Every small town Halloween story I ever heard as a kid was about our own town, and every one of them was about Walter Pell. In Halden, Vermont, every porch lights a jack-o’-lantern on October 31st so Walter can find his way home. My family was the only one that didn’t, and the town made sure we noticed. Most jack o lantern stories are about a trick or a curse. This one is about a debt.
We moved to Halden in the summer of 1994. My dad took a job as the science teacher at the regional high school. My mom did the books for a sugarhouse. I was eleven. The town had about nine hundred people, one general store, a white church, a covered bridge, and a closed wool mill on the river that the kids called the Castle.
Within a week, I knew everybody’s nickname. There was Stub Brennan, who ran the general store and was missing the end of his thumb. There was Aunt Lou, who wasn’t anybody’s aunt and ran the post office out of the front room of her house. And there was Mr. Ashby. Everybody called him Mister, even the grown-ups. He was in his sixties then. He’d owned the mill before it closed. He played Santa at the church every December and fixed people’s furnaces for free. If Halden had a favorite person, it was Mr. Ashby.
The Jack-O’-Lantern Rule
In October, Aunt Lou handed my mom a flyer with the electric bill. It said, in old typewriter letters: “Remember Walter. Light your lantern on the 31st.”
Mom asked her what it meant. Aunt Lou told her the story the way you’d tell somebody where the dump was.
In 1958, a nineteen-year-old named Walter Pell worked at the mill. On Halloween night he walked home from his shift along the river road and never got there. They searched for a week. They dragged the river. They found one of his work boots on the bank below the covered bridge, and nothing else.
The next Halloween, his mother put a lit jack-o’-lantern on her porch “so Walter can find his way home.” By the year after, half the town did it. By the time we got there, it was every house. Every single one. You’d drive down Route 12 on Halloween night and the whole valley glowed orange.
My dad thought it was morbid. He wasn’t a mean person, he just didn’t like being told what to do by a flyer. He said we’d hand out candy like normal people and leave the dead alone.
So in 1994, our porch was the only dark one on Mill Street.
Nobody said anything. That was the strange part. Kids still came for candy. Stub Brennan still waved at my dad at the store. But when I walked to the bus stop on November 1st, there was a jack-o’-lantern sitting on our top step.
Not one of ours. We hadn’t carved any. It was a big, pale field pumpkin, carved with a plain triangle face, and the candle inside had burned all the way down. The wax was still soft.
Dad said it was a neighbor making a point. He put it in the compost. That was that.
Two Pumpkins, Then the Kitchen
In 1995, Dad still wouldn’t light one. Mom asked him to, quietly, at dinner. He said no.
On November 1st there were two pumpkins on our step. Both burned down. One of them had a face like the year before. The other one had numbers carved into it instead of a face. A one and a nine and a five and an eight.
1958.
Dad called the town constable, a big quiet man named Harlan Dufresne. Harlan came out, looked at the pumpkins, and told my dad that if it was him, he’d just light the dang lantern next year. Then he left. He didn’t take a report.
That was the first time I noticed how people in Halden talked about Walter. They didn’t say he drowned. They didn’t say he ran off. They said, “Walter didn’t come home.” Like it was the weather. Like nobody had anything to do with it.
In 1996, my dad gave in a little. He didn’t carve one, but he bought a plastic light-up pumpkin from the Ames in Rutland and put it on the porch. He said that was as far as he’d go.
When we came downstairs on November 1st, there was a real jack-o’-lantern on our kitchen table.
Not the porch. The kitchen table. Inside our house. The candle was still lit. The whole kitchen smelled like scorched pumpkin and candle smoke. The plastic one was still out on the porch, unplugged.
We never locked our doors. Nobody in Halden did. Mom stood in the kitchen doorway in her robe with her hand over her mouth. Dad walked over, blew the candle out, and didn’t say anything for a long time.
Then he said, “Who has a reason?”
Nobody answered him. I don’t think he expected anyone to.
In 1997 we lit a real jack-o’-lantern on the porch. Dad carved it himself. We never found another pumpkin that we didn’t put there.
What My Mother Told Me About This Small Town Halloween Story
I left for college in 2001 and didn’t think about Walter Pell much after that. It became one of those things you tell people at parties. My weird little Vermont town and its weird little Halloween rule.
Then in 2019, Mr. Ashby died. He was eighty-five. Mom called to tell me, and she sounded off. I asked her if she was okay, and she said, “I need to tell you something your father never wanted you to know.”
She told me that in the spring of 1997, the spring after the pumpkin on our kitchen table, my dad went to the town office to look up the old records on the mill. He was a science teacher. He liked to know how things worked. He found the fire marshal’s report from October 1958.
Two days before Walter Pell disappeared, there had been a fire in the mill’s dye house. It did a lot of damage. The report listed the cause as “suspected arson.” It named one suspect.
Walter Pell.
Dad got curious. He started asking older people about it, carefully, the way he’d ask about the Revolutionary War. Most of them changed the subject. But Aunt Lou had a few glasses of wine at a church supper and told him what her husband had told her before he died.
Walter didn’t set the fire. Everybody at the mill knew who did. The owner’s son was twenty-two, and he’d been drinking in the dye house with a lantern. He knocked it over. When the fire marshal came, he said he’d seen Walter in there.
Walter was poor. His father was dead. His mother took in washing. The owner’s son was the owner’s son.
Aunt Lou said that on Halloween night, some men from the mill met Walter on the river road to “talk to him about what he’d done.” She said they only meant to scare him into leaving town. She said that’s what her husband told her, and she’d always believed him, mostly.
Walter never got home.
The owner’s son was Mr. Ashby. He took over the mill in 1963. He played Santa every Christmas for forty years. He fixed people’s furnaces for free.
And according to Aunt Lou, he’s the one who bought the first pumpkins for Walter’s mother every October. He paid for the flyers. He drove around on the night of the 31st to make sure every porch was lit. Every porch in town.
She said he couldn’t stand to see a dark one.
I asked my mom why Dad never told me. She said he didn’t want me to grow up in a town where I knew that. She said he wasn’t sure he believed it himself. She said he lit the lantern every year after that anyway, and he never once said the word “Walter” out loud.
I asked her one more thing. Were there any pumpkins on her porch that morning? The morning after Mr. Ashby’s funeral?
She was quiet for a while. Then she said there was one. On the top step. Carved with a plain triangle face. Burned all the way down.
Mr. Ashby had been dead for nine days.
Halden still lights the lanterns. I went back last October. Every porch glowed. I stood on the covered bridge at midnight and looked down the valley and I couldn’t decide what they were for anymore. To bring Walter home, like his mother wanted. Or to show the man who took him that the whole town still remembered.
I guess it depends on who’s looking at them.
For more halloween pumpkin stories and quiet towns with loud secrets, read the neighborhood watch horror story about a captain’s notebook, a small town urban legend that the sheriff made up on purpose, or a scarecrow horror story from a county road in Iowa.
Does your town have a small town Halloween story?
Some towns have a Halloween rule that nobody explains. If your hometown has a jack-o’-lantern legend, a small town Halloween story, or any halloween urban legend that the old-timers still won’t talk about, share it in the comments below.
How scary was it?
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