Good evening, it’s Spooky Boo Rhodes coming to you from the beautiful yet haunted coastal town of Sandcastle, California. Today I have for you a spooky, scary Halloween story written by Jake Wick called The Pumpkin Patch. A boy at school is harassed so badly that he has made his own beliefs in a deity, one that is very, very hungry for bad boys. Listen to this scary tale for a good All Hallow’s Eve Scare!
You can read along with this episode by visiting my website at http://www.creepypastascarystories.com and clicking on today’s episode. I would love to read your stories. Click on the submissions tab to find out how.
Now let’s begin…
The Pumpkin Patch
by Jake Wick
Liam was the believing type, but even more so than your average 3rd-grader. Most kids at his age believed in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny, but Liam found those tales foolish and irrelevant, fictional characters conjured up to draw young hearts and minds into holidays. Liam surmised that his faith could only lie with a single idol. Like an agnostic questioning which deity out of Yahweh, Allah, and Buddha could be the one true god, Liam knew there could only be one authentic holiday totem. There couldn’t exist both a Santa and a tooth fairy, there could be only one. And for Liam, the one in question was The Pumpkin King.
Down the road from Liam’s house was a pumpkin patch that stretched on toward the horizon, below which the sun dipped each and every evening. This, Liam believed, was where his holiday deity arose to reward his disciples, young and old. The night on which this happened was All Hallow’s Eve, of course.Now, Liam knew in his heart that this Pumpkin King was the one true idol, just as any tiny tot with their eyes all aglow knew that Santa Clause would slide down their chimney with his bag of goodies on Christmas Eve. But the kids at school thought Liam to be asinine for his childlike beliefs. Just like the world’s religions—where believers of a talking serpent poke fun of believers of a winged horse—the grade school believers of flying reindeer and Christmas elves jeered at Liam for his devotion to a pumpkin god.
“When are you gonna stop believing in that stupid pumpkin?”
“Hey, Liam! Watch me carve the pumpkin king’s face!”
“Santa’s real, my parents told me. But my parents said the pumpkin king isn’t real!”
On his two-mile walk home, the school’s fifth-grade bullies—Franky, Tyler, and Aspen—waited patiently for Liam to walk under the arched stone bridge. When Liam emerged from under it, he was greeted by a shower of cold and slimy pumpkin guts that rained down on his head, immediately followed by sounds of devilish snickering.
Word spread through the small South Carolina town that little Liam Henson believed in the occult and would be spending Halloween night in a pumpkin patch, awaiting his pagan deity. A notion that was met with judgmental stares and virtue-signaling gossip from those bible-belt dwellers. And soon, Liam’s parents stopped receiving invitations to local church functions. His older sister was shunned in school, believed to be some sort of witch who, like her brother, bowed to heathen idols.
The afternoon of Halloween soon arrived. The classroom was thoroughly decorated for the occasion; paper cutout jack-o-lanterns were strung together with yarn and tacked to a corked staff on the wall, a large black cat cutout was pasted to the classroom door, and a jack-o-lantern bowl filled with candy sat atop the teacher’s desk. None of the decorations in the school dared echo anything to do with witches or goblins or vampires or devils, something which would have drawn judgement from more than a few sets of parents.
Liam’s school held a trick-or-treating event within its walls. Costumed children lined up outside each classroom to receive their treats. Liam, of course, dressed as a pumpkin. He received the usual jeers from his classmates; if they weren’t making fun of his devotion to the Pumpkin King, they were laughing at the fact that pumpkin costumes were normally reserved for an infant’s first Halloween. It was not until Liam was kindly asked to refrain from the school-wide trick-or-treating, however, that he became most distraught.
“Liam, I think it’s best if you hang out in Principal Reviss’ office for an hour.” His teacher, Ms. Volskay… he hated her with a passion.
“Why?” Liam asked quite innocently.
“Because.”
Liam hated her for that, the way she’d never give a real answer. She acted as if she was the all-powerful overlord upon which the righteousness of rules rested. But she was only a part of the problem. The bigger issue was that Liam was a believer among nonbelievers, at least when it came to his Pumpkin King. These bible-thumpers just wouldn’t have it. The Easter Bunny and Santa Clause were fine to them; they were the mascots for Christian holidays, and were thus virtuous and pure. To them, the Pumpkin King was equal in nature to the god Pan, upon which their Satan character’s appearance was based.
