3 Disturbing Halloween Stories That Will Make You Stay Inside

A friend sent me one of your Halloween episodes, and said I should tell you about the party at my sister's place. She'd been there earlier that night, but she only heard about what happened after she left. For me, it was the reason I spent six weeks sleeping on my parents' couch at 24. For most of the people who came, it was an ordinary party until they got a call the next morning. This was in 2009, in Dayton, Ohio. My older sister Natalie rented a small house with a girl named Aaron, and I'd been staying with them for about a month after a breakup. I was supposed to be looking for an apartment. Mostly I was working, putting off calling landlords, and getting annoyed whenever my mother asked whether I'd found anywhere yet. Natalie had given me the little bedroom at the front of the upstairs. There was a mattress on the floor, a plastic set of drawers, and a television that only worked if you hit the side. It wasn't much, but after living out of a suitcase for a week, having a room where I could shut the door felt pretty good. Natalie loved Halloween. She'd start planning her costume in September and then end up changing her mind a few days before. That year, she went as a bride, using a sleeveless wedding dress she'd found in a thrift store. It was a little too big, but she'd decided that was better than spending the evening unable to sit down. Aaron was a mechanic, which meant she borrowed some coveralls and carried a clean rag around all night. I wore black clothes and a pair of cat ears. Natalie said that wasn't a costume. I told her I'd put on eyeliner too, and that was about as much effort as she was getting out of me. The plan was to have everyone over for a few hours, then go to a bar where one of Natalie's friends was working. I wasn't going with them. I had an early shift the next morning, and even if I hadn't, I wasn't in much of a mood to go out. Natalie knew that. Aaron knew it. Pretty much everybody who asked whether I was coming got the same answer. At the time, there didn't seem to be anything private about telling people I was staying home. There were probably 20 people in the house at its busiest. It was a mixture of Natalie's friends, people Aaron worked with, and a few partners I hadn't met before. I knew maybe half of them. Nobody was checking invitations at the door. People came in caring drinks. Somebody shouted hello, and they joined whatever conversation was happening in the kitchen. That's how parties worked for us then. You didn't think you were letting strangers into your house. You thought you were meeting your friends' friends. The man I'm writing about wore a dark suit and a cheap rubber mask of an old man's face. It had eyebrows made out of this horrible white hair and a long nose that sat crooked. I first noticed him standing beside the kitchen counter while Aaron tried to open a bottle of wine. She was laughing about something. He was laughing too. I remember that because I later told the police I'd assumed he was one of her friends, and that was why. I'd seen them laughing together. He took the mask off while he was still in the kitchen. There wasn't anything memorable about his real face. He was older than most of us, somewhere in his late 30s, with short brown hair that had gone flat underneath the rubber. He had a little red mark across the bridge of his nose from wearing it. I can remember that mark better than I can remember the shape of his nose. That bothered me afterward when people needed me to describe him. At some point Natalie asked his name, and he said it was Dean. She asked if he was with Aaron's group, and he said something about knowing a few people there. She was putting food into bowls while they talked. Someone asked her where the bottle opener had gone, and the conversation moved on. I was at the table cutting a label off the back of my cat ears, listening without really listening. I didn't think anything of his answer until much later. He was helpful. That's one of the things that makes me angry when I think about it. He picked up a drink, somebody knocked over. He held the back door while a couple of people went outside to smoke. When Natalie couldn't find room in the refrigerator, he moved some bottles into a cooler. He behaved the way a considerate guest behaves when he doesn't know everybody, and wants to make a good impression. By about 10, I'd stopped thinking about who he was there with. I spoke to him properly when I went into the kitchen to make coffee. He asked whether there was enough for another cup, and I said there was. We talked about nothing much. The weather, the mess, whether the people at the bar would actually let Natalie in, wearing a full wedding dress. He asked if I lived there, and I explained that I was staying with my sister for a little while. I didn't tell him about the breakup, but I did tell him I worked at a place that opened early on Sundays. He asked whether that meant I was missing the rest of the night. I said yes, and he said he'd probably be heading out soon himself. That should have been the end of my conversation with him. In my memory, it was the end for years. Then, once when Natalie and I were talking about it, I remembered him asking one other thing. He wanted to know whether my sister and Aaron would come home afterward, or stay with friends closer to the bar. I told him I wasn't sure. It didn't sound strange at the time. Everybody was discussing rides, and who was going where? He'd found a subject that let him ask what he wanted without having to explain why he wanted to know. People started leaving in little groups around 11. Aaron went with two women from work. Natalie was still upstairs getting the bottom of her dress pinned up because she kept standing on it. I was collecting cups in a trash bag. Dean was carrying empty bowls into the kitchen. He'd put his mask inside his jacket, which was hanging over the back of a chair, and loosened his tie. If you'd walked in at that point, you might have thought he lived there. I thanked him for helping, and told him we could deal with the rest in the morning. He said it was no trouble. Then he asked if there were more trash bags, and I pointed to the cupboard under the sink. That was when I started to feel a little uncomfortable. There were only a few of us left, and I suddenly realized that I didn't want to be alone in the house with him. It wasn't because he'd done anything frightening. I just didn't know him, and I wasn't sure how to tell him to leave without making it sound rude. Natalie came downstairs carrying her shoes. Her friend Beth was smoking on the front porch while she waited for their ride. Dean had gone into the back room with a stack of cups, so I leaned toward my sister and asked her to get her friend to leave before she went. She looked at me, and said she thought he was Aaron's friend. I said he might be, but I didn't want him hanging around once everybody else was gone. Natalie said of course, put her shoes down, and went to find him. She wasn't subtle about it. She told him we were closing up and thanked him for coming. He was perfectly pleasant. He said he'd just been helping me finish, collected his jacket, and wished us a good night. I watched him walk out through the front door. Beth moved aside to let him past, and he went down the porch steps toward the sidewalk. There wasn't an argument. He didn't look annoyed. I actually felt embarrassed for making