Spooksville!

Our son Dan has been on about vampires and werewolves for months now which I put it down to all those B movies he watched with Nick and Gabby in Maine this summer. We have since been indulging his obsession by taking him to spooky events and, frankly, scaring the willies out of him!

Dan and Georgiana on the
haunted tractor tour

There's a series of books, and now a TV show, called "Horrible Histories" that focuses on the more gruesome side of life. Kids generally love it, but need a sick-bag at hand sometimes. There's a stage version that goes on tour each autumn and it gets better every year. This time we went to see "Awful Egyptians" at the Cambridge Arts Theatre.

With a small cast of only 5 or 6 players, but an excellent stage set enhanced with 3D projection effects, the show covered all the usual topics that you would expect in a very humorous way. Of course the mummy bit was the tops with the screaming tiddlers in the audience because it involved the removal of vital organs and plenty of blood and slime. The appearance of the living mummy among the audience caused real panic though. I'm guessing there would be a few wet seats afterwards.

On the haunted punt

Sacrewell Farm, near Peterborough, also excels in scariness at Halloween. They run a haunted tractor tour and their water-mill becomes a labyrinth of steps and walkways where every step of the way is spooked-up with skeletons, ghouls, cobwebs or bats. Dan opted out on the first pass but just couldn't resist a look around once he'd had time to process what was going on.

But the top event for me was the haunted punt tour along the backs of the colleges of Cambridge. Our zombie/skipper told us a long string of horror stories as he took us for an hour on the Cam in the dark. We passed the places where John Bunyan and Isaac Newton did their best work and heard all about the  Princes in the Tower, the Black Death and local hauntings. As if that wasn't enough, we then went on a tour of the back-streets of Cambridge for another hour, visiting haunted colleges, a haunted book-shop and a haunted photographer's studio, all close by.

Dinner at Carluccio's

Afterwards we had a slap-up meal at Carluccio's during which Dan was absolutely brilliant, except that we ordered too much grub because our carers are both on diets and Dan fancied Hanna's seafood meal more than his own meatballs. Apart from that, it was a very memorable evening, especially for Gabby who must still have the bruises. Dan squeezed her hand through all the frightening bits.