Our 70's Cardboard Maze Adventure

ENID, OK - The arrival of Fall always reminds of the good times my friends and I had preparing for the oncoming Halloween season in Enid, Oklahoma. The street that we lived along in the late 70's was a very wide avenue lined with older two story houses and bungalow's. Along every block there were very large elm and maple trees that would cast great shadows over the bumpy sidewalks running along either side.
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Fall was the kickoff of our big adventure. The air became cooler and the leaves on the huge trees in the front yards began to turn and fall. The days began to get shorter and the sun would go down earlier and earlier every evening.
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Our big adventure was building a haunted cardboard maze inside my best friends old, multi-room garage. His dad would relinquish the dusty garage around this time each year and leave his cars parked in the driveway. We would have full reign over the entire space.
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The haunted maze would become our after school and weekend obsession for over a solid month. We'd spend hours in the garage sometimes completely losing track of time. We would clean out all of the rooms to make way for the large boxes.
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The quest would begin with our carefree hunt for the biggest and best cardboard boxes in town. We were both in junior high and couldn't drive so we relied on our trusty bicycles to get us around town. You know the ones, bright colored paint, banana seats, chopper style handle bars, goofy white grips and chrome fenders. Real junior high nerd bikes straight out of the seventies!
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My bike was multicolored with reds, oranges and blues while my best friends was mostly green. We would ride these modes of monster transportation all over town searching out appliance stores, furniture stores, dumpsters and the most coveted place of all, the funeral homes. You see, couch boxes were good, refrigerator boxes were great, but coffin boxes were the pièce de résistance of our haunted maze.
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There was one slight problem when finding these magnificent boxes. Getting them back to the garage on our bikes became a small adventure in itself. To this day I wish there was a photo of us lugging a coffin box, balanced between our two bikes, down the street.
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With most boxes, we could unstaple them and fold them up like pancakes. We would stick as many as we could under one arm and pedal like heck while steering with the other arm. I remember dropping boxes along the way and having to make several stops just to rest and get a new grip.
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Coffin boxes were virtually impossible to tear apart and fold like a pancake but we sure weren't going to have a haunted maze without at least one genuine cardboard coffin box. A box that large usually created an entire room inside our maze. It was something we had to have.
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This ritual of box hunting would begin in late September and continue well into October. The ground would be covered with dry, crunchy leaves in different hues of red, orange, brown and yellow. The air would be cooler and the skies would become a little grayer.
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With the garage our own, we would shut the doors, flip on the heater and start creating our masterpiece. There are many songs, that to this day, will immediately take me back to those carefree times. I can hear them now, Thelma Houston, belting out "Don't Leave Me This Way" and Rita Coolidge singing, "(Your Love Has Lifted Me) Higher and Higher."
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Creating the maze was the second part of the adventure. We spent hours piecing boxes together just so they would create the perfect turn, dead end or straight away. Our only tools were box cutters and duct tape. With the radio blaring we would work day and night creating holes in the boxes for hand grabbing, dangle things from the top and scatter slimy things all along the floor.
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The garage that we used for the haunted maze was divided into four sections. The first area was the entry where we'd let the uneasy children stand and listen to the screams of others. This room was filled with things on the walls, a black light and one of friends hidden in an area where the dogs slept.
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The parking area of the garage had most of the maze in it. It was large enough that the maze could wind back and forth with an actual dead end every now and then. We had scary music playing throughout and we were all sticking our hands in one hole or another.
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That large room led into a smaller room which was my area. The kids would still be trapped in the maze as they entered my area. I would have a spot with a false wall that I could remove and grab whoever I wanted. It was so much fun hearing the kids scream. After my room there was another small room that would allow the kids to finally stand up again.
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The last room had a door that opened into the backyard. As the kids would exit the maze and think their horror was over, we'd have a scary character come out of nowhere and chase them all way back to the front of the garage. It was the perfect setup for a haunted maze inside a scary looking garage.
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It seems like we would even take the opportunity to spend the night in the maze on a weekend or two. All of this preparation would continue up until the very day of Halloween itself. Of course we would have our friends over to do a run through before we would allow any stranger to enter our maze of horror. Many days were spent just hanging out and talking in the big, coffin box rooms.
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On some occasions one of us would end up working on the maze alone. Those times were few and far between. Not only because we were always together but every now and then you'd catch a noise you couldn't explain and that old garage would get just a little bit scarier.
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Outside preparation included raking leaves into large piles that looked like graves. We even created cardboard tombstones for the head of each pile. We also had a few random plastic body parts that we'd half bury in the leaves. It was always a pretty cool looking graveyard.
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Once Halloween was upon us we would go out onto the cold cracked sidewalk, in costume, and lure the neighborhood kids down the long dark driveway to the old tattered garage. Each kid, brave enough, would then enter the maze and crawl for his life to the end. There was no escape once you entered and most kids left running and screaming out the exit.
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As the kids would crawl through the maze we would run to our designated locations and setup to scare them. We had special boxes that only we could get to and they had the holes cut in them. We'd reach out for the trick-or-treaters and dangle things in front of them. In some spots we'd bang the box or shout really loud. It was all about giving the kids the unexpected.
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We would laugh so hard that we would make ourselves cry. Seeing the scared little rug rats running for their lives was all we needed to see to know that we had accomplished what we had set out to do. We were the best of friends and we enjoyed creating things together that entertained others. Those memories I'll never forget and I can only hope that every kid finds his own great cardboard box adventure.
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I may be expanding on this story and turning it into a full short story so stay tuned.
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