Ghostly guests and Halloween hijinks part of Clovis history

Bill Southard must have enjoyed Halloween. At least he wrote a lot about it when he was managing editor at the Clovis News-Journal for much of the 1970s and early 1980s.

Some of his spooky reports were funny – we'll get to the naked woman in a minute – and some were real-life scary – like the time Clovis leaders asked kids to skip trick-or-treating due to concerns about poison candy.

He wrote about the "good old days" of the holiday, "when kids used a good deal of ingenuity in the tricks they performed."

There was the time a group of teens disassembled a car, carried the parts to the roof of the Curry County Courthouse, then reassembled it and left it there overnight.

He lamented the days of outhouses appearing on school roofs, at the top of flag poles and "almost any place else you could imagine. ... The advent of indoor plumbing has brought an end to that era, though."

But there was one Halloween puzzle that seemed to leave Southard a little uncomfortable. It involved a mysterious old lady ... or maybe she was a ghost. Today's a good day to share that story because this week is the 50th anniversary of her last known appearance on the streets of Clovis.

One at a time ...

• Cities across the country in 1982 banned trick-or-treating just a few weeks after cyanide-laced Tylenol killed seven people in the Chicago area. Other tainted products were discovered about the same time, in candy and soda.

The Civic Affairs Committee of the Clovis Chamber of Commerce "discouraged" trick-or-treating locally due to the fears. For those who braved the dangers, hospitals across the country invited children to bring their candy for x-rays prior to consumption.

"Halloween is mixed up this year," Southard wrote in page 2 column called "Memo ... from the editor."

Most other years, Southard's Halloween coverage took on a decidedly less-serious tone.

• He wrote about the naked woman for Halloween 1976.

He declined to publicly identify the lady, except to say she was a "sister of an acquaintance." He insisted it was a true story.

Seems the woman was perturbed at her husband who refused to answer the door when trick-or-treaters arrived. "He stubbornly refused, keeping his nose in the book he was reading," Scribe Southard reported.

And so the woman gave her husband a good lecture, then left the room and told him the next doorbell was his to answer – or else.

A few minutes later, he was called to action. Opening the door he found an adult, a stocking covering the face, a full-length coat covering the body, reaching out for candy.

"You're kind of big to be trick-or-treating, aren't you?" the man asked his visitor.

"Without a word," Southard reported, "the figure at the door threw open the long coat. It was a woman, stark nekkid. The young man sustained a rather nasty leg injury retreating from the door, we're told."

Of course the woman at the door was the fellow's wife.

"He has never since that day answered the door on Halloween night," Southard wrote.

• The Halloween story that left Southard baffled seems to have occurred three consecutive years, from 1972 to 1974.

A Mrs. Jean Hardin first brought it to public light, describing her visitor as a little old lady.

"As a matter of fact, she was a little old lady," Hardin told Southard. "I saw a wedding band on her hand and her face was wrinkled."

The woman wanted candy, so Hardin dropped a handful into her "already bulging sack" and she went on her way.

Southard appears to have heard about the woman again in 1973, thought he didn't write about it. We know this because in 1974, he noted a "rather unusual trick-or-treater" had made the rounds of doors in northwest Clovis "for the third straight year."

"She's a woman estimated to be in her 80s, who very matter-of-factly rings doorbells and accepts goodies in her Halloween bag."

Southard joked that "in these days of sky-high food prices, we may see more like her on the trick-or-treat circuit."

He also noted, perhaps with a little trepidation, she "travels alone."