I've never gotten into watching horror movies (I'm probably a bit of a scaredy-cat when it comes to them); I am, however, a fan of classic monster movies. Ever since I was little, I've loved everything spooky. So, while I'm not too attracted to the man-with-a-chainsaw-is-coming-to-kill-you/razor-in-an-apple kind of Halloween, I have always appreciated the special feeling of autumn as the time when the world is dying, and Halloween as a time to celebrate that, to enjoy all the eeriness. (I can only imagine what commercial Halloween must be like in the Southern Hemisphere, where October 31st falls in the height of spring.)
Fordham is a great place to be in the fall, since fall is nothing without brilliant autumn leaves, and while they might fall off the trees too early elsewhere, the magic of Fordham's groundskeepers (or whatever it is) makes it (so it seems) that the leaves always stay on the trees as long as they ought. Today at 7:00 in the University Church we have a "Spooktacular" organ concert, and last night I had a marvelously fun time going to the Great Jack O'Lantern Blaze in the Historic Hudson Valley, with its amazing illuminated carved pumpkins. (My favorite was the night sky made out of pumpkins, the cover photo for this article.) A cool thing about the Jack O'Lantern Blaze is how it (rightly) celebrates the enormous cultural capital of Washington Irving's "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow". (When I was a kid I thoroughly enjoyed an illustrated children's adaptation.)
Fordham, incidentally, is a notably haunted campus, and, whatever you think of the existence of ghosts, it is certainly a fact that Edgar Allan Poe stayed on campus. (There's even a street on campus named after him.)
Halloween, as is no secret, is a marvelous transformation of a time of year that could be dreary into a time for celebrating everything uncanny; and at the moment I'm particularly glad that Fordham is a swell place for that.