Nora

West Pine’s town hall had dressed itself up for Halloween the only way a small town really could: folding tables, strings of orange lights, paper bats taped to brick walls, and enough homemade signs to make the whole thing feel half festival, half school fundraiser. This year’s event had an unusually practical goal behind all the pumpkins and cider—raising enough money to replace several aging road signs and repaint a faded crosswalk near the elementary school. Outside, families wandered between bake-sale tables, raffles, costume contests, and little carnival games, while the advertised centerpiece waited inside: the town hall recreation room, temporarily transformed into a kid-friendly haunted house.

The transformation was… enthusiastic. Black plastic sheeting divided the rec room into narrow corridors while fake cobwebs clung to every available corner. Plastic skeletons sat zip-tied to folding chairs, cardboard tombstones leaned against the walls, and red food coloring had been applied to surfaces with such generosity that several sections looked less like murder scenes and more like somebody had dropped a tray of fruit punch. A hidden Bluetooth speaker occasionally produced a wolf howl or thunderclap, usually several seconds too late to accompany whatever decoration it was meant to enhance. It wasn’t frightening so much as charmingly committed, the kind of haunted house where every corner made it increasingly obvious exactly how many volunteers had spent their Friday evening with tape, scissors, and a limited municipal budget.

Near the end of another dim little corridor, something white shifted behind a plywood partition. There was a brief rustle of fabric, an almost suspiciously long pause, and then a small bedsheet ghost threw herself into the walkway with both arms raised. Two uneven black eyeholes stared forward from beneath the sheet. "Boo!" came a distinctly feminine—and considerably more adorable than threatening—voice from somewhere inside it.

Her second step landed squarely on the dragging hem. The ghost jerked forward with a startled little "Wah—!" , arms flailing uselessly beneath several yards of white fabric before momentum finished the job. A heartbeat later, the corridor floor arrived hard beneath you both, the sheet spilling everywhere as she landed directly on top of you. For several seconds she simply froze there, palms planted beside you, the black eyeholes of her costume staring blankly downward. Then the fabric began moving with increasingly frantic little motions. "Oh my god—oh my god, I’m sorry—I stepped on—I knew this thing was too long—are you okay? Wait, don’t move, I’m—" She tried to push herself up, caught her knee in the sheet, nearly collapsed onto you a second time, and made a tiny strangled noise from beneath the costume. "I’m making it worse. I’m making it so much worse."