This is an actual true story of my life. It’s not a ghost story or a Bigfoot sighting or anything, but I thought you might appreciate it anyway. I am posting it in honor of my father’s memory (his birthday would be today).

For a little background: My father was a dentist until he was forced to retire due to a prolonged auto-immune disorder. He loved horror films, especially the really campy old black and white ones of the Universal Studios Monsters era, but the more obscure the better. I think his favorite may have been The Invasion of the Space Preachers, but that may have just been the flavor of the day at one time. Personally, I always liked The Beginning of the End but then again the scene at the end with the giant grasshoppers let loose all over the Chicago skyline with the shot changing every time they crawled out onto the sky just tickled me.

Anyway, I found the perfect Christmas gift for my father on clearance after Halloween: the Spooky Hollow house of the Spooky Dentist. It looked like a wide grinning skull with stairs leading up into its gaping maw. It came with a green light bulb and was meant to be a part of your Spooky Hollow Halloween porcelain lighted town to ensure that you represented all of the wondrous merchants and businesses that the world had to offer and thusly procured yet more lighted figurines for your Halloween decor setup. What can I say – it was the late 1990s or early 2000s, and this fit right in.

So I picked up the Spooky Dentist and… my father adored it. He placed it prominently in the window front and center on the enclosed porch so that all who came to the house could bask in its beauteous green glowing glory. My stepmother did not feel the same, however, and so it became the leg lamp of our family for awhile. She would turn it off, and he would go turn it on again. When the light bulb finally died, he bought a new one online at way more than one should ever have to pay for a small green light bulb, just to get it up and running again. It’s wide-grinning toothy smile greeted everyone who came and went, and so it continued on until one fateful day.

Like the leg lamp of A Christmas Story lore, the Spooky Dentist met a similar fate. It fell to its inevitable demise while my stepmother was out watering her plants. In fairness, the enclosed porch was a veritable jungle of sorts, including something a bit too closely resembling a corpse lily, but that’s a story for another day. At any rate, the Spooky Dentist was knocked from its perch and fell to the concrete below, shattering like Humpty Dumpty into too many pieces to put back together again. The porch lost some of its sparkle, bereft of the green glow that had once greeted visitors and was no more. Sure, there was still the giant Mothra butterfly kite looming at the beacon supernova of a plant grow light bulb, but honestly it just wasn’t the same.

My father passed away in 2014. I wish I could find another Spooky Dentist to place prominently somewhere in my house to greet visitors, but alas I have not been able to procure one. I admit, being banned from eBay isn’t helping, but that’s a story for another day as well. At any rate, here are some pictures I gleaned online. Maybe someday I’ll run into one somewhere, and I’ll crank up the old Frankenstein laboratory, fix it up, and maniacally laugh as I bask in its glorious green glow.

If you want to get a sense for just how well this will fit into my decor when I finally find one, you can check out some of my art collection highlights here on Haunted MTL.