Opinion By Nick Grabbe

Halloween fell on a sunny Saturday this year, so many people in Amherst anticipated a bump in student misbehavior. And we now have five undergraduates as very close neighbors, after a house just 30 feet away from ours was sold.

A perfect scenario for a noise problem, right? I want to explain why we had a happy Halloween, even with up to 100 young people partying outside right next door.

In early September, I engaged most of our new neighbors in conversation as they were moving in, using a common interest in the Red Sox as an ice-breaker. I told them if they want to host parties, that’s fine, just have them in the afternoon.

A few days later, an annoyed neighbor filed a late-night noise complaint, and police officers visited the student house. I found the contact information for the new owner, and our neighbor spoke to her. Several of the students came to our door to apologize for the noise, and we told them that we slept through it because we had our white-noise machine on. We got the names and phone numbers of three of the students.

On Saturday morning, two of our student neighbors approached my wife, who was outside, and told her they were planning a Halloween party, but it would be over by 6:30 PM. She encouraged them to stop by for candy afterwards.

When the party got started around 1:30 PM, I was washing windows outside and could hear loud music coming from next door. Two of the songs were ones I might have partied to 55 years ago: “Fortunate Son” by Creedence Clearwater Revival and “Brown-Eyed Girl” by Van Morrison.

As the party got revved up, I enjoyed observing it, noticing that almost all of the young people there were men. In the center of the back yard was a 10-foot-tall inflatable dragon with wings that flapped.

I watched the young men play beer pong, and tried to understand the appeal of this game, which has become a staple of student parties. One young man playing catch with a football made a fumble because he had a beer can in one hand. At one point, 13 men climbed on the roof of the house, and one was tossing a football with a friend in the back yard.

One young man had on an 8-foot beer bottle costume (which seemed to restrict his movements), and I also spotted a wizard, a bee and a pumpkin. But Bruins and Celtics jerseys were more common.

I was worried that the predominance of men was an indication that the genders socialize separately these days. But around 3:00 PM the young women started arriving. Some were wearing ballerina costumes, and most were dressed in ways that seemed designed to attract male attention.

There was something exciting, even stimulating, about watching these young people having fun. The celebratory sense of frivolity rubbed off on us. The impact of the persistent beat of the music was moderated by the knowledge that the party was limited in duration.

And sure enough, by 6:30 PM the house next door was quiet. Some of our new neighbors came to our door for candy. One was dressed as Gordon Gekko, another as The Man in the Yellow Hat from the “Curious George” books. We thanked them for ending the party when they said they would.

There were no police visits, no ambulance runs, and just four beer cans in front of the house on Sunday morning (I picked them up for the deposits). There were surprisingly few cars at the party (many students seemed to have walked or Ubered there).

So we had a happy, and not at all scary, Halloween. It feels good to have cordial relations with our close-by student neighbors, and to know that they are learning how to be responsible citizens.

The Amherst Current has published numerous posts on interaction between students and longtime Amherst residents. Here are some links:

Town Councilor George Ryan and I outlined here the common problems resulting from this interaction and outlined some solutions.

In this post, I critiqued some of the usual responses to student rowdiness and offered some tips to promote peaceful co-existence.

I adopted the persona of a virulently anti-student resident in this post, to illustrate satirically how some people seem to regard students as alien beings.

And Evan Naismith argued here that students living off campus deserve the same equal treatment as longtime residents.

Nick Grabbe, who was a newspaper editor and writer in Amherst for 32 years, has lived in the same house near the middle school for 42 years.