COMMENTS & CURIOSITIES:

It’s true. People do strange things at night, with or without a full moon.

This is the story of how I spent my Friday night, with full moon, in Lake Forest. It’s an interesting story, assuming there’s not much going on in your life.

Early Friday morning, I was making my customary double espresso while skimming the paper and noticed a filler item about a Halloween fright night in Lake Forest.

The city was turning Heritage Hill Park into a spooky scary haunted place for families to do Halloween things. One of the special attractions was an actress who would be on hand to sign autographs Friday night.

It was her name, Julie Adams, that almost made me cough up my double espresso. Does the name ring a bell? I didn’t think so. It does to me.

There are two films that scared me senseless as a kid and prevented me from becoming a normal person, which explains a lot now — “The Creature From the Black Lagoon” and “Invaders From Mars.”

In “The Creature From the Black Lagoon,” Julie Adams was the girl who made the giant fish-lizard-gill-man-thing who lived in the black lagoon melt, and he in turn kept me awake from the third grade to the fifth grade.

Both films were prime examples of a genre that was large and in-charge in the early 1950s: B-horror movies that Hollywood turned out at a rate of about 12 a week.

They always had something to do with science that somehow went wrong — a metaphor for the newborn atomic age, about which people were generally bonkers in the ’50s.

But I didn’t care about metaphors. What I cared about was big horrible-looking things that came out of the shadows and ate you. The monsters are what made low-budget black-and-white horror movies tick and I loved them all, couldn’t get enough, the scarier the better.

Here is the unofficial plot summary of “Creature From the Black Lagoon”: Richard Carlson, who did about 83 of these things, plays Dr. David Reed, a scientist who leads an expedition to the Amazon in search of a mysterious fish-man-giant-lizard-thing that the locals have whispered about for years.

Julie Adams (who appears in the credits as Julia Adams) plays Kay Lawrence, whose role on the expeditionary team is a little vague other than being gorgeous, having dynamite legs and being Dr. Reed’s fiancee — because when you go hunting for a dangerous fish-man-giant-lizard-thing in the Amazon, it’s always a good idea to bring your beautiful fiancee along.

Now that there is a great-looking girl involved, the fast-learners have already figured out the rest of the flick. Hint: The giant-lizard-thing is going to go ga ga over someone, and it’s not Richard Carlson.

Dr. Reed and company trap the giant-lizard-thing in a creepy dark-water lagoon so they can haul it back to the lab, poke it and take notes.

But — and this part will shock you — it doesn’t take long for the giant-lizard-thing to escape.

Not only is the creature back in the scary business, but he falls head over gills in love with Julie Adams, as if all the pre-pubescent boys in the audience weren’t.

Get in line, fish-boy. While everyone is off looking for the creature, Kay Lawrence decides — for reasons no one could understand then or now — to go for a swim in the creepy black lagoon wearing, of course, a jaw-dropping swimsuit for the time.

This part will also shock you, but the giant-fish-man-thing comes out of nowhere and grabs her and she spends the rest of the film screaming and pounding on the lizard thing’s chest and wearing the skimpy swimsuit because when giant-lizard-things kidnap you they don’t give you a lot of time to pack.

Flash forward 20 years to the mid-’70s.

I am in a Hollywood memorabilia shop I really like called Hollywood Book and Poster, and I see a lobby poster, technically called a one-sheet, for a double bill with “Creature From the Black Lagoon” and “It Came From Outer Space,” which is where things with three eyes invariably came from.

Just looking at the creature from the black lagoon made the hair on the back of my neck stand up.

And there was Julie Adams lying helpless and in the skimpy white swimsuit at his webbed feet.

I’ve had that one-sheet ever since, and on Friday night, I grabbed it, tossed it in the back seat and headed to Lake Forest to meet Julie Adams after all these years.

Here’s what I found out: Julie Adams was beautiful when the giant-lizard-thing was chasing her 50 years ago, and she is beautiful now, in addition to being charming and sweet.

It also turns out she never stopped working in Hollywood and has done a boatload of films and television shows, including recurring roles on “Lost” and “CSI: New York.”

But to this day she says, if anyone recognizes her name, it’s, “Oh yeah, the girl from ‘Creature From the Black Lagoon.’ ”

She asked how I wanted my one-sheet signed, and I said I would be delighted with anything. “How about this?” she said. “To Peter … stay out of dark water … Julie Adams.”

“You’ve done this before, haven’t you?” I said.

“Yes, I have,” she said, with a sweet smile.

And there ends the tale of Julie Adams, Lake Forest, and the fish-man-giant lizard-thing.

Be careful. It’s a jungle out there. Or it was anyway.

I gotta go.

PETER BUFFA is a former Costa Mesa mayor. His column runs Sundays. He may be reached at ptrb4@aol.com.