Episode Details

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 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 t