There are two types of people in the world: those who adore Halloween and those who don’t. Personally, I have always loved Halloween, but I can understand why some people dislike this holiday. I really can.
The most common reason I’ve heard is from people who hate dark, scary, supernatural things and wish this entire creepy season would stop harshing their mellow every year. I also know people who can’t eat sugar and therefore abhor Halloween and all the pumpkin spiciness that leads up to it. Then there’s the hardworking teachers among us who hate how this holiday turns even perfectly well-behaved children into ravenous, candy-crazed hooligans all month long at school. Shudder. And of course you’ve got the general Halloween Scrooges who hate all the commercialism, the bother of costumes, the chaos of too many events, and too much pumpkin-flavored everything.
Sure, I Understand These Points of View—But I Share None of Them
Because let’s be real, Halloween IS AWESOME. It’s probably the only holiday that has no “deeper meaning” to feel guilty about forgetting. The candy and the costumes are the entire point of it, plus I could never get tired of dressing up like something I’m not. Or pumpkin-flavored anything, thank you very much. As such, I deeply enjoy celebrating this time of year in all the ways.
Usually I commemorate Halloween on this blog by gathering round-ups of scary fairy tales, but mom life is leaving very little time for intensive research lately. So instead I thought I’d share some short and spooky Halloween Stories from my very own life. Not urban legends that happened to my cousin’s neighbor’s boyfriend. Ones that happened to yours truly. So . . .
Hair-Raising Stories that Have Actually Happened to Me
Halloween Story #1: The (Almost) Chainsaw Massacre
It happened the Halloween I was twelve. This was the year my family moved to Utah and my first Halloween in the Beehive State. Also the year I went to great lengths to sew my own Hogwarts robes to be Hermione Granger for Halloween. I still sometimes don those robes as a last-minute Halloween costume.
But anyway, this was a particularly magical Halloween with an almost full moon, and a crew of girls from my neighborhood were all trick or treating together, me included. This was also the first year I’d ever been trick or treating with zero adult supervision, so it was going to be an epic night. How much so I didn’t know at the time . . .
So there I was, having the best Halloween ever. Bonding with my fellow candy-seekers. Hitting every house possible because we were on a mission to trick or treat all night no matter what! It had just gotten dark out when we finished knocking on all the doors of our immediate neighborhood, and we were ready to hit the next neighborhood. As we started up the hill, I remember having the distinct thought that the tree cover and lack of street lamps on this particular stretch of road made it really dark here.
And Then—It Happened
My friends and I were mid-conversation when some guy shouted, “HEY! Little girls!” We looked behind us to see a dark figure in a mask charging our direction with a chainsaw running at full power.
Of course we did what any twelve-year-olds would do in said situation: we screamed at the top of our lungs and ran for our lives with the sound of death blasting behind us. We were pretty fast considering we were running in costumes up a hill and couldn’t see very well, but one of my friends dashed off the sidewalk to hide alongside the nearest house. The rest of us followed suit, which in hindsight was a terrible decision. If we’d actually had a murderer pursuing us, we should’ve just kept running and left our cowardly friend to deal with the consequences of trying to hide. But instead we hid for a solid sixty seconds with our hearts hammering. Only then did we realize the chainsaw wasn’t running anymore.
By the time we peeked out from our hiding place, there was nothing there. No masked guy with a chainsaw. No people and no disturbances. It was like the prankster had just . . . disappeared. Looking back, he’d probably jumped a fence or something. But on that ghoulish Halloween night, it was easy to imagine that our tormentor could have been something other than human.
Halloween Story #2: An Unexpectedly Foul Treat
On a different year with a couple of the same friends, I was once again trick or treating in a neighborhood that wasn’t mine. This happened after the chainsaw incident, which means my friends and I were now teenagers. Some people might say that made us too old for trick or treating, which is something I’ve never understood by the way. Like, what would people prefer teenagers to be doing on Halloween? Partying in some warehouse where underage drinking is happening? Smashing pumpkins or other personal property? Stealing candy from little kids? Seems like trick or treating is the least harmful thing teens could be doing.