a fuss about it. Natalie pulled the front door shut and turned the lock. We went back into the kitchen, where she found one of her earrings beside the sink. She was trying to put it in when she asked what Dean did at Aaron's work. I told her I didn't know. She said she'd ask Aaron whether he'd made it home, because he hadn't seemed to have a ride. I said he hadn't been drinking as far as I'd seen. I remember saying that very clearly. He'd had coffee with me. I'd never seen him holding a beer. Their ride was late. Beth called through the front window to say it would be another 10 minutes, so Natalie helped me put the food away. We talked about whether we could freeze what was left. I put lids on containers while she found room for them. By the time I went back to the sink, I'd stopped thinking about Dean altogether. I was rinsing the coffee pot when I looked out through the glass in the back door. The porch light was on, and he was standing right outside it. He wasn't looking into the kitchen. He was looking down at the lock. His jacket was folded over one arm, and he had something small in his other hand. Then the knob turned, and the door opened a few inches before I put the coffee pot down. He looked up and saw both of us. I remember him looking past me at Natalie, still in her wedding dress. For a second, none of us said anything. He said he'd left his mask. I could see part of the mask sticking out from under his folded jacket. One of those white eyebrows was pressed against the dark lining. Even then, I didn't say anything about it. I was trying to work out how he'd opened the door. I knew I'd locked it after the last people came in from smoking, while Natalie was still upstairs getting ready. Nobody had used it since. My sister saw what he was holding before I did. She asked him why he had her keys. There was a little blue plastic tag on the ring. Our landlord had put it there to distinguish Natalie's set from errands. Natalie always left her in a bowl on the kitchen window sill. I'd used them a few times, and when he shifted his hand, I recognized the tag. He hadn't found a door we'd forgotten to lock. At some point during the party, he'd taken our keys. He said someone must have handed them to him by mistake. Natalie held out her hand. For a moment, I thought he was going to give them back. He looked at her hand, then at me, then passed us into the house. The kitchen was at the rear, with a narrow passage leading to the stairs in the living room. From where he stood, he couldn't see whether Beth was still on the porch. He asked if everybody else had gone. Natalie told him Beth was right outside. I think she wanted him to know there was someone who could hear us. Natalie told him to put the keys on the counter. He came the rest of the way through the doorway and shut it behind him. I moved back until my hip caught the edge of the table. There was a horrible pause where I still expected him to explain himself. I wanted him to be drunk. I wanted him to be confused. I wanted there to be some ordinary reason he was standing in our kitchen with my sister's keys, after we'd asked him to leave. Then he took a knife out of his jacket. It wasn't one of ours. That's something people have asked me, as though it would make much difference. It was a short knife with a dark handle, and he'd brought it with him. He held it low beside his leg. He didn't wave it around, and he didn't start shouting. He looked at Natalie and told her to call her friend in from the porch. That was the first time I understood that we might not be able to talk our way out of it. Telling him about Beth hadn't made him leave. He wanted her inside with us. Natalie started yelling Beth's name immediately. She didn't call out the way he'd told her to. She screamed it, and he came around the table toward her so fast that his jacket fell off his arm. I grabbed the nearest chair and pulled it across the gap. It caught against his leg and bought us just enough time to get into the passage. Natalie was ahead of me. The front door was beyond the stairs, but he was already following us, and when she turned upward, I went after her. Later, she said she'd thought about getting caught at the locked front door. In that moment, all I knew was that my sister was running upstairs, and I wasn't going to stay behind. I lost one of my shoes near the top. I can still remember feeling my heel come out, and trying to curl my toes to keep it on, which was such a useless thing to be worried about. We reached my room, and Natalie pushed the door shut while I turned the little lock. He hit the other side before I'd taken my hand off it. The door jumped against the frame. I put both palms against it, and Natalie leaned into it with her shoulder. From downstairs, we heard Beth pounding on the locked front door and calling our names. Natalie shouted that there was a man with a knife, and told her to get away from the house and call the police. Dean stopped pushing for a moment. Then he shouted down that everything was fine. His voice changed completely. He sounded irritated, the way someone might sound if their friends had gotten drunk and started making a scene. He told Beth to wait there, and said he'd come down to let her in. Beth didn't wait. We heard her calling for help from farther away, out toward the street. I was crying by then, although I don't remember starting. The only thing I could see was the strip of floor beneath the door. He was so close that I could see the toes of his shoes. Natalie had her phone in a little cloth bag she'd been carrying with her costume, but it had fallen downstairs when we ran. Mine was somewhere under a pile of clothes. I told her we had to find it. She told me to open the window instead. My room faced the street, directly above the porch. The window opened onto its sloping roof. I'd looked out often enough to know there were several feet of roofing between the window and the gutter, with a drop of about 8 feet from the gutter to the lawn. There wasn't a tree or anything else we could climb down. I'd never gone any farther than leaning outside. Natalie had once when she'd needed to clear leaves from the gutter. She knew we could at least get onto the roof. I left her at the door and shoved the window upward. It stuck halfway. I had to hit the bottom of the frame with my hands to get it higher, and for a few seconds I couldn't hear anything else. Then there was a sharp crack behind me. A piece of wood had split away beside the lock. Natalie had her back against the door and both feet planted on the floor. She kept telling me to hurry, in this strained little voice that didn't sound like her at all. I got one leg out and then the other. The roof was cold and rough beneath my hands. From the street, Beth saw me and started shouting for me to stay where I was. A man who'd been walking past came into the yard. I didn't know him. I never learned his name. He was wearing a green sweatshirt and carrying a white grocery bag, and he put the bag down beside the path as if that mattered. That tiny sensible thing is something I've never forgotten. I turned back and told Natalie to come out. She said she couldn't let go of the door. I told her to run, and she did. The moment she moved away, he drove it inward hard enough to strike the plastic drawers. She reached the window, caught the frame, and started climbing through. Her dress snagged on something inside. I grabbed a handful of the skirt and pulled. The fabric