People always say Halloween’s the one night you should stay inside that the veil between the living and the dead gets paper thin. I used to roll my eyes at that kind of thing. Just stories, I thought. Until last year. It happened in Kentucky, at my grandmother’s old farmhouse. She’d passed the year before, and I went back to pack up what was left. The place sat miles from town, surrounded by cornfields that looked like they hadn’t been touched in decades. No neighbors. No streetlights. Only the kind of silence that hums in your ears. The locals had warned me, half-joking, about the “Halloween screams.” Thirteen of them, they said. Always before sunrise. No one ever went looking for where they came from. Some said they were echoes. Some said they weren’t echoes at all. I didn’t believe a word of it until I heard the first one.
