3 CHILLING Trick Or Treat Horror Stories Animated

📖 Free book of Kettleby Archive files: https://louloubooks.com/horror/free?ref=podcast-chilling-trick-treat

3 CHILLING Trick Or Treat Horror Stories Animated · Kettleby Archive · Episode 25

Who prints a stranger's full name on a card and carries it out into the rain, waiting under the only working streetlight on the street? That is not how the world works. Yet there it was, held out to me under the amber glow of the only working streetlight on Hill Road, block letters, every syllable o

Chapters:
0:00 Your Name on the Card
2:55 Your Name on the Card
5:50 Your Name on the Card
8:11 A House I Barely Knew
11:03 Eleven Minutes Early
14:01 📖 The free book (louloubooks.com/scary)
14:26 The Dry Ghost
17:20 The Dry Ghost
20:05 The Dry Ghost
22:39 Every Door, Every Night

Written and narrated by Alice Kettleby.
Original fiction — names, places and events are invented.

Read the story

Who prints a stranger's full name on a card and carries it out into the rain, waiting under the only working streetlight on the street? That is not how the world works. Yet there it was, held out to me under the amber glow of the only working streetlight on Hill Road, block letters, every syllable of my name, dry and crisp while everything else was soaked. I should have kept walking.

I did not. My name is Jane Harris. I was twenty-four. Warehouse shift, seven until eleven, nine pounds an hour, payday three days out. I had watched the last bus shrink away four minutes before I reached the stop. My phone was at eight percent and dying. Grey hoodie soaked through, warehouse lanyard still round my neck.

My torch was in my hand, and twelve minutes of empty road stood between me and my front door. I had one rule on Hill Road: torch on, headphones off, never stop. One working streetlight, two thirds along. Corner shop shuttered on the left. Low brick wall on the right. Twelve minutes door to door, and nothing had broken that routine in months.

I was still counting on it when the torch beam swung forward and found the figure standing perfectly still under the light, holding a cardboard box in both hands. The box came up the moment my beam hit it. Cheerful voice. Flat, but cheerful. Trick or treat, mate. The box held a small portable charger coiled at the side and a full-size chocolate bar, free, just play the game.

My phone was at eight percent. I actually laughed out loud, at the painted grin, at myself for hesitating. I plugged the charger in and pocketed it before I even decided anything. He stood there, box still extended, grin still painted on, perfectly patient. I tried stepping right.

He matched me again, nothing changing behind that painted grin. Then he said it. Game. We play a game. Same flat, cheerful voice. I told myself he was drunk, someone having a laugh. I even said, alright mate, very good, but I need to get home. Thunder rolled in from somewhere east of town.

Long and low. Coming closer. He said nothing else. Just held the box out. And waited. Why wasn't he moving? He opened the box wider, tilting it toward me. Inside, beneath where the charger had sat, a neat stack of playing-card-sized cards lay face down, identical backs, thin red border, dull cream centre, not one mark to tell them apart.

He said: pick any card, turn it over, choose trick or treat, pick wrong and you hand the charger back. I wanted it over. I reached in. That was the mistake. I pulled a card and turned it over. One side: my full name. Jacob Daniel Harris. Block letters, dry ink, the name on my work contract, not a nickname, not a guess.

The other side I already knew before I looked. One word, printed before I ever reached into that box. The charger in my pocket felt heavier. I looked up at the painted grin. He had not moved. Thunder cracked close, and the rain came harder. Trick. Already decided before I touched it.

The figure clapped once. Slow. Deliberate. Wrong one, same flat cheerful voice. I fanned the remaining cards with my thumb. Every face identical. Every single one already printed TRICK. The game was never a game. So I held the card back out and said, clearly, treat. Refusing his answer.

The figure went still, head tilting, grin unmoving. That pause was the only gap I got. I turned and walked. Not running. Walking. Fast, not running, because something said do not run. The figure followed at exactly my speed, never closing the gap, never falling behind. That was the part that undid me, not the mask, not the name, the precision of it.