tore, and she tumbled onto the roof beside me. I caught the window ledge to keep us from sliding. We were still right beneath the window when he reached it. Natalie had one hand on my arm and was trying to get her knees underneath her. He looked at the people in the yard, then leaned out and caught the back of her dress near the neckline. She tried to move down the roof, but he pulled her back against the wall. I don't know whether he meant to drag her inside or keep us there while he decided what to do. I only know that he had her, and I couldn't get his hand loose. The front of the dress pulled tight against her throat. She was trying to turn toward him when I saw the zipper at her back. I let go of the ledge, braced my feet, and pulled the zipper down. She dragged one arm out, then the other. He was still holding the dress when she bent forward and got her head through the loosened neck. She was wearing a slip underneath. Once she was free, she slid down toward the gutter. She tried to turn and lower herself over it, but her legs went over before she had a grip. The man in the green sweatshirt tried to catch her. They both went down into the little patch of grass beside the porch. I heard her make a sound when she landed, and I thought she'd broken something terrible. But she rolled over and started trying to get up. She was still telling me to come down. I scrambled down the roof on my stomach. At the edge, I lowered myself until my arms were straight. The gutter bent under my hands, and a sharp edge cut into my palm. Then, I let go. I landed badly with one leg folded under me, and the pain went right up into my hip. The man grabbed me under the arms and helped me away from the house. I looked up once. The window was empty. Beth was on the phone, telling someone we'd gotten out. Our next door neighbor had opened her front door, and the man helped us across her lawn. A police car pulled up while we were still outside. Beth pointed toward our house, and one of the officers ran down the side while the other came toward us. I remember trying to tell him which room we'd been in. He told us to get inside the neighbor's house and stay there. I apologized for getting dirt on her carpet. I was wearing one shoe. My sister was in her underwear, and there was a man with a knife inside our house. But I was worried about the carpet. The neighbor locked her door and pulled us away from the windows. She gave Natalie a coat. Then we sat on her hallway floor and waited. Beth later told us only a few minutes had passed between her call and that first police car arriving. The weight inside the neighbor's house felt much longer. We could hear people shouting outside, but we couldn't tell what was happening. When someone knocked hard at the door, I crawled backward until I hit her stairs. It was an officer. He identified himself through the door, and the neighbor let him in. They'd caught Dean behind our house. I didn't see the arrest. I want to be clear about that. Because over the years, people have repeated versions where he chased us into the street or came after us at the neighbors. He didn't. He went downstairs and tried to leave through the back. One of the officers had gone around the side when Beth told them he was still inside. They found Natalie's keys on him. The knife was recovered in the kitchen. Her dress was on my bedroom floor. Natalie broke her wrist in the fall. I sprained my ankle and needed a few stitches in one hand. The man who tried to catch her had hurt his shoulder, but he stayed until he'd told the police everything he'd seen. Beth rode with Natalie to the hospital. I went in another ambulance because I couldn't put weight on my foot. Our parents arrived before either of us had been discharged. Dean wasn't his name. I'm not using his real one here, partly because I don't want people turning this into something they can look up for entertainment, and partly because I still hate saying it. He wasn't a friend of errands. Nobody at the party knew him as a boyfriend or coworker either. Once the police started speaking to the guests, that became clear very quickly. He'd told different people different things, always vague enough that nobody felt there was a reason to question him. One of Natalie's friends remembered him coming through the front door behind her. She hadn't brought him. She'd held the door because his hands were full, and he'd thanked her. The drinks he'd been carrying were still in our refrigerator the next morning. During the case, we learned that he'd already committed another break-in nearby. That didn't make him a criminal mastermind. He'd walked into our party, asked who was leaving, and taken a set of keys when nobody was watching. From his questions and the way he looked at Natalie when he came back, I think he'd expected me to be alone. That's my own conclusion, not something he admitted. What we could prove was that he'd let himself into a locked house, pulled a knife on us, and chased us upstairs when we tried to get away. His lawyer described it as a burglary that had got out of hand. I remember hearing that phrase and being unable to look at Natalie, he'd had the keys, he'd had his jacket, he'd been outside on the sidewalk, free to keep walking. Nobody had forced him to come back, and nobody had forced him to follow us upstairs. He pleaded guilty before we had to testify and received fourteen years in prison. We never heard from him again. We were told when the case was finished, and our things were eventually returned. Natalie threw away the keys even though our landlord had already changed the locks. I don't blame her. There wasn't anything wrong with the metal. She just couldn't stand the sight of that blue tag. I stayed with our parents until I found an apartment. Natalie and Aaron finished their lease and moved into separate places. We didn't stop celebrating Halloween forever. For a few years we did, and then we started doing smaller things with people we knew. Natalie got married in a dress she chose herself. Her wrists still bothered her sometimes, but she could use it normally, and by then, she could joke about how much trouble she'd caused our mother by arriving at a hospital in a slip. I can tell the story without crying now. That took longer than I'd like to admit. I can even have people over, although I'll probably ask how I know you twice if it's been a while. Most people just think I'm bad with names. I let them think that. The thing I keep coming back to is that there was a perfectly ordinary ending available that night. My sister asked a guest to leave. He put on his jacket, wished us a good night, and went out the front door. If I'd gone upstairs a few minutes earlier, or if her ride had arrived a little sooner, I'd have gone to bed thinking he'd left. Instead, I saw him using our key. My sister was still beside me. Our friend was still outside. We got out, and he went to prison. Those are the parts I try to finish with when I tell somebody, because for a long time, all I could remember was what happened in between. Hey, I've been listening to the podcast on my commute for about a year now. Mostly the ones about people, rather than creatures, and I finally worked up the nerve to send one of my own in. You can use my first name if you want, but I'd rather you leave out the town. A couple of people who were there that night still live in the area, and I don't think they'd appreciate hearing it come out of a stranger's mouth on a Halloween