Pace, Mississippi, is so small that a few paces in any direction are required to be out of Pace. In this tiny Delta farming community, everybody knows everybody … except on Halloween, when kids, disguised as ghosts, gangsters, goons, goblins and ghouls, roam the streets and terrorize the residents, who offer treats to avoid tricks.
One moonless Halloween Saturday night, my friend John and a pal, both ten years old, successfully pillaged the neighborhoods, and headed toward the main street to extort goodies from storekeepers and shoppers.
To get there, they had to walk across an unlit, rickety old footbridge traversing the Bogue Phalia, a Yazoo River tributary lined with gloomy, moss-covered cypress trees.
According to local yore, the eerie apparitions of those who drowned in the miasmic, phantasmagoric slough or were devoured by its resident alligators, arise from their watery crypt on Halloween night to bemoan their dreadful deaths.