Why are we here? This question has challenged the human race since the dawn of time. People have gone to great lengths to answer this question, studying religion, philosophy and science, but they have not yet arrived at a concrete answer.

That is, except for the last week of October every year, when it becomes obvious that we are here for the express purpose of finding the scariest Halloween costume known to man.

I began this journey for truth in 1984. My first attempt was respectable. I was a ghost, but I’ll be the first to admit that throwing a sheet over your head isn’t too scary. I did better each year, going from Count Dracula to the Headless Horseman to a werewolf. Still, I could sense that there was something even scarier out there.

This year my quest is at an end. I have discovered the scariest costume there is: the business suit. How can something so common be the scariest costume there is? Simple. It’s people in suits who are doing the things that scare me the most.

All vampires do is seduce you and then suck out your blood. First, you get the self-esteem boost of being sought after, and then you get to be a vampire and never worry about being photogenic again. People in business suits play the stock market with the ISU Foundation. The ISU foundation would be the most important in an economic crisis (i.e. stock market crash) when people could no longer afford to hand out money. Count Dracula will only cost you a pint or two of plasma, not millions of dollars.

The Headless Horseman is a terrifying guy, but he only hangs out in Sleepy Hollow. Sleepy Hollow is somewhere out in New England. For those of us hanging out in Iowa, that’s no problem. If you’re familiar with old Headless, you know that once you make it across the bridge you’re home free. He’s more or less on house arrest. If you walk around on campus, though, you see people in suits all over. They’ve got free run on of the place to cause problems.

Werewolves are pretty scary, but they only turn up during a full moon. You run into people in suits everyday as opposed to just once a month. If a werewolf is causing you problems, all you have to do is shoot him with a silver bullet. Problem solved. However, if you shoot a guy in a suit, his family will find some more guys in suits to sue you, putting you right back at square one.

You might think that He-Man’s archenemy Skeletor was the scariest after-school cartoon character.

With a skull for a face and a shrill evil laugh, he makes for a frightening costume. He was always conjuring up some diabolical plan to get rid of He-Man once and for all. He wasn’t really that scary though, because you knew that by the end of the show He-Man was gonna sort him out.

On the other hand, suit-wearing CIA officials can do things like facilitate the transport of cocaine into Los Angeles to help fund the Contras in Nicaragua for the better part of the early 1980s, allowing crack to reach epidemic proportions across the country. Skeletor just wanted to get rid of He-Man. He neither directly nor indirectly provided street gangs with the capital for automatic weapons. Not to mention Skeletor always had He-Man to keep him honest. The suit-wearing CIA goes essentially unchallenged.

I know what you’re thinking. I’ll admit that Food Service lasagna is far scarier than any business suit. In fact, last week I put some in a box and mailed it to the Netherlands to stand trial for crimes against humanity.

But if you look a little deeper you’ll find that it’s people in suits who can somehow explain the math behind the 20 meal a week plan costing $918 per semester and the 10 meal a week plan costing $853. They can also explain why if you skip a meal you can’t get that money back to spend on real fruit and antacids at the grocery store like you can at other universities. By eliminating the competition, it’s the men in suits who are responsible for the gristle burgers and the “what is that?” casserole that are doing irreversible damage to my digestive system and causing me to go blind.

There’s always the issue of the “Curse of the Mummy.” Mummies are over 2000 years old, so they have been scary for a long time. Business suits in their current form have only been around for about a century. Even so, they’re always busy in Congress carving up America just a little bit smaller and causing or ignoring social problems. The decisions they make will affect us for hundreds of years. So long as you don’t rob any pyramids, mummies will leave you alone, but suit-wearing politicians are always on T.V. and in the newspapers trying to get you to endorse the scary things they do.

Don’t get me wrong; not everyone in suits is up to no good. Casper is a friendly ghost, but if I see a ghost, I’m not going to stick around to see if it’s Casper. In the same way, you have to be suspicious of people in suits.

At the age of 20, I’ve seen enough spooky shows and movies to know exactly how to deal with anything from werewolves to Freddy Krueger. But if I see anyone wandering around tomorrow evening in a suit, I’ll likely run the other way screaming.

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Erik Hoversten is a senior in math and physics from Eagan, Minn.