This Halloween stalker story is about a costume I spent six weeks making by hand, and the person who showed up wearing a perfect copy of it at three different parties in three days. I’ve read a lot of adult scary stories since, and none of them felt as close to home.
I’m a dental hygienist in Minneapolis. I sew as a hobby. Every year I make one big Halloween costume from scratch, and every year I post the progress on Instagram. Pattern, fabric, the mistakes, the finished thing. It’s my favorite part of the year. I had about two thousand followers back then, mostly other people who sew.
In 2023 I made a moth. A Victorian moth lady. Long gray dress with a bustle, a fur collar, a little veil, and a set of wings I built out of wire and silk organza and painted by hand. The wings took three weeks alone. Brown and cream, with two big eyespots on the lower half, the way real moths have.
In early October, while I was still painting the wings, my radiator stopped working. I called the property management company. A maintenance guy came on a Tuesday afternoon while I was home for lunch. Gray work shirt, no name patch, quiet. He said the valve was stuck. He asked if he could have twenty minutes, so I went to grab a sandwich down the street and let him work.
When I came back, the radiator was fixed, and he was gone. The wings were hanging on my dress form by the window, where I’d left them.
I thought nothing of it. I want to be clear about that. I’ve thought about that afternoon a thousand times since.
The First Copy
The first party was the Friday before Halloween, at a brewery in Northeast that did a costume night. I went with my friend Danica and her boyfriend.
About an hour in, Danica grabbed my arm and said, “Oh my God. Look. Somebody copied you.”
Across the room, by the pinball machines, there was a person in my costume. Gray dress. Fur collar. Wings. A veil, longer than mine, all the way down to the chin. You couldn’t see a face at all.
Honestly? I was flattered. People make costumes from other people’s posts all the time. I figured one of my followers lived nearby. I walked over to say hi, and the person turned and walked out the side door into the beer garden. When I got out there, they were gone.
Later that night, a guy dressed as a banana bumped into me with a full pint. Beer went down my back. When I got home, I saw that it had made a long brown drip across the left wing, right through one of the eyespots. I was so mad. I didn’t have time to repaint it, so I left it.
The Paint Drip That Made It a Halloween Stalker Story
Saturday was a house party in Uptown. A friend from work.
The copy was there again. I saw it through the kitchen doorway, standing in the living room near the TV. Same veil. Same stillness. Everybody else was dancing or yelling, and this person was just standing there, facing the kitchen. Facing me.
I didn’t go over this time. I watched it for a minute, and something didn’t sit right, and I couldn’t figure out what.
Then it turned a little to the side, and I saw the left wing.
There was a long brown drip across it. Right through the eyespot.
Same place. Same shape. It had happened to my wing less than twenty-four hours before. Nobody had taken a picture of it. I hadn’t posted it.
I told myself it was a coincidence. Maybe I was remembering it wrong. Maybe their wing had a drip too, and I was just seeing my own mistake because I was tired and three drinks in. I asked my coworker who it was. She said she had no idea, her roommate invited half the city.
When I looked back, the copy was gone.
“We Match”
On Halloween night, Danica and I went to a bar on Lyndale that does a big costume contest. I almost didn’t wear the moth. Danica said I was being paranoid and I’d worked too hard on it not to wear it on the actual night.
I was at the bar waiting for drinks when I smelled it. Fresh acrylic paint. That plasticky, sharp smell. The kind I’d been breathing for three weeks in my apartment.
Someone was standing right next to me.
Gray dress. The fur collar was the same fur. The same faux fox from the same fabric store on University Avenue. And the veil, down to the chin. I couldn’t see anything through it except the shape of a nose.
It didn’t look at me. It looked at the mirror behind the bar, at the two of us standing side by side.
And it said, very quietly, “We match.”
The voice was flat. Not a man’s voice or a woman’s voice. Just calm. Like it was telling me what time it was.
I left my drink and found Danica and told her we were going, right now. She saw my face and didn’t argue. She drove me home. It was 11:52.
My apartment smelled like paint when I opened the door.
Not old paint. New paint. Wet. My sewing table was by the window. My pattern pieces were on it, the brown paper ones I’d cut for the dress. Next to them, on top of the stack, there was a big sheet of tracing paper I had never seen before.
It was a tracing of my wings. Both of them. Every vein, every eyespot, done in pencil. Someone had laid paper over my wings while they hung on my dress form and traced them by hand.
In the corner of the left wing, someone had drawn in the drip.
The pencil was so fresh it smeared under my thumb.
What the Property Company Said
Danica stayed with me. We called the police. The officer who came was nice but not much help. Nothing was stolen. There was no sign of forced entry. He asked who had a key.
The next morning I called the property management company and asked who had fixed my radiator on the 3rd. The woman on the phone looked it up. Then she looked again.
She said there was no work order for my unit in October. She said she didn’t have a maintenance tech who matched what I described. She asked if I was sure it was their guy.
I wasn’t sure of anything anymore. I’d let a stranger into my apartment because he was wearing a gray work shirt and knew the word “valve.”
I moved in January. I still sew. I don’t post anything in progress anymore. Just the finished costume, after Halloween, if I post at all.
Last year I didn’t make anything. I went to one party as a bedsheet ghost, just a sheet with two eyeholes I cut a little crooked with kitchen scissors.
There was another bedsheet ghost at the party. Standing by the door. Its eyeholes were a little crooked too.
Every sheet ghost looks the same. That’s what I keep telling myself.
For more scary stories to read about people who watch too closely, try the scary Halloween story about a raffle on Maple Court, our creepy text stories post about a man who bought an old phone, or the scary babysitter stories about a man waving from an upstairs window.
Has anyone ever copied you on Halloween?
A costume can make you feel invisible, until you realize someone else has been watching you make it. If you have a Halloween stalker story, or any spooky stories from a costume party that stopped being fun, tell us in the comments below.
How scary was it?
More Creepy Stalker Stories
Someone Kept Returning Things I Didn’t Know I’d Lost
One Buyer Bought Something From Every Room in My House
My Date Knew About the Squeaky Stair in a House She’d Never Seen
The Car Ahead Paid for My Coffee Every Morning
My Quiet Rideshare Passenger Always Asked for the Same Song
The Footsteps Behind Me on the Empty Street