Goosetown Halloween

Goosetown Halloween
by John Forster
© 2003 Limousine Music Co. (ASCAP)

Every year, when we’re done trick-or-treating
And we’re all sick of eating
Tootsie Rolls by the pound,
Off we go to a strange kind of meeting
That’s for every kid for miles around.
Down at the firehouse
Where all the firefighters
Are putting on their yearly trick-or-treat.
They drape the firehouse,
They decorate the pumper
And all put on a costume or a sheet,
As the witches and the zombies
And the goblins all convene
For a killer diller thriller of a
Goosetown Halloween.

But new this year in the rear of the station
Stood a weird habitation
That gave all of us chills.
Clanking chains and a nightmare vibration,
Well, it made you wanna run for the hills.
They’d built a spookhouse,
Those wacky firefighters,
With sound effects
And lighting they’d prepared.
They’d made that firehouse
A very scary area
And frankly even I was kind of scared
As the witches and the zombies
Turned a ghostly shade of green
On a killer diller thriller of a
Goosetown Halloween.

Little vampires started wailing.
Little mummies were coming unwound.
All at once, though, something happened
To turn the whole evening around.

“It’s a fire! Two alarms.
Sorry kids, party’s over.”

It was a madhouse
With everybody running
From the spookhouse
To find their boots and helmets
In the firehouse
“No time to change your costumes!”
A gremlin came a-sliding down the pole.
A cob-webbed pumper with a skeleton crew.
Frankenstein was driving and away they flew
With the clanging and the honking
And the screaming high sirene.
What a killer diller thriller of a
Goosetown Halloween.

Left on Highmount the engine was turning,
You could smell something burning,
Something very nearby.
Where they stopped was extremely concerning.
Well, the truth is that I wanted to cry.
They stopped at my house,
Well, actually behind it,
At our henhouse,
The flames were leaping out.
It was a madhouse,
As everyone came running
From the spookhouse
To watch the ghouls and zombies
From the firehouse
Spray water on the fire
And gather all the chickens, who’d escaped.
(They were all safe.)
As the witches and the zombies
On the big red fire machine
Had a killer diller thriller of a
Goosetown Hallo—

Holy cow! It’s the thing we were dreading.
Now the flames, they were spreading
To the chicken feed drop.
All that corn that we stored in the shedding,
You could hear it. It was starting to pop.
Cross Orville Redenbacher
With a firecracker,
I’m pretty sure that this’d be the sound.
Oh, everyone in town
Is gonna long recall the scene
Of the killer diller thriller of a
Goosetown Halloween.

This song appears on Tom Chapin's In My Hometown CD.

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