Halloween Countdown Stories: Seven Scary Stories for the Final Week

The Final Week, Night by Night

Read one each evening, ideally with the lights low. The stories get darker as Halloween gets closer, and the last one is meant for Halloween night itself.

October 25: The Pumpkin Count Every year my father carves one pumpkin for each person in the house and lines them up on the porch steps. Four of us, four pumpkins. This year, when he came in from the porch with orange on his hands, he said he had carved five. My mother laughed and asked who the fifth was for. He did not know. He said his hands had just kept going. That night I went out to look. The fifth pumpkin had no face at all, just a smooth, uncut front, as if it was waiting to see who it should become. In the morning, it had eyes. By the evening, it had a nose. My little brother says it is starting to look like me. I have stopped going out onto the porch, and I have stopped looking in mirrors, because yesterday I noticed my own face has begun to feel a little hollow.

October 26: The Costume Fitting The seamstress on Elm Street only takes Halloween orders, and only from children. My mother took me for a fitting because the shop was cheap and the costumes were beautiful. The seamstress measured me slowly with a yellow tape and wrote the numbers in a book full of other children’s names. “Come back on the thirty-first,” she said, “and it will fit you perfectly.” On the way out, I saw last year’s costumes hanging along the back wall, a pirate, a witch, a little astronaut, all standing up by themselves, as if someone were still inside them. I asked my mother who had worn them. She said they must be display pieces. Then the astronaut turned its helmet to watch us leave.

October 27: The Candy Bowl Rule Our neighborhood has one rule on Halloween that everyone follows: if a house leaves its porch light on, you knock; if the light is off, you walk past. Nobody remembers where the rule came from. Last year, old Mr. Avery forgot to switch his light off when he went to bed. In the morning his candy bowl was full, not empty: full to the brim with wrappers, each one torn open, each one licked clean, hundreds of them, far more than he had bought. And on his doormat, pressed into the frost, there were small bare footprints that came up the path and never went back down. This year, Mr. Avery has already put tape over his light switch. I keep checking ours.

October 28: The Hayride Headcount The farm runs its last hayride of the season after dark, and the driver counts heads before he pulls away. Nineteen, he said, and we all laughed, because there were eighteen of us; we had bought the tickets together. He counted again. Nineteen. Then he shrugged and drove into the trees. Halfway round, the lantern on the wagon went out, and in the dark something very cold sat down beside my sister and rested its head on her shoulder. She thought it was me. When the lantern flickered back, there were eighteen of us again, and my sister was crying, and she said whoever it was had whispered that it had been waiting since the last ride of 1961 for someone to make room.

October 29: The Mask on the Door Someone hung a mask on our front door. Not a cheap one: a carefully painted face, pale and smiling, with real eyelashes and empty holes where the eyes should be. We thought a neighbor had done it as a prank, so my father took it down and threw it in the outside bin. The next morning, it was back on the door. He burned it in the barbecue, and we all watched it curl and blacken. The next morning, it was back, unmarked. Tonight we are not touching it. We have locked the doors and drawn the curtains, and we are trying not to think about the fact that, from inside the house, through the letterbox, you can see it has turned around. It is facing in now. It is watching us.

October 30: Mischief Night The night before Halloween is mischief night in our town, when kids soap windows and wrap trees in toilet paper. My friends and I always pick the same street. This year, at the house at the very end, someone had already been: every window on the ground floor was soaped, from the inside. We pressed our faces to the glass and saw letters drawn in the soap, backwards, so they would read correctly from the street. LET US OUT, they said, again and again, in a dozen different handwritings, some of them very small. Then a light came on upstairs, and a woman looked down at us and smiled, and every one of the soaped words was wiped clean at once, from the inside, by hands we could not see.

October 31: The Last Knock At the end of Halloween night, when the candy is gone and the porch light is off, my grandmother always leaves one piece on the step, wrapped in a napkin. “For the last one,” she says, and she will not explain. This year she was in the hospital, so I did not bother. At midnight, there was a knock. Not the eager pounding of trick-or-treaters: three slow knocks, patient, polite. I looked through the peephole and saw nobody, only the empty step. The knocks came again. Then a voice, very close to the wood, said in my grandmother’s exact tone, “For the last one.” I ran to the kitchen and put a whole bag of candy on the step. In the morning it was gone. My grandmother came home the next week and asked, before anything else, whether I had remembered.

A Reading Plan for the Last Week of October

Pair each night’s story with something from the rest of the LiveLore library. On October 25 and 26, warm up with our short scary stories. For the hayride and the mask on October 28 and 29, try the campfire scary stories to read around a fire pit. On mischief night, October 30, the sleepover scary stories suit a group that is staying up late, and on Halloween night itself, close with our Halloween poems.

Reading with younger listeners? Swap in the gentler scary stories for 10 year olds. Want something you can tell in a single breath between trick-or-treaters? Our two sentence scary stories fit on a napkin.

How to Tell a Halloween Countdown Story

Each story here follows the same shape: an ordinary Halloween custom, a small detail that is wrong, and a final line that brings the wrongness inside. Read the first half at a normal pace, slow down when the detail appears, and pause before the last sentence. If you are counting down with a group, let a different person read each night, and save the final story for whoever has the steadiest voice.

For true chills between the fiction, mix in a few creepy facts that sound fake but are true or creepy animal facts. And if the countdown inspires you to write your own, the guide on how to write a horror story will help.

Halloween Countdown Stories — FAQ