There used to be three of us. We were the only kids who lived on Lantern Street, by far the poorest neighborhood in town. That was a long time ago, and I haven’t thought about it in ages. But a few weeks ago, something happened that just… well, it changed everything. But to get the full picture, we have to take a step back.
Lantern Street originally had another name, but no one called it that. It was always just Lantern Street. It was the only street in town where they refused to fix the damn streetlights, so instead the locals put up solar-powered lanterns. It had this dark and ominous feeling to it. Some parents refused to let their kids play there, as it was on the far side of town and in a poor area. Still, kids interpreted this in the worst way possible. A dark street at the end of town, where you’re not supposed to go? Of course there was something wrong with it.
That’s where we lived. Me, Dawson, and Abbie.
Abbie was the oldest and had four years on me. Dawson was about two years older than me; at that age, those numbers mean something. It was true, our parents weren’t that well-off, but we made do in our own way. We couldn’t play any video games, and we had to use the computers at the library, but we didn’t mind. We didn’t know any other life.
The three of us did pretty much everything together. I was an only child, but I always considered those two to be my brother and sister. We were the Lantern Street kids, and we stuck together no matter what.
During Halloween, we had an ingenious idea. For one night, we took down all the lanterns so we could have a completely dark street. If kids wanted to pass from the north side of town to the west without crossing the highway, they had to pass by Lantern Street. We figured we’d make sort of a “toll” and really spook the place up. It was the only time of year when kids regularly passed by, after all.
See, we had this neighbor. He lived on his own with his two cats, and he had these strange paranoid delusions. For example, he only accepted mail if it was directly delivered to him by hand. He refused to drink tap water without boiling it. He covered all his windows in cardboard. But the strangest thing, by far, was that he thought the government was going through his garbage.
His solution? To bury his trash in his back yard.
It created this awful stench, and everyone living next to him had complained about it for years. But, just like the streetlights, the city did nothing.
This was our meal ticket. This creepy, paranoid nobody.
We started spreading rumors around school. We started saying that he was chopping kids heads off and burying them in garbage bags in his back yard. We even namedropped some kids who’d moved out of town years prior, implying that they might’ve never made it out. We were trying to give Lantern Street a bit of a reputation, so that when Halloween came around, we’d be there as brave protectors and guides for those who wanted to pass through safely. All it took was a few pieces of candy.
That way, we could just stand around and do nothing, and still get a ton of candy.
It was brilliant.
When Halloween rolled around, we’d dressed up in cheap costumes that we’d made ourselves. All our parents were working night shifts. Abbie was a pirate, and Dawson was a ghost. I was trying to be a gangster, but it was just my Sunday finest with a fancy hat. I’d painted a mustache on my face with permanent marker. Big mistake.
We’d taken down all the lanterns. Abbie was placed up front to play up how scary the street was, and letting people borrow hand-held lanterns (which we’d just taken from around the street). Dawson was in the middle of the street, pretending to be a look-out and “making sure” it was safe to go through. He paused kids passing through sometimes just to play it up, and asked them to hurry up when the strange man was “on the move”. I was at the end of the street, to take the lanterns back and take our fair share of their candy as payment.
Hell, we placed an old shovel on the sidewalk outside his house, just to make a point. Sharp old thing, still.
And I gotta say, it was flawless.
Even the kids who had their parents in tow got in on it. It was this harmless, Halloween-y kind of thing to do. It was just stupid fun. No one really believed the stupid rumors about a guy kidnapping kids, so instead they just kinda went with it. We were the “lookouts”, and we were handsomely compensated. No one would be taken by the spooky man with the shovel tonight.
I have never gotten more candy on Halloween than I did that year as a lookout on Lantern Street.
Eventually, we noticed we’d started something we didn’t completely control. Some kids got genuinely disturbed by the rumors, and even though the lanterns were put back up, some kids asked us to be lookouts long after Halloween was over. After all, our neighbor was often seen with a shovel in hand. It was pretty much the only time he went outside; to bury garbage bags.
Whenever someone had to pass through Lantern Street, it wasn’t unusual for them to ask us to watch their backs. Hell, it was free candy and Pokémon cards, how could we say no?
This influenced the street at large though. Some parents were genuinely worried when they heard their kids talk about some strange man threatening to kidnap them. The rumors were like a death from a thousand cuts. Every new rumor or alleged sighting had an effect, and it came to the point where my parents told me to just stop talking about it. They rarely cared, no matter what I did, so to have a serious talk with them usually meant someone had pressured them. Abbie and Dawson had a similar experience. We agreed collectively that we would no longer provide lookout services, even if people asked us.