Game. We play a game. Then silence. Game. We play a game. A man appeared ahead walking a dog. I opened my mouth to shout. Thunder rolled in from the east, long and close, and swallowed every word before it left my throat. I turned off Hill Road into the narrow service alley behind the corner shop.

No light. I pressed flat against the damp brick and killed the torch. The figure's footsteps reached the alley entrance and stopped. Its shadow stretched long across the wet brickwork, perfectly still. Then headlights swung in from a delivery van, engine loud, and when the light moved on the shadow was gone.

I counted to thirty. Then I stepped back out, charger still warm in my pocket, phone climbing to twenty-two percent. I came out onto the main road at a pace just short of running, eyes forward, when at eleven forty, barely twenty minutes after leaving the stop, my phone buzzed. Unknown number.

A photo. Me, inside that alley, torch off, back flat against the brick. Taken from the alley entrance. Clear enough to read my face and the lanyard round my neck. Caption, plain capitals: YOUR TURN. Three seconds I stared at it. Then I ran. Properly ran, toward town lights, not thinking about direction, just moving toward brightness and noise and other people.

I made it to a takeaway on the main road and called the police from a corner table. Officers found nothing on Hill Road except the box: every card read TRICK, except one face-up card already turned, TREAT. He had decided my ending before I picked one. A motion-activated camera caught the figure, matching my younger brother, sectioned the week before and walked out that same evening.

I still do not know if he knew what he was doing, and I do not know which answer is worse. The white oval mask was filling the kitchen window, eye slits level with mine. That image is where this ends up. My name is Emma. I was nineteen. Now let me go back two hours, to the point where I still thought this night was going to be nothing.

Two sleeping kids, a quiet street, forty pounds cash already in my pocket. I had absolutely no reason to be afraid. Not yet. I arrived at Seabrook Close just after seven. I'm Emma, nineteen, picking up babysitting work wherever I could find it, rent was due Monday and forty pounds cash was already in my pocket.

Ben and Amy were easy. Pasta, one episode of something animated, asleep by eight thirty. The Prices' number rang out. Halloween, quiet street, two sleeping kids. I told myself it was going to be the simplest forty pounds I'd ever earned. Mrs Price had said something before she left that I filed away and forgot.

Their previous babysitter had known the children so well it was almost uncanny, she said, always remembered every little detail. Then she patted her lanyard and laughed: that girl wore the most eye-catching thing, a bright orange lanyard, you could spot her from the end of the street. I smiled. I didn't think about it again.

Forty pounds cash, rent due Monday. I wasn't going anywhere. Just after nine the doorbell rang. I opened the door and there it was on the step. Oversized raincoat, orange trick-or-treat bag, plain white oval mask, no mouth, no nose, just two narrow slits for eyes. What got me first was the stillness.

Most people shift their weight, rock a little. This one did not move at all. Not even its hands. The rain came down around it and it just stood there. It said trick or treat in a voice too flat and too low for the occasion. I started to say we'd run out of sweets. Then it said, tell Ben I said hello.

My face went rigid. I ran through every reason a neighbour might know that name. Then it spoke again, same flat tone, same unhurried delivery: I know what they ate. Correct, down to the pasta. I picked the explanation that let me breathe and held onto it. I should not have done that.

I moved to close the door. The figure tilted its head, very slightly, and said: Amy had fish fingers tonight, didn't she. Correct. Down to the meal. My hand found the door edge and I stepped back at the same moment, catching my hip hard on the hall table. The fruit bowl rattled and an apple rolled onto the floor.

I got the door shut, got the chain on, stood there listening to the apple spin to a stop on the tiles. A neighbour. Just a neighbour. My phone said one bar and six percent. I tried the parents. Both rang out. I thought about calling the police and heard myself trying to explain it: a masked trick-or-treater knew the children's names.

