Adventure Hooks : Your Real Life Halloween Stories .

[Racer]

Okay it's that time of year again & after last year's lockdown I think we can go for it now .

Two Halloween stories from my time at boarding school .

1985 a brat who'd been at the school over a year , decided to go on a prank rampage his second Halloween .
Running around banging on windows , throwing sticks at staff member's houses , running through fields surrounding school grounds with sheet over him etc .
The dark nights & lack of street lighting deep in Kent countryside helped conceal him & his antics .
Next morning he found his trainers {sneakers) & jeans had dried blood all over them . Turns out someone had slaughtered a calf in one of fields by our Art Room he ran through !
Various Prefects pointed out this had happened before - about 4 years previously - and he was lucky not to have run into 'The Cow Butcher' & ended up chopped to bits too ...
So some wags made a mock up of a bulls head , stuck it on a pole & banged it against his (upstairs) dorm window midnight two days later ... The screams were very entertaining ...

(Decades later it was suggested to me by a pupil who attended in late 1960s to 1970s , that the cow killing may have been an ongoing feud between two farmers . Brothers , their farms were either side of our grounds & they hated each other . Pigs being let out in the night , barrels of cider stolen , sugar in tractor fuel etc . Some of my school's pupils may have been the actual culprits (the cider) but these two always blamed each other .)

I'll keep this one short as my phone playing up :

November 1st the next year , on a school field trip we encountered remains of a campfire surrounded by a pentagram in corner of field .
A burnt sheep skull was amongst the ashes . In the daylight of an autumn morning not particularly spooky . Speculation about what the hell happened night before was extremely nerve wracking !

(Again research decades later shows that a local village was/is the centre of Devil worship for whole of Kent ! Both my school & this village weren't too far from Pluckley as well - the 'Most Haunted Village in Britain' . I have pleanty more spooky stories from my six years at that school , but these two actually happened around Halloween .)

I've another incident from 1999 , which I post after I fix my phone .

[shadowjack]

When I started working at the grocery store, they had me closing shift on the register, and this was one of our regular late-night customers:


A little old man, small, grey, kindly.

He wore a brown suit with leather patches on the sleeves.

He spoke with a pronounced accent from somewhere in Eastern Europe.

His teeth were healthy but crooked, with extremely pronounced incisors.

He was always accompanied by his wife, as old as he was, smiling sharply -- messy teeth, again! -- at everything in her senility. He shepherded her with genteel courtesy.

He only bought the reddest of red meat, in quantity, at the end-of-day clearance prices. "Your butchers do very well. It is always best when the blood is fresh," he once explained.

It wasn't a large town, but I never saw either of them anywhere during the day.



One summer, among the usual tourists, I spied a new daytime customer who appeared regularly for several weeks:

A fit man in his prime.

He wore black, a leather trenchcoat, a broad-brimmed hat, sturdy boots, rugged gloves, crosses and talismans about his neck.

He showed the signs of hard living: unshaven, dusty, sunburnt. But he wasn't ragged, beaten down, like the homeless folks.

I saw him all around town, striding doggedly up and down different side streets, always during the day.

He'd quickly buy sandwich makings, canned goods, water, then head back out into the sun. He spoke little.



Summer moved on, and so did the trenchcoated fellow.

And I eventually realized that I had not seen that sweet old couple in some time. And I never saw them again.

[shadowjack]

On a road trip from California to Colorado, we passed through Las Vegas. We had never seen it, so even though it was daylight, we made sure to drive down the Strip, just to gawk for a bit. It's what it's there for, we figured.

It was our habit on that trip to stop at whatever grocery store we could find, and buy supplies for a picnic lunch at whatever park we could find, wherever we happened to be, but choices seemed limited out there in the desert (at least along the road we were on), and this was before ubiquitous GPS maps. We finally bought our lunch items from some convenience store on the edge of Vegas.

There was a gigantic shopping mall on the other side of the road, and the convenience store and gas station on our side, and that was it.

Every customer inside the convenience store was buying lottery scratchers. This was all they were doing. They would buy a handful of tickets, walk to the end of the line, work their way through them all, and then buy more when they again reached the register. They all gave us dirty looks for interrupting the play to purchase food, but said nothing.

