Be Very Afraid

The ominous flood started slowly--a couple of drips in the morning mail, a few drops amid the faxes. It soon became a stream, then a deafening deluge.

By the entry deadline, scary stories and illustrations were crashing into our office in relentless waves, spewing from overheated fax machines like jets from high-pressure fire hoses.

Nooooooooooo!!!

More than 5,200 ghoulish souls from every corner of Southern California entered this year’s fourth annual Scariest Halloween Story Ever Told Contest.

We read every blessed word and we thank one and all for your contributions.

The best (eight winning stories, two winning illustrations and five honorable mentions) are printed in today’s Life & Style section. But many of the others held hidden treasures too. Creative themes, hot plots, hair-raising spelling, even some really bad puns from those who like a little corn on their macabre.

Here’s a sampler:

* Great titles: “The Haunted HMO,� “Revenge of the Puppy Lover,� “The Return of Charles Manson,� “How the Mommies Disappeared.�

* As kids see things: “Becky, along with many of the girls in her high school, thought that Arnold was probably a serial-killer-in-the-making.�

And: “My mother and father planned to go to Mt. Everest, the highest mountain, for our vacation. How boring!�

And: Accidentally or otherwise, somebody sent us a quiz from math class. Scary enough for us.

* Food frights: “The skeleton said, ‘What do you want on your tombstone?’ And the kids answered, ‘Pepperoni and cheese.’ �

And: “T’was the night before Halloween, when all through the school, not a creature was stirring, not even a ghoul--except in the cafeteria . . . “

And: “They realized she was possessed. Lucy (-fer) chased them around the school, but they had a plan. Eric and B.J. went to the cafeteria and got some left-over fish sticks, which were like wooden stakes and drove one through her heart. . . .�

* Mind your manners: “The vampire left to get a napkin to clean his mouth after sucking their blood.�

* As adults see things: “Oh, the horror of it! The absolute bone-chilling, teeth-rattling, blood-curdling reality that is a married John F. Kennedy Jr. . . . [Our only hope is] that he will soon discover that his precious Carolyn is really an escapee from some Scandinavian clinic, and her sex-change didn’t really take after all.�

And: Most horrifying to another writer was looking in the mirror, seeing “a face only vaguely her own,� having fuzzy eyesight and fearing that someone put something weird in her drink last night--only to discover she wasn’t dying; she had just turned 40.

* Lessons learned: “I realized it was all a dream. I should not watch ‘Jurassic Park’ before I go to bed.�

An A in math: “There were hundreds of thousands of pumpkins in his patch, and when you multiply that by a dollar or two a pumpkin, you have quite a bit of money.�

An F in anatomy: “My heart thumped hard in my head.