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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.

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All Harrowing Tales stories are original works of fiction.