Scary stories from the Reader staff

The Hound of the Hagavilles

By Zach Hagadone
Reader Staff

Growing up in the hinterlands of Bonner County, there was no reason to lean into decorating the front of our house for Halloween. We carved pumpkins, of course, but no one trick-or-treated in our neighborhood of unlighted dirt roads, and there was no middle ground for knocks at the door after dark: either we knew the caller, and they were welcome, or we didn’t, and they were more than likely not.

I haven’t lived in the country since before the turn of the 21st century, and so my Halloweens have been much more urban — especially now, as my kids are in their preteen years; we live in town, and we’ve collected a bunch of those fake skeletons that you can buy in the shape of cats, fish, scorpions, bats, even octopuses (which famously don’t have bones). 

Among these decorations is a howling hellhound that has stood sentinel in our yard for numerous Halloweens, bellowing at passersby until it got too annoying and we tore out the mechanism that triggered its ominous moans.

This year, it’s been sitting between two plastic human skeletons themed as “hillbillies” — though the guy looks an awful lot like me. It has also been silent since (as I mentioned) we de-howled it. 

Or so we thought.

On a recent morning, I stepped outside in the predawn darkness to admire the pouring rain, and, as I stood on my back porch, wearing nothing but a bathrobe and slippers, the hound suddenly sounded off. 

Sitting alone — with no foot or vehicle traffic to trigger it — the damned dog started raging into the void with its eyes blazing red and its plastic-bone jaw chattering in bestial rage. 

I leapt from the porch and slip-skid through the muddy grass to stop its bestial yowls before it woke up the neighbors. 

After gathering it in my arms, the hound continued its baleful cacophony all the way into the garage, where I threw it into a corner and stood, drenched in my morning garb and trying to imagine how this hunk of Spirit Halloween junk had suddenly come to life.

I still don’t know, and I’m not going to ask any questions about its accursed anatomy.

A mother’s protection

By Soncirey Mitchell
Reader Staff

My dad likes to tell stories of my great-grandmother, Mary, one of many women in the Mitchell family with psychic powers. Mary could spiritually tether herself to others — living or dead — across long distances. This connection manifested physically and emotionally, allowing her to feel a person’s pain, sense when they were in danger and potentially alleviate their suffering.

Once, when my dad was young, he remembers running from the kitchen to answer a frantic knock at the door. Mary rushed in, grabbing him by the hand and dragging him into the living room, all the while shrieking for the rest of the family to join them quickly.

“Paul is in danger. Paul is going to die,” she kept saying.

Her son, Paul, was a pilot. He’d left for work several hours earlier on a routine flight in his small Cessna. Mary gathered the family in a circle and instructed them to close their eyes and will Paul to live. My dad looked outside, wondering how his father could be on the cusp of death on such a beautiful, sunny day.

Minutes passed before Mary announced he was safe.

Paul returned home several hours later, shaken but alive. Earlier that afternoon, he said, his plane had been overtaken by the thickest cloud bank he’d ever seen. He couldn’t escape it, no matter how high or low he flew. Navigating by his instruments alone, he turned the plane toward home — until his altimeter, compass and radio stopped working. He was truly flying blind.

Paul began to ease the plane down, hoping to find a safe place to land, when the Cessna burst out of the clouds and into the sunshine.

He was face to face with the side of a mountain.

He jerked the plane up and sideways, narrowly avoiding an old-growth forest that would surely have skewered him alive. Mary spared him that gruesome fate — for a while. After her passing, Paul found himself in a helicopter leaking fuel above a familiar mountain. He wrestled with the machine until the end, rotating the fuselage so his passengers avoided the brunt of the crash.

Paul bled out, run through by unforgiving branches.

‘They’re just playing around’

By Ben Olson
Reader Staff

Growing up, my summers were punctuated by road trips with my father as he drove thousands of miles across the country to visit baseball stadiums that were slated to be demolished.

One year, when I was about 7 or 8 years old, we were in Chicago to watch his beloved Cubs at Wrigley Field. As a side adventure, even though he was no White Sox fan, my dad wanted us to see Comiskey Park, which was to be torn down the year after.

Always a cheapskate, my dad parked clear across town in some residential neighborhood to avoid having to pay for a parking garage. He walked us kids down streets that were pretty rough, weaving through crackheads and burned-out vehicles on blocks. 

We safely arrived at Comiskey Park and watched the White Sox play one of their last dozen games before the wrecking ball took it down later that year.

Walking back to the car through the same rough neighborhoods, we came to a car with people gathered around it. There was some kind of commotion. As we walked past, I looked over and saw something that still haunts me to this day. There were two people hanging out of each front window, arms over their heads and dragging on the ground. The man hanging out of the passenger side window had his eyes open, but there wasn’t any life in those eyes. 

I saw blood dripping down his chest and pooling onto the pavement below. A woman held her head shrieking in terror. There were no police anywhere to be seen.

“Dad, what’s going on?” I remember asking.

He kept trying to cover our eyes, rushing us past the scene, telling us kids, “They’re just playing around, they’re just acting. It’s just a skit. C’mon, let’s get to the car.”

I accepted his answer for a couple years, until I thought about it when I was older. I realize now that we had just walked past a double murder on the streets of Chicago and it had likely just happened since the cops weren’t even on the scene yet.

To this day, if I close my eyes tight enough, I can still see that macabre scene with those two lifeless bodies dangling out of the side windows of the car, blood pooled beneath them and their dead eyes looking right into my own, beckoning me to come closer.