The Ghost of Halloween

Halloween can be a magical time for any kid: candy, costumes, and the chance to scare and be scared. It’s a time when convention is upended and the symbolic power to punish and reward – to trick or to treat – is granted to the least powerful among us, to children. The only thing required is the wearing of masks, but sometimes, putting on a mask is all a part of growing up.

When Dylan was six years old, he carved his first Halloween jack-o’-lantern. Dylan’s dad had spent the afternoon with him at his mother’s house. “My parents had been split up for about a year,” Dylan tells me. “So, I think that was the first Halloween after.”

By the time his father left that evening, Dylan had a large handsome pumpkin with a gaping, toothed mouth, arched triangle eyes, and a matching nose.

“I guess it was a real old school pumpkin,” Dylan recalls. “I think that was all my dad knew how to make.”

After dinner with his mother, Dylan wanted to take his jack-o’-lantern to the front porch, but his mother had other ideas. “My mom wasn’t really into the whole giving-out-candy thing,” Dylan tells me. “We just turned off the lights so no one came to the door.”

After the last of the trick-or-treaters went home, Dylan took his jack-o’-lantern to the porch.

As a consolation for sitting in the dark for two hours, Dylan’s mother had even let him light the candle himself.

Dylan carefully placed his jack-o’-lantern on the porch table facing the street with an orange grin. Dylan took a few steps down to the sidewalk to see what it looked like from the street.

In the dark the pumpkin looked suitably terrifying to Dylan. “Then I looked down the street and I saw this orange mess on the road,” Dylan remembers.

A neighbor’s jack-o’-lantern had been snatched from its porch and viciously smashed on the street, no doubt the work of local teenagers. “I was so freaked out,” Dylan tells me. Dylan rushed back up to his porch and turned the jack-o’-lantern around so it faced the family room’s large window. And Dylan came up with a plan.

That night, Dylan tried his best to secretly stay awake. He lay in his bed on his Batman sheets and thought about his defenseless pumpkin waiting outside for him. When Dylan thought his mother was asleep, it was time to put his plan into action.

Little Dylan slowly got out of bed and crept into the hallway. He could hear his mother’s snore coming from the far bedroom. Down the steps he went, avoiding all the secret spots on the staircase that creaked, a knowledge gained through trial and error and spankings.

At the bottom of the steps, Dylan almost changed his mind. The downstairs was a different planet after bedtime. A deep, impenetrable darkness suffused what was usually so familiar, so warm to Dylan. It seemed a black sheet had been thrown over what made up most of Dylan’s world.

“I closed my eyes and ran for it,” Dylan recalls, “until I hit the couch.” And there Dylan had planned to wait until morning, watching over his vulnerable jack-o’-lantern.

The couch was deep and warm, and Dylan wrapped himself in the blanket that his mother kept there. Determined to spend the night staring at the flickering face of his jack-o’-lantern, Dylan quickly fell asleep.

“I don’t know how long I was out for,” Dylan says. “It was the wind that woke me up.” A fierce storm was on the way – the first of October – and the wind was howling ‘round the house.

Dylan looked out the window, past the pumpkin’s still-glowing smile, but the leaf-littered street seemed darker now as if the storm were blowing an inky blackness over Dylan’s neighborhood. He shuddered a little to think of the cold and the dark just beyond the thin pane of glass.

As Dylan studied the night half-asleep, he thought he caught sight of something else blowing in the wind. A piece of black cloth seemed to be caught somewhere on the sidewalk, maybe on a bush or a lamppost.

“I was concentrating on looking at this thing in the wind,” Dylan tells me, “that I didn’t notice when it started moving closer to the house.”

Dylan could see now that the dark cloth was not moving with the wind; it seemed to form a whirlwind of tattered black fabric that was heading for his house. “Then all of a sudden,” Dylan remembers, “it was standing there in the front yard.”

What looked to Dylan like a mass of cloth one moment was suddenly in the shape of a human figure the next. And it was walking swiftly toward Dylan’s house, toward the window where Dylan sat.

It walked up the porch steps and stopped, the wind seemingly blowing right through it. It wore a great black cloak, shredded and trailing stray strips of cloth. The face was hidden in a deep hood but Dylan sensed a menacing presence there, one he thought he recognized. 