But anyway, we rang the doorbell of a non-descript house, and an older gentleman answered the door with a warm smile. He looked like a completely normal, nice guy as he said, “Happy Halloween, girls! I made this special treat myself.” He held up a porcelain dish that had some very strangely shaped candies in it that didn’t seem to be wrapped. My friends and I leaned in to take a closer look . . .
And Those Were NOT Candies
The three of us realized in the same moment that this “candy” was actually chicken feet. Yes. Actual severed feet from real chickens piled on a plate, claws and all. Us teen girls stared at them in shock, and I remember wondering where one gets chicken feet and how exactly this guy got so many of them. Did he own a farm?
One of my friends asked in a shaky voice what those were, and the man said conversationally that they were candy. Did we want some? Apparently our stunned silence was the desired reaction since the man finally said he had regular candy too and lifted the plate of feet to reveal a bowl of Hershey’s chocolate underneath. He encouraged us to take some of the other candy too as my friend and I laughed nervously and took some chocolate. Our other friend, who seemed particularly disturbed by the feet, snatched a candy bar so fast that her hand bumped the chicken plate. And sent a dismembered foot falling to the ground.
She screamed and ran from the house with the other two of us laughing right behind her. Though to be honest we were equally horrified. Still, I have to admire the old man’s commitment to the prank since he seemed completely serious about offering chicken feet to children on Halloween. It was disgusting, but props to him.
Halloween Story #3: The Ghostly Visitor
This one didn’t happen on Halloween night, but it did happen in the fall and certainly captures the spirit of Halloween. Years after I was no longer trick or treating, my roommate invited me to go ghost hunting at a haunted mill. For context, this roommate invited me to do adventurous things all the time. Think horseback riding, watching falcons fly, or attending writing conferences to meet authors and agents. At the latest conference we had attended, she’d met well-known ghost hunter Tom Carr. Because my roommate was just that charismatic, Tom personally invited her to a ghost hunting tour of a haunted mill in Tooele, Utah. And I was her plus one.
I had no idea what to expect that night, so I was just along for the ride. We dressed warmly and showed up for the tour in the daylight. Tom took our group of thrill-seekers around the various buildings of the mill and told us the lore of this mill. Apparently an old millworker still haunted the place. So did a little girl named Alice who had drowned on the property.
Tom used a hand-held EMF device to detect if the ghosts were active and ask the spirits yes and no questions. The little meter lit up multiple times in the various buildings as Tom had conversations with disembodied entities. The tour group was generally impressed, but it was hard for me to get into the spirit of it all while sunlight was streaming in through the huge windows of the mill.
But Then . . . It Got Dark Out
As the sun set, the tour group splintered to explore the property and see if we could get our own EMF devices to light up. My roommate and I didn’t have any success on our own, so we followed Tom around to see if anything interesting happened. We ended up in the mill’s mail cart with Tom and a married couple from the tour. The cart was basically a trailer on wheels that used to deliver mail to the mill. Tom had heard rumors that other hunters had seen activity there, so the five of us waited to see if any ghosts showed up.
In the middle of a conversation, the temperature of the air around us dropped. Then Tom’s EMF device lit up.
My roommate and I watched in fascination as Tom asked some questions and found out that the spirit knew someone in the cart. Tom asked all of us if someone we knew had died recently, and the wife sitting across from us turned white and gripped her husband’s arm. The husband explained that his wife’s brother had died a year earlier. Tom asked the spirit to trigger the EMF if that’s who he was—and it lit right up.
The married couple left soon after since the wife was pretty freaked out, but my roommate was jumping out her skin to ask Tom more questions. Me? I wasn’t sure what to think. While this wasn’t my first time visiting a haunted location, it may have been my first time encountering a ghost. If you believe in that kind of thing . . .
In Closing, Go Live Out Your Own Halloween Stories This Year!
If there’s one thing that I love about Halloween (besides the chocolate, cute pumpkins, and great-smelling candles), it’s the mystical feeling that anything can happen. So however you prefer to celebrate this spooky season, I hope each and every one of you enjoys yourself and finds your own exciting adventures. Happy Halloween. ❧
