A Letter From Next Halloween

I wrote this story in 2016 and it's been heavily re-edited for this episode, as I now know how to use commas in a slightly less annoying way. But it is still very much a time capsule of my writing back then. It's also a bit of a time capsule of what I would call the only sort of paranormal experience I've ever had as it's (very loosely) inspired by real events. We wanted to air this story for our Halloween special because I'll be telling the real story that inspired it on a friend's podcast soon. 

Transcript

You’d found a lot of surprises getting ready for the move, most of them in your garage. You didn’t have a basement so the garage had become the place to keep anything you weren’t ready to throw away yet. And after a decade in the same house, you’d had enough time to forget about some of the surprises in there. The ghosts of your old hobbies lived in the garage; a box of clay and sculpting tools, stickers and colorful cardstock, a cheap guitar with a broken string. The further you got, the farther back you went in your life, with the far back corner having the oldest prize of all; a box of your old middle school and high-school yearbooks. You didn't think you even still had those, so you sit for just a moment in the dusty heat and you reminisce. You start with 6th grade and you go through the group photos first, and you're shocked that you've forgotten so many names. You recognize the faces though, some good memories, some bad, some just cringey before you work your way up to the ultimate cringe. You find the courage to flip to your 6th grade headshot, bracing yourself for, well braces and shaggy hair that covered just one eye, but it's not there. You think maybe there was a misprint or they accidentally put your headshot out of order so when you can't find it you pull out 7th grade. You remember your hair being even worse there, almost a mullet, but that picture is missing too. You frantically flip through 8th grade, freshman year, but you find nothing. For sophomore and junior year you scour the group photos because you remember vaguely which ones you were caught in, but you've been erased from them all. Finally you pull out senior year. You had to do a whole photoshoot for this, your parents even hired a real photographer, this one has to be here. You take your time flipping through, you remember more names for this year, faces are more familiar, you know you've looked through this before. But you get to that last page and there's just a black square where you should be. And written underneath, instead of your name is: The Podcast Inside Your House. 

Every weekend my dog wakes me up at seven AM sharp, he doesn’t understand the concept of sleeping in. Our morning routine usually runs like clockwork, no matter what day, no matter the weather. I take around five minutes to throw on some pants and find my glasses, and another five to get Peanut ready. Every day we take the same route, on a community path that runs through a little wooded park behind my block. The walk itself takes ten minutes and we are back at the house by roughly 7:20. Sometimes on weekdays it's a bit longer because we need to go around other dogs or people. But on weekends, since nobody else wants to be out that early, it usually runs smoothly.

But on Halloween morning, things were different. Only by a matter of seconds, but that was enough.  

That morning, as soon as we got into the woods, there was a man walking the opposite way. Since I couldn’t tell which way he was going to go, I decided to play it safe and pick Peanut up so he wouldn’t try to run at him. He started barking and tried in vain to wriggle out of my grip as the man got closer, but I held him firm. He was small even for a dachshund but he never seemed to know that. We’d see coyotes on the walk sometimes, and he tried even harder to fight those. As the man passed, I stepped into the woods a bit and put on an apologetic smile. 

The man called Peanut cute, despite the snarling, but he did pick up his leisurely pace after he passed us. I set Peanut down again, and we started walking. This diversion had thrown us off by less than two minutes but I felt irrationally irritated by the setback. I just wanted to get home and get back to sleep as soon as possible.

I was just starting to zone out, getting lost in looking at the fall leaves when I saw something blow across the path just ahead of us. It stood out as pure white against the browns and reds and oranges of the foliage. The leaves all scampered across the path, hitting enough small bumps to give the illusion they were little creatures running across the pavement. They were organic, they belonged, but this did not. It moved in a straight neat line across the ground flipping occasionally until it crossed to the other side and got caught in a bush.

I walked up to it, and Peanut lunged at it like he was going after a squirrel. Just before he hit the bush, the wind knocked it out and it flew into a small tree, wrapping around the base. I jumped over to it and snatched it just as it was about to dislodge.

The envelope crinkled ever so slightly when I grabbed it, but otherwise, it looked brand new. I registered that the handwriting looked a bit familiar in the half a second before I read the address. It was meant to go to somewhere in Canada which didn’t mean anything to me, but the name listed was mine. First, last, and middle initial.