On Halloween. I had a rule with myself about this kind of job: don't be the babysitter who panics and never gets hired again. I was invoking that rule on purpose and I knew it. I put the phone down on the kitchen counter beside the charger and told myself I'd plug it in before the battery went any lower.

That was my mistake. I opened the doorbell camera app the Prices had set up. The footage was there, the figure on the step, the raincoat, the mask. The audio came through as a flat electronic hiss, no words at all. Then I checked the timestamp. The clip started eleven minutes before I had opened the door.

It had been standing there in silence, in the rain, before it ever rang the bell. I locked the kitchen door and checked the back of the house. The gate to the rear garden was standing open, swinging slowly in the rain. I watched through the front window until the figure turned the corner and disappeared into the rain.

I made tea. Sat at the kitchen table with the brass lantern burning, the baby monitor green, and told myself: Halloween prank. Someone trying to scare the babysitter. Twenty minutes went by. I wrapped both hands around the mug and started to believe it. Then I heard the first tap from the back of the house.

Soft. Rhythmic tapping from the kitchen window. I picked up the brass lantern and walked toward it and held it up to the glass. The white oval mask was pressed flat against the pane, filling it entirely, eye slits level with mine. Then it spoke, clearly, through the glass, in that same flat voice: it said one word.

Pasta. Then it used my name. My actual name. I had never said it at the door. Every explanation I had been holding onto came apart at once. I backed into the hall. I backed into the hall doorway. Three percent battery. The children must not go out in that rain and I would not leave them.

I dragged the hall table hard against the front door, then wedged a dining chair under the kitchen door handle. Ben and Amy were still asleep. I got them up quietly, kept my voice flat and calm, and moved them into the lit sitting room. I put myself between them and the hall. Then I used my last three percent to dial nine nine nine and kept the line open.

Officers arrived in under six minutes. They found a listening device behind the kitchen clock, which explained everything: the names, the pasta, Ben's drawing mentioned on the phone that afternoon. The figure was never identified. Three days later I looked up the Prices' previous babysitter.

Reported missing six months before. She always wore a bright orange lanyard. I looked down at the one around my own neck and understood. The children were never the target. I was just wearing the wrong colour. One thing before we carry on. There's a story I've never told on the channel.

A woman was paid four hundred pounds to be filmed while she slept, and on the seventh night the camera caught someone sitting on the edge of her bed. It's in a free book of Kettleby Archive files. Go to LouLouBooks.com slash scary. That's LouLouBooks.com slash scary. I am standing in my own hallway at twelve seventeen in the morning, video call live, staring at my flat door as it swings slowly shut by itself.

Kate's voice is saying go, go now, but my legs have stopped working. That is the moment I want you to hold. I will rewind in a second. But first I need you to understand what it felt like to realise someone had been inside while I was standing right downstairs. My name is Lucy. I was thirty-four, living alone in a first-floor flat on Brook Lane, a converted house with both other flats empty between tenants.

Halloween night, the kind of rain that makes windows look like rivers running sideways, and eleven pounds in my account until Friday. So I stayed in. I noticed muddy child-sized shoe prints on the mat inside the front door, assumed a kid from the previous tenancy had left them, and thought nothing of it. The flat was simple enough to picture.

Front door at the top of a short internal staircase. Big window over the street. Narrow hallway, sitting room, kitchen, one bedroom. I had a rule: torch on my phone whenever I went downstairs, never open the main door to a stranger alone. The catch on the building's main front door had been sticking for a week.

I had reported it twice and nobody had fixed it. Anyone could push it open. Including me, if I needed to run, and including anyone else who decided to walk in. Just before eleven I heard a knock. Very soft. I turned the film up, finished my tea, told myself it was the oak branch out front catching the wind.

Then I noticed the smell: something damp and close, like wet rubber, more contained than rain. I could not place it. Thunder rolled in from the east. I decided it was nothing. I know now that first knock was him, testing whether I would come down, deciding whether to set the costume in place.

