Fall is in the air. The colors of the fall flowers are fading, while the leaves on the trees are turning to red, yellow, and orange. Halloween is this Saturday night, and we will lose an hour of daylight when we return to Eastern Standard Time at 2 a.m. on Sunday, Nov. 1. Fall is my favorite time of year, and even though we no longer have children young enough to Trick-or-Treat, cool, dark evenings are perfect for sitting around the firepit and conjuring up stories of spooky creatures that scared us when we were kids: black cats, big spiders, werewolves, and vampire bats that change into elegant but sinister aristocrats. As adults, we know that black cats don’t change into witches; werewolves are no more real than Bigfoot, and spiders hold important positions in the garden by eating undesirable insects. Bats are another story. They tend to haunt our darkest evenings when we are walking home from a friend’s house or hear a noise in the attic. Some of the scariest movies featured vampire...