“That corpse you planted last year in your garden,

Has it begun to sprout?”

— T. S. Eliot, “The Wasteland”

Let’s talk about fear. It’s almost Halloween, after all.

As a child, I feared more or less everything: quicksand, stormtroopers, the elaborate traps set in place to guard ancient treasures (and, worse, the face-melting that took place when the wrong person seized one of those treasures).

Sometimes, it occurs to me not that those things scared me, but that I, generally anxious, seized on them to justify the fear I already felt.

I didn’t like mirrors.

There was always the possibility that I would look into a mirror and see someone else’s face reflected. Worse, that I would see the back of someone’s head turning toward mine, and that I would be unable to look away when our eyes met. Her gaze would be unblinking, and there would be nothing of warmth in her smile.

Ghosts were real. I knew that, as a child. I had never seen one, but I had never seen Australia, either. Ghosts were out there, just as Australia was.

Banished to my room for some infraction or other, I would stay silent and still. No reading, no moving, until my mother released me. If I made a sound, a ghost would discover me, and I would hear a voice come through the radiator panel, a voice speaking my name.

In school, classmates would talk nervously about The Smurf Man. He was a grownup, they said, who painted himself blue. He would drive around the city, looking for children to kidnap.

The Smurf Man terrified me. That might not be so surprising. What surprises me, looking back, is the certitude that I saw him: I saw an overweight, middle-aged man, bald on top but with unruly dark hair at the sides, sitting shirtless in a van. His face, chest, and arms were a powdery blue.

I couldn’t have seen him, of course. There was no Smurf Man. How long could you drive around kidnapping kids, while painted blue, before the authorities stepped in?

Still, I wish I could explain to you how terrible it was to see him, how dead his eyes were, and how the paint on his skin looked almost like chalk.

I was 16 when I moved to Alpena. By then, my fears had become more prosaic: Would listening to the country music the bus driver played turn me into a country fan? Would my many pimples coalesce into one giant pimple, as large as my face? And what about the future? Before long, I knew, I would be out in the real world. What would I do then?

I still tried to avoid mirrors at night. And I left the shower curtain open, a little, so that I could poke my head out when I showered and make sure no ghost was watching me (although what would I have done if one was)?

But mostly, I worried about what I was confident were Real Things.

At Alpena Community College, in Biology, I watched with detachment as a large drawer was opened, revealing a dead body. Its face was covered by a cloth. I’m sure that was for privacy reasons, but also, maybe, for the peace of mind of us, the young students. Unnecessary, really. What harm could a dead man do?

Soon, I transitioned into the fears of young adulthood, and regular adulthood, and, now, middle age (I’d list them here, but they’re boring). Fear of the supernatural became an occasional indulgence, something to be found in a book or movie, experienced briefly before returning to regular life.

It’s not that way for all adults. My grandmother, a resident now of Alpena, is heroic: In old age, she rented a reputedly haunted house and stayed up all night, drinking wine and waiting for the ghost to arrive. It never did.

Maybe it knew she was too tough for it to bother with.

But what if it had been me? Me, who has become so certain that the only reflection he’ll see in a mirror is his own? What if I’d sat there in the candlelight, clutching a glass filled with something red and opaque as blood?

What would I see if I went out to my garage tonight, in the darkness? What would I feel if I sat there and waited?

Nothing, probably. It’s just a garage, just a place to store tools and toys for my daughters.

There’s certainly no chance that it would reconstitute itself in the darkness, that the concrete floor I sat on would become the concrete floor of the garage of my childhood, and that I would feel on my suddenly small shoulder a heavy hand.

No chance that I would look back to see, in the moonlight, a shirtless man whose blue skin looked grey in the moonlight.

Almost no chance at all.

John Kissane, alumnus of Alpena High School and Alpena Community College, now lives in Grand Rapids with his wife, children, and terrible dog.