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At ten to midnight on Halloween 1996, five teenage girls were sitting around a talking board in her basement, and it spelled out a name. Not her name, but the childhood nickname nobody had called her since she was thirteen. She heard it with her ear pressed to the heating grate on the kitchen floor.

In this original horror story, a mother looks back on the night her thirteen-year-old daughter Kelsey had her first sleepover since Grandma moved in. Her own mother had stopped recognizing her a month after arriving. She did the crossword every morning in pen, wrong, with total confidence, and some nights she stood in her doorway asking where Birdie was. The old house had a gravity furnace whose iron floor grates carried every sound from room to room like a tin-can telephone. Kelsey’s one request was “Be normal, Mom,” so she stayed upstairs, listening through the floor. Then the girls come thundering up the stairs, laughing, to tell her what the board said next.

A slow-burn, unsettling tale of a Halloween sleepover, a talking board, and a family name only one person in the house should have known. 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.

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

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.

🎧 If this one got under your skin, follow Harrowing Tales for new scary stories every week, and leave a rating to help other listeners find the show.

📺 Watch the illustrated version on YouTube: Harrowing Tales

All Harrowing Tales stories are original works of fiction.

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

Every year, the week after Halloween, the local paper ran the same little item: on Mischief Night, someone had soaped a single word onto a single front window, and nobody saw who did it. The paper called it a prank. Her neighbor, who had lived on Fulton Street for fifty years, said none of them were ever random.

In this original horror story, a single mother looks back on her first fall in a narrow 1911 house she could barely afford. The radiators knocked all night, the fuse box blew whenever the dryer and the space heater ran together, and she worked nights on a hospital ward while her twelve-year-old son Petey left notes on the kitchen table (“Ate the meatloaf. All of it.”). Then, the Saturday before Halloween, she comes home to a single curved stroke of white soap on her front window, at about the height of her face. So on Mischief Night she turns off every light, pulls her chair up to the glass with a thermos and a flashlight, and waits to catch them.

A slow-burn, unsettling tale of Mischief Night, an old house, and a message she read the wrong way. No gore, no jump scares, just quiet dread that stays with you.

🎧 If this one got under your skin, follow Harrowing Tales for new scary stories every week, and leave a rating to help other listeners find the show.

📺 Watch the illustrated version on YouTube: Harrowing Tales

All Harrowing Tales stories are original works of fiction.