Oct. 31: Graveyard On Halloween night just before the witching hour, I rose from Biology texts and stumbled across the Yard. Dressed in a purple rubberized rain suit from head to toe, I set off to the Old Burying Ground in search of the occult. The rain was falling in sheets. Leaping the iron fence with little finesse, I landed, fully expecting the Prince of Darkness to be waiting. I sat by a tree and watched as rain drops landed on silent tombstones. My adventurous spirit began to subside as the reality of this evening began to sink in. There were no witches in sight, nor anyone with facial warts in the vicinity. In fact it seemed like I would see nothing of the sort. The rain had prevented any candle-burning Satan worshippers from performing their heretical rituals, there was no dull moon for werewolves, high-winds had grounded the vampires and it was obviously too wet for mummies. The Tories themselves were terribly conservative folks, not really the types to haunt the living. Even a raven or a black cat would have sufficed, but my hopes of spotting something even moderately spooky soon dwindled. At midnight there were no church bells or demons, only the beeping of my watch and the whirr of passing taxis. Ethan A. Vogt

Oct. 31: Widener steps To commemorate the tradition of setting our watches back an hour, the Cult of Cronus assembled on the Widener steps at 2 a.m. Halloween morning. Holding candles and a clock drawn on a pizza box, the cult recited a chant marking the annual event. "Tick!" "Tock!" the cult members shouted in turn.

As the ceremony was drawing to a close, two police cars arrived. "Do you realize you're disturbing everybody in the yard?" the police officer said to the cult leader. The leader defended his group, claiming they were performing a religious ceremony. "People have been more rude to us than we have been to them," the cult leader said. He claimed that onlookers mooned the group in the middle of its incantations.

After a short reproach, the police left, and the group marched off the steps to burn its pizza-box clock. Traditionally, the cult burns its clock in front of the John Harvard statue, but as they left the library steps, one woman told her leader, "Maybe this year we should do it in the quad."   Joshua D. Fine