Don’t Be Afraid
When Horror Came Home
Growing up in Pittsburgh in the 1960’s, we had this great Saturday night double-feature of horror flicks on T.V. called “Chiller Theater”. It was hosted by a cat named Chilly Billy Cardille. I always stayed up late on Saturday nights to watch it. Of course, it filled my young head with lots of scary scenarios, but part of it, I think, was how one faced down those “kid fears”. You watched Chiller Theater and screamed your head off. It was fun to do.
But one morning, when I was about ten, I had a Chiller Theater moment of my own that I will never forget as long as I live. I’ve never known such raw, shear terror as I did on that morning.
I delivered the morning newspaper, the Post-Gazette, to 67 customers every morning, save Sundays, when the Post-Gazette did not do a paper. We lived in a big old house on Berkshire Avenue in the Brookline section of the city. I kept my paper sack on a hook inside a door that led from the kitchen down into the cellar, with a landing halfway down, where we hung our winter coats on hooks. The landing also had a door which opened onto a walkway that ran beside our house.
On this particular morning, as I made my way through the dark house at 5 a.m., long before the sun came up, I opened the cellar door from the kitchen, reached in to get my paper sack and coat, then heard a rustling coming from the landing. From out of the darkness came a soft, scary voice saying, “Don’t Be Afraid!”
I.Lost.My.Mind. That was just the kind of thing the grizzly murderer said right before they chopped you to pieces in the Chiller Theater flicks. I immediately dropped my sack and coat, turned tale and hauled my little body through the kitchen and front hallway, and flew up the stairs to the second floor, two-three at a time, all the while screaming my head off.
By the time I reached the second floor my Dad, all six feet three inches of him, was at the top of the stairs in his pajamas, looking perplexed as I dove headfirst into his outstretched arms, repeating over and over again, “It moved — it moved — Dad, it moved!!!”
Dad then saw, coming up the stairs behind me, my poor older brother Jim, with a sheepish look on his face. “I just didn’t want him to be scared.” Jim, home from college, had forgotten his key when he went out with friends for a late night of whatever college kids did in those days, and had let himself in the side cellar door, making a bed for himself from the coats on the cellar landing.
This has become one of my family’s favorite stories through the years. At a family gathering, all anyone has to say is “Don’t Be Afraid” and everyone laughs, remembering the funny story about the time I was scared out of my mind.
Me? I still shudder a bit when I remember that morning. Never in my life have I known terror the way I did for those few moments, when I thought I was going to die, the way they always did in the horror movies.
I did stop watching Chiller Theater for a good while after that incident.