I didn’t know what to think about it, but I felt uneasy and decided I didn’t want to look at it anymore until I was out of the woods. I walked as quickly as I could, and I was thankful to have Peanut at my side.

The minute I got home and locked the door I flipped over the letter again. The address it was from didn’t look familiar, but the sender had the same last name as my girlfriend Ellie, which was Mason. I looked at the name it was addressed to, half hoping that it would be something else, that I'd misread,  but my name still stared back at me.

At that point I wasn’t really creeped out, I figured it was just some weird junk mail, a mistake, or even a prank. But that line of thinking fell apart quickly the more I dissected it. The fact that I just happened to find it in the woods, blowing in the wind, and not in my mailbox was strange. The fact that I wouldn't have found it had I not thrown off my routine by a minute or two was stranger. Not to mention that it wasn’t even sent to this address. But I was still convinced this was some kind of strange coincidence until I opened the letter. Here is what it said:

Dear Sam,

We really hope that this letter reaches you okay. It took us a long time to find where you had gone. We just wanted to reach out and let you know that we all miss you. Your parents miss you too, you’re all they have left. Please just write back and let us know you are okay. We can’t imagine what you’re going through, but we lost our little girl too and we know you shouldn’t be dealing with this alone.

The signature was from the same woman who sent it; Barbara Mason so I decided to text Ellie and ask her, just out of curiosity if she had any relatives with that name. Surely this was some kind of weird coincidence, and I could rest easy once I found out this woman wasn’t related to her. Plus it sounded like this Sam was an only child, and I had two sisters.

When my roommate, Max, woke up I showed him the letter and joked about how we were totally going to get murdered. I mean what other kind of response are you supposed to have to finding something that weird? He thought it was strange as well, but we couldn’t really come up with an explanation so we just dropped it.

Ellie texted me a few hours later and said that Barbara was her mother’s name. She'd probably told me that, but we hadn't been together very long and I hadn't even met her parents yet. She asked why I wanted to know, and I didn’t know what to tell her, so I just told her I would explain it later.

That night we were going to have a cheesy Halloween horror movie marathon so I spent the morning just kind of lying around browsing the internet. I kept wanting to look over the letter, to obsess about it, but I managed to hold off until a few hours before everyone got there. I read through it again and spent some time examining the signature. I was thinking I could ask Ellie when she got over if it matched her mother’s handwriting. That’s when I noticed the date. I don’t know how I missed it but it was signed October 27th, which made sense, it took a few days to get here, but the year said 2017; it was dated one year into the future. I felt my heart speed up just a bit, this whole thing was just bizarre.

The next hour went by quickly as I frantically cleaned up my living room. It was just Ellie and my sisters, Holly and Hannah coming over, but I still didn’t want to have dirty socks everywhere. Everyone arrived more or less on time and each time I opened the door, I kept telling myself that when everyone got here, I would show them the letter. 

We put on the first movie and settled in.  Peanut begrudgingly joined us. We had put him in a hot dog costume and he didn’t seem too excited about it. Everyone was having fun, and I kept telling myself there was really no point in killing the party just to show them something that I was probably overthinking. About twenty minutes in we heard our first knock at the door. My older sister, Hannah was closest, but I jumped up before she could move.

“I’ll get it!” I looked through the peephole and saw a group of princesses with a tired-looking dad behind them. I opened the door and Peanut ran over so they could fawn over how cute he looked in his costume. As I handed out candy I felt silly for even looking through the peephole, with so many kids, and parents, and cops patrolling, Halloween was probably one of the safest nights of the year.

After a few trick-or-treaters my anxiety had calmed somewhat, and I let my sisters hand out candy and ask about costumes. We moved on from a cheesy summer camp slasher to a home invasion one, and I found myself thinking about the letter again.

I watched the couple on screen open their door to one of the murderers, who was feigning trouble with his car. Of course, we all berated them for being so stupid, but it gave me an idea that I just could not shake off. Halloween was the only day of the year when people willingly opened their doors to dozens of strangers. It would be so easy to knock on someone’s door pretending to be a parent looking for their kid, then pull out a gun. 