episode. I'm in my early 40s with two kids of my own, and I still can't walk past the Halloween aisle at a drugstore, without my chest getting tight when I see one of those full-head rubber masks hanging on the pegs. My wife knows why. My kids will find out when they're older. I've started writing this out probably four or five octobers in a row, and quit halfway through every time. Hearing some of the other submissions you've read made me think I should just finish it. This happened in 1994. I was 11. We lived in a small town in western Pennsylvania. One of those places built around a single main street, with a hardware store, a pizza place, a Methodist church, and not a whole lot else. The streets off the main drag were all the same. Two story houses with porches, chain link fences, and these narrow strips of grass between the yards that everybody used as shortcuts. Behind our neighborhood, the land sloped down to a creek with a walking path along it, that the town had put in years earlier, and then stopped taking care of. Mostly it was kids who used it. Halloween in that town wasn't fancy, but people took it seriously enough. Pumpkins on every other porch, a few houses with the plastic skeletons, one old guy on Lyndon Street, who set up a fog machine every year, and scared the hell out of the little kids. My parents let me go out without them for the first time when I was 10, and by 11 I had my routine down. The rules were that we stayed on Lyndon, Walnut, and the two streets that connected them, and we were back at my friend's house by eight. That was it. Nobody carried a phone back then, obviously. You just agreed on a time and you kept to it. There were five of us that year. Me, my best friend Tyler, two brothers named Cody and Brent, who lived across the alley from me, and Tyler's little sister Jenna, who was seven. Tyler's mom made him take her. He complained about it for a week beforehand, but the deal was that if Jenna came along, we could stay out until 830, so we took it. I was dressed as a ghost buster in a tan jumpsuit my mom had found at a thrift store, with a cardboard proton pack that fell apart before we'd hit the second block. Tyler was a vampire. Cody and Brent had matching ninja turtle costumes that they were both embarrassed about. Jenna was a princess, with a plastic crown, and a pink dress over her winter coat, and she carried a pillowcase for candy that was nearly as long as she was tall. The first hour was normal. We did the whole of Lyndon, hit the fog machine house, worked our way down Walnut. Jenna was slow, and Tyler spent most of his time yelling at her to keep up, but we were getting good candy and the mood was good. It was cold enough that you could see your breath under the street lights, and there were kids everywhere, little packs of them moving between the porches, some with parents trailing behind and plenty without. I don't know exactly when he joined us. That's the part I've thought about the most over the years. Somewhere around the middle of Walnut, I looked back to check on Jenna, and there were six of us instead of five. There was a kid walking along at the back of the group, right beside her. He was about a head taller than Jenna, and a little shorter than me, dressed in a brown-hooded robe that went all the way to the ground. Underneath the hood he was wearing one of those full rubber werewolf masks, with the fur glued on and the mouth open in a snarl. His hands were tucked up into the sleeves of the robe. He had a plastic grocery bag hanging from one wrist, and it was empty. I remember thinking, who's that? And then I remember immediately answering my own question. He was probably Cody and Brent's cousin, or one of Jenna's friends from school whose parents had let him tag along, or some kid from the next street over who'd lost his own group and attached himself to ours. Kids did that all the time on Halloween. You'd end up with somebody's little brother in your group for three blocks, and then he'd peel off to go home. I didn't say anything. Nobody did. We all just assumed somebody else knew who he was. Here's what I noticed that I should have paid more attention to. He never went up to a single door. At every house, the five of us would go up the steps and do the trick or treat thing, and he'd stay down on the sidewalk, standing still with his hands in his sleeves. That mask pointed at the porch. When we came back down, he'd fall in beside Jenna again. He stayed completely silent the whole time. Jenna talked to him though. She talked to everybody, and she didn't need the other person to say anything back. I heard her telling him about her crown, and about her cat, and about how Tyler was being mean. I thought it was kind of sweet, honestly. The little kid in the wolf mask being shy, and Jenna taking him under her wing. We finished Walnut and turned onto Cherry Street, which ran back toward Lyndon. Cherry was darker than the other two streets, because it only had houses on one side. The other side was a chain link fence with the creek slope behind it, and about halfway down there was a gap in the fence, where the path came up from the water. Everybody knew that gap. We'd used it a hundred times in daylight. We were about four houses down Cherry when I realized Jenna wasn't behind us anymore. I turned around, and she was back near the gap in the fence with the kid in the wolf mask. He had one hand resting on her shoulder, and he was walking her, slow and steady, toward the dark opening in the fence. Jenna went along with him willingly. She was looking up at the mask and talking. I yelled her name. I don't know why I yelled instead of just walking back, but something about the way he was steering her made me yell. Both of them stopped. Jenna turned around and waved at me, totally fine, totally happy. The wolf mask turned toward me too, and the kid just stood there. Then I looked down at the hand that was resting on Jenna's shoulder. because the sleeve had slid back when he turned. It was a man's hand. Thick fingers, hair across the knuckles, a wristwatch with a metal band. There was a pale band of skin on one finger where a ring would have been. I stared at it and I remember my brain refusing to process what I was looking at because I'd spent the last 45 minutes thinking of this person as a little kid and that hand belonged to a grown man. The reason the robe went all the way to the ground was that he was crouching inside it. He'd been walking bent at the knees for the better part of an hour so that he'd be the right height to blend in with us. I screamed for Tyler. Tyler and the brothers came running back from the porch they'd been heading toward and I guess the sound of my voice told them more than any words could have because Tyler didn't ask what was wrong. He just ran at his sister. The man let go of her. He took his hand off her shoulder, straightened up to his full height which was maybe five foot six, turned, stepped through the gap in the fence and walked down the slope into the dark toward the creek. He never once hurried. That calm walk is what still gets me. Tyler reached Jenna and grabbed her up and by the time I looked back at the gap, the man was gone. We heard him start running once he was out of sight. Fast footsteps on the gravel path, fading toward the bridge. We ran the other way. All of us. Tyler carrying Jenna the whole four blocks back to his house with her pillowcase of candy dragging behind her. Jenna was crying