“I don’t know if I knew the name at the time,” Dylan says, “but it was pretty much the Grim Reaper on the porch.”

The figure moved closer to the window where Dylan sat frozen in fear, his jack-o’-lantern still stupidly grinning. The figure paused again and it seemed to contemplate the mutilated gourd before it.

Now the figure stood directly in front of Dylan, just behind the pumpkin. It bent over and two bony, clawed hands reached out for the jack-o’-lantern.

Dylan’s pumpkin rose in the air as the figure lifted it high, then it placed the lit pumpkin in the hood, in the spot where its own head should be. The pumpkin sat there awkwardly for a moment as something inscrutable adjusted itself.

In that moment Dylan’s jack-o’-lantern no longer belonged to him. The pumpkin face contorted and stretched, the mouth opened and closed as the eyes squinted in terrorizing displays of dexterity unknown to winter squash.

A great peal of sinister laughter erupted from the pumpkin-headed shadow and joined the wind’s screeching. Dylan could do nothing but watch as the shadowy figure turned to leave. As it did the jack-o’-lantern seemed to look in his direction and Dylan thought it he saw it wink.

Dylan’s mother found him the next morning asleep on the couch. “She searched the whole house before she heard me snoring,” Dylan remembers.

In the years that followed, Dylan made many more pumpkins, but he never forgot his first and the strange fate that befell it. “At first I thought maybe the Grim Reaper took my pumpkin for a Halloween mask,” Dylan tells me. “But now I think it was Samhain, the spirit of Halloween, and he picked my jack-o’-lantern for his head that year.”

A very special episode of Scary True

Next Week on Scary True: A little boy learns the true meaning of Halloween in "The Ghost of Halloween."
And check out this week's monster story, "The Impostor."

This month marks the one-year anniversary of Scary True and we'd like to take a moment and thank every one of our readers. If only a few of the people who stumble upon this blog get a shudder, feel creeped out, or can't sleep at night, then it's all been worth it. Happy Halloween!

The Impostor

If there’s one thing that epitomizes the celebration of Halloween, it’s dressing up in a scary costume. The practice of trick-or-treating has a long history as a means of imitating evil spirits and placating the restless dead. Sometimes, however, traditions become unmoored from their origins and people forget their own customs; sometimes, even the evil spirits forget.

Don writes to tell me the bizarre story of one Halloween night in 1993 when something strange – stranger than usual for Halloween – came to the door. Don and his wife, Kathy, were home with their son, Brian, handing out candy to the children who came to the door.

“Brian was just thirteen then,” Don tells me, “but he thought he was too old to go trick-or-treating.” Don and Kathy took turns answering the doorbell. It was getting late and Don was about to turn out the porch light and call it a night.

“There hadn’t been a trick-or-treater for a good half hour,” Don recalls, “but near nine-thirty, there goes the bell again.”

It was Kathy’s turn to answer the door and she rose from the family room sofa. Don heard his wife grab the bowl of candy from the chair in the hallway and open the door. It was quiet for a moment and then Don heard his wife’s low fearful gasp.

“I thought it must be a doozie of a costume to give her a scare,” Don tells me.

Don set down the magazine he was reading and leaned back on the sofa to listen better. He could hear his wife nervously clearing her throat and the night sounds coming through the open door – crickets and far away traffic – but the trick-or-treater remained quiet.

Kathy broke the silence and said, “That’s quite a costume you’ve got there, young man...or young woman?” She nervously tapped the candy bowl with her fingers for a moment, seemingly waiting for a reply.

Suddenly Don heard a strangely amplified voice scream “Trick-or-treat!” It sounded like a recording played on poor quality speakers, and Don jumped up off the sofa when he heard the crash of the candy bowl as it hit the floor and shattered.

Don called to his wife and she reassured him that everything was fine, she had just dropped the bowl. Don walked to the door and he could see his wife’s back but not the trick-or-treater standing outside. As Kathy bent down to pick up the shards of porcelain, Don got his first glimpse of the costumed figure.

“Well, it was real odd,” Don remembers. “It was a mixed-up sort of costume, I guess.”

