I’ve always loved Halloween because it gives adults permission to be a little silly. For weeks, nobody thinks twice about skeletons hanging from porches, fake cobwebs stretched across bushes, or grown people arguing about which horror movie villain would win in a fight. I’ve always been one of those people who enjoys the whole thing.
I love scary movies. Halloween. Friday the 13th. A Nightmare on Elm Street. Dracula, Frankenstein, werewolves, haunted houses, monsters in the dark, all of it. I’ve never needed Halloween to be sophisticated. Give me a creepy soundtrack, a masked killer, an old castle, or something scratching at the window, and I’m happy.
By October 2025, I’d added Beetlejuice back into the mix. I’d bought a vintage Beetlejuice shirt when Beetlejuice Beetlejuice came out the year before, and there I was in Phoenix, sitting on my couch in that shirt, rewatching the movies and enjoying that strange, funny world all over again.
What I didn’t know was that another version of that world was sitting just down the road.
There was a house on East Earll Drive that people had turned into a full Beetlejuice experience for Halloween. Decorations, characters, scenes, the whole wonderfully weird idea of taking something you love from a movie and letting it spill out into real life. I had no idea it existed.
That’s the part I keep coming back to.
The funny part is that Phoenix is enormous, yet our lives can still become surprisingly small. We drive the same roads, shop at the same stores, sit in the same rooms, and assume we know what surrounds us. Most of the time, we really don’t.
I was sitting there watching a movie I already knew, surrounded by characters I loved, wearing a shirt from a story I’d seen before, while something completely unknown to me was happening only a short drive away. Had I known, I would’ve gone. I would’ve worn the shirt, walked around, taken pictures, laughed at the details, and enjoyed every ridiculous second of it.
Maybe that’s why the whole thing stuck with me after I learned about it. I’ve always loved horror because the unknown is part of the fun. You hear a noise behind the door. You know Michael Myers is somewhere in the house. Freddy is waiting for somebody to fall asleep. Jason is never as far away as everyone hopes. The audience knows something is coming, but not exactly when or how.
In a movie, the unknown is safe. You can enjoy being scared because somewhere underneath it, you know the lights will come back on.
Real life isn’t always that cooperative. Around that same time, parts of my own future felt uncertain. I didn’t know exactly what the next months would look like, and there were questions I couldn’t answer yet. For once, the unknown wasn’t just hiding behind a movie door. Some of it had followed me home.
Maybe that’s why I needed Halloween more than I realized.
Not because I wanted to be frightened. I already had enough uncertainty for that. I think I needed the reminder that not every unknown thing waiting around the corner is bad. Sometimes it’s a house you didn’t know existed. Sometimes it’s a room full of people laughing. Sometimes it’s a stranger who built something completely unnecessary simply because it made them happy.
The unknown isn’t always something to fear. Sometimes it’s where the fun is.
I wish I’d known about the Beetlehouse that October. I wish I’d gotten off the couch, driven over in my Beetlejuice shirt, and walked into that strange little world for myself. There’s something almost perfect about the fact that I didn’t. The story works because I missed it.
I spent that Halloween enjoying a fictional world I knew, while a real one I would’ve loved was sitting just down the road, and I had no idea it was there. It makes me wonder how many things are like that. How many places, people, experiences, jokes, meals, conversations, and ridiculous little adventures are sitting just beyond what we happen to know today.
Maybe that’s the funny thing about Halloween. We spend the whole season pretending the unknown is scary, when sometimes the unknown is just something wonderful we haven’t found yet.
I still love the monsters. I still love the slashers, the vampires, the ghosts, the werewolves, and all the things that go bump in the night. I’ll probably always enjoy a dark room and a movie that makes me wonder what’s standing just outside the doorway.
But now I think about that house on Earll Drive too. Not because I was afraid to go.
Because I never knew it was there.
And sometimes the scariest thing about the unknown is simply how much fun you might be missing.
