a church. It now sells floor tiles.
My guess is that one developer eventually sold the land to another, someone who did decide to do something with it, because on my most recent visit home, I noticed that the lot had been cleared. A wide red-dirt lane had been carved into it from the road, and there was now a giant hole in the middle of the property. I picked up Dad from his assisted living place in town and together we drove out to investigate. In fact, we went all the way down the dirt lane and parked right at the edge of that huge, gaping pit.
“Probably’ll be another apartment complex,” Dad mused. Several of them had sprouted around Winsloe in recent years. “Or maybe even a condo.”
“Yeah, probably,” I replied, though the idea seemed ludicrous.
We hung out for a long time there at the edge of that muddy pit, where my mom’s childhood home had once been, perhaps hoping to glean some sense of her spirit in that place. We were feeling nostalgic as twilight gloamed across the neighbourhood.
We probably lingered there longer than we should have, because a security guard eventually came by and told us to move along. Did we not see the huge plywood sign on stilts at the front of the property? she asked.
Of course we did. It had, quite naturally, said NO TRESPASSING, but we didn’t think that applied to us.

Mark Sampson

is a fiction writer, poet, book reviewer, and literary critic, originally from Prince Edward Island and now living and writing in Toronto. He is the author of seven books: the novels All the Animals on Earth (Wolsak & Wynn, 2020), The Slip (Dundurn, 2017), Sad Peninsula (Dundurn, 2014), and Off Book (Norwood Publishing, 2007); the short-story collection The Secrets Men Keep (Now or Never Publishing, 2015); the poetry collection Weathervane (Palimpsest Press, 2016); and the poetry chapbook Big Wilson (Emergency Flash Mob Press, 2023). His new novel, Lowfield, a tale of horror and suspense set on his native PEI, is forthcoming from Now or Never Publishing in the Spring 2025.