I kept running through increasingly elaborate scenarios in my head until the doorbell rang again. I jumped up to get it and peered out the peephole. It was a dad chaperoning his son who was dressed up as some superhero I didn’t recognize. Certainly, nothing to be afraid of, but I couldn’t get rid of a deep sense of dread that something could go terribly wrong if I opened the door. I watched them walk away, then mumbled something about those darn kids ding dong ditching because I didn’t want to explain to everyone about how paranoid I was being. I turned out the porch light, hoping that our meager attempt at pumpkin carvings on the porch wouldn’t still draw people in.

It seemed to work, it was almost twenty minutes until the next ring of the doorbell. The husband on-screen had just been murdered, so Ellie had a death grip on my arm, and I had to quickly untangle myself to get up before Holly could get to the door first. 

I peered out the peephole and felt the temperature in the room plummet. Something about these trick-or-treaters was off. The sun had gone down completely and without the porch light on, it was hard to get a good look at them. The kid was clearly a bit older, standing at just over five feet, but she had a raggedy Ann mask on, so I couldn’t tell for sure. Her hair was pulled into rough pig tails, and the smile painted on the mask was far more intricate than the rest of it. It had detailed lips and each tooth was individually outlined. Her dad towered over her, and he had also decided to go with the doll theme. Instead of raggedy Ann, he had on a baby doll mask that was too small for his face, so you could see his beard sticking out at the bottom. I’m sure it would have looked hilarious in better lighting, and not in front of my house at night. 

Now, I know had already made several mistakes, ignoring the letter, not telling everyone about it, and never asking Ellie to look at the signature. But I was not about to do something as stupid as open that door when my gut was telling me not to. I kept my eye trained on them, not daring to so much as blink. The dad stepped up and knocked on the door, much harder than was necessary. Everyone looked over and I motioned for them to be quiet. When I looked back they were walking away, but Raggedy Ann looked back for just a second, like she could sense I was watching her, and she waved.

“What was that?” Hannah asked. She was smiling a little, and I immediately felt silly for being so creeped out.

“Just some teenagers, they looked kinda sketchy.” I slipped next to Ellie again and pulled her over to me, trying my best not to act like I was the one who needed comfort this time. Max was trying to catch my eye from the other couch while I was doing my best to ignore it. He wanted me to talk about the letter, but I was far too creeped out to do that now.

The rest of the night passed without incident. Our next-door neighbors were having a party and being incredibly loud, so we turned up the volume full blast for the last movie. Our houses were cheaply made with basically no yard between them, so I kept hoping someone else might file a noise complaint and shut down the party before it was time to go to bed.

Since it was a holiday I guess everyone decided to let it slide. I went to sleep to the sound of drunken yelling and obnoxious bass music. I kept waking up and checking on Ellie and each time I woke up, I tightened my grip around her waist, irrationally worried that she would be gone the next time I opened my eyes. The last time I awoke, the music had stopped and the birds were singing. I went to sleep again feeling better, and watching the first rays of sunlight dance across Ellie’s face.

Then the next thing I knew I was being shaken awake by Ellie. Red and blue flashing lights now shone in stripes through the blinds. Ellie pointed wordlessly out the window and I nudged the blinds apart enough to look through.

There were ambulances and police cars in front of our house. It looked like they were concentrated on our next-door neighbor's house but I couldn’t be sure. We hastily got dressed and raced to the front door. We had never been very close with the neighbors. The mom was a bit stuck up and didn’t enjoy living next to college kids, so we didn’t really talk but I knew they had three kids living there. I couldn’t imagine something happening to them.

We burst out the front door just as an officer was walking up our steps. He flinched and instinctively put his hand on his gun.

“Sorry! Sorry, we just woke up and we saw all this, and we wanted to know what was happening.” Ellie stuttered a bit as the door of the house next door swung open. They were carrying out a body bag.

“Why don’t we go inside so we can talk?” The officer's face softened and he reached out a hand. He guided us inside. What he told us next has been mixed together in my mind with details that I would have to learn from the news and the internet over the next few days.

The family next door had been slaughtered, there’s no other way to describe what happened to them. The officer spared us the details but the internet did not. They were butchered, well except for the husband. These particular killers always liked to leave one witness traumatized but alive, so the husband was off in a psych ward somewhere. This had all happened just a few yards away from where we had been sleeping. Some of the screams that we had mistaken for drunken yelling that night had undoubtedly been the families’ cries for help.