But even though us lookouts tried to distance ourselves from the rumors, it was too late. Our neighbor was a genuinely strange man, but he wasn’t dangerous. He just kept to himself a lot and didn’t trust the government. That was enough for the rumors to take on a life of their own.
Which is why we knew there would be trouble when we saw a police cruiser parked outside his house.
This was a man who genuinely distrusted government officials, and the police. There was no way he would cooperate or comply. He refused to let them in without a warrant, and he refused to talk to them. It all escalated to the point where, after three days of officers trying to reach a peaceful solution, they finally got their warrant. I have no idea how, but this is a small town.
The result? He locked the doors, barricaded the windows, and refused to let anyone in. Four police cars were parked outside, and it was starting to look more and more like a siege. Everyone was looking out their windows, despite officers yelling at us to stay inside. I could hear every word shouted from a megaphone from my bedroom window.
Finally, they broke the front door with some kind of sledge.
I don’t know why he did it, but the second the police entered the house, he fired at them. Someone got hit.
He didn’t stand a chance in an open firefight. It was over in seconds.
I had never heard a sound like that. Three houses away, I could still hear the screams, and I hid under my bed. I probably stayed there for half an hour, just waiting, and holding my breath. I could still hear the gunshots echo down Lantern Street.
Word got out that the rumors weren’t true. Sure, he’d buried garbage in his back yard, and there was a lot of strange things in his house, but nothing particularly illegal. No drugs, no bombs, no plans to kidnap innocent young children. It was just this paranoid shut-in, deluded into defending his home with a legally purchased weapon. It was chaos.
No one wanted that property. It was torn down within a year.
When the next Halloween came around, there were new rumors about Lantern Street. They spoke of a psychopath ghost, evil spirits, and a vengeful murderer. The fact that an odd but innocent man had been gunned down was not the story. Among the kids, he was still scary, from beyond the grave.
God, we were dumb.
I thought a lot about it. Being responsible for someone’s death just felt unreal. As a kid, it was difficult to even grasp. No one talked to us about it, checked if we were okay. There were no councilors for dirt poor Lantern Street kids. And Abbie and Dawson, well… we just didn’t talk about it. I think, in a way, that we tried to believe in our own rumors. We tried believing in our own lies.
In time, Lantern Street outgrew us, and even the lanterns themselves went away. There were new streetlights put up, and a convenience store was built on the empty lot. Rumors started growing more obscure, and over time the street was just known as the place where they “shot that weirdo”.
But as the years passed, we left it behind. Abbie moved when she got into Minnesota State, and Dawson moved cross-country to live with his long-distance girlfriend.
And me? Well, I moved to Minneapolis to pursue a career in law enforcement. I guess I was inspired.
That was my life until a couple of weeks ago.
I was coming home from a long day of work. As I parked my car on the driveway, I noticed several streetlights had gone dark. One more was flickering, about to go out. It brought my mind back to those days with Abbie and Dawson, being the lookouts on Lantern Street.
I looked them up on social media, but I couldn’t find any active accounts. Abbie stopped posting about four years ago, and Dawson stopped two years after that. I couldn’t find anything about them.
It took me 45 minutes of intense googling before I found Abbie’s second account. On her final post, dated four years ago, people were commenting on how much they missed her.
She was dead.
I got this awful feeling in my stomach. I couldn’t find anything about Dawson, but from the way people were commenting on his images I got the feeling that something had happened. Something people weren’t too keen to talk about openly.
As the clock crept closer to midnight, another light went dark outside.
I was wide awake as I got in bed that night. For the first time in years, I slept with the lights on; it was just too dark outside. As I drifted off to sleep, there was a sudden pounding on my front door.
I jumped out of bed as the sound stopped. It was so strange, I started thinking I’d imagined it. So unexpected. I put on a t-shirt and crept closer to the front door.
No one in sight, but every light down the street had gone dark by now.
And there, on the other side, I caught a glimpse of a pale light.
A lantern, perhaps.
This occupied my mind for a solid week. I waited for the streetlights to be replaced, but no one ever came. It was history repeating itself. I’d looked up as much as I could about Abbie and Dawson, but I couldn’t find any specifics about their passing. The only thing I found, which might be the weirdest thing about it, was that they had both died on their birthday. The same year they turned 31.
That got me thinking, and I dug a bit into the case of our old neighbor. Turns out, he was 31 years old when his house was raided.
That just gave me the creeps, seeing as my 31st birthday was coming up.
