Boo!

Had an excellent trick-or-treat night. I decided to play "scare the kids" so I hooked up my smoke machine and used an extra piece of the pipe I had left over. I cut a hole in an orange bucket we've got and filled it with ice, connected the pipe to the hole and the other end to my smoke chiller. All the ice meant that the smoke got super-chilled and was cold to the touch and it swirled along the ground. I put a blacklight bulb in the porch light, then ran the smoke machine remote lead under the doormat. Finally I dressed up in all my biker gear complete with mirrored glasses and sat slumped in the corner of the porch with the candy bowl between my feet and the remote in my right hand. I'd flick the smoke machine on and off to generate a nice mist and then the kids and parents would come up really cautiously, trying to decide if I was real or a dummy. I stayed perfectly still and let some of the kids grab some candy, and with others, I lurched at them. I got tons of people, including our neighbour and her kids. The best one was one of the big sisters of a group of kids. She said to her friends "that's so fake - man - take a picture of me with it". She scooched right down on my left and because I had the mirrored glasses on, I could see everything. I held my breath and stayed totally still. Just as her boyfriend went to press the shutter release on his camera, I jammed my thumb on the smoke remote, moved my left hand off my leg and sucked in a loud breath. The woman freaked out just as the flash went off. The air filled with mist, she took all three steps in a single jump, her boyfriend jumped backwards through the spider web and the three kids took off screaming. You know, for such a simple setup, the results were awesome.
Next year, I'm going to do the same, but stuff some straw in my trousers and arms of the jacket to make me look even more like a dummy.
Our neighbour the ex-marine, was dressed in his gillie suit and hunkered down with his bushes. He'd run out roaring and scare the kids and parents at his house too. Between the two houses, I think we managed to put some of the spook back into Halloween. Enough of this giving candy away for free. Time to actually do some scaring :-)