The Spookiest Halloween

Karsten Moran for The New York Times

Dear Diary:

Nothing was spookier than bicycling late Wednesday night on Catherine Lane, where scaffolding has created a tunnel between buildings and Sandy has darkened it pitch-black. I shut off my bike lights and let out a holler. Evidently, my friend, a grown man going on 30, felt the same. “I was legitimately scared,” he said.

It was precisely what we had come for, to revel in the darkness encasing Lower Manhattan. To tour the biggest haunted house ever. The streets were owned by shadowy figures, some of which had cameras and tripods to take advantage of the conditions, and police.

A few pricks of light pierced the dark sky (stars, in New York?) and fewer ligh ts shone from the windows of apartments, each blacker than the next. The landscape of dark towers and a maze of deep canyons resembled a strange wilderness of some kind. It brought to mind night in the Utah desert.

Halloween has never been so surreal.

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