No one in Maple Bend ever trick-or-treated past the old house on Wren Hollow Road.
It wasn’t haunted, not exactly — but every Halloween, the yard filled with glowing pumpkins. Hundreds of them.
Each one was carved differently: smiling, scowling, weeping, whispering — their faces lit by a steady orange glow that didn’t flicker like candles should. No one ever saw who put them there. They just appeared, sometime after sundown on October 31st, and vanished by morning.
The grown-ups said it was a prank, or a clever artist’s tradition. The kids said it was a curse.
This year, thirteen-year-old Ellie Granger decided to find out the truth.
Ellie wasn’t scared, not really. She’d always liked spooky things — her bedroom was full of fake cobwebs and paper bats, and her dad said she had “a touch of the macabre.” But the Pumpkin House was something else.
Her flashlight beam wobbled as she crept up the cracked front walk, her sneakers crunching leaves that smelled of rot and rain. The gate, half-broken and crooked, groaned when she pushed it open.
“Hello?” she whispered.
Nothing. Just wind through the dry grass.
Then — a light flickered.
A pumpkin near the porch blinked awake, its jagged grin stretching wider. Then another. And another. Within seconds, the entire yard was alive with orange light — a sea of grinning, grimacing faces.
Ellie froze. The air smelled like burnt sugar and smoke.
From inside the house came a slow creak of floorboards.
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