by then. She had no idea what had almost happened but the rest of us were so scared that it scared her. When we got to the house, Tyler's mom opened the door and the first thing out of my mouth was that a man had tried to take Jenna. That's the word I used. I'll be straight with you about what happened next because I think it matters. The adults didn't take it seriously at first. Tyler's dad went out onto the porch and looked up and down the street and asked us if we were sure it wasn't just some older kid messing with us. My own parents, when they came over, wanted to know exactly how I knew it was a grown man when he'd been wearing a mask the whole time. I told them about the hand. I told them about the watch and the crouching. I could see them deciding that an 11-year-old had gotten spooked on Halloween and his imagination had filled in the rest. What changed their minds was Jenna. Tyler's mom sat her down at the kitchen table and asked her, nice and calm, what the boy in the wolf mask had said to her. And Jenna said he hadn't said anything until right at the end. Right at the end, down by the fence, he'd leaned down and told her he had puppies at his house and that they were just down the path and she could pick one to keep if she came quick before her brother saw. Tyler's mom was already dialing the phone before Jenna finished the sentence. The police came, two cars. They walked the creek path with flashlights and found nothing except a plastic grocery bag caught on a bush near the bridge, which may or may not have meant anything. They took statements from all of us and the officer who talked to me asked me three times whether I was sure about the watch and three times I told him I was. I remember being so angry about that. I'd never been more sure of anything. For a few weeks after, that was the whole story, a scary thing that happened and nobody ever found out who did it. Jenna wasn't allowed to go to school without Tyler's mom walking her there and back. My parents started waiting up for me if I went anywhere after dark. The town talked about it for a while and then stopped. Then in February of 1995, a man was arrested in a town about 20 minutes from hours. He'd approached a six-year-old girl at a school bus stop in the morning in plain clothes and told her he had kittens in his car. A neighbor saw it from her window and called it in and the police caught him before he got the girl into the car. When they searched the car, they found a rubber werewolf mask and a brown-hooded robe in the trunk. The arresting officer remembered our report because of the mask. He'd been the one asking me about the watch. The man was 34. He lived with his mother in a house on the other side of the creek, which meant that the path he'd walk down that night led almost directly to his own back door. He'd been in that neighborhood his whole life. He'd probably passed me on the sidewalk a dozen times. He was convicted on charges related to both incidents and a third one that came out during the investigation. And he was sentenced to a long enough term that he was only released a couple of years ago. I know that because I looked him up when it happened, which probably says something about me. Jenna is 39 now. She's got a daughter of her own. She doesn't remember most of that night. And Tyler and I have never had a reason to fill in the details for her. She knows something happened and that it ended fine and that's all she needs. What I think about every Halloween is the hour before any of that happened. A grown man crouched down to the height of a child and walked along with five kids in the open under street lights, past dozens of parents, the rest of the way down walnut and onto cherry, and nobody asked who he was. We all looked at that mask and that robe and we all decided that somebody else knew him. That's the part I can't get over. On the one night of the year, when every face in town is covered, all he had to do was be small and quiet and we did the rest for him. I take my kids out every year. I count heads at every corner. And if there's ever a kid in our group that I don't recognize, I ask. For about a year after this happened, I couldn't sit at a red light with a car behind me without checking how much room I had in front. My wife noticed it before I did. She'd be talking and I'd stop listening halfway through a sentence because I was looking in the mirror again. I wasn't always like that. I drove a truck for work and before that Halloween, I thought the worst thing that could happen on a quiet road was breaking down somewhere nobody could find you. My name's Owen. I was 26 at the time and this happened outside Morgantown, West Virginia in 2006. I worked for a small rental business that supplied everything from concrete mixers to folding chairs. If you rented it, I was usually one of the people who brought it over. It wasn't a job I loved, but the money was steady and I got along with the people there. I also got to spend most of the day outside instead of having somebody watch me look busy. The other driver was a man named Vince. He was in his late 40s and had worked there long enough that he knew which customers would help you unload and which ones would disappear the second you opened the truck. He could be a difficult man to work with. He'd make you unload half a truck because he didn't like how you'd stacked the first thing in it. At the end of a long day, that could make you want to throw something. But if you asked him to help you move on a Sunday, he'd be outside your apartment before you were dressed. We were working late because a group had rented equipment for a Halloween fundraiser. They'd set up a haunted trail on some private land outside town with a ticket table near the entrance and little scenes spread through a patch of woods. We delivered two generators, some lights and a load of tables earlier that week. The generators had to be back for another job the next morning, so our boss had agreed we'd collect them when the event finished. By the time we arrived, the public had gone. There were about a dozen adult volunteers taking things apart. Some had changed out of their costumes. Others were still walking around in them, carrying extension cords and trying to find the boxes things had come in. One man in a cheap skeleton suit spent 10 minutes helping us fold tables. A woman with half her face painted green gave us coffee and paper cups. It was cold enough that I kept both hands around mine between trips to the truck. There wasn't anything frightening about the place once the work lights came on. You could see the plywood behind the fake brick walls and the lawn chair inside a little booth where someone had been pretending to be a fortune teller. Vince found a bowl of candy left beneath a table and spent the rest of the job eating things he complained were going to pull his fillings out. That's how ordinary the evening was, right up until we drove away. We had a box truck with a 16 foot body. It was an older one with a cracked plastic dashboard and a passenger door that took more force to close than you'd expect. The back had a ramp that slid underneath the floor and we used it to wheel the generators aboard. Vince made me help him strap each one down before we loaded the tables. Then checked the straps around those as well. I remember being annoyed because I wanted to get home and I figured everything would stay put on a short drive. He told me a short drive was still a