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On Halloween night in 1989, a cab driver made four hundred and eleven dollars, still his record after thirty-one years behind the wheel. A hundred and fifty of it came from one man, in three different costumes, going to the same address every time.

In this original horror story, a divorced father looks back on the best night a small-town cab ever has: every lodge’s Halloween dance letting out drunk, his daughter Shay’s braces due by the fifteenth, and Bernice on the night radio calling every driver “sugar.” His dashboard holds fourteen years of things nobody came back for: a pink retainer, a rosary, one roller skate, false eyelashes glued to the speedometer. At five past nine, a monk in a brown robe climbs into the back with his hood pulled so low there’s no face, asks for the end of Ferrier Road, where the dairy has been dead since the seventies, and tips him ten dollars. Two hours later, a gorilla from a different party asks for the same address. Same dry cough. Same scuffed brown wingtips.

A slow-burn, unsettling tale of Halloween night, a small-town cab, and a passenger who keeps coming back. No gore, no jump scares, just quiet dread that stays with you.

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📺 Watch the illustrated version on YouTube: Harrowing Tales

All Harrowing Tales stories are original works of fiction.

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

Every kid on Larch Street knew the rule for the empty house at the dead end: you could knock on the door on a dare, but you knocked twice and you walked away, never three times. When he asked why, the older boy next door said it like it was obvious: “Three’s for the people who live there.”

In this original horror story, a man looks back on Halloween 1978, when he was eleven and would have followed Ricky Thale, fifteen, off a roof. Ricky called him Squirt, taught him to spit and to whistle through a blade of grass, and gave him all his root beer barrels every Halloween because they tasted like a cough. That year Ricky made him an offer: knock on the house at the end of Larch Street, and he could come trick-or-treating with the big kids out past the water tower, where the new houses gave out full-size bars. The house had stood empty since 1959, every ground-floor window boarded from the inside. So at seven o’clock, in a ghost costume with eyeholes cut too far apart, he climbed onto the porch and knocked twice.

A slow-burn, unsettling tale of a neighborhood haunted house, a Halloween dare, and the older boy he looked up to. No gore, no jump scares, just quiet dread that stays with you.

🎧 If this one got under your skin, follow Harrowing Tales for new scary stories every week, and leave a rating to help other listeners find the show.

📺 Watch the illustrated version on YouTube: Harrowing Tales

All Harrowing Tales stories are original works of fiction.

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

He works the overnight stock shift alone at a Halloween pop-up store in a dying mall, nine weeks a year, locked in from outside until morning. It’s ten past three, and he’s sitting on the floor in the costume aisle, being very, very quiet.

In this original horror story, a twenty-four-year-old writes from inside his shift at a seasonal Halloween store, in an empty shoe-store unit in the dead east wing of the mall. If he runs overnights clean, he gets a full-time job in January, and a full-time job comes with a dental plan. His company is Gloria, a six-foot animatronic witch who’s switched off and a great listener; his grandmother, who calls at a quarter past two to ask about the knife that cuts through a shoe; and Lonnie, the mall guard, who brings him coffee with sugar every night at two-thirty no matter how many times he’s told. He checks all eight security cameras on the hour, and every night he eats at one in the only spot none of them can see. Then the eight-foot reaper he parked by the register turns up in aisle three, facing the stockroom door.

A slow-burn, unsettling tale of a Halloween store after hours, a locked gate, and a security camera app that shows how many people are watching. No gore, no jump scares, just quiet dread that stays with you.

🎧 If this one got under your skin, follow Harrowing Tales for new scary stories every week, and leave a rating to help other listeners find the show.

📺 Watch the illustrated version on YouTube: Harrowing Tales

All Harrowing Tales stories are original works of fiction.