And so Liam sat and seethed and stewed in the principal’s office. Principal Reviss offered him candy from the bowl on his desk. As Liam pathetically chewed on a piece of caramel, he thought of how much better the other kids had it in terms of quality and quantity of candy. It made his blood boil to think of it. Of how those commonplace zombies were rewarded for their lack of original thinking.
“Excuse me, I hope I’m not interrupting anything.” Ms. B, the school counselor, entered the room with a firm knock on the already-opened door.
“Not at all,” Principal Reviss replied. “Have a seat.”
Oh, god. Liam knew what this meant. Ms. B was about to ‘counsel’ him. Even at his age, Liam thought it to be a useless position that could be handled by anyone and everyone. Ms. B sat down across from Liam, next to Principal Reviss. As Ms. B adjusted her hair, Liam caught Reviss’ eyes wandering down toward her tights-covered legs. Such hypocrisy.
“Now, Liam,” said Ms. B in her thick southern accent, talking to Liam in a most passively degrading manner, “we wanted to talk to you today about certain things you’ve been saying around school.”
“Okay,” said Liam, uninterested.
“Liam… do you know what the word ‘gossip’ means?”
Oh, boy. Here we go.
“Yes,” Liam replied.
There was a pause. Ms. B was waiting for an answer.
“Go on, then. Tell me.”
“It means to go around saying things that aren’t true.”
“That’s right. Well, that’s sort of what this is about, Liam.” Another pause as Ms. B stared Liam down with demeaning puppy dog eyes.
“Okay,” said Liam amidst the awkward air.
“I hear you’ve been going around school, talking about a thing called ‘The Pumpkin King’. Is that true?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s almost Halloween. And every Halloween, the Pumpkin King comes out of the pumpkin patch and gives presents to all his believers.”
“Now, that’s not really true, though, is it?”
“Yes, it is.”
“Liam, there’s no such thing as a ‘Pumpkin King’”.
“Are you a god-fearing woman?”
Ms. B was taken aback, and this was two folds; not only had young Liam turned the questioning onto her, but he was also asking an intelligent question, intelligent for his age. She couldn’t tell whether he was that mature in intellect, or if he was just repeating something he’d heard an adult say.
“I, uh,” Ms. B stammered, “yes, I believe in God. Go to church twice a week.” Liam grimaced at how she pronounced ‘twice’ as twass.
“And do you believe the story about the snake in the garden?”
“Of course. First story of the bible.”
“Is a talking snake in a garden less crazy than a talking pumpkin in a patch?”
“Well, Liam, it’s important that you understand the difference. The bible’s the word of god.”
This was going nowhere. Liam quit and spent the rest of the session staring at a wall as Ms. B rattled off baptist drivel and quotes about ‘dishing dirt’ that she picked up at a help site for counselors. She is child, Liam thought. Unenlightened, uneducated.
Evening soon came, and there was Liam’s older sister, Tara, wearing her glittery witch costume. She scolded him for his stupid beliefs that had garnered her so much flak in school and around town.
“I swear to god,” she said, “if I hear one more word from you about this stupid pumpkin thing, I’m gonna drop you off in the cemetery overnight.”
But Liam would not be spending the night in a cemetery. He’d be spending it in the pumpkin patch near his house. Tonight was the night, and it made him grin. All of the torments, the virtue-signaling religious fanatics, the bullying, the harsh words, the neglect… it would all pay off on this chilly Halloween.
Liam left the house, but unlike the hoards of children walking the earth that evening, Liam was not in a costume. He wore jeans and had on a fur coat to keep warm once the sun fully set. His lack of a costume drew confused stares from the adults who were handing out candy. The other children were too busy gobbling down chocolate to notice. Liam cut through several yards as he made his way to the patch. If he hurried, he’d be able to catch that reddish orange sunset in its full glory.
As he walked among swirling hoards of dead autumn leaves, he saw something out of the corner of his eye that he hoped was just his imagination. But it wasn’t. He saw them clear as day. Franky, Tyler, and Aspen, the three bullies, were standing on the side of someone’s house. And they saw Liam, too, who was obviously walking off toward the pumpkin patch.
In this moment, Liam wished he hadn’t ran off at the mouth so much about the Pumpkin King. The three bullies seemed to freeze in place as their hawklike eyes tracked Liam’s every step.
“Going to see the pumpkin man?”
One of them shouted it. Liam wasn’t sure which one. This was bad. They surely wouldn’t pass
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The original Spooky Boo’s Scary Story Time telling spooky, scary stories since 2016. Here you’ll find true scary stories, fiction stories, urban legends, creepypasta, and other tall tales from the darkest corners of the internet.
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