drive. The woman organizing the event signed our paperwork near 11. She reminded us to turn left out of the driveway and follow the paved road back toward town. There was another way through the hills but she said it wasn't suitable for our truck. We thanked her, finished our coffee and left. I was driving. Vince had the paperwork in his lap and was trying to flatten a candy wrapper so he could read what he'd just eaten. We hadn't gone much farther than a couple of bends. when I saw the cones. There were two of them across our side of the road, with a piece of painted board propped against a folding stand. It said, "Road closed in black letters." A man stood beside it wearing an orange vest over a dark sweatshirt. He had a flashlight in one hand, and a rubber skull mask pushed up on his head. I slowed down and stopped a few yards short of him. I lowered my window, and he came over and set a truck had gone off the road ahead. They were waiting for a tow truck, and nothing our size could get past. Then he pointed to a gravel entrance on the right, just before the cones. He said we could go through the old yard, turn left beyond the scale building, and come out farther down the road. He told me the people dealing with the wreck had opened it up. There are things in that conversation I should have questioned. He never said who he worked for. There wasn't an emergency vehicle anywhere I could see. The board looked like something somebody had painted in a garage, but we just spent an hour working around adults and costumes, using borrowed equipment to direct trucks, and take down an event. He didn't look out of place to me yet. He looked like one more tired volunteer who wanted us out of his way. Vince leaned across and asked whether the yard was open at the far end. The man said it was. He said a delivery van had just gone through. I asked if there was enough room to turn with our truck, and he said there was plenty. Then he stepped back and waved the flashlight toward the entrance. I remember thanking him. That's one of the parts I don't enjoy remembering. I rolled my window back up against the cold, and pulled into the gravel lane. It was wide enough for trucks, because it had once served some kind of materials yard. There were shallow drainage ditches along both sides, and the old wheel ruts were full of water. My headlights picked out another board attached to a post. That one said detour, with an arrow pointing straight ahead. I drove past it in low gear, trying not to bounce us through the holes. Vince had stopped looking at his candy wrapper. He said he thought that yard had been closed for years. I said maybe that was why they'd had to open it. It was an answer that didn't really mean anything, but it was enough to keep me driving. I was already picturing the time we'd waste backing out, turning around, and asking somebody for another route. All I wanted was to get the truck back to the shop and go home. The lane ran straight for a little way before bending into a wider gravel area. There was a small block building on the right with a flat roof and a boarded window behind a metal grate. Beyond it, I could see a fence and a closed gate. I slowed down because there wasn't an obvious left turn. There was a pickup parked near the building, and for a second I thought its driver might be there to direct us. Then its headlights came on. They were pointed almost straight at us. I could make out someone getting out on the driver's side, but the light made it hard to see what he was carrying. Vince told me to stop where I was. I put my foot on the brake. We were still in the narrow part of the lane, just short of the open yard. The man came around the front of the pickup. He had a long gun held across his body. I know people sometimes use the word shotgun when they mean any gun that isn't a handgun, but this was a shotgun. I saw it well enough when he raised it toward our windshield. He pointed toward the block building and told us to get out. He wasn't dressed up. He had jeans and a brown jacket, and there was nothing covering his face. For a moment, that made me think we'd driven on to somebody's property by mistake, and he was trying to frighten us away. I actually started telling him that the man on the road had sent us through. Vince put a hand on my arm hard enough to make me stop talking. In my mirror, I could see another set of headlights coming down the lane behind us. The man with the shotgun kept walking closer. He told me to shut the truck off. Then he pointed to the little building again and said we were going inside. He didn't ask what we were carrying. He didn't tell us to leave anything in the cab. All he seemed interested in was getting us out of the truck and into that building. I still had my foot on the brake. I was looking at the gun instead of at him, and I couldn't seem to make myself do anything else. Vince told me to keep the engine running. He said it quietly, without looking at me. He had his phone out below the dashboard. I learned afterward that he'd already called 911. He kept the phone low and left the call connected. The vehicle behind us stopped. In my mirror, I could see part of a red pickup angled inward from the edge of the lane on my side. It's nose stuck into the space we'd need to back out. One headlight was visible beside the back of our truck. The other had disappeared behind it. There was space between us, but not enough to turn around. The driver got out, and when he crossed through the light, I saw the orange vest. It was the same man who'd waved us off the road. He wasn't hurrying. He shut his door, adjusted the mask on top of his head, and came toward the rear of our truck. I could only see him for a few seconds before the box blocked my view. After that, I couldn't see him. Vince was watching the other mirror. Vince said, "Back up." I told him there was a pickup behind us. It sounds ridiculous, but I said it the way you might point out a shopping cart to somebody in a parking lot. He said he knew. Then he told me again, much louder, to back up. I put the truck in reverse. The engine was still idling, and I lifted my foot off the brake just enough to let us move. Vince said the man in the vest had jumped off the lane on his side. The man with the shotgun started running toward my side of the cab. He was shouting for me to stop. I pressed the accelerator, but not very hard. I was still thinking about the pickup. I was still worried about hitting somebody else's vehicle. He struck my window with the gun hard enough that I heard it through the engine. The glass held. His face was so close that I could see where he'd missed a little patch of hair shaving beneath his jaw. He hit the window again, and that time it broke. Glass came into my lap and down the front of my shirt. I turned away and pressed the pedal harder. The truck moved out from beside him. I looked in my mirror, saw the red pickup coming closer, and nearly hit the brake. Vince put his hand over my knee. He didn't push my leg down. He just kept it there and told me to keep going. I don't have a clear memory of the impact itself. I remember a bang from behind us and my head knocking against the seat. I remember the sound of the tables moving against their straps. For a second, the truck stopped completely. I thought we'd stalled. Then the rear wheels caught and we moved again. The pickup hadn't been parked square across the lane. Its back end was near the ditch on my side, with its nose