If Your Kids Go Out to Trick-or-Treat - Don't Let Them Go Down Wicker Street

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Spoilers ahead!

Please check out my newest nosleep story here

This one was inspired by fond memories of Halloween and trick or treating with friends. I tried to channel some of those recollections and build a story out of them. In particular, I remember one year a neighbour set up a cardboard box haunted maze in his house that kids could climb through and get scared in various ways.

Like the kids in the story, we also kept track of which houses gave out the full sized chocolate bars and cans of soda as well as which ones were always generous with mini chocolate bars and chips. I remember my best friend would save up his candy for months like a squirrel sparingly eating its nuts through the winter. He would be snacking on fun sized treats well past Christmas some years. (I never had that much willpower and my candy was usually long gone well before that. Needless to say he took trick or treating very seriously.

A couple little details about the ghostly witch characters and the burnt down house:

The sign out front which reads:

☼wϱ±ƒê☼

Was a loose interpretation of an old word for "witch woman" with a couple weird flourishes around it just because. The idea was this was a witches coven that was burnt down by townsfolk many years before. It comes back every year on Halloween or Samhain which is the old Celtic word for that holiday - basically a festival celebrating death (autumn) and the harvest. During this time people would go door to door in costumes reciting verses in exchange for food. The dead were also thought to return to their homes during the festival.

I was trying to think of a twist for this one and had the idea of a coven of witches who captured the boys and made them go through various Halloween activities that were extremely morbid and cruel, like bobbing for apples that are actually organs and eating eyeballs, etc. I actually wrote an entire ending which I decided in the end not to use in favour of the one which was in the story - the other one was just a little too cheesy and didn't feel quite right. I tried to make it a bit scarier instead.

Hope you all enjoyed the first Halloween story this month! More to come soon 🎃

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If you enjoy my writing and would like to show your support by purchasing one of my books, I greatly appreciate it! I have a novel titled Beneath the Asylum out now published by Manor House.

[USA Link](Beneath the Asylum https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08M3ZHK1L/ref=cm_sw_r_apan_glt_NKJERJDT2Y82R3GJMYKS)

Also I just released a horror short story collection which is available now on Amazon. Here's the link

Both are available free with Kindle unlimited.

Thanks everyone for reading!

• Jordan Grupe