Halloween, typically, is about scary things…so let me tell you about my scariest Halloween experience. Actually, this experience lasted from about the week before Halloween up until right after my birthday, so I had residual Halloween spookitude.

Back in 1994, I worked at a bank and became friends with a co-worker we’ll call Psycho Psarah. She was everything I sort of aspired to be - she had a new red Saturn coupe (leased, I found out later, for $450 a month), a cool apartment in a cool area of town, and fun friends. Not that I didn’t have fun friends at the time…but these folks were just…different. How different, you might ask?

Well, Psycho Psarah had a guy friend we’ll call…Obsessed Otto. The three of us got together for brunch one Sunday morning and I guess he became smitten with me, and asked me out. He picked me up at my apartment and we went to this big haunted house which was “the thing to do” at the time. When he dropped me off at my apartment afterwards, I was polite and invited him in. I had a roommate so nothing was going to happen, but the guy wouldn’t leave. He wasn’t all over me or anything; quite the contrary, he was a real gentleman…but again, he wouldn’t leave. It was a work night, it was 11:30 - I needed my beauty sleep. Nice enough guy, but I just didn’t think we clicked.

Unfortunately, he thought we clicked a lot and yapped to Psycho Psarah the next day about our fantastic date. Well, she called me at work and went on and on and ON about how Otto thought I was cool and isn’t that cute and…I don’t know, I got a weird vibe…like she was pissed her friend was interested in me (sidenote: She always claimed to have a boyfriend, who lived out of town, but I never met the guy - we’ll call him George Glass, since he was supposed to visit three times and never materialized). This didn’t really worry me or anything, because I was young, and had no idea yet that people could be so disturbingly strange.

A few days later, pshe called me and invited me to a Halloween party at one of her friend’s houses. You’d think after her pissiness the previous week I would have run, run, RUN away from anything having to do with her, but no. You’d also think she wouldn’t invite me anywhere since apparently I was taking her non-boyfriend away from her, but it is stories like this which make us into the wiser adults we are today.

So, I made my classic layered taco dip, and showed up at her apartment dressed as a baby. What an easy costume - footie jammies from Target, pacifier, bib, etc. Anyway, we hop in her car and drive around, literally, for 45 minutes…looking for her “friend’s” house. I asked her why she didn’t know how to get to her friend’s house and she mumbled something about leaving the directions at home. I found that odd, since Sacramento is basically one big grid…but what was I going to do? I was 8 miles from home, and dressed in footie pajamas.

Eventually she “gave up” looking for the non-party and recommended we just go back to her apartment…which we did. We ate taco dip, drank Rolling Rock beer…and watched TV. I never did find out if there really was a party, or if she was just looking for someplace dark and secluded to chop me up into a million pieces.

As I’m sure you can deduce by this point, I hadn’t been tortured enough, so when another one of my friends decided to throw me a 23rd birthday party and asked if there was anyone else I wanted to invite other than the usual suspects, I said, “Psure! Psycho Psarah!”

Well. Psycho Psarah came to the party and proceeded to do everything within her power to insult all of my other friends. She got possessive, declared the party “lame”, then eventually departed in a huff. I never heard from her again, except when she called demanding her salad bowl back (she’d brought Caesar salad to the party, and left it behind during her dramatic exit). I told her I’d get it from my friend who had hosted the party, then call her back and we could meet up. She didn’t return any of my calls, and was always conveniently unavailable. Fortunately, ten days earlier I had changed jobs, so I never had to actually see her again…and I got a rather nice salad bowl out of the deal.

Otto on the other hand…was a little tougher to ditch. It seemed the less Psycho Psarah liked me, the more he did. Finally, I just had to tell the poor guy I just wasn’t that into him and after about a dozen more unreturned phone calls from me, he finally got the message.

And this, my friends, is why you don’t go to a haunted house with a girl friend’s guy friend.