A small figure, not five feet tall, stood in a ragged brown robe, a dirty plastic bag held out in one mittened hand and a small orange box with a jack-o’-lantern face in the other. On its head, it wore a yellow-stained pillowcase with two frayed holes for eyes.

When it saw Don approach, it held up the orange box and punched a button. “Trick-or treat!” the box screeched.

Don stopped and stared for a moment, not sure if what he was seeing was a threat to his family or just a harmless kid. “I mean, not every kid gets a new costume and you make due with what you got sometimes,” Don tells me. “But this kid gave off a really weird feeling.”

Don continued to the door and got down on his knees to help his wife gather up the candy. He glanced up at the trick-or-treater. The porch light was behind and above the figure, so when Don was standing, he couldn’t see much of the face. But now, as he knelt on the floor, he could see into the ragged eye holes.

“There were the eyes and they were black, like completely black, no irises or pupils,” Don recalls. “And the skin around the eyes, I’m pretty sure it was covered in black fur, real fur.”

Don recoiled in surprise and put his hand on Kathy’s arm. She looked at Don and then slowly rose with a fistful of candy in her hand. “Trick-or-treat!” the plastic toy screamed again.

The costumed figure cocked it’s head slightly and Don could hear a low gurgle. Kathy held the candy in an out-stretched arm. The figure held out the plastic bag in a mirror image of Kathy.

The two stood frozen facing each other, Kathy waiting for figure to close the gap between them and the figure apparently mimicking her posture. At last Kathy stepped forward and quickly dropped the candy into the bag.

As she stepped back, the figure stepped forward, and Don, still on his knees, could see that the feet under the cloak were shoeless, but covered with the same black fur. “And they had claws, big claws,” Don tells me.

Kathy nodded at the plastic bag but the figure continued to stare at her. Suddenly Brian walked up behind his parents and said, “What’s going on? Somebody break the ...”

Brian stopped when he saw the trick-or-treater at the door. The figure looked at Brian, studying him, and then grunted sharply. Rising to his feet, Don could see the black eyes widen in reaction to his son and Don began to feel very afraid.

“Well, I guess my wife has things more together than I do most of the time,” Don says. “She knew just what to do.”

Kathy took another step backwards and slowly closed the door on the strange little figure. The trick-or-treater simply stood there with the plastic bag still extended, still staring at Brian.

“Damn it if he didn’t stay there for another fifteen minutes,” Don remembers. “Every so often we’d hear that gizmo go off.”

Finally, it walked away and Don and Brian peeked through the curtains as it did. “It walked funny, kinda exaggerated,” Don recalls, “like it didn’t know how to do it right, but it was trying to imitate a person walking.”

Sharing their thoughts afterwards, Don and his family agreed that the last trick-or-treater to visit their house that Halloween night was not human. “Maybe it was a really, really good costume,” Don tells me, “but you can’t fake the feeling we all got that whatever was under that pillowcase was a monster.”

Halloween costumes represent a kind of meeting of the dead and the living, the human and the monstrous, a halfway point where recognition is exchanged. Could it be that the other side – the monstrous side – has changed the terms of the agreement and more visitors like the one that came to Don’s house are already on their way?

Or have the ghosts and goblins that come out to play on Halloween night forgotten their role in the show and are they now merely imitating what they see around them? Maybe the ancient practice of imitating evil in order to conquer it has now been obscured, becoming merely the performance of a performance.

“I think my wife said it best after I kept pestering her,” Don tells me. “She said, when a monster comes to the door, you give him some damn candy and then send him home.”

Trick or treat?

Next Week on Scary True: It's hard to pick out a costume for Halloween but it's even harder when you're already a monster! Take a look under the mask in "The Impostor."
And check out this week's Midnighters story, "The Midnighters: All Hallows."

Every so often, Scary True would like to spotlight websites, books, films, and other fun stuff that promote scares, creeps, and the heebie-jeebies for the edification of our readers. This time Scary True does horror movie reviews. We'll do it by category and pick it up with monster movies!


