I Found a Terrifying TikTok While Home Alone on Halloween

"Have a good night, sweetie. We'll be back after midnight," my mom said. "Don't forget, we left extra candy in the basement in case you run out!"

"I know, you've told me like six times. Just go! Have fun, I'll be fine."

They gave me one last worried look. I was fifteen, and being left home alone was still a rare privilege. My dad was giving me this sideways glance like he didn't trust me to remember my own name. Then they finally headed down the front steps toward the car, dressed in their couples Grease costumes — they were off to a Halloween party, which made my dad's parting words kind of hilarious.

"Okay, okay, we're going. Remember — no parties, no girls, no drinking or drugs!"

"Do lots of drugs, have unprotected sex, invite people over and get drunk... got it! Thanks!"

I shut the door and stood there in the quiet. Alone. Finally, mercifully, peacefully alone. If you've ever been fifteen, you remember that feeling — your parents go out for the night and the whole house is yours. It's magic.

The sun had gone down and it was properly dark, a moonless night. Trick-or-treaters would be hitting the door soon. This was my first Halloween on the other side of it — handing out the candy — and I'd made sure the porch light was on so kids knew we were open for business.

Honestly, I was kind of pumped about it. Unlimited candy all night, scary movies, video games, nobody telling me what to do. I had a whole lineup queued on Netflix — The Babysitter, Scary Movie, The Ring — but I couldn't commit to a movie just yet. The night was young. So I sank into my dad's big faux-leather recliner with the candy bowl in my lap, fished out my phone, and figured I'd burn through some TikToks first.

I opened the app one-handed while unwrapping a Reese's cup with the other.

The first video on my feed was dark and hard to make out. Looked like somebody filming in a forest. Then there were concrete steps, and wooden planks — a deck, or a porch. I almost swiped past it. But the deck looked familiar. And so did the front door in the frame.

DING DONG! DING DONG!

I paused the video. The Reese's cup sat uneaten in my hand. I lifted it toward my mouth, figuring the kids outside could wait thirty seconds.

DING DONG! DING DONG! DING DONG! DING DONG!! DINGDONGDINGDONG! DINGDINGDINGDINGDINGDING!

I got up, candy still whole, and stalked to the front door, annoyed. Little brats were going to break the doorbell hammering it like that.

I yanked the door open, ready to tear into them — and there was nobody there.

I looked around. No trick-or-treaters anywhere. And something I hadn't noticed before: none of the other houses on the street were decorated. Ours was the only one. It was pitch black outside, too. The porch light had burned out sometime in the last few minutes — it had been working fine when I waved my parents off.

I closed the door and went back to the recliner, my heart beating a little faster than I wanted to admit. I sat down and couldn't get comfortable. My shoulders were up around my ears. A floorboard creaked somewhere upstairs and I jumped, then told myself to stop being an idiot. Probably just kids outside messing around. I leaned back and tried to breathe normally.

We'd only moved into this house that summer, and it still felt foreign to me. I was still learning its noises — the way it wheezed and moaned in the middle of the night like something ghostly and possessed. The eaves whistled. The shutters that sealed off the attic rattled in the wind, and sometimes they sounded like bones shaking. Sometimes like muffled screaming.

I picked up my phone and unpaused the TikTok. It was almost over.

The camera tilted upward, and I watched the person filming raise a black-gloved finger and press a doorbell.

DING DONG! DING DONG!

The sound came through my phone's speaker, weirdly familiar. In the video, nobody answered. So the finger started pressing again. And again. Faster and faster.

DING DONG! DING DONG! DING DONG! DING DONG!! DINGDONGDINGDONG! DINGDINGDINGDINGDINGDING!

It was too close to what had just happened at my own front door to ignore. The exact same pattern. Maybe I was imagining the similarity. Probably I was imagining it.

I glanced at the bottom corner of the screen. The account was unknown to me. The video was titled "Halloween Take-over." It had been posted a couple of minutes ago.

Another creak from upstairs. This time it didn't sound like the house settling — it sounded like footsteps, bending the old floorboards one at a time. My heart started hammering. I could feel it in my throat, in my temples. My mouth went dry.

With a shaking thumb I scrolled past the video. Gone. Next. Anything else. It had been a coincidence, nothing more. It couldn't be anything else. That wasn't possible.

The next video was a live feed, I realized. Had the last one been live too? Maybe. I might just not have noticed.

This one showed the person filming from their own point of view — black shoes, shadowy grass — and then suddenly they were standing on a stone-tiled porch at somebody's back door. Please be somebody else's house, I thought. But those stone tiles looked familiar. Way too familiar. Just like the wooden deck in the last video had.

There was no doorbell this time. Whoever it was just started pounding with a heavy fist.

BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG!

I shot up out of the recliner, because I heard it at my back door a split second before I heard it through the app — like there was a tiny delay traveling through the cell network.

There was no question anymore. They were at my back door. The same person filming the TikTok was standing outside my house.

Something in me snapped into pure stubborn anger. This was probably just some jerk from school messing with me, and I was furious at how well it had worked. I ran for the back door, ready to give this asshole a piece of my mind.

I threw the door open with an insult loaded and ready — and looked out into the dark at absolutely nothing.

Nobody there.

I stepped out onto the grass in my bare feet, the door hanging open behind me, and scanned the yard while shouting into the night.

