Bats are big in October, whether it be those varnished pieces of wood meant to connect with baseballs or those slightly spooky creatures associated with Halloween.

In J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series, bats hovered in Hogwarts’s Great Hall during Halloween as an evil professor let a troll into the castle; as Harry and his friends attended a ghost’s deathday party; as someone framed for a murder disguised as a dog tried to murder the framer disguised as a rat; and as Harry’s name was entered into a dangerous contest without his consent.

Bats have bad eyesight, although it isn’t clear whether the government definition of blindness applies to them. Nor is it clear how well they might benefit from the services that vocation rehabilitation agencies provide to us light-independent adults.

Last year as Halloween approached, two bats silently hovered high above my apartment door.

On Halloween in elementary school, I went trick-or-treating with my mom, sister, and neighborhood kids. My sister was a witch, and I was a ghost. Mom, with my sister’s help, created the costumes. When I asked Mom what she remembered about her Halloween costume-making, she wrote, in part:

“I remember putting a sheet over your head, planning to cut holes in it for eyes, when I was stunned to realize that you didn’t need eyes—this ghost simply didn’t need eyes.”

This caused a bit of consternation among neighborhood adults, first because there were no eyeholes in my costume and then because I was blind. I often got an extra piece of candy.

When I was nine or ten years old, we as a family decided that I would be a Martian. In addition to donning that sheet with no eyeholes, I wore a helmet consisting of glued-together paper plates with pipe cleaners simulating antennae. Over my shoulder and under the sheet, I wore my schoolbag in which two rubber balls would beep at varying rates and pitches whenever I pulled out each of their pins. My sister, two neighborhood kids, and I approached neighborhood houses while our parents shared a flask of brandy while watching our antics from behind clumps of nearby bushes.

“Trick or treat!” I shouted with everyone else in my best Martian voice as someone opened a door. As the adults fawned over our costumes, gave us candy, and dropped coins into our UNICEF boxes, I removed the pins from those rubber balls.

Beep beep beep beep beep

“What’s that noise?” the adults would ask.

“My Martian military commanders are giving me instructions,” I explained in my best extraterrestrial drawl.

The idea that a blind kid could communicate with Martians using pipe-cleaner antennae unnerved several neighbors.

Which we found very funny as we divvied out our unusually large supply of candy.

On another Halloween early evening nearly fifteen years later, my guide dog, a weimaraner named Heidi, and I were speed-walking home from graduate school when an adult asked me to control her.

“What’s she doing?” I asked, as she wasn’t pulling, stealing food, stalking birds, or anything else she sometimes did while working.

“She’s glaring at the kids,” the adult told me.

I guess there’s a reason why weimaraners are sometimes called gray ghosts.

During more recent Halloweens, I have assisted with candy distribution while wearing devil’s horns.

Congratulations, Boston Red Sox, for winning the World Series.

Happy Halloween — and prepare to be assaulted with two months of canned Christmas music.

As for those bats hovering above my apartment door, they vanished in early November.