It wasn’t the first, but it was the best. James Whale’s Bride Of Frankenstein was a sensation in 1935 and hasn’t lost any of it charms or scares. What old school horror movies did was make an atmosphere that was scary because the monster would always suffer from bad make-up or bad acting or any number of technical faults. The monster you thought was chasing you, not the one you could see, was the scariest. Bride Of Frankenstein had the creepiest atmosphere of any horror movie. Ever. There, I said it.

Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979) is the modern contender for the best horror atmosphere. This is pretty much dark, foggy London streets in space (of course the fog comes from all the steam vents that spaceships in the '70s had). Would I be remiss to mention the scene where the chest-burster does what it does? I thought not. I also credit this movie with beginning the trend of cats jumping out of shadows at people (or being thrown at the actors by their off-camera wranglers).

Honorable mention goes to a much more recent film, The Descent (2005). Spelunkers and monsters trapped underground? You can’t make that movie without coming up with a really creepy atmosphere.

The Midnighters: All Hallows

For over thirty years, Jerry worked as a police officer in Pittsburgh. In his time on the force, Jerry had seen some bad things, some worse things, and some downright evil things. Cleaning up when people got mad or got crazy was part of the job, but there were other things that Jerry saw, things that most people never see, things that prowl the night, things that refuse to die.

I interviewed Jerry several times in 2002. The following incident is just one of the many stories Jerry shared in hours of audio recordings. I have transcribed them just as they were told to me by Jerry.

“This must’ve been about 1970 or thereabouts, right around Halloween, when Frank and me – that’s my partner, Frank – we were investigating this homicide, well, it was more like a missing persons case at that point, but we had a hunch – Frank had a hunch – that there was more to it.

“The story behind it all was that in October this girl disappeared and she used to be real friendly with Mayor Flaherty which is a big problem, right? Well, that ain’t the half of it, ‘cause the real problem was she also used to go with Johnny LaRocca who ran the gambling and girls and the whole mob there in Pittsburgh.

“So, the girl goes missing and it’s kind of a mess for all the muckety-mucks, but of course this poor girl’s family are wondering are they ever going to see her again. Well, the girl – her name was Rosie – she was last seen downtown near the Liberty Bridge with a couple of shady guys, then she just up and disappeared.

“Frank and me, we were helping out on the case on account of all the heat from the mayor’s office. I was thinking the girl skipped town or was hiding out but Frank, he was pretty sure she came to a bad end. The problem was, nobody knew where she was and the blame was going around and people were getting antsy.

“Now it’s the night before Halloween, right, and we’re all working overtime and Frank, he pulls me aside and says let’s go for a drive. I’m like, sure, I could use a coffee or something but Frank takes me up the Boulevard of the Allies there and at Grant he pulls over and he shuts off the engine.

“Now, I’m like, this is all fine, Frank, but we got work, right? But Frank, he’s just staring off and I can tell he’s got something on his mind. Frank points up at the street signs and he says, where are we, Jerry? And I say, on the Boulevard at Grant, so what? And Frank says, right, Jerry, we’re at a crossroads.

“I’m like, big whoop, so it’s an intersection, who cares? But Frank, he says, no it’s a crossroads and he tells me how a crossroads is a place where ghosts and stuff hang out or something ‘cause it’s a place between two places...I’m not really saying it right, but intersections are spooky places is all I mean.

“Then Frank says, what day is it? And I say it’s the 30th and Frank says, no, it’s after midnight, it’s Halloween. And then he tells me how on Halloween, the wall between us and them ghosts is thin, as thin as it gets all year, and sometimes you can see the ghosts.

“So, Frank had a double whammy here with it being Halloween and us being at that crossroads and I’m wondering what Frank has up his sleeve but he just tells me to wait and I say, wait for what? And Frank says, for Rosie.

“It must’ve been two hours we were on spook stakeout there and I was falling asleep and Frank gives me a nudge and points down the Boulevard and I look and there’s this mist come rolling down the street, right?

“Now, I’ve seen some heavy fog before but this was something else and it just came like a flood down the Boulevard and up over the car. Frank and me, we’re just quiet, watching and waiting, and then after a minute or so, the mist starts to thin out and then I see that, yeah, there’s people in there.

