Bogleech.com's 2013 Horror Write-off:

" Sock Stealer "

Submitted by Infernalthing

A little recently I moved to a house in the suburbs. The neighbors are nice and friendly. They seemed close and united. My friend, Alex, lives here too so the others already heard about me.

It was my first Halloween here and I was invited to a Halloween party at a neighbors house. It was kind of a tradition here to hold a neighborhood party.

I was getting ready to dress for the party. But for some reason I hardly found any socks to wear. Most of the socks I found had a missing pair. That was strange.

Speaking of strange, something happened at the party. I got to the kitchen to grab some drinks and found the window open. I was sure it was closed the last time I was in there.

Like that wasn't enough, I saw a kid running in the crowd of people. He was short, maybe he was seven. He was wearing a grey sweater with some dark colored horizontal stripes and he had a smiling pumpkin head with big round eyes. The eyes and mouth were pitch black.

The kid wasn't someone we knew and he was running so stealthy between people that nobody even noticed him. He was busy stealing the socks of peoples feet, sometimes just one sock from a person. His stealth level was supernatural! How can you not notice someone is taking your socks off when you're standing?

I tried to catch him but he disappeared in the crowd. I went into the kitchen and the window was open again. I looked out and I saw him running towards my house. He easily opened the door and entered. But I locked the door! How did he even entered? It looked like he picklocked the door with his fingers and did it fast and effortