A Halloween horror story. Part one of two. Ghost, Scary Stories.

There are four rules on my street, and my mother taught them to me when I was small. Keep your porch light on, all night. Answer every knock, no matter how late. Admire the costume, and mean it. Give them whatever they ask for, and never turn anyone away.The early hours are sweet. The pumpkins, the princesses, the parents waiting at the end of the path. It's later that the costumes start getting better. Older. Heavier. The ones that come alone, up the dark path, and stand, and wait, and don't always say the words. I've gotten very good at working out what the late ones want.A year ago tonight, the street was dead by midnight. Every porch light still burning. Nobody left outside.And my doorbell rang.Part one of two. Both parts are out tonight. Keep your light on, You're going to need to be good at it.

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The sequence takes hours now. And the figure is no longer only at the foot of the bed or on the stairs. It is in every room, ahead of her, waiting.She was deep in the steps when the knock came. Not the figure. A human knock, low on the door, and the voice from the phone. It's so cold out here, Mum. I've been coming for two years.Then the voice said it had found something in the spring, in her closet. A small red coat.The finale of The Instructions. Part 4 of 4.

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The rule is simple. If you lose your place, you start over from the front door, no matter how far in you were.She lost her place upstairs, an hour in. When she turned to go back down, the figure was on the stairs — standing on the only path to the beginning.Then her sister Kath let herself in with their mother's old key, stood in the hallway looking at the turned mirrors and the paths worn into the floorboards, and started to cry. There's no one here, she said. There was never anything here. It's just you.For one moment, she believed her.Part 3 of 4.

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The steps grow. Nobody tells you that at the start. The fear learns the gaps you leave, and every gap you close becomes a new step.

Now there are the mirrors — every one turned to the wall before dark, because she looked once, in the hall, and the hall behind her reflection was not empty. And there is the phone, which must never be answered once the steps have begun.

This week it rang four times. On the fourth, she answered. A young woman's voice, crying, calling her Mum, saying her own name into the line.The name went somewhere and did not stay.

Part 2 of 4.

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Halloween Pop-up Channel Apple.
Halloween Pop-up Channel Spotify.

Cackles. Howls. Shrieks.
Something's stirring at Caloroga Media.

The gates are open... and the Halloween Pop-Up Channel has arrived. Hundreds of episodes. One haunted feed. Every kind of fright you could want this season.

Start with Ghost: Scary Stories, tales that'll have you glancing over your shoulder. Best enjoyed with the lights on. Craving something sweet among the tricks?

5 Good News Stories: Halloween Edition is the full-size candy bar of the bunch. Hitmaker Chronicles uncovers the stories behind music's spookiest songs.

Monsters, Sharks and Dinosaurs brings you creatures real and imagined... some of them extinct. Probably.

For true crime fans, Murder Weekly and True Crime serve up real cases with a Halloween chill. Grab a flashlight. Check the locks.

And Romance Weekly? Love stories with a dark seasonal twist. Happily ever after... with a little bite.

New Halloween episodes drop every single day. It's free, no costume required, and like any good ghost... it won't be here forever. Once the candy runs out, it vanishes.

This is the Halloween Pop-Up Channel from Caloroga Media. Search for "Halloween Pop-Up Channel" wherever you listen.

If you dare.

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AI helps us with some of our voice acting and portrayl of characters.

There was a stretch of her life, not long ago, when the fear came and would not leave. She was not a foolish woman. She ran a full, loud household; she was the one other people leaned on. Then something ended, and into the space it left, the fear came — a certainty, every night, that something was testing the edges of the house, looking for the way in.She checked the locks a hundred times a night. It didn't help, because she did it frightened and at random.Then she found the steps. The same doors, in the same order, a hand flat on each one, the name said out loud. And for the first time in months, the fear stopped.It came back, of course. A little bigger each time. And each time she did the steps, the relief was a little sweeter.Part 1 of 4.

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AI helps us with some of our voice acting and portrayl of characters.

She promised, at the very start, to tell you how to stay alive. She kept every other promise. She told you she survived. She told you she'd give you the rule. She told you what it costs and what she had to refuse and what happened to the man three houses down.She has one thing left to tell you, and she has been building toward it for four nights. Listen the way she asked you to. The finale of The Listener. Part 4 of 4.

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AI helps us with some of our voice acting and portrayl of characters.

There was one other house on that road with a light in it.The woman who opened the door was about seventy, and she knew everything before Marion said a word. She raised a hand to stop her. She pointed to her own throat, then to her own ear. She would listen. She would not speak.She wrote on a yellow legal pad, in careful capitals, and the first thing she wrote — before hello, before her name — was this:DON'T ANSWER IT. NOT ONCE. NOT EVER.The houses on that road were not empty once. They were full of people at the end of a road that goes nowhere, which is a certain kind of person. She had watched the lights go out, one at a time, for thirty years. And she had a list of names.Part 3 of 4.

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AI helps us with some of our voice acting and portrayl of characters.

She stopped answering. She thought going quiet was the same as being safe.Every night it got better. The first phrases came out wrong — rhythm off, stresses in the wrong places, a voice reading letters it didn't understand. Then the seams closed. And it wasn't only voices it was learning. It learned that if it said half a sentence and let the silence stretch, she would lean toward it, aching to hear the end.Then it found her mother. Not just the voice — six years of that voice, every grain of it right. And in her mother's voice it said the things her mother never said in forty years. I'm proud of you. I'm sorry. I heard you. I always heard you.All she had to do was answer. One word.Part 2 of 4.

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AI helps us with some of our voice acting and portrayl of characters.

It starts as warmth. That's the part she needs you to understand, because if you're waiting for it to sound like a monster you'll miss it, the way she nearly did.Marion nursed her mother for six years in a house at the end of a road that goes nowhere. Six years of being talked at by a woman who never once heard her. Then her mother died, and even that was gone, and the silence came down so completely that she started saying things out loud just to hear a voice in the house.The knocking began in the small hours. She explained every sound away, sensibly, correctly — right up until the sounds started answering her. And then, because she was so tired of being the only voice in that house, she started talking back. She told it about her day. She told it about her mother. She told it the things from the middle of her.It listened. It never once interrupted. It let her finish.Part 1 of 4.

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AI helps us with some of our voice acting and portrayl of characters.

The week she left was the coldest of the year, and nobody was holding her anywhere. The door was right there. It was always right there. That's the whole horror of what Walt built. You can leave any time. You just have to be willing to die in the snow to do it — and he made sure you weren't, and then he called your staying love. What broke it was the custody review. Because her stability was Walt, and the day her children came home was the day she'd have to stand on her own, and he had spent five months making certain she never could. The road through him didn't lead to her kids. It circled. So she stopped trying to win, and started trying to get out. Which meant becoming, on purpose, for the length of one conversation, exactly the woman he had always so gently implied she secretly was. The finale of The Provider. Part 4 of 4.

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AI helps us with some of our voice acting and portrayl of characters.