The neighbors next to them had apparently even called the police, but a noise complaint on Halloween wasn't treated as an emergency and the killers had escaped by mere minutes. If they had just stayed a minute longer, or perhaps if they had picked a house where the neighbors would have called sooner, they would be in jail. But things had worked out perfectly to allow them enough time to escape.

After the police left I asked my roommate about the letter. I was half worried he had been pranking me, so I didn’t want to say anything in a report until I found out for sure it wasn't him. But to my surprise, Max insisted that he had no idea what I was talking about, and he started to get pissed off when I kept asking about it. It was like he had no memory of me ever showing him the letter. 

Eventually, I dropped it, we had enough to deal with. Max and I reconciled and made sure we each had somewhere else to stay for a few days, not wanting to be so close to the scene of the crime. I had almost managed to force myself to forget about the letter when I heard a knock at the door.

Max had already left for the night, so I was completely alone. Peanut ran right up to the door and started barking like crazy. I had 911 ready to dial, and I grabbed a knife from the kitchen before I even looked at the peephole. 

It was a familiar face but I couldn't place where I knew him from. He was in a suit, holding a briefcase, and my first instinct was that he was a Jehovah's Witness or something.  But why did I know him? He knocked again, lightly, and on the third knock, the door flew open, throwing me to the floor. I landed straight on my back, and all I could think about for a few seconds was how to breathe again. 

“Hello Sam,” the man said. Peanut latched onto his leg and he just smiled and reached down to pat him on the head. “It’s good to see you again.”

“Get out!” I tried my best to sound intimidating as I sat up, but my voice was shaking. I grabbed my phone, ready to call the cops. But as soon as I touched it, a spiderweb of cracks crawled across the surface.

“You don’t want to do that.” He reached out a hand and grabbed my arm, pulling me to my feet. “I just want to talk.” He shoved me into a chair and took a seat at the table with me. That’s when it clicked. He was the man from the woods on Halloween morning.

Peanut had bit into another part of his leg, and blood was starting to pool on the floor, but the man acted like he didn’t even notice. The kitchen knife was on the other side of the room, my mace was on the counter, and I definitely couldn’t take him in a fistfight. I didn’t know what to do so I just watched him open his briefcase.

“Now, it’s rather unfortunate about your neighbors. But I think we can agree that you and your friends are very blessed that you are all perfectly fine.” He pulled out a series of papers that all had my signature on them. He spread them all out on the table, and it felt absurd like I was buying a car or something. All of them had my name in red ink, aside from a blank line at the bottom of the last one. “Now, I need to ask you a few questions.”

“Who are you?” I asked, finally working up the courage to say something.

“I’ll ask the questions” Up until then he had been incredibly cheerful, but irritation had started creeping into his voice. “Now, I’m sure you've read up on all of the gory details of your neighbors' tragic murder, so I want you to tell me; are you glad it was them, and not you?”

I weighed my options for a minute but decided the best thing to do would be to just give him the answers he wanted. “Yes, I’m glad it wasn’t us.”

“Now I would wager that if your loved ones had been the ones killed, you would be willing to do anything, trade anything to get them back. Even if it meant hurting someone else.” He smiled at me again, and Peanut tried biting his other leg, but it didn’t do anything. “Would you agree with all that?”

“Yes.” I said, trying to keep my voice even. I felt realization clawing at me, and I stopped looking around for something to fight him with.

“Excellent, I mean you already have agreed to it,” he gestured at all of the papers, “but I wanted to give you a chance to change your mind. Because you can if you want to, just say the word and I’ll rip all of this up, and things can go back to the way they were meant to be.” 

I was silent. 

“Great, so if you are satisfied with how last night turned out, all I need is your signature right here.” He pointed to that last blank line.

I picked up the pen and signed without hesitation.

“Pleasure doing business with you.” He packed up his suitcase, and I stared at the table defeated.

Just as he was about to close the door I yelled out “Wait! What did I give you? When do I have to pay you?”

“Oh I’m not worried about a few decades,” he said.  “You can have the rest of your life. As for the what, don’t worry about that. You’ll find out when you die.” With that, he winked and closed the door. 

Thank you for tuning in to this episode of the podcast inside your house! To hear every tale of terror as they are released, subscribe to our show on your podcast app or on Youtube or follow us on Facebook and X. AndUntil Next Time: Remember to always keep an eye out when you’re walking down memory lane, you never know what else might be walking back the other way.