It was October 1991, and I was teaching English at ELS, a private English language institute in Seoul, when a rather unusual confrontation took place just outside my classroom. One of the institute’s cleaning women stopped at the classroom door and stared into the trash can. For a moment, she didn’t say anything. Then she looked at my students, looked at me and began speaking rapidly in Korean. I understood enough of what she was saying to know that it had nothing to do with cleaning. Her tone alone was enough to send chills down my spine. It was all over a pumpkin. Or, more precisely, what had once been inside it. I was nearing the end of my first year teaching English in Korea, and Halloween was still something of a novelty. Most of my students had never heard of trick-or-treating, carving a jack-o’-lantern or dressing up as witches, ghosts and monsters. For English teachers, that made the holiday a wonderful opportunity to introduce a little Western culture into the classroom while giving everyone a break from grammar drills and pronunciation exercises. As Halloween approached,