John Clark encouraging MCW members to participate in a game of Halloween Two Truths and a Dare. Each set of statements below has one that’s false. Your challenge is to decide which ones they are. Best guesser wins something interesting.  Here are mine.

1-I once saw a rocking chair move on its own in an abandoned house.

2-My collection of shrunken heads was confiscated by the Maine State Police.

3-The Hells Angels let me sleep in an abandoned car while they played with fire inside a house.

Kaitlyn Dunnett/Kathy Lynn Emerson chiming in with two truths and a lie. Can you tell which one is untrue?

1-A short story I wrote is included in a horror anthology.

2-Every Halloween we dress up a dead tree in our front yard so that it looks like a witch.

3-When I was compiling his memoirs for the family, my dead grandfather sent me a “sign” that he approved of the project.

Maureen Milliken two truths and a lie! [Or do we  just say “alternate facts” these days?]

1.-There’s something in the walls, eaves and between the floors of my house — too big to be mice, or even squirrels. I can hear it running through the ceiling when I’m in the living room. It — or they — is/are big and loud and I expect one day it’s going to burst through the walls like the monster in the movie “Aliens.”

2-The college I went to (Catholic college buildings from the 1840s) had a hidden exorcism room in secret tunnels under the older buildings on the campus, and particularly on Halloween, we’d go looking for it. Though we never found the room, we heard enough whispers and cries to know that the spirit of something was there.

3-Every time I open the door of a remote place — particularly state park and rest area outhouses, but also walk-in refrigerators and closets in public buildings — I expect there to be a body. I’m relieved, yet disappointed, when there isn’t one.

From Sandra Neily

3) I once trick or treated as the backend of a horse. I do not recommend it for many reasons, most especially because many grownups do not see the second candy bag sticking out from the back.

Kate Flora

1 While driving on a foggy night on Route 128, a woman suddenly appeared in the middle lane, waving her arms wildly for me to stop. I rolled down my window and she approached the car and said, “Pull over to the side and stop.” When I continued to stare, she said, “It’s okay, Fraulein. It’s what the Fuhrer wants you to do.”

2 Once, while I was on a visit to New York, there was a man on the subway staring at me. Unnerved, I got off and explored above ground, but an hour later, there he was again, staring. So I went back to hotel, more than a little bit spooked. When I went out a few hours later to get some dinner, he was eating in the restaurant I choose. Was I being followed?

3 A few years ago, on a Sisters in Crime field trip to the New Hampshire Medical Examiner’s office, she showed us the morgue freezer where the bodies were stored, and once we were all inside, she went out, shut the door, and turned off the light. That sure made the visit memorable.

Brenda Buchanan

1- Many people fret about roller coasters, but I love ‘em. The steeper and twistier, the better.

2 – I’m not afraid of spiders or snakes.

3 – I love to camp in remote places, sharing the woods with animals but no other people.
Jen Blood

1 – As teenagers, my friends and I regularly broke into a creepy abandoned inn in Northport for seances and canoodling.

2 – At seventeen, my ex-bf and his buddies took me out trick o’treating as their little sister, dressing me in a sheet topped with a Winnie the Pooh baseball hat because I was short enough to pass for a child.

3 – When I was in my late twenties, a woman in white appeared in my room at Kirkpatrick Hall my first night at Goddard College, whispered something that I couldn’t understand, and then vanished. I was wide awake at the time, and to this day wonder if someone spiked the punch at that first Goddard dinner.