“They was moving down the street, the Boulevard, in a big group – a parade, I guess – and I say they was moving, not walking, ‘cause I didn’t really see any walking going on. They were whitish like they were covered in chalk dust or something and they were kind of see-through. I mean, they were ghosts, right?

“There must’ve been hundreds of ‘em and every kind of person, right? There were guys and ladies, adults and kids, some looked like they died yesterday and there was some looked like cavemen and must’ve died a thousand years ago.

“I saw a guy, he looked like he might be a Revolutionary War soldier, and there were lots and lots of Indians all marching together. There were men in suits and top hats and others in rags and all bloody. They just stared right ahead and kept moving down the street.”

“But there were these other ones, right? I don’t know what to call them exactly, but some were big, bigger than people ought to be, and they were black and shadowy – hard to make out – with what looked like big bat wings, and there were some were smaller, but they had these big claws and teeth and they looked more like animals than people.

“I said to Frank, what are those things? And Frank says, I got no idea, Jerry, but let’s hope they don’t notice us sitting here. And none of them did, in fact, I don’t think any of them moving down the street even looked our way once.

“I said to Frank, what are we doing here Frank? And Frank says, we’re waiting for Rosie, and I’m thinking if she ain’t dead, she ain’t here, but I know Frank thinks she is.

“Well, we watched all this go on for a good twenty minutes – longer than anybody ought to – and then Frank says, look, and he points and there in the crowd is a little figure, and I can see it’s Rosie, I recognize her from her picture, and, I mean, you know, jeez, she’s just a girl, and she’s as white as the rest of them and soaking wet from head to toe.

“Well, we watch her pass on by up the Boulevard and the whole crowd starts to thin out and then that’s it, they’re all gone with the fog. Frank and me, we’re both a little shell shocked here. I don’t think Frank even expected all that to happen, but now we know, right, now we know that Rosie’s dead and she’s in the drink somewhere, in the river.

“We can’t exactly go back to headquarters and tell ‘em what happened, but Frank fudges a bit about a tip we got and he gets them to search the Mon River there around the bridge and after a couple of days, they find her down there with a chunk of concrete tied to her legs.

“Things cooled down between the mayor and the mobster after they buried the poor girl and that makes me think they were all in on it and that girl must have known some bad stuff about everybody’s business.

“Frank and me, we never been back to that intersection – the crossroads, right – but I guess if someone wanted to, they could go down there on Halloween, wait for Rosie to walk by, and ask her what happened. Couldn’t hurt, I guess.”

Read more stories of the Midnighters here.

Halloween parade of the dead!

Next Week on Scary True: At a crossroads on Halloween, anything can happen! The Midnighters go searching for a missing girl on Halloween night in "The Midnighters: All Hallows."
And check out this week's witch story, "The Corn Witch."

Every so often, Scary True would like to spotlight websites, books, films, and other fun stuff that promote scares, creeps, and the heebie-jeebies for the edification of our readers. This time, in the spirit of the season, Scary True does horror movie reviews. We'll do it by category, starting with zombies.

George Romero’s 1968 classic, Night Of The Living Dead, started it all and remains the best all around zombie movie. What does that mean? Well, Night Of The Living Dead has real dead zombies (yeah, they’re pretty messed-up), it’s shot in creepy black and white, and it features the first honest-to-goodness zombie apocalypse, a theme we can’t seem to stop filming.

28 Days Later kicked off the latest love affair with the walking dead and probably ranks as the most well-made and thoughtful zombie movie. And if you want to argue that the film features no actual zombies, your point is well-taken but misguided. Dead or not, 28 Days Later certainly functions as a zombie movie and also manages to give great zombie apocalypse in the middle of London. 

Honorable mention goes to Dawn of the Dead. Which one? Take your pick. Romero’s 1978 sequel to Night Of The Living Dead is an undead tour de force, while Zack Snyder’s excellent 2004 version introduced the terrifying and always-controversial running zombie.

Next week: Monsters!

The Corn Witch

The following story is found in The Hamlyn Book of Ghosts, Part II by J. Allen Randolph, published in London in 1973:

As the crisp scent of autumn permeated the chill evening air, I sat down with Mr. Martin Fleetwood on the porch of his North Carolina home. Mr. Fleetwood had been a resident of the region his entire life, over ninety years as he figured it. Here he had farmed his small plot and provided a satisfactory, if arduous, life for his family.

