It Misses Its Friend Halloween Scary Story Preview
A Halloween night turns chilling when a boy finds a cryptic message and a doll’s eye.
Unearthing a dark family secret, Leo discovers a terrifying truth about his home and a vanished twin.
Dive into this spooky, suspenseful horror story of buried pasts and ghostly whispers.
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The Unmarked Offering
A pillowcase full of candy is a map of a successful night.
Each wrapper a landmark, each chocolate bar a trophy.
But sometimes, a stranger leaves an unmarked offering in the bag—not a treat, but a message, delivered to a door it has been waiting for.
The light from Leo’s desk lamp cast a golden, sugary glow over the mountain on his bedroom floor.
Candy cascaded from his pillowcase: miniature chocolate bars, sour gummies, jawbreakers, and a galaxy of hard candies in crinkling, transparent wrappers.
His friends, Maya and Sam, were performing a similar ritual on their own respective piles, the sounds of their giddy inventory echoing in the room.
Triumphant sighs and the crinkle of plastic were the sounds of victory.
Leo, as always, was the stoic commander of the operation, carefully cataloging his earnings with a detached sense of satisfaction.
He didn’t believe in ghosts or ghouls; he believed in the simple, satisfying math of a heavy sack.
“Whoa, what’s this?” Sam said, holding up a peculiar object.
It was a single piece of saltwater taffy, though not one they recognized.
The wax paper wrapper was plain, unmarked by any brand, and twisted at the ends with unusual precision.
It had a faint, homemade quality to it.
“I got one too,” Maya chimed in, fishing a similar one from her pile.
“It was from that last street we went down, remember?
The one past the park.”
Leo sifted through his own treasure and found it.
One piece of plain taffy.
He remembered the house.
It was darker than the others, with a single, dim porch light casting long, skeletal shadows from a dying oak tree in the yard.
He hadn’t seen the person who gave it to them clearly—just a silhouette in the doorway, a swift hand dropping the candy into their bags before quietly closing the door.
“Probably some cheap old lady,” Leo scoffed, beginning to unwrap his.
“Probably tastes like soap.”
As he twisted the paper, a tiny, folded strip fell out, no bigger than his thumbnail.
The paper was thin, almost brittle with age.
He unfolded it.
Inside, printed in faint, spidery lettering, was a single sentence.
It wasn’t a joke, like in the other candies.
It was a message.
It said: Look under the loose board.
It misses its friend.
Maya and Sam leaned in, their eyes wide.
“Whoa, that’s so creepy,” Maya whispered, the rustle of her costume suddenly sounding very loud in the room.
Leo just snorted, crumpling the tiny paper in his fist.
“It’s a dumb prank.
They probably give the same one to every kid.” He tossed the taffy onto his ‘reject’ pile.
His skepticism was a shield, and he wielded it with pride.
The night ended, his friends went home, and the mountain of candy was neatly stored in a drawer, the strange taffy and its bizarre message all but forgotten.
A Splinter in the Mind
But the words didn’t quite leave.
Over the next two days, the sentence would surface in his mind at odd moments.
Look under the loose board.
He’d be doing his homework, and the gentle pop of the old house settling would sound, for a moment, like a floorboard being tested.
He’d be lying in bed, and the quiet gurgle of water through the pipes in the wall would carry a strange, mournful quality.
He was the brave one, the one who wasn’t afraid of anything, yet he found himself listening to the quiet sounds of his home with an attention that felt foreign and unsettling.
He felt a prickling sensation on his neck, the distinct and irrational feeling of being watched when he was alone in his room.
He kept telling himself it was stupid, just his imagination working overtime after Halloween.
But the words were a splinter in his mind.
It misses its friend.
On the third night, he couldn’t take it anymore.
The house was asleep, a vast creature breathing in slow, rhythmic silence.
Every tiny sound was amplified—the resonant tick of the hall clock, the distant cycling of the kitchen’s cooling fan.
His heart hammered against his ribs, a frantic, muffled drum.
