The children of Sutter’s Hollow, Iowa, don’t trick-or-treat anymore. Not since Halloween 1997, when six kids vanished between the Methodist church and the water tower, a distance of three blocks. Not since their bodies were found arranged in the Benson cornfield like points on a pentagram, their Halloween candy scattered across eight acres, each piece opened, each piece emptied, the wrappers filled with dried kernels of corn.
This Halloween marks the twenty-eighth anniversary. I’ve come to Sutter’s Hollow because the town council has finally agreed to let children trick-or-treat again. They claim the danger has passed. They claim the thing responsible is gone. They claim the protection holds.
They’re lying about something.
Main Street stretches four blocks through downtown, decorated with paper pumpkins and cartoon witches that flutter in the October wind. Karen Benson, whose father owned the cornfield where the bodies were found, runs the hardware store now. She agreed to talk while she strung orange lights around her storefront window.
“People think we’re superstitious fools,” she said, testing each bulb. “They think we destroyed our children’s childhoods over nothing. But they didn’t see what I saw that night.”
Karen was sixteen in 1997, helping her father with the harvest. She heard the screaming first, she said, though the nearest house was two miles away. When they found the children at midnight, arranged in that perfect geometric pattern, something else was present in the field. Something that moved between the corn rows without disturbing the stalks. Something that whispered numbers in a language that predated human speech.
The police reports describe finding the bodies. They don’t mention the symbols carved into the dirt beneath each child. They don’t mention that the corn in that field grew black the following season, that buyers from three states competed to purchase it at ten times market price, that everyone who ate it reported dreams of walking through endless corridors made of living flesh.
Sheriff Dale Morrison was a deputy in 1997. He keeps a bottle of whiskey in his desk drawer and a loaded shotgun with shells he had blessed by priests from three different denominations. When I asked him about tonight’s trick-or-treat revival, his hands shook as he poured another drink.
“The town council says we’ve paid enough,” he said. “Twenty-eight years of keeping our children inside on Halloween. Twenty-eight years of the house lights off, the streets empty. They say the debt is cleared.”
But Morrison knows what the council won’t admit. Every Halloween since 1997, something has walked the streets of Sutter’s Hollow. Residents huddle in their basements, listening to footsteps on their porches, knocks on their doors, voices calling their children’s names in tones that almost sound human. The brave few who’ve peered through curtains report seeing figures in Halloween costumes from 1997, pristine and unworn, trick-or-treat bags swinging, walking in formation toward the Benson field.
This afternoon, I visited the field. The corn grows tall despite the drought affecting neighboring farms. The harvesting equipment sits idle. Tom Benson, Karen’s father, refuses to cut it down. He’s eighty-three now, gaunt and hollow-eyed, and he spoke to me only after I promised not to use his name. I’m breaking that promise because what he told me matters more than my word.
“It ain’t the children who come back,” he said, standing at the field’s edge as the sun began to set. “The children were the payment, not the collectors.”
The truth, as Tom revealed, is that Sutter’s Hollow made a bargain in 1969. The town was dying, the farms failing, the young people fleeing to cities. The town council of that era found something in the original survey records, coordinates that marked Sutter’s Hollow as the geographic center of something vast and hungry. They made contact. They made an agreement. The town would thrive for thirty years in exchange for a single payment.
“We thought it meant money,” Tom said. “Or crops. We were fools.”
Six o’clock arrives. Halloween night officially begins. Parents emerge from houses with costumed children, their faces rigid with determination to reclaim normalcy. Spider-Men and princesses, zombies and superheroes fill the sidewalks. Their laughter sounds forced, their movements careful, as if following choreographed steps.
I follow the largest group down Main Street. The children clutch their bags, approaching each decorated house, calling out “trick or treat” in voices that grow more confident with each stop. The adults watch from porches, their smiles not reaching their eyes, their hands never far from door handles.
At the corner of Main and Sycamore, a child in a corn-husk scarecrow costume joins the group. No parent accompanies him. His mask is too elaborate, too detailed, kernels of actual corn embedded in latex that looks wet in the streetlight. The other children make room for him without seeming to notice. The adults don’t see him at all.