angled into our path. Our rear bumper caught its front corner and pushed the nose back toward the same ditch. I couldn't see all of that from the cab. I could see its headlight moving sideways in my mirror, and I could hear metal scraping along the back of our truck. The police helped us piece together the collision afterward. At the time, all I understood was that we weren't stopped anymore. Vince was watching his mirror and telling me which way to turn. I was watching mine. As the pickup straightened along the edge, its front wheel went into the ditch. That left a gap on the passenger side of our truck, but I had to take us close to the opposite shoulder to get through. I could feel the truck leaning, the steering wheel pulled in my hands, and something hit the side of the box with a long scraping noise. Then we were past it. I kept backing down the lane. I couldn't see directly behind the truck, only the narrow strips of road in the mirrors. It wasn't fast. It felt fast because I was doing it backward in the dark, with glass working its way under my shirt. Vince kept telling me to slow down, then telling me to keep moving whenever I stopped. He'd put his phone on speaker and set it on the seat between us. He told the dispatcher a man had a shotgun and we were trying to get away. I could hear her answering, but I couldn't make out the words over the engine. There was a loud bang from the yard. I ducked so hard I nearly lost sight of my mirror. Vince shouted at me to keep looking. We didn't know then whether the man had fired at us or into the air. I only knew I wasn't stopping to find out. The road behind us had looked short on the way in. Backing out, it seemed to go on forever. I kept expecting to feel the rear wheels drop into a ditch. Every time my mirror filled with bushes instead of gravel, I corrected too hard and had to straighten it again. Once, I stopped without meaning to because I thought the truck was tipping. Vince looked out his side and told me we were still on the lane. I could hear him breathing between the words. I hadn't heard him breathe like that while we were moving the generators. That was when I understood he was just as frightened as I was. We reached the entrance and he told me to stop. I didn't want to. He had to say it twice before I put my foot on the brake. The rear of the truck was close to the paved road, but the cab was still too far inside the lane for either of us to see approaching traffic. Vince picked up his phone, told the woman we were getting back onto the road, and opened his door. I grabbed his sleeve. I thought he was getting out to run. He told me he was going to check for traffic. Then he climbed down and ran along the passenger side of the truck. I watched the passenger side mirror until he appeared near the rear corner, clear of the truck's path. The phone was still in his hand. He looked both ways, turned back, and waved for me to move. I backed up slowly while he stayed where I could see him. He kept moving along the roadside as I turned the wheel and swung the back of the truck onto the pavement. When the cab cleared the entrance, I stopped so he could get in. He was already running toward the door. For a few seconds while he was climbing up, I was certain somebody was going to come down that lane and grab him. I looked from him to the entrance and back again. Nothing appeared. He got his leg inside, pulled the door shut, and told me to drive. It hadn't latched properly. He had to open it and slam it a second time while I was reaching for the gear shift. I remember being furious with the door. I turned toward town and drove through the cones. One went under the front wheel, and I felt it come out beneath the back of the truck. I didn't stop. There wasn't a wreck beyond the bend. There wasn't a tow truck or a blocked lane. There was nothing wrong with the road at all. Vince told the woman on the phone that we were out. Then he started describing where we'd been. He remembered the name of the road from our delivery paperwork and explained where the gravel entrance was in relation to the fundraiser. She asked whether anyone was following us. He looked in his mirror, then told me to check mine. I couldn't see any headlights. I kept checking anyway. I was driving too fast. Vince told me that several times. I slowed down when he said it, then looked in the mirror and started speeding up again without realizing it. There was cold air coming through the broken window, and every time I moved my left arm, I felt another little piece of glass inside my sleeve. I could taste blood. I didn't know whether I'd bitten my mouth or been cut across the lip until much later. We reached a gas station that stayed open all night. It was on a wider road closer to town, with enough space for me to pull the truck well away from the pumps. I stopped beneath a light and left the engine running. There was a man at one of the pumps filling his car. He looked at our truck, then at me, and stopped what he was doing. Vince got out with the phone still against his ear. I couldn't get my seat belt undone. My hand kept missing the release, and when I finally found it, I didn't seem able to press it properly. I started getting angry. It was a seat belt. I'd used the same one twice a day for months, and suddenly it was the hardest thing I'd ever tried to operate. The man from the pump came over and asked whether we'd been in an accident. I told him somebody had tried to make us get out of the truck. That was all I could manage. I didn't say anything about the shotgun or the detour. He reached inside, released my seat belt, and helped me down. There was a police car there a few minutes later. Vince had given the dispatcher the gas stations name while I was still trying to get out. By then the clerk had brought us paper towels, and made us sit on the curb beside the building. I was holding a towel against my cheek. Vince was sitting with his elbows on his knees, staring at the pavement. When the officer asked which one of us had called, he raised his hand without looking up. I expected to have trouble explaining what had happened. There were costumes everywhere that night, and we'd just come from a haunted trail. I worried somebody was going to tell us we'd misunderstood a prank. The officer didn't do that. He looked at the broken window, listened to Vince describe the gun, and went back to his car to pass on what we'd told him. Other officers were already heading toward the gravel lane. We stayed at the gas station until an ambulance arrived. While we waited, another officer walked around the truck with a flashlight. The rear bumper had been pushed crooked, and there was red paint along one corner of it. One side of the box had a long scrape where we'd squeezed past the pickup. When they opened the back later, both generators were still held in place. I never argued with Vince about strapping down a load again. There were also fresh dents and small holes high in the front wall of the cargo box above the cab. That was the end that had been facing the gunman as we backed away. The police later confirmed the marks were from the shotgun blast. At the gas station, the officer showed us where the truck had been hit and asked us to stand clear while he examined it. I kept looking up at that panel. We hadn't imagined the bang from the yard, and the man hadn't been shooting into the air. After Vince finished speaking with the dispatcher, I borrowed his phone to call my wife. I