He knelt, his pajamas whispering against the floor, and ran his hands over the old wooden planks near his bed.
Most were solid, immovable.
But then, his fingers brushed against one that shifted, just a millimeter.
It was loose.
The Discovery
A cold dread, unwelcome and unfamiliar, washed over him.
This was ridiculous.
It was a coincidence.
He was Leo.
He wasn’t afraid.
With a grunt of effort, he dug his fingernails into the seam and pried.
The sound of the board groaning as it lifted was agonizingly loud in the stillness.
A small puff of dust and the scent of old, dry wood filled the air.
He peered into the dark cavity beneath.
There, nestled in a bed of gray dust and ancient cobwebs, was a single, small, round object.
It wasn’t a coin or a marble.
With a trembling hand, he reached in and picked it up.
It was a glass eye, the kind from an old porcelain doll, its blue iris staring up at him with a vacant, timeless gaze.
A wave of relief, so potent it almost made him laugh, washed away the dread.
A doll’s eye.
It was just a stupid, elaborate prank.
All that anxiety, all that creeping fear, for this.
A piece of trash from a weirdo neighbor.
He felt a surge of indignant anger.
He would show his mom in the morning, and they would all laugh about the weirdo on the other street.
He, the skeptic, had been right all along.
He placed the eye on his nightstand, the loose board back in its place, and for the first time in three nights, he slept soundly.
“Found.”
The next morning, he found his mom in the kitchen, the air rich with the scent of coffee.
He walked in with a confident smirk, the glass eye cold in his palm.
“You won’t believe the crazy prank someone pulled for Halloween,” he began, placing the object on the counter.
His mother looked at it, and her smile faltered.
She picked it up, her fingers tracing its smooth, curved surface.
The sound of her breath catching was a small, sharp tear in the morning’s calm.
“Leo… where did you get this?” Her voice was a strained whisper, all the warmth gone from it.
He recounted the story smugly—the strange taffy, the cryptic fortune, finding it under the floorboard in his room.
He expected her to laugh.
Instead, a low, guttural sound escaped her throat, and the coffee mug slipped from her other hand, shattering against the tile with a sound like a gunshot.
Her face was a mask of chalky white.
“Oh, no,” she whispered, staring at the eye in her hand as if it were a venomous spider.
“It wasn’t a prank, Leo.” Tears began to well in her eyes.
“When I was a little girl… I had a brother.
A twin.
His name was Nathan.” Her voice cracked, a sound of old, sealed-away grief breaking open.
“He vanished when he was six.
Right from this house.
The police, everyone… they never found him.” She held up the glass eye, her hand trembling violently.
“Nathan had this doll.
He took it everywhere.
He lost one of its eyes a week before he… before he disappeared.
We looked everywhere for it.”
Leo stood frozen, the story of the weird neighbor dissolving into dust.
He suddenly remembered the house, the one at the very end of the street.
Not the other street.
Their street.
The house that had been empty and for sale for as long as he could remember.
His mother looked at him, her eyes filled with a horror he had never seen before.
“Leo… the message.
What did the message say?”
His own voice was a dry croak.
“It… it said… ‘It misses its friend.’”
The full, horrifying weight of it all crashed down on him.
The eye wasn’t the friend.
The eye was the it.
And it missed its friend.
Nathan.
His mother let out a strangled sob, the sound of a heart breaking all over again.
Leo’s skeptical world crumbled into nothing, replaced by a single, crushing truth.
He was no longer the brave leader.
He was the keeper of a terrible, impossible secret.
His gaze drifted from his mother’s shattered face toward the hallway, toward the stairs leading up to his room, to the loose board that was not a hiding place, but a headstone.
And from the profound, listening silence of the old house, he heard it.
A faint, dusty whisper, seeming to curl right from the air around him, a sound of impossible hope and endless patience.
It was a single, joyful word.
“Found.”
A secret unearthed cannot be reburied.
It can only grow.
And in the suffocating quiet of an old house, a single, hopeful whisper is the most terrifying sound of all…