VIDEO AVAILABLE: A HALLOWEEN STORY | THE DOORBELL, Part 1: Keep the Porch Light On

0:03 Hello and welcome to Ghost Scary Stories. This series is The Doorbell. Episode 1. Keep the porch light on. It's Halloween tonight and I want to tell you about my street. And about the rules, because they're good rules and you should know them. Everybody should know them. You've got your own door, wherever you are. And I promise you it works the same as mine tonight. Every door does. That's the thing about this night. So listen to me and learn them. And then you'll be safe, the way my mother made sure I'd be safe. She taught me the rules when I was small. I'm going to teach them to you. Think of it as a gift, from one neighbor to another, on the one night it matters. Here they are, there are four, and they're simple, and you

1:14 must never break them. Keep your porch light on, all night, from dusk until the sun comes up, that light stays on, no matter what. Answer every knock, every single one, it doesn't matter how late, it doesn't matter if you're tired. If you're frightened, if you've run out of candy, if the whole street's gone dark and quiet and you think surely that must be the last of them, you answer.

1:42 Admire the costume. Whatever is standing on your porch, you tell it how wonderful it looks. You mean it. You smile and give them what they ask for, whatever they ask for. And never, ever turn anyone away. That's all. Four rules. My mother used to say them like a little song while she filled the bowls. Keep the light on.

2:07 Answer the door. Love the costume. Give them what they want. And I can still hear her saying it. And I say it myself now. Every year, in this same house, filling the same bowls. You'll be saying it too by the end of the night. You'll see. Let me tell you how the evening goes, so you know what to expect.

2:34 It starts so sweet. That's what people forget about Halloween, how sweet the front of the night is. The little ones come first, because they have early bedtimes, so the first knock is always around six, still a bit of light in the sky. And you open the door, and there's a child, the size of a fire hydrant, dressed as a down at the end of the path with their phone out. And the child has forgotten entirely what it's supposed to say and just stares at you. And you crouch down and you say, oh my goodness, what a wonderful pumpkin. And you give it more candy than it could ever eat. And everyone's happy. I live for that first hour. I do. The little witches and the dinosaurs and the superheroes. And the parents I half recognize.

3:29 And the porch lights all the way down the street glowing in the dusk. Every single house. Because everyone on my street keeps the rules. Everyone. We don't talk about why. We just all keep our lights on. Every year. Without fail. You might think that's just a nice neighborhood. I used to think that too. The first wrong thing is so small you'd let it go. I let it go. For years.

3:56 before I understood. Somewhere in that first sweet hour, there's always one, one child you don't quite place. The costume's a little off, a little old-fashioned, a little too carefully made, the kind of thing nobody's mother sews anymore, and it stands a bit too still. And it doesn't say trick or treat, it just looks up at you from under its mask and waits, and there's no parent at the end of the path for that one, and you give it its candy a little faster than the others. and you don't quite watch which way it goes when it leaves.

4:30 You tell yourself it's a shy kid from the next street over. You say, what a wonderful costume, because that's the rule, and you mean it a little less than you meant the others, and you shut the door a little quicker, and you move on. Because the doorbell's already going again, and here come three more princesses. I want you to hold on to that one, the one that doesn't fit. Because as the night goes on, there start to be more of them, and fewer of the others.

4:59 And that's how you know the night is turning. Because it turns. Around eight, half past, the parents stop walking their little ones, and the groups get older. Teenagers in a bit of face paint and a hoodie, barely bothering, holding out a pillowcase. And that's fine. That's normal. You give them a handful, and off they go being too cool for it. And then it gets later still, and the gaps between the knocks get longer, and the street gets quieter. The little kids all home in bed now, and the costumes that do still come get better. That's the word I want you to sit with. Better. Earlier it was cheap masks and bedsheets. Now, late, the ones that come to the door are good. A Victorian woman in full morning black, the lace just right, standing silent

5:53 on my porch at half past ten. A figure in a long coat whose face, under the hat, I could not quite find in the porch light. Costumes with real weight to them, real age. Costumes that don't look bought or made so much as kept. And they come alone now. No groups, no parents, no laughing. They come one at a time, up the dark path. And they stand. And they wait. And they do not always say the words. Now, before I go on, I have to tell you the story my mother told me. The one that's underneath all the rules. Because without it, nothing else I say tonight will land the way it needs to. When my mother was a girl, there was a house on this street that broke the rules. Just once. The Harlow House, she

6:43 called it. though there's another family there now, and has been for 50 years. One Halloween, the Harlows turned their porch light off early. They'd run out of candy, or they were tired, or they just didn't feel like it. And they switched the light off, and they didn't answer the knocks. And when a last knock came, late, they ignored it. They turned someone away. They broke all four rules in one night. My mother said that in the morning the Harlow house was just a little bit wrong, nothing you could photograph. The family was all still there, all alive, all accounted for. But they were quieter, diminished, she said. That was her word. Like something had been taken out of the middle of them in the night,

7:33 and they'd come down to breakfast, not quite as much as they'd been. And every year after that they kept the light on and answered every knock more faithfully than anyone. Because they knew now, they'd learned, and you could see it in them. The way they jumped at the doorbell. The way the mother's hand shook filling the bowls. They'd met the thing you meet when you turn it away.