We ate in the car, in the parking lot, with the air conditioner up high, and took our time doing it.

The entire time, no one else entered the convenience store, no one else left it.

Across the street, the entire time, no one entered the mall, no one left it -- neither delivery trucks in the rear loading docks, nor cars in the parking lot. For all I know, that mall could have been an empty shell of a movie set.

Cars passed on the road. I think perhaps one other stopped for gas, but they paid at the pump.

That was the most unsettling place I have ever been: a convenience store outside Las Vegas in broad daylight.

[Anders]

A friend of mine was working late at the morgue and suddenly the electricity went out...

[BaHalus]

Well, there I was working in the Amazon, on the border between Brazil and Peru.
I was in the hotel, getting ready for bed. Torrential rain falling.
Suddenly, the lights start to crackle and burn, one by one, in succession.
So I turned off all the lights before they all burned out.
So basically the only illumination was the cell phone flashlight.
So far so good.
My bed was in the middle, away from the walls. And my suitcase was beside the entrance and, at bedtime, I left my cell phone carrying on top of my suitcase.
So I lay down to sleep and slept really fast.
In the middle of the night, I woke up wanting to go to the bathroom.
Absurdly dim light (-9 penalty I'd say). And my cell phone was not within my reach.
I looked in the direction of the door.
There wasn't a door there.
In the place was an altar of sacrifice.
On the side of the altar was an artifact, a kind of chest made of bones.
I sat down, took a deep breath, and analyzed myself to see if I was dreaming or awake.
Yes, I was awake.
I kept looking at it and it was still those things.
So I thought to myself, "That's not real, it's an illusion. The lighting is low and my mind is filling in the wrong information. Maybe because I just woke up, maybe because of the event of the light bulbs popping out earlier.
So I decided to take courage and go towards the altar.
Getting close to the altar, what did I see? Two homunculi (little devils?) squatting.
I stopped and mentally spoke to myself: "Calm down, they're just the result of your imagination. It's just your brain playing tricks on you from incomplete visual information."
So I crossed in front of the little devils towards the chest of bones (which would be my suitcase, where my cell phone would be).
The little devils slowly look up and start following me with their eyes.
I remain firm in my skepticism and continue on my way.
I reach out my hand toward the bone artifact, where my cell phone should be.
The cell phone is there.
I immediately turn on the flashlight and shine on all illusions, dispelling them.
Then I managed to go to the bathroom (though still shivering a little).

[Alden Loveshade]

I have a true and tragic Halloween story.

One year, one of my co-workers and her family took some of the kids trick-or-treating. That was fine, but then two things happened that definitely should not have happened.

One, instead of going to the corner, they crossed a street in the middle of the street. This was after it had gotten pretty dark.

Two, a car came down that dark street that didn't have its headlights on.

My co-worker was hit, and ended up in the hospital. Fortunately, she started recovering, and was moved to a rehabilitation facility. Tragically, about 24 hours later, she was dead.

[J. Edward Tremlett]

Not my story but...

This was back in the 70's. A friend of the family had just gotten out of the Marines and was heading home (Ohio, maybe) from California. He had a car and decided that after however many years of taking orders and hurrying up to wait he was just going to drive home the scenic route. Eat pricey, sleep on the cheap. Have an adventure that didn't involve being shot at.

He's making his way East and winds up in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by weedy overgrowth. At some point, past a long turn, he sees a car by the side of the road. It's clearly wrecked, and looks recent. There's debris on the road. And he thinks he sees people in the car, and maybe they're not doing too well...

But something in his head says KEEP DRIVING. DO NOT STOP.

He obeys, but he does slow down a little. And as he does he looks in the rear view mirror. That's when he sees people crawling out of the weed walls on the side of the road, looking at him.

Some of them have scythes.

He floors it for a full hour and doesn't stop until he's in another state. After a few days he became convinced he'd maybe misjudged the situation. But years later he learned that there was a rash of cases where motorists went missing around that area, and he'd probably dodged a very ugly bullet.