told her I was alright before I told her where I was, which only made her more frightened. She came to the hospital with a coat for me because the paramedic had helped me out of my work shirt and put it in a bag. There was glass caught in the fabric. My wife looked at that bag for a long time without touching it. Most of my injuries were small cuts. The one beside my mouth needed stitches. Vince had heard his neck in the collision, and by the time we reached the hospital, he couldn't turn his head without moving his shoulders. They examined him and sent him home with instructions, but he was sore for weeks. Neither of us had been hit by the gunfire. Our boss came to the hospital, too. He'd gotten a call about the truck while we were on our way there. I started explaining the damage before he asked anything. I told him I didn't think I'd had another choice. He pulled a chair over, sat in front of me, and said he wanted to know whether my wife was coming to get me. That was the first time I cried. We learned what happened at the yard over the next few days, mostly from the detective handling the case. The red pickup was still in the ditch when the officers arrived. Its front end was damaged badly enough that it wasn't going anywhere. The man in the orange vest had run from it. They found him walking along the paved road not far from the entrance. He'd taken the vest off, but one of the officers found it near the lane afterward. The other man had left in the pickup we'd seen near the building. He wasn't caught that night. The man they'd arrested identified him, and he was taken into custody the following afternoon. We were told when both of them were being held. Until that call came, I hadn't wanted my wife answering our front door. There was somebody else at the yard when the police got there. His name was Alan. He was in his 40s and worked for himself repairing appliances. He'd been driving home after a late job when the same man stopped him at the cones. He'd followed the same directions and pulled into the same yard. When the man with the shotgun told him to get out, he did. They took him into the little block building and tied his hands. They hit him when he tried to pull away, then locked him inside. By the time the police opened the door, he'd been in there long enough to believe nobody was coming. His van was parked behind the building with its rear doors open. Some of his tools were recovered from the gunman's pickup after his arrest. That was the van the man at the cones had told us about. I hadn't given that part of his explanation another thought. A delivery van had just gone through, he'd said. He'd used another man's vehicle to reassure me that the lane was safe while that man was tied up at the far end of it. Alan had heard us arrive. He heard the shouting, the collision, and the gunshot afterward. He couldn't see through the covered window and he thought we'd been caught too. When our engine noise faded, he didn't know whether we'd escaped or whether the men had taken our truck somewhere. He kept trying to make noise whenever he heard movement outside. The officers heard him when they went to check the building. I met him several months later. We'd all been called in as the case moved toward trial and we ended up sitting in the same waiting area. He knew which incident was hours before I introduced myself. He asked if I was the driver and I told him I was. Then he asked about Vince. He'd been told there were two of us and he wanted to make sure we were both all right. I couldn't stop looking at his hands. There were still marks around his wrists. He noticed and pulled his sleeves down and I felt awful for staring. He'd had a worse night than we did and he was sitting there asking whether my co-workers neck had healed. There wasn't a complicated explanation behind it. The men knew the old yard was empty. One of them had worked there before it closed. They'd put the signs up that evening and told drivers there was a wreck on the road. Halloween gave the man at the cones an excuse for the mask and the homemade equipment. But the gun was real and the building was somewhere they could hold people while they took what they wanted. I don't know why they chose our truck. It might have been because they saw us leave the fundraiser. It might have been because we were the next vehicle to reach the cones. The detective didn't tell us they'd been following us and I don't want to pretend we knew more than we did. What mattered was that there hadn't been any official detour. We'd been directed into a robbery and there was already a man being held there when we arrived. Both men went to prison. The one who'd stood at the cones pleaded guilty. The gunman's trial was the following summer and I testified about him breaking my window and ordering us into the building. Vince testified too and So did Alan. The verdict covered what the gunman had done to all three of us. We were told he would be serving more than 20 years. His partner received a shorter sentence, but it was still years, and neither of them was coming straight back to that road. After the verdict, Alan shook my hand in the hallway. He said he was glad we'd made the call. I told him it had been Vince who called, and Vince said it didn't matter which one of us had done it. The three of us stood there for a moment, not really knowing what else to say. Then Alan's wife came over and we all went outside together. Long before the trial, I'd gone back to work, although I hadn't felt ready. There were bills, and I didn't have another job waiting. Once Vince could turn his head comfortably again, he did the driving whenever we worked together. He never made a speech about it. He'd pick up the keys before I did and tell me to bring the paperwork. After a few weeks, I asked if I could drive us back from a delivery. He handed them over without saying anything about that either. The year after it happened, the same group called about renting equipment for Halloween. Our boss arranged for collection the following morning. Vince and I did that job. The volunteers gave us breakfast. We loaded everything in daylight, and the woman who ran the event made a point of walking us out to the truck. She'd been blaming herself for sending us along that road. We told her the road she'd sent us onto had been fine. It was the people standing beside it who'd done this. The entrance to the old yard had a locked barrier across it by then. I noticed it on the way past, but I didn't stop. There wasn't anything there I needed to see again. Alan had his van back. The case was finished. The men responsible were in prison. I wanted to get the truck unloaded and spend the rest of the afternoon with my wife. Vince retired a few years ago. We still talk, although it's usually about ordinary things. His garage needs clearing out. My water heater is making a noise. He thinks the tools they sell now aren't worth what they charge. If I tell him he saved my life, he says I was the one driving. We've had that argument enough times that I usually leave it alone. I know what I was thinking when I saw that pick up behind us. I was thinking about the truck, the damage, and how I'd explain it to our boss. Vince was thinking about getting us home. When he told me to keep going, I finally listened. We both made it home after the hospital. Alan went home the next day. That's the part of the story I make myself remember when I catch myself checking the mirror again. [BLANK_AUDIO]