This trunk or treat horror story happened on Halloween night on a two-lane road in the middle of nowhere. I pulled into a church lot to ask for directions, and every car there was ready for kids, except there were no people at all.
It was Halloween, around ten at night.
I was driving back from my aunt’s place in southern Indiana. Two hours of farm roads. I’d done it a dozen times.
That night my phone lost signal outside of a town I couldn’t name. The map froze on a blue dot in a field of gray.
I thought I’d missed a turn. I wasn’t sure.
The road was dark. Corn stubble on both sides. No houses for miles.
Then I saw lights.
A little white church on a rise, set back from the road with a gravel lot in front. And the lot was full of cars.
Maybe fifteen of them, parked in a neat line, all facing away from the road. Every trunk was open. Every trunk was lit up.
Orange string lights. Purple ones. A plastic skeleton sitting in the back of a minivan. Fake cobwebs. A cardboard coffin. Candy bowls on the bumpers.
A trunk or treat. Churches around there do them every year. It’s safer than walking door to door.
I was relieved, honestly. People. Somebody would know where I was.
A Trunk or Treat With No One Around
I pulled in at the end of the line and got out.
It was quiet.
I don’t mean peaceful. I mean nothing. No kids. No parents. No music. A trunk or treat at ten o’clock should be winding down, sure, but there would be somebody. Somebody packing up. Somebody’s dad on a lawn chair.
I said, “Hello?”
Nobody answered.
I walked along the line. I told myself they were all inside. Maybe there was a chili supper. Maybe a costume contest in the basement.
But the church was dark. Every window.
The candy bowls were full. Not picked over. Full to the top, like nobody had come at all.
In the back of a pickup there was a big thermos with a stack of paper cups next to it. The lid was off. Steam was coming out of it. I could smell it. Hot chocolate, the cheap powdered kind.
Somebody had poured that recently.
I kept walking. I don’t know why. I think I wanted to find the one person who would explain it.
That’s when I noticed the third car from the end. An old silver sedan with a pumpkin-shaped bucket in the trunk.
The rear window was fogged.
From the inside.
You know how a car window looks when somebody’s been sitting in it with the heat off. That gray breath film. Just the back window. And just that car.
I told myself it was the cold. Condensation. Cars do that.
I looked at the next car. Its rear window was fogged too.
And the next.
I stopped walking.
I didn’t look into any of them. I want to be clear about that. I didn’t lean in or wipe the glass. I just stood in the middle of the lot with all those lights on me, and I understood that every car in that line had its trunk open toward me, and every one of them had somebody in the front seat.
The Long Walk Back to My Car
I started back toward my car. Slow. Like you would with a dog you don’t know.
I was maybe four cars away when I heard the first one.
A soft electric whine. The sound a power liftgate makes.
Behind me, the trunk of the last car in the line came down and shut.
Thunk.
Then the next one.
Thunk.
Then the next.
They went down the line, one after another, toward me. Not fast. Steady. Like somebody counting.
Thunk.
Thunk.
I ran. I got the door open and I didn’t even put my seatbelt on. I backed out across the gravel and the lights in all the trunks went dark as their lids came down, and the last thing I saw in my mirror was the silver sedan.
Its trunk was still open. The pumpkin bucket was still sitting there.
It was the only one that didn’t close.
I drove until I had signal again, which was eleven miles. I called the county sheriff from a gas station parking lot at 10:42.
A deputy called me back the next afternoon. He said he’d gone out there around midnight.
The lot was empty. No cars. Some tire marks in the gravel, but that’s a church lot, there are always tire marks.
He said that church had been closed since 2019. The congregation merged with one in the next town over. He’d called the pastor there. They hadn’t done a trunk or treat at the old building in years.
I asked him if anybody else reported anything.
He said no.
I asked him about the hot chocolate.
He didn’t say anything to that.
I’ve thought about it a lot. Maybe it was some kind of prank. A group of people with a lot of time and a lot of string lights. That’s the explanation I tell people.
But I keep coming back to the silver sedan. Every trunk closed when I ran. Every one but that one.
Like that one was still waiting for somebody to come get their candy.
Have a trunk or treat horror story of your own?
Have you ever pulled into a trunk or treat and felt that something was wrong? Share your trunk or treat horror story, or any back road Halloween horror story, in the comments below.
How scary was it?
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I Passed the Same Hitchhiker at Three Exits, Forty Miles Apart
There Was a Scarecrow at Every Mile Marker on My Drive Home