31 Short Horror Stories for Halloween

Decorations

He'd always loved Halloween. He went all out on the decorations as though it were Christmas. He didn't buy them at the store. Nope, that was cheating. He made them.

He used cardboard to create huge spiders that climbed the side of his house. He used an absurd amount of thick string to make fake cobwebs. He actually burned paper to create realistic ash and spread it outside his house every day. He spent hours cutting out tombstone shape from thick cardboard, and cutting out letters from a rubber sheet to paste on them. Sometimes he'd write a name, and sometimes he'd write a silly joke. He even made a scarecrow and stuffed it with cornstalks, and gave it a wide brimmed straw hat to wear on its potato sack face.

There was just one problem; squirrels. They'd gotten big living on city food and they'd often chew through his decorations. Every time he walked past his front yard, he could hear a scratching sound coming from the fake graves. The miserable rodents were going to chew through his precious tombstones. He walked up to the grave where the noise was coming from and stomped hard on the ground, 'you stop that or tomorrow I'm going to find you all and burn you to a crisp!' he yelled. The noise died instantly and he didn't hear it again, not even when he came home from work that night.

Somewhere in the middle of the night though, it returned. Loud as ever. It couldn't be squirrels, he thought getting up to look outside his bedroom window. He was right. It wasn't squirrels. The scarecrow was digging the grave he had stomped on earlier that day.