This kind of thing might be rare, but does it really cross over to “mean”? When my kids were young — probably the ages of the kids here — I was taking them around on Halloween and the scarecrow on one of the porches (actually the homeowner in disguise) came to life and shouted “Boo!” as the kids rang the doorbell.

Shrieks ensued.

(And this was a whole lot more startling that somebody already dressed as a skeleton removing his fake head)

But once regular heartbeats resumed, everybody thought it was awesome.

A commenter at the GoComics site wrote “there’d be more than one parent calling the police.”

Seriously?