Well it just so happened he could fold the collar up over his head so high that he looked quite headless. It actually worked on me at a bonfire one night after he secretly stalked off into the distance and pretended to be a headless guy wandering around in this field we were supposed to camp at.
I didn't sleep that night and it goes without saying he didn't either.
Teach him to play a prank on me! HAH!
Following up on success...That Halloween my mom got this GREAT idea to get back at the neighborhood kids who were taking advantage of the "take one" signs people would leave in their bowls of candy while they were out trick-or-treating with their kids (or in some cases were being too damned lazy to get up and keep going to the door.)
We had this real nice park bench outside our house that we always left the candy basket on while we went out to knock down people doors and scream for candy ourselves. This year it was going to be a little different.
We left dad on the park bench disguised as the headless man and when the greedy little kids would come up to take a handful he'd grab their hands and scare the "trick" right out them.
Joyously humor filled. Trust me on this: There's nothing more delightful than knowing that little kid down the street was screaming because he just had the snot scared out of him.
However, my mom knew this wasn't going to work the next year. So she devised a new plan. Two weeks before Halloween we had "arts and crafts" at our house. Every night. We painted tombstones and raked leaves from other people's yards and shopped at discount places for tricky looking graveyard props and a long black robe with an attached hood.
Then my dad found "the mask".
There just is not a way to properly describe this thing. It has this gory looking face on the front. It's jaw hangs open in what can only be described as a shriek of pure maliciousness. The reddened eyes bore into you with pure hate and it has this mottled looking skin with the color of spoiled dairy and fog... To top it all off snow-white wiry-feeling hair encases the entire outside of this face from hell.
He was our Grim Reaper and we couldn't have been more excited about him coming to life.
My family is evil. We know.
The day of Halloween we began setting up the lawn. We laid out a stuffed version of "Headless Bannon" and his gravestone read:
"Here lies Bill
Forever Still
He Lost his Head
and Now is Dead."
My dad stayed inside all day.
We loosely covered our stuffed dad with leaves and dirt and placed the other gravestones we'd created around him. The end result was pretty cool looking... And you really could not tell "Bill" was stuffed.
My mom found this nappy looking wig and painted up her face to look like a caretaker / gravedigger.
She would sit on the front porch and wait for an army of kids to come up to hear the story of "Bill"then give them the candy they were waiting on. All the while they've got their eye on the stuffed "Bill" and are waiting for him to get up and scare them...
My dad, on the other hand, donned this long, pitch-black flowing robe, "the mask", and put up the hood to the point that, in the dark, the only thing visible was that wretched face and the snow-white hair. While my mother told the story my dad would slip around the opposite side of the house "Bill" was laid on... and come up behind the group of kids listening to the story.
Then they would turn around to see this.... Thing.
To describe the reactions does them an injustice. We found a lot of candy on the lawn the next day. There were near-constant shrieks of terror flowing away from our home all night. One kid ran all the way down the street and then shouted back that "I KNOW that's YOU Mr. Bannon! And THAT wasn't VERY NICE!"
Our home was the most talked about home for years because of that Halloween.
Truth is.. Kids stopped taking too much candy after that. Because... who knew when the Grim Reaper might show up next?
