Season 3 episode 5: The Monster Of Walnut Grove

Day 5
This is the Halloween special.

The episode begins with Laura telling the story of Ichabod Crane and the Headless Horseman to her little sister Carrie. The two oldest girls leave for soaping the Olsen's windows right after that. Laura goes around the corner from Mary in order too get to windows without soap already on them. While she is away from her sister, Laura sees Mr. Olsen and hears Mrs. Olsen fighting over the budget and whether the sword that Mr. Olsen had bought was real or not. In his anger, Mr. Olsen appears to chop off Mrs. Olsen's head with his sword. When Laura tells Mary, her Ma, and her Pa, none of them believe her. She decides to walk to school with her friend Carl, whom she is distressed to find does not believe her, either. Throughout a series of circumstances, Carl, Laura, Willie, and Nellie are all briefly (but extremely - They think they saw Mr. Olsen carry away the body in a black bag [ he was carrying off a new dummy]) convinced that Mrs. Olsen is dead. Then Nellie and Willie find out the truth - that Mr. Olsen cut the head off a dress maker's dummy - and decide to use it to their advantage. Willie tells Carl and Laura that he heard his father digging in his cellar and that he found an apron covered in blood (really, it was red sauce) in his kitchen. He asks them to come to his house to go in the cellar with him, where Nellie is waiting to play a ghost. The trick goes very well for Nellie and Willie, in fact, it went even better than they imagined, for Carl and Laura, coming out of the cellar, saw a rather haunting Mrs. Olsen standing outside the house looking in. Later, after having the truth told to them by a rather startled Mr. Olsen, they drop the dressmaker's dummy's head down  into the cellar with Nellie and Willie, which frightens them both very much. The closing shot is of the Headless Horseman galloping through Walnut Grove.

This was a very boring episode for the Trope Tracker (literally, NOTHING ON IT HAPPENED), and, other than the whole ghosts-are-fake and Mr.Olsen-is-way-too-nice kinds of things, there wasn't really a thing for Reality Check. Sigh.

Quote Of The Episode:
"I'm afraid of feet" Carrie Ingalls.

My Personal Feelings about this episode
Well, my feelings about this episode now are way different than my feelings about it when I watched it for the first time in the ER when I was six. Then I was scared out of my skin. Especially in the nightmare scenes. Really, I was terrified by this episode. But now, on the other hand, I kind of laugh at this episode. Their attempt at making this a short movie that would scare a ten-year-old is kind of weak, and it makes me laugh. I am sorry if anybody who reads this is genuinely scared by this episode.