Last night I took the dogs out for a walk, and I looked up to see the creepiest night sky. The doom-ridden grey clouds. The eerie glow of the moon. The skeletal remains of an old tree.
I remember looking out at that tree as a child, and having awful nightmares about creatures coming out of its twisted trunk. And then in 1999 the Tim Burton film Sleepy Hollow was released….
![](http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_nLe_aIrpywU/SvR8E3pycZI/AAAAAAAAALQ/J3vaJ799c_Q/s640/untitled.bmp)
…and there was the tree of my childhood nightmares. The tree in our front yard is not actually that gnarled up, but in a child’s imagination it was The Tree of the Dead. I still get the hebbie gibbies when I’m walking down the lane way on a dark night, and see its ominous silhouette.