Telling spooky stories around a campfire (or flashlight if you're indoors) is a Halloween tradition that keeps the art of storytelling alive in an age when kids would rather stare at a screen than talk to each other.
And if you really want to shock the kids of today who have been exposed to all kinds of terrible stuff online you've gotta tell them a true story, one which they can verify via Google to make it extra shocking.
Start 'em off with the source of an urban legend about tainted Halloween candy:
In 1974, 8-year-old Timothy O’Bryan died on Halloween evening after eating candy laced with cyanide. But the story has an even more horrific twist.
It turned out the candy was poisoned by Timmy’s father, Ronald, who was in financial trouble and had taken out insurance policies on his children. In addition to Timmy, Ronald O’Bryan gave poisoned candy to four other children, including his daughter, Elizabeth. Thankfully, none of them ate it. O’Bryan was executed by lethal injection in 1984.
Then you can hit 'em with a tale about a suicide mistaken for a Halloween decoration:
In 2005, a 42-year-old woman in Delaware committed suicide by hanging herself from a tree across the street from a residential area. Though the body was easily visible to passersby and passing vehicles, no one called the police for hours. Why? They assumed the woman swaying in the wind was a Halloween decoration.
And once they're good and scared thanks to these two true stories you can introduce the idea of a killer-at-large who wears a Ghostface mask and make sure they never sleep again!:
In Scream, killers wearing Ghostface masks callously murdered the people in their town. Chillingly, on Halloween night, 2013, someone wearing the same Ghostface mask shot and killed 19-year-old Anthony Seaberry before disappearing into the New York night.
Read 11 True And Truly Horrific Halloween Horror Stories here
The costumes and paraphernalia today is that of trauma and mass horror as compared to the simple costumes we use to make at home.
The man problem is society. Television and movie glorify sex and violence to the hilt. Yes, we had our share of evil movies, but we also grew up on The Munsters and The Addams family. We rarely saw a close-up on an evil act. The shots were more focused on the faces and reactions of the actors... and that was enough to scare us to death.
Today it's horror to the MAX. To read the stories that Zeon told are horrific indeed... but to many today , people will just read this and go on without a thought to how bad these cases really were. The rate it's going, I expect to see the stores even starting to sell Halloween as early as July next year