Mr. Fleetwood, having been privy to secrets and tall tales of the area for much of long life, was a living archive of Americana, especially the kind that liked to lurk in dark corners and deserted country lanes. I traveled to Mr. Fleetwood’s modest home in order to hear a master storyteller “weave a yarn,” as the Americans like to say. I was not disappointed.

Of the many stories related to me, that of the Corn Witch was easily the most compelling, being a tale steeped in history and dripping with both tragedy and horror. The story of the Corn Witch begins in the early years of the century in the same part of North Carolina where Mr. Fleetwood’s family lived. I submit this story to you in Mr. Fleetwood’s own words:

“The Matthews family lived just up over the hill. Now, they were poor – we all were poor – but they were poorer than most. Mr. Matthews had been born into slavery and he took for his wife a Catawba Indian woman and some people didn’t think that was a proper way of doing things. What that meant was they didn’t get help when they needed some, so when Mr. Matthews died, why they were hard-pressed to keep the bank from taking what little land they had left. 

“Now, two of the Matthews children, Zora and John, were twins and were always going about together, always getting into trouble of one kind or another. At the time they must’ve been about twelve or so; young enough to know everything.

“Their mother was worked up about the money trouble and some said she had turned to drink, and so, the twins were desperate to find any way to hold onto their daddy’s land.

“It was coming up on Hallowmas – Halloween – and Zora and John remembered there was an old story about a witch what used to live hereabouts. Folks called her the Corn Witch and it was said she could make the corn in the fields wither and die with nary but a sideways look.

“Some folks said she was up and hanged before the start of the War for the Union, and some others said she was an English woman married to a pirate what come across the sea before the Independence War, and some said she was an Indian maid cursed by the Devil, and still some others said she was older than all that, that she had been here before there was people here.

“Well, the part of the tale told ‘round these parts has it that the Corn Witch walked the fields by night, and she could bless ‘em or she could curse ‘em, depending on if she was feeling charity or spite. People back then liked to leave her little things like hard candy or rock salt or little dolls made with corn feathers and folks said the Corn Witch would take them and make your corn grow.

“The other part of the legend said that if you caught the Corn Witch in the field, if you looked down her long nose and didn’t turn from her old warty face, why you could get her to give you a wish, just like a genie in old Araby. The thing was that you could only catch her in a field she had cursed and you could only do it on Hallowmas night, when all the ghosts and the goblins and Hell’s own went to trooping about.

“John and Zora, being kids, got it into their heads they were going to catch that there witch. Hallowmas night came and John led Zora up to the high fields, the ones that get left to themselves more oftener than not. There was a field there owned by a Mr. Freemer that did bad that year and that was where they were going to go to wait for the Corn Witch.

“It was an awful cold night and them twins had a long wait ahead of them. Now the corn field was picked clean except for a few ears here and there – food for the crows – but the dead stalks were still standing row by row.

“John and Zora walked hand in hand down those rows and stepped across the dried-up husks, watching the moon get bigger and hearing the sounds of the night birds. It was sometime in the dead of the night, when it’s so cold it can’t get colder and it seems like the sun ain’t never coming back, that the Corn Witch came upon them.

“Now, this is the part of the story that folks want to hear and it’s the part of the story that can’t ever get told because no one except John and Zora can tell it and they for sure ain’t talking. This story’s got a big hole right in the spot where the heart ought to be, but it really ain’t like that at all.

“People like to get to talking about things they know, but they love to talk about the things they don’t know. For every corn stalk in Freemer’s field, there’s a dozen stories about what happened to John and Zora Matthews that night.

“Some folks think it was the Devil himself come up and others that it was a crazed-up mountain man, but I imagine that a black shape rose up out of the corn and crossed the face of the moon on an old corn broom, trailing a dirty, tattered shawl behind it.

“It might’ve struck John and Zora as looking like one of Freemer’s old scarecrows before it lightly came to rest among the dead stalks. On her head she wore a tall, crooked hat like she was pointing one angry finger up at God, and she glared at the children with hellfire eyes from beneath the broad brim.