More children in corn-themed costumes emerge from between houses, from behind trees, from shadows that shouldn’t be deep enough to hide them. They integrate seamlessly into the trick-or-treat groups, their bags already heavy with something that rustles like dried leaves.
I try to warn Karen Benson, but she’s staring at the cornfield visible from her porch. The stalks are moving against the wind, creating patterns, forming words in a language older than agriculture itself. She grabs my arm, her fingers ice cold.
“Count the children,” she whispers.
I count forty-three children on Main Street. The town records show thirty-seven children under age twelve in Sutter’s Hollow.
The extra six wear costumes identical to those worn by the victims in 1997. They move through the crowds, collecting candy, their bags never filling, their faces never visible behind masks that seem to shift and writhe in peripheral vision. When they laugh, it sounds like corn husks rustling. When they speak, windows fog with frost.
Sheriff Morrison stands at the intersection, his hand on his holstered weapon, watching something the rest of us can’t see. Or won’t see. Or don’t want to see. He’s counting too, his lips moving in what might be prayer or might be calculation.
At exactly 9 PM, all the children stop moving. They stand perfectly still in the middle of the street, their bags held at identical angles, their heads turned toward the Benson cornfield. The corn-costumed children walk through the frozen tableau, selecting six trick-or-treaters with movements that suggest careful consideration. They touch each chosen child gently on the shoulder. The touched children begin walking toward the cornfield, their parents unable to move, unable to scream, unable to do anything but watch.
But then the twist comes, the revelation that reframes everything.
The corn-costumed children remove their masks. They’re the six children who died in 1997, unchanged, unaged, their faces patient and sad. They speak in unison, their voices like wind through grain silos.
“We stayed to pay the debt. Every year, we pay. But the contract ends at thirty. Two more years, and we’re free. Unless you give us replacements now.”
The parents understand immediately. The bargain made in 1969 wasn’t for thirty years of prosperity. It was for thirty years of payments. Six children every Halloween, except the town stopped offering them after 1997. So the same six children have been paying, over and over, dying repeatedly in that field, their souls recycling through an endless Halloween night.
The chosen children stand at the field’s edge now, waiting. The parents have a choice: let these six new children take the place of the victims from 1997, freeing those souls but condemning new ones to two more years of cyclic death. Or refuse, and watch the original six return to the field for another Halloween massacre, knowing it will happen again next year, and the year after.
Karen Benson makes the choice for everyone. She walks to her hardware store, returns with six lengths of rope, and hands them to the parents of the chosen children.
“Your kids or ours,” she says. “But someone pays tonight.”
The parents look at their frozen children, at the six patient ghosts, at the corn that rustles with anticipation. One father steps forward, takes a rope, and ties it around his own wrist. Then another parent. Then another. Six adults connected by rope, walking toward the field.
“Take us instead,” the first father says. “End it with us.”
The corn ghosts consider this. They look at each other with eyes that have seen twenty-eight years of Halloween nights. They nod. The living children unfreeze, collapse, cry for their parents. But the adults are already entering the corn, led by the six ghosts who finally, finally get to stop being children, stop being victims, stop being the currency in a bargain they never made.
The field swallows them in darkness. The corn rustles once, violently, then goes silent. The children of Sutter’s Hollow run home, their candy scattered and forgotten, their Halloween ended.
Tomorrow, six new scarecrows will stand in the Benson field, so lifelike that crows won’t land on them. The town’s prosperity will end. The farms will fail. The children will leave for cities. But they’ll leave alive, unbound by contracts signed before they were born.
And every Halloween, the scarecrows will wave in the wind, their stuffed hands pointing toward town, reminding Sutter’s Hollow that some debts can be renegotiated, but only if you’re willing to pay a different price.
The corn is already growing around them as I write this, black stalks rising in the darkness, ready for a harvest that will feed nothing human, that will be bought by no one, that will grow forever in a field where six adults made the only choice that mattered.
The children of Sutter’s Hollow will trick-or-treat next year. Their parents won’t be there to watch them.