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Every kid in town knew the rule on Joanie Pruitt’s grave before they knew their own phone number: on Halloween, you leave one piece of candy on her stone, because Joanie never got to finish her Halloween. Leave one, never take one.

In this original horror story, a woman looks back on October 1991, when she was fifteen and in trouble. She’d cracked her mother’s heirloom watch at the homecoming dance, the repair cost twenty dollars, and her mother’s birthday was nine days away. Then a junior with her brother’s car bet her exactly twenty dollars that she wouldn’t climb into the cemetery at midnight and take one piece of candy off Joanie’s grave. Her best friend Tasha, who could do the principal, the priest and a cat being sick, spent the whole week doing Joanie’s ghost voice: “She’s gonna want that back.” And at dusk on Halloween, they watched an old woman with a cane climb the hill and leave one homemade peppermint on top of the pile.

A slow-burn, unsettling tale of a small-town legend, a dare, and the one thing on the grave that was really meant for Joanie. No gore, no jump scares, just quiet dread that stays with you.

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All Harrowing Tales stories are original works of fiction.