Everyone who works in stores has retail horror stories about customers. Mine is about the Halloween pop-up where I worked overnight restock in 2023, and the motion-sensor props that kept going off after we locked the doors. I’ve heard a lot of scary night time stories from people who work closing shifts. This is mine.
The store was in an old mattress outlet in a strip mall in Mesquite, Texas. You know the kind of place. It opens in August, sells costumes and fog machines and animatronic zombies for two months, and disappears on November 1st. The mattress store had been closed for two years before the Halloween company leased it.
I was twenty-four. I’d just been laid off from a warehouse job, and the pop-up was hiring overnight stock for the last two weeks of October. Ten p.m. to six a.m. Fifteen an hour. I took it.
There were three of us on nights. Me, a guy named Royce who was saving for a car, and our lead, Pilar, who’d worked six Halloween seasons and could fold a costume bag in her sleep.
On my first night, Pilar walked me through the store. She showed me the stockroom, the breakroom, and the old fitting rooms in the back corner. The mattress store had used them for something, she didn’t know what. The Halloween company just put a rope across the hallway and a sign that said EMPLOYEES ONLY.
“Don’t bother going back there,” she said. “It’s just old junk and a dead outlet.”
The Props That Went Off After Close
Every big Halloween store has props on display that react to motion. A witch that cackles. A clown that leans forward and laughs. A butler with a candelabra that says, “Welcome, welcome.” Customers walk by, a sensor picks them up, the prop goes off.
We left them plugged in overnight because unplugging forty animatronics every night was a nightmare. We just got used to them going off when we walked past.
Around 2 a.m. on my third night, the witch went off at the back of the store.
Royce and I were up front, unboxing inflatable spiders. Pilar was in the stockroom. Nobody was near the witch.
She cackled her whole line. “Come closer, my pretty.” Then she went still.
Royce said it was probably a rat. He said the mattress place had rats. Pilar came out of the stockroom and said the sensors were cheap and sometimes the air conditioning set them off. That made sense. I went back to my spiders.
The next night, at almost the same time, the clown went off. The clown was in the middle of the store, by the mask wall. Again, nobody was near it.
The night after that, it was the butler. The butler stood right next to the rope across the fitting room hallway.
“Welcome, welcome.”
I said to Pilar, “It’s moving.” She said, “What is?” I said, “Whatever’s setting them off. It started in the back, then the middle, now it’s over there.” She looked at me for a second like she was thinking about it. Then she said rats move, that’s what rats do, and asked me to break down the cardboard.
I broke down the cardboard. I kept looking at the butler.
The Worst of My Retail Horror Stories
The last night of the season was Halloween night itself. The store closed at ten. We had to stay till six to start packing everything up for the trucks.
At 1:40 a.m., Royce went out to his car to get his phone charger. Pilar was on the phone in the office with the district manager. I was alone on the floor, pulling masks off the mask wall and putting them in bins.
The mask wall was the biggest display in the store. Maybe two hundred masks on hooks. Latex mostly. Old men, monsters, zombies, a whole row of clowns. They hang there with their mouths open, and after a while you stop looking at them.
I was working down the second row when I noticed the smell.
Not latex. Latex smells like a balloon. This smelled like someone who’d been wearing the same clothes for a long time. Sweat and old fabric. It was coming from the wall.
I stood very still and looked at the row in front of me. Old man. Werewolf. Skull. Old man.
The second old man mask was hanging lower than the others. And under its open mouth, the latex was moving. In and out. Very small. Like breathing.
I backed up. My shoe hit the floor sensor for the clown behind me, and the clown leaned forward and screamed its laugh, and the old man mask on the wall turned its head toward the sound.
I ran. I ran to the office and slammed the door and Pilar was still on the phone, and I said, “Somebody’s in the masks.” She hung up on the district manager.
We called 911 from the office with the door locked. We could hear the props going off in the store one after the other. The clown. The witch. The butler. “Welcome, welcome.” Then the back door alarm went off, the one by the dumpsters.
Then nothing.
What Was Behind the Fitting Rooms
The police came in about eight minutes. Royce came running in behind them. He’d been sitting in his car the whole time with his headphones on.
The officers went down the roped-off hallway into the old fitting rooms. The last one had a mattress on the floor. One of the old store mattresses, still in plastic. There were water bottles, a portable radio, a pile of clothes. And costume pieces from our store, with the tags still on. Gloves. A cape. Three masks.
The officer said somebody had probably been living back there since before the Halloween company moved in. The old mattress store had a broken back window that nobody fixed, just boarded over from the inside. The boards came off easy.
That wasn’t the part that got me. The part that got me was on the wall of the fitting room, taped up at eye level. Our schedules.
Every overnight schedule for the last two weeks. The ones Pilar printed and pinned to the breakroom corkboard. Someone had taken them down at night, made copies at the office printer, and put the originals back. On every page, my name was circled in pen.
Not Royce. Not Pilar. Me.
They never caught him. The store closed the next day, like it was always going to. The trucks took the masks and the props, and by November 3rd it was an empty storefront again with a FOR LEASE sign in the window.
I work at a hardware store now. Days only. But last month a new Halloween pop-up opened in the same spot. I drove past it one night after dinner. Through the front window I could see the butler, right inside the door, holding his candelabra.
There was nobody near him. But his arm was raised, and his head was turned toward the parking lot. Toward me.
For more spooky stories for adults from the night shift, read the haunted hayride story about one actor too many, our haunted hospital stories post about a whiteboard in Room 612, or a Halloween stalker story about a costume that got copied.
Share your retail horror stories
If you’ve ever worked overnight in a store, you know how loud an empty building can be. Tell us your retail horror stories, or any Halloween spooky stories from a seasonal job you only lasted one October at, in the comments below.
How scary was it?
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