Who's afraid of fear itself?

Reasons not to lose your head this Halloween

There’s a story I like to tell to explain my attachment to cats. From age six to older than I care to admit, I was afraid to be alone upstairs in our house because of ghosts. I was the youngest in our family by many years, so bedtime meant being alone in the dark bedroom listening to the voices of the grownups downstairs, all safe in their togetherness. But our cat, Mitzi, had a habit of chewing on the chenille bedspread—she’d sucked the colour out of one spot. To get to sleep at night, I’d snuggle down under the covers so that my head was underneath Mitzi’s body, and I’d fall asleep to the sound of her purring and suckling. I’m a grownup now, but a purring cat can still soothe my uneasiness.

Here’s a fun fact. The Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Concord, Massachusetts, close to my current dogsitting place, is not the same Sleepy Hollow traversed by Ichabod Crane in Washington Irving’s tale—that one is in New York state. I’m glad to report the Sleepy Hollow Cemetery I visited this week didn’t have any signs of a headless horseman. It has a section called Authors Ridge, where you can visit the gravesites of Louisa May Alcott, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry David Thoreau. But, sunny weather and unseasonably warm temperatures notwithstanding, a nearby gravestone marked “Adams” did give me a microdose of existential dread.