(Photos by Katie Furr Mobley)

Let Me Tell Y’all A Story is a weekly column that’s not focused on sports. It’s brought to you by our partners at Chuck Owens, Alfa Insurance.

I live in a neighborhood in Brookhaven known as “Vernondale.”

You might better know it as the neighborhood where everyone goes to trick or treat.

I actually heard it referred to as that once by a lady that was walking by our house on Halloween night. She was on her cell phone and seemed annoyed at the person asking what street she was on.

“I don’t know where I’m at,” she said, “I’m over here where everyone comes to trick or treat.”

Personally, I love living in the center of all the Halloween action in Brookhaven.

Our house and those of our neighbors are decorated and it’s fun to have all the kids from multiple counties come streaming down the sidewalk, holding out their bags and calling, “trick or treat,” as they come towards our house.

It’s a lot different than what Halloween looked like at my childhood home, growing up on Nola Road.

There were no neighbors that we could walk to, so we’d load up in the car and mama would drive us around to visit Mr. Charles and Mrs. Mable next door, our grandparents up the road, and maybe some friends from church.

Our costumes were bought from Walmart or repurposed from another event, like a Christmas play. I’m almost positive I once went trick or treating as a shepherd from the birth of Christ.

I’m not a huge fan of scary movies, but I’ll watch Scream or Halloween or Friday the 13th this time of year. They’re not scary anymore and scratch a nostalgic itch.

Watching the original I Know What You Did Last Summer reminds me of going to see it on opening weekend in October of 1997.

I am not, however, a fan of haunted houses.

My family has been jumping out of the dark to scare me for as long as I can remember. Even as a kid, they’d laugh at my absurd reactions.

I don’t like the dark. I don’t like the idea of any kind of ghoul jumping out to scare me.

Luckily for the folks at Terror on the Homestead and all the other haunted trails and houses in this part of the world, there are plenty of you sickos that do like to be scared

Growing up, I wouldn’t even go in the “haunted house” attraction at the Exchange Club Fair in Brookhaven. It is just creepy music and blacklights, or at least that’s what my friends would tell me when they came out of it.

When I was a senior in high school, some buddies of mine asked me if I wanted to go to a haunted house one night this time of year.

It was over behind the old UPS terminal, but it wasn’t one of those attractions that you paid to get in.

A beautiful family home now, it was overgrown back then, and the state of the yard made it look abandoned.

My friends gave me a pitch, as they’d been by the night before.

They claimed to have looked in the window and to have seen a “creepy looking hospital bed” through one of the dirty panes.

Naturally, I declined the invitation.

They then told me that in their bragging about it, they’d talked a bunch of juniors into going to check it out that night, and the plan was for my friends to hide in the overgrown yard and to jump out and scare our buddies.

Being the scarer and not the scaree…that was the type of fun I could get down with.

We met and pulled up, but it was too late, the other group was already there, tentatively poking around the yard.

Somebody suggested going to the back door and this is where my memories grow fuzzy, because this is where some crimes were committed.

I don’t know who shook the doorknob until we got in, but it happened and before I knew what was going on, approximately 10-12 teenage boys started walking into this big, dark, creepy house.

A few of the braver souls went looking for killer clowns or knife wielding old ladies up the stairs, but I stayed well back, just inside the doorway.

There was a faint noise that everyone in the house could hear. It was low, but consistent.

One of my friends who was also hanging back looked at me and at the same time we both hollered, “it’s an alarm!”

The house was ramshackled for sure, but it had been recently bought by a man who lived in Jackson. He’d hoped to clean the yard up and restore the home over the coming months.

To keep out curious teenagers and vagrants, he’d installed an alarm on his back door.

This wasn’t some joke alarm either, we’d soon find out.

Imagine that many people trying to get out of a single doorframe, all at the same time. We spilled out into the yard and jumped into the vehicles we’d ridden in, including the Suburban of a buddy’s mom.

As we pulled out into the street towards Highway 51, two Brookhaven Police Department cars came up with sirens screaming and lights flashing.

Thankfully, they pulled right past us, and into the yard of the house we’d just left.

I won’t go into every detail, but my friends and I weren’t the Navy Seals. We’d accidentally left three men behind.

Those guys took the fall for the rest of us.

Their punishment wasn’t too severe. They had to go to court and get admonished by a judge and promise to never do anything similar again.

They also had to go back to the house on a Saturday and spend eight hours helping the homeowner get his yard cleaned up.

On the night it happened though, they were taken back to the police station and had BPD call their parents to let them know that their sons had been caught breaking into a house and needed to be picked up.

I promise I haven’t done any breaking or entering since that day, about 25 years ago, as the thought of my daddy getting a call in the middle of the night to get me at the police station was scarier than Freddy Krueger, Jason Voorhees, and Michael Myers all rolled into one.