Haunted by the mysterious arrival of Screaming Skull

The American import did not exist when I was a boy, and was only a passing fancy when my sons were growing up.

Real blood did spurt though, as I had to hollow out four swedes to make bagie lanterns, and those tough old tornips were a lot harder to carve than modern-day pumpkins.

The potato peeling knife was not robust enough for the job, and my hands would suffer 1,000 cuts, which would sting viciously when coming into contact with vegetable juice.

Four candles would also be lodged inside, in a process which is doubtless banned now by Elf and Safety, and the house would reek of swede and candle grease almost up to Christmas Day.

It’s only relatively recently that Halloween has overtaken Bonfire Night as the major rite of passage into winter for children of all ages, and has become a big business opportunity for the supermarkets now that fireworks have been denounced as the work of the devil.

The shops peddle bat tat and wonky witches’ hats, along with bumper bundles of overpriced sweets to give away as protection money to trick or treaters.

However, the run-up to this Halloween has been genuinely spooky in a macabre sort of way, thanks to the arrival early one evening of the Screaming Skull.

Mrs Hextol and I were watching Pointless when there was the familiar dull thud of something striking the conservatory window with some gusto. It usually means that a bird-brained member of the avian community has discovered that window glass is a lot more robust than it appears to be – and it is usually the last discovery they make.

I went outside, expecting to see a crumpled feathery form on the block paving, but on this occasion, there was nothing there so I assumed the blackbird, thrush or whatever had flown away nursing a twisted beak and a very bad head,

Several days later though, Mrs Hextol summoned me with some asperity to remove what appeared to be a particularly weighty clump of leaves that were sullying the snowy perfection of the conservatory roof.

I peered idly out of the bathroom window at the offending mass, and was somewhat startled to note that the accumulation included what appeared to be fur, bones and lots of nasty looking teeth.

I rooted out my binoculars to get a close up view of the tangled mass of decaying matter, the better to discern what we were dealing with.

“It looks like a skull’s head,” I announced with some amazement, echoing my younger brother, who at the age of four used the anatomically tautological term to describe the cover of the Manfred Mann LP Soul of Mann in my collection, which featured a human skull, glowing red from internal fire and crowned by tongues of flame.

While there was a merciful absence of spurting gouts of flame from the mysterious arrival on the roof, it was certainly a puzzle as to how it got there.

A closer look was deemed essential, so I swathed my hands in double thickness bin bags and mounted my little steps to bring the specimen to hand.

I was too short to see it directly, but I groped up over the guttering to sink my finger into the putrying mass to bring it down. It was so rotten than even the flies were put off from landing on it and it was one of the oddest sights I had come across in many years.

There were the remains of one small ear, lots of heavy duty molars and more elongated teeth at the front.“It must have been a giant bat, out on patrol before Halloween, ” I jested. “Only something that could fly could get on the roof.”

“Rubbish,” opined Mrs Hextol, from a safe distance, with a handkerchief over her nose. “It’s obviously been dead for quite a while, so a bird must have dropped it. Lots of birds like buzzards and kites scavenge already dead creatures rather than catching their own.”

“Or maybe someone with a grudge threw it up there,” I continued.

Detailed forensic examination revealed it to be a rabbit’s head, in an advanced state of decomposition – but how it got on the roof I have no idea!