"Hey! I know what you're doing! You don't scare me, asshole! Come and get me!"

That last part I would regret.

I went back inside, shut the door, and locked it. From where I stood I could see the basement stairs off to the right and the main floor straight ahead. The darkness down to the right looked like it was hiding something, and I hurried past it and up to the main floor, slamming the basement door behind me fast, like something cold was going to grab my ankle if I took too long.

There was a flimsy little chain lock on the door between the main floor and the back exit, down by the basement. We never used it. This time I slid it into place with both hands shaking. It wouldn't stop much. But it was something. Protection from what, though?

That was the question, wasn't it. It was starting to dawn on me that this might not be a kid from school. It could be anyone. It could be a murderer. My knees went a little weak.

I went back to the living room, took a breath, and sat down in the recliner. I held my phone and thought about calling my parents. I played out how it would sound.

"Hey mom, so I was on TikTok and I saw this scary video, and then the doorbell in the video rang, and then our doorbell rang, and there was nobody there, and then somebody knocked on the back door, and there was nobody there..."

I sounded insane. They'd come home and my mom would look at my dad and say, "Well, I guess you were right. He wasn't ready to be home alone. Maybe next year."

No way. Not happening. Whoever this was, I could handle it myself. I got up and went to my room to grab my baseball bat.

The second I had it in my hands, the lights went out. The entire house went black and dead silent — no hum of the fridge, nothing. And of course my phone was sitting in the living room.

Gripping the bat, I felt my way along the wall out of my room and into the hallway. As far as I could tell, the house was empty. So why did I keep hearing soft little squeaks of footsteps above me, on the second floor?

That settled it. The moment I got back to my phone, I was calling the police.

I moved slowly through the dark, trailing my hand along the walls, through the kitchen, past the basement door — and as I went by, I got this crawling feeling, like somebody was standing on the other side of it. Then I heard the doorknob turn.

Goosebumps ran up my spine and covered my whole body.

They were inside the house.

That cheap chain wasn't going to hold against anything more than a firm push. I didn't have much time. Whoever was on the other side of that door was not a kid from school — I was sure of that now. They sounded angry, yanking the knob back and forth, hammering on the door until it rattled in its frame.

I ran as fast as I dared through the dark, not caring if I slammed into something, and made it to the recliner where I'd left my phone. My plan was to grab it and dial nine one one, but I never got the chance.

A huge crash shook the house, and then I heard footsteps on the second floor — clear now — running for the stairs that led down to me.

There was more than one of them in the house.

My phone was blinking where it lay on the armrest of the recliner. I lunged for it through the blackness, cracking my shin on a dining chair on the way. I got to it, unlocked it — and at that exact moment the basement door burst open with a BANG.

The only thing I could think to do was turn on the flashlight. I needed to see what I was dealing with. I got it on fast with the shortcut from the home screen, and harsh white light flooded the room.

I walked toward the broken door. There was nobody behind it. No one who could have smashed it open.

Then my phone dinged. A text. A link to a TikTok.

I opened it. A voice spoke — ghostly, thin, like it was coming through water.

"Sorry about your door. Do you have any more candy? The bag in the basement was mostly tootsie rolls and licorice. I HATE licorice."

That's when my parents got home. They found me shaking in the recliner, every light in the house off, staring at my phone, watching that same video on loop. On the screen: our basement. Our candy stash.

"Really?!" my mom said, stunned. "You sat here all night with the lights off, eating candy and watching TikTok on your phone?"

"We're going to have to talk about cutting back on your phone time," my dad said, annoyed. "I thought you'd at least hand out candy to the kids, maybe watch a scary movie or something!" I barely heard him.

Because my mom was heading for the basement. I realized it a second too late.

"Mom! Don't go down there!!" I screamed. Too late.

"Yep, he ate all the candy down here too! You are in so much trouble, mister! I thought you didn't even like Tootsie rolls!"

*

That was the night I learned that ghosts are real. And that once a year, on Halloween, they come back to their earthly homes — to the places where they spent their happiest days.

My parents told me later what they'd learned from the neighbors. We'd bought the house from a couple who were downsizing after their kids died in a freak accident on a school trip.

The son loved TikTok. Loved playing pranks on people. Loved candy — just not licorice, apparently. The daughter mostly stayed upstairs in her room. Quiet. Never caused any trouble. Greg and Alice, their names were.

The neighbors told my parents some other things too. About the people who'd owned the house before that. Some of the stories were... darker.

But it's not Greg and Alice who keep me awake on Halloween night, too scared to sleep.

It's the other one. The one Greg told me about.

He whispered it to me in the dark, after my parents had gone to bed that night. "He stays up in the attic. That's why it was boarded up," he said. "I didn't find out how scary he really was until I crossed the veil. I can see him up there, waiting. Just don't ever unlock those doors or open those blinds. All he needs is a little breathing room and he'll be out of there next Halloween. And you do NOT want to run into HIM. There's a reason he was locked up there to begin with."

Halloween is coming again soon. Just a couple of weeks away.

And my dad just started renovating the attic. He did it today, while I was at school. The shutters are off for the first time in decades. The doors are hanging wide open.

"We've gotta let it air out," my dad told me, grinning in a way I'd never seen on him before — like he wasn't himself at all. "We've gotta let it breathe!"