I started noticing things. The streetlights were just the first thing. There had been holes popping up in the front yards around the neighborhood. When the garbage truck came around last Thursday, there were no garbage bags to pick up. They’d just collectively gone missing, causing much confusion.
But the most telling thing, by far, was the solar-powered lantern I noticed hanging from a birch tree across the street.
Every night, I anticipate a pounding on my front door. I’d only heard it once, but once you start anticipating something it is hard to relax. I’ll be the first to admit I wasn’t handling it well, and it felt silly to talk about. It was all just superstition and coincidence. Right?
Sometimes, as I’d drift off to sleep, I’d get the feeling that someone was standing in my room. Someone showing themselves, just as my eyes closed. Sometimes I’d twist my head and spring my eyes open, hoping to see him; but he was never there. But as soon as I drifted off to sleep, I’d jolt back up again, expecting something to happen.
Last Sunday, something did happen.
I’d been to dinner with a friend of mine when I got back home, only to see my entire front lawn covered in holes. A sturdy old shovel was leaning against my front door. At first, I was terrified, but it gave way to anger. I asked my neighbors about it, but no one had seen anything; most had been out, working.
I didn’t want this to intimidate me, but it did. It absolutely did. I’d just stand there, looking out my window, as if the holes in the yard would fill themselves in. There were more lanterns in the birch tree across the street. Some people had even started carrying them.
And maybe I was imagining things, but I’d started seeing a few more stray cats than usual. And was that a blue sunflower, growing next to my mailbox?
That night, as I brushed my teeth before bed, there was another pounding at the front door. This time, I jumped to action. I brought my handgun with me and ran. I pulled the door open, only to see two faces I barely recognized.
Dawson and Abbie.
They were my age. Just standing there, holding one lantern each. In their other hand, they were holding some kind of fabric. It wasn’t until much later that I realized it was their old Halloween costumes. A white sheet. A homemade pirate hat.
They just stared at me with these blank, expressionless faces. They didn’t blink. Dawson wasn’t even looking directly at me, his head was sort of turned away.
I didn’t even notice I was aiming my handgun at them, and still, I couldn’t put it down. Something in me was screaming at me that this was a threat. I just couldn’t tell how, or why.
Abbie raised her lantern, giving me a better look.
She had this long scar across her neck. Jagged, nasty thing.
With the lantern, she pushed her head into place. It was slowly sliding off her shoulders.
She’d been decapitated.
I took a step back, forgetting how to breathe. They were just standing there, illuminated by this pale light. For a few seconds, I just looked at them, trying to make heads or tails of what I was seeing.
Then, they moved.
Dawson was first. He stepped right on in, letting his head fall all the way off. It bounced off the stairs leading up to my front door with a meaty smack. He left his old costume behind, dropped the lantern, and just came at me with arms outstretched. Abbie stayed behind him.
I was a breath away from firing, when something turned my world upside down. Someone tripped me from behind. Someone who was already inside.
He must’ve gotten in through the back yard.
For a moment, I just laid there, looking up at the ceiling. I felt a foot pressing down on my hand, as I dropped my pistol. A headless body came into view, and the faint light of a solar lantern cast soft shadows over me. There were so many hands and feet, I still have trouble recounting how many there were.
“Your birthday… is coming up” Abbie wheezed. “Get your affairs… in order.”
She didn’t move her lips. She didn’t move her eyes. And, looking down at me, she had to use both hands to keep her head in place.
Inches from my neck, a shovel slammed into the creaking floorboards.
Someone pulled a bag over my head. It smelled like candy.
I heard footsteps as they just left me there. I think there were three of them, all in all. It felt like that day when I’d hid under my bed as a kid, just waiting until it was all over. That was me, again, that night. Just waiting, long after it was over.
It must’ve been over an hour before I dared to move.
I just curled up in a fetal position and cried.
All I have to prove that they were ever here is a shovel. I’ve reported it as a home invasion, and I’m taking time off of work. But there isn’t much time. If the pattern holds up, something awful is going to happen to me, and I don’t have the slightest idea how to handle it. I can’t eat. I can’t sleep. I keep dreaming I can’t breathe, and I sometimes wake up with this immense pressure on my neck.
I don’t know if this is all just nonsense. I don’t know what will happen. But just in case I go away and stop responding, I want there to be some kind of record of what I’ve seen.
And if you know Lantern Street, and if you know me, please just try to do something. Anything. For me it is too late, but it might not be for others.
I’m posting this not long before I turn 31. If I don’t return, you know what’ve happened.
Look for the broken streetlights. Pay attention. Maybe visit a priest.
I just hope I’m crazy. I pray that I am.
But I don’t think I am.