“So, I’d imagine it might’ve been. All I know is that, in the morning, John came down from the high fields alone. Zora was nowhere to be found from that day to this. Folks said she run off with a peddler and others in their whispering said that John had killed her and buried her up in the field.

“Now, I don’t believe hardly none of it, but I don’t know exactly what to believe if you take my meaning. December was coming up when the bank agent come to town and went up to visit the Matthews farm. John met him at the door and paid off the family debts with a fistful of Spanish doubloons. 

“The bank agent almost fainted dead away but he took it for the debt ‘cause he knew that John was overpaying. John didn’t care about that; he worked hard to help his mama and get that farm working again.

“No one in these parts had seen crops grow so fast and so well as they did on the Matthews farm the next season. Why, in a few years, John was able to buy out some of his neighbors, and by the time his mama was put in the ground, John Matthews was one of the richest men in the county.

“That sure gave people something to talk about, no doubt. They were jealous and they were petty and mean and most of all they wondered what really happened to Zora Matthews on that Hallowmas night so many years before.

‘Well, if, like me, you like to take evening constitutions and wander the backroads, and if, like me, you don’t mind walking after the sun is down and everything is dark, and if, like me, you sometimes stop to watch the moon and listen to the music them night birds make, then you might, on nights when the air is getting chilly and the leaves are starting to fall, spy a figure behind the corn stalks, a small figure, ‘bout the size of a girl, wearing a big old pointed hat and tattered black cloak, sweeping the rows with an old corn broom.

“They say the corn grows well in this part of the country, but I say we just know how to treat our friends. What happened to little Zora Matthews? Well, the corn needs to be planted again every year, and I’d imagine that maybe something like a Corn Witch needs to be planted again from time to time.”

In the fields, behind the rows!

Next Week on Scary True: Terror stalks the corn field as a Halloween legend comes to life in "The Corn Witch."
And check out this week's monster story, "Night of the Melon Heads."

Every so often, Scary True would like to spotlight websites, books, films, and other fun stuff that promote scares, creeps, and the heebie-jeebies for the edification of our readers. This time, Scary True gets into the Halloween season with Retroween, where you can get your hands on some old school Halloween decorations. I can remember some of these decorating my elementary school, although it's hard to say whether they were retro then or had just been around for a long time.

Night of the Melon Heads

There was a time we called them fairy tales, but now they’re known as urban legends: stories that frighten and bewilder, stories that enforce norms with the often gruesome results of what happens to transgressors. But sometimes, when one looks closely at an urban legend, a true story emerges, and sometimes, the legend turns to look back at you.

Diego and his friends had heard the legend of the Melon Heads many times while growing up around Cleveland, Ohio. The stories said that a mysterious Dr. Crow or Kroh had conducted hideous experiments on children, turning them into huge-headed monsters. Or they said that he operated a home for children suffering from hydrocephalus and, after mistreating them, the children killed their tormentor and went feral in the woods.

“So, yeah, the stories were silly,” Diego tells me. “We didn’t believe any of it, but it was fun to try to scare each other.”

One night in 2004, Diego and his friends were, like generations of teenagers before and since, bored. It was October 30th, the night before Halloween, and scary stories like the Melon Heads were making the rounds again.

“One of my friends, Josh, had just gotten his license,” Diego says. “So, I said, screw this, let’s go up there and find some Melon Heads.”

Diego’s friends exchanged nervous glances, but no one was willing to call the bluff. The four boys piled into Josh’s mom’s Camry and headed out to Wisner Road, where the Melon Heads were said to lurk.

The rural road cut a winding path through dark, deserted woods. The leaves were dying and falling, and many trees were already bare and skeletonized against the car’s lonely headlights.

“There was a spot where they said a trail led off to where the Melon Heads used to live,” Diego tells me.

After driving slowly through the woods, Josh brought the Camry to a stop just before a small bridge. On the side of the road, there was the faint trace of a trail marked by old tire tracks overgrown with weeds.

The boys sat in the car, the engine’s soft whine the only sound. The trail in front of them, distorted by the shadows thrown by the headlights, looked like a huge hole torn in the woods. 