7:57 And it had left most of them. But it had kept something. It always keeps something. The rules aren't so it leaves you untouched. The rules are so it only takes the toll, and not the rest of you. I told you I'd tip my hand about whether any of this is real. I won't, not yet. I'll only say this. On my street, nobody talks about it. That's the part that convinces me, more than any story my mother told.

8:31 Not that people say keep your light on, but that nobody ever has to. In forty years, I have never once heard a neighbour explain it, never seen a sign, never had a single conversation about why every porch on this road burns all night on the 31st, while half the town goes dark by nine. We just do it.

8:54 New families move into the houses, and within a year or two their lights are on all night too, every Halloween, like they caught it off the street, like the street taught them in their sleep. You'd think, If it were nothing, somebody in 40 years would have said, why do we all do this? Isn't it a waste of electricity? I'm having an early night. Nobody ever does. And the only reason a whole street keeps a rule that nobody will say out loud is that every single one of us, in some year we don't discuss, has had our own midnight knock and answered it and learned. I have lived my whole life on this street and I have never once let my light go out And I am still here, still myself, mostly. And the nights I think about the

9:42 harlows are the nights I do not sleep. And so I follow the rules. All of them. Every year. I keep my light on. I answer every knock. I tell the silent Victorian woman that her costume is beautiful. And I mean it. I make myself mean it. because the rule is you admire the costume and you give them what they ask for and when they don't ask for anything when they just stand there and wait you work out what they want and you give them that I have gotten very good over the years at working out what the late ones want It isn't always candy. I'll give you one, so you know what I mean, so you're not caught off guard at your own door. A few years back, late, near eleven, the bell rang, and I opened it, and there was a little boy on

10:35 the porch. Small, seven or eight, in old pyjamas, no costume at all, no bag for candy, just a little boy, standing in the cold in his pyjamas, at eleven o'clock at night. And he looked up at me and he said, in a small, clear voice, Can I come in? I'm cold. And every motherly thing in me wanted to say, Yes, of course. Come in. Get warm. Let me call your parents.

11:03 The way any decent person would. The way you would. And that is the one time the rules and your heart pull against each other. Because here is what my mother taught me. Underneath the four rules... the thing she gripped my arm to say. You give them what they ask for, but you never, ever let them over the threshold. Candy, yes. Kindness, yes.

11:30 A coin, a prayer, a compliment. Whatever they ask, you hand it out across the doorway. But the door is the line, and the inside of your house is yours, and the one thing you cannot give, the one thing it will take everything if you give, is an invitation in. So I knelt down in my own doorway, with this freezing child looking up at me asking so politely to come inside, and I said, I'm so sorry sweetheart, I can't let you in, but here, and I filled his little hands with everything in the bowl, and he looked at the candy, and he looked at me, and he was not cold anymore, his face was not a child's face anymore, and he said, in a voice that was much older than seven. You know the rules. And he turned and walked back down the path into the dark,

12:23 and I shut the door, and I shook for an hour. You never let them in. Whatever they are, whatever they ask, that's the rule under the rules. Now I can tell you about a year ago tonight, the worst knock, the one I have carried for twelve whole months and told no one, and the real reason I am teaching you all of this now, tonight, before your own night gets late, because a year ago tonight, the rules and I came closer to breaking than we have ever come, and I need you to know how it felt, so that when it comes to your door, and it will, you are readier than I was. A year ago tonight, the sweet hour came and went, the pumpkins and the princesses, the teenagers came and went, The late ones came. The good costumes.

13:17 The silent ones. The Victorian woman. The man whose face I couldn't find. And I gave them all what they wanted. And I admired them all. And I kept my light on. And by midnight the street was dead. Truly dead. Every other porch light still burning all the way down. But no one on the paths anymore. No cars. No voices.

13:39 the particular silence of a street that has finished being Halloween and is just waiting for it to be November. I was cleaning up the bowls. I thought I was done. I had my hand on the switch, not to turn the light off. I would never, just resting my hand near it the way you do. And I was thinking about bed, and the doorbell rang. At midnight, on a dead street, when every child for a mile was asleep and every teenager was home, and there was no one, no one, left to be out. The doorbell rang, one long ring, and then the knock came, slow, three times, low on the door. And I stood in my hallway and I did not move, because I knew, the way you know, the way the animal in you knows before the rest catches up, that whatever was on my porch

14:32 was not a child, was not a person, was not anyone who had come for candy. I could feel it through the door, that specific weight, that patience, the thing the rules are actually for. Finally, after a whole life of lights and bowls and silent visitors, standing on my porch in the dead middle of Halloween night, having rung my bell, and here is the thing, here is the whole thing, I wanted, more than I have ever wanted anything, to leave the door shut, to pretend I was asleep, to turn the light off and go up to bed and not answer, But I knew the rules. My mother's rules.

15:14 The Harlow rules. You answer every knock, every one, no matter how late. You never turn anyone away. The one you turn away is the one that comes back for you. So I put my hand on the door. And that's where I have to leave you, for now. With my hand on the door, and the thing on the other side of it, waiting to be let in. Because you have your own night to get through first, and your own door. and I need you to practice before I tell you the rest. Keep your light on tonight. Answer every knock. You're going to need to be good at it.

15:50 I'll tell you what opened the door next time, if I still can.