That was the first mistake. The knock came again just after midnight. I opened my flat door and looked down the stairs. Standing in the tiled hallway at the bottom was a small figure in a white sheet. It was swaying very slightly, rhythmically, like something rocking itself, wrong for a child, wrong for a person standing still.

But that was not what stopped me. The sheet stopped me. Bone dry. Not a single dark patch on it. Outside, rain was running sideways off every surface. I called down, asking if the child was lost, keeping my voice easy and calm. The figure did not move. Did not answer. I told myself a child this small must have slipped in when the sticky latch gave.

Kids wander on Halloween. Parents lose track for a minute. It was the most normal explanation available to me, so I broke my own rule and started down the stairs to help. I crouched to the figure's height and asked where its parents were. The sheet shifted, like a slow head-tilt.

Then a small gloved hand came up holding a keyring. My keyring. The one I had lost three weeks ago and never found. A quiet voice said: I kept it safe for you. How long had it been watching me to know what was mine? I did not go further. But I did not go back up either. I was watching the keyring, trying to decide, and I did not once turn toward the staircase behind me.

Outside, a second crack of thunder rolled in and I heard nothing from the stairs over it. I know now I should have looked. Something had changed nearby, a faint dry rustling, like plastic shifting against itself, quiet and close, directly behind me on the stairs. I noticed it. I told myself it was the draught through the sticking front door.

I did not move. Every instinct said go back upstairs and lock your door. But I could not make myself leave a child alone in that hallway at midnight, so I stayed on the bottom stair, phone torch on, talking softly, asking its name. And then, from inside the empty flat to my left, I heard it.

One slow creak of a floorboard. A weight settling. Then silence. Then one more creak, deliberate this time, heavier, like something shifting its footing. Rain hammered the window above the door and almost covered it completely. Almost. The small figure turned, pushed the sticky front door open without effort and walked out into the rain and was gone.

I stood in the hall breathing. Rain hammered the step outside. For one full moment I thought it was over, thought I would laugh about this tomorrow. Then I looked up. The door to the empty flat on my left was standing two inches open. It had been shut when I came downstairs. I was certain of it.

At twelve seventeen I heard it. One slow footstep on the top stair above me. A pause, long enough to feel intentional. Then my own flat door clicked shut. I was still holding the torch when I heard it. I had left the door open when I came down. I had not heard anyone climb those stairs.

In that pause I understood exactly what had happened and exactly what the click meant. That door was now between me and the only way back up. I killed the torch and opened a video call with Kate, my closest friend, the one person I knew would pick up at that hour, hands shaking hard. I held the camera up so she could see the hallway behind me.

Then I said out loud, clearly, for anyone listening in that building: this call is recording and two people already have this address. I said it like it was true. I needed whoever was standing up there in the dark to believe every word of it. Kate kept the call open and told me to stay on the line and keep talking.

So I did. I described every sound, every door, every shadow at the top of those stairs. Not for her. For whoever was standing up there in the dark listening. Two minutes passed and nothing moved. Then the creak in the empty flat went very still, and the silence that followed was worse than any sound I had heard that night.

The creak in the empty flat went silent. I counted three full minutes on the call, Kate's voice low and steady, telling me to go. Then I walked straight out the front door into the rain and did not stop. No coat. No keys. I drove to the police station with soaking hair and shaking hands.

Officers went back and found the empty flat unlocked, the back window forced from outside, and a set of rubber overshoes discarded behind the boiler. Police told me the next morning that a man had been sleeping in that empty flat for at least four days, using the sticky latch as a way in. He wore rubber overshoes over the costume feet to stay dry, which explained why the sheet was bone dry and why the smell had been wet rubber. The shoes were child-sized so the prints on the mat would look innocent.

They also found the keyring inside the empty flat. I still do one thing now that I never did before. Every night, in every place I stay, I walk every room and check every door, open or shut, exactly the way I left it. Quietly. Methodically. I do not stop until I am certain. The feet.

Bone dry. And once, just once, I found a door open that I was certain I had shut.