“We were all pretty charged up until that point,” Diego recalls, “but something about the look of the trail shut everybody up.”

The boys drew courage from their shared fear and, after many teases and threats, managed to get out of the car. Josh left the headlights on because the boys had forgotten to bring a flashlight.

“We went looking for mutants or ghosts or something and we didn’t even have a flashlight,” Diego tells me. “Yeah, it was pretty dumb.”

The quiet woods awoke to the sound of nervous laughter as the four boys warily picked their way along the trail. The crunching leaves punctuated each tentative step, taking them farther and farther away from the halo of the headlights.

That was when one of the boys, Ken, remembered the two glowsticks in his coat, part of a Halloween stockpile. The glowsticks were cracked and the faint green light that illuminated the few feet around the group only served to heighten the sinister atmosphere.

“Two of my friends, Ken and Dave, they wanted to go back and wait in the car,” Diego tells me, “but Josh wouldn’t give them the keys.”

The quartet were well beyond the light from the car and the path they had been following was becoming difficult to make out in the green glow.

“I was just about to call it off and make fun of those guys for going out there,” Diego tells me, “when we saw the first one.”

Off to the side of the trail, Diego and Josh both noticed a strange bulbous object reflecting the weak glowstick light. “It looked like a white balloon or something,” Diego tells me.

The two boys stopped and stared, whispering their discovery to Ken and Dave. As the boys tried to make out what they looking at, the balloon-shaped object began to sway and bob.

“That really freaked us out because there wasn’t any wind,” Diego remembers. “And then Ken and Dave just took off.”

Before Josh and Diego could react, their friends were already back at the Camry. “I said to Josh, let’s check it out,” Diego tells me, “and he said, let’s do it, so we did.”

Josh and Diego tried to walk quietly through the underbrush but the dried leaf crust made it impossible. Whatever it was they were approaching, it was going to have plenty of warning.

“We got right up to it,” Diego recalls, “and I still didn’t know what it was.” The boys stood within two yards of the strange object and held their glowsticks above them. The object was whitish with an irregular surface, reminding Diego of a mushroom, and its shape was like an oval or a balloon or a melon. 

“I remembered why we were there, and I thought, shit, that’s a head,” Diego tells me. “Then I think the Melon Head finally realized we were there.”

As it dawned on Josh and Diego that they were looking at the back of a bizarre head, the Melon Head turned around. Two empty holes that seemed to only mimic eyes faced the boys and a wide slit opened to reveal a mouth full of brown fibrous gills. A thin root-like body held the head above the ground and two long white stems that ended in crude hands jutted out from the sides. 

“I dropped my glowstick and ran,” Diego tells me. Behind them, the boys could hear a strange shrill cry, barely audible, that seemed to sound more like a rallying call than one of fear.

Diego and Josh ran straight for the Camry. In the woods around them, they could see more of the Melon Heads rising above the forest floor, watching them go.

Diego and Josh rejoined their friends and the four boys scrambled into the Camry. As the car sped off down Wisner Road, the headlights arced across the face of the woods, but from the road all seemed quiet and ordinary.

Dave and Ken barely believed their friends’ strange story, but all four boys had heard the eerie wail of the mushroom Melon Head. “I tried not to talk about what happened,” Diego tells me, “but of course it got around the high school.” A few months of teasing were all the boys had to show for their terrifying encounter.

In the spring of 2008, Diego was away at college in Pennsylvania when he received an email from Josh. Josh had sent along an article detailing an extraordinary find in the woods of Ohio.

An enormous fungus, covering an area approximately two square miles, had been discovered living under the woods along Wisner Road. The amazing fungus was a huge collective organism and thought to be over two-thousand years old. Like any underground fungus, it was capable of producing fruiting bodies, what we know as mushrooms.

“I thought maybe we solved the Melon Head mystery,” Diego tells me, “but now the story is even weirder and gross.”

Could fungal life evolve to include animal-like locomotion? Fungi can grow at prodigious speeds and, after thousands of years, who’s to say what a fungus couldn’t accomplish. The Melon Heads are still out there somewhere haunting the woods of Wisner Road, but it may be that the real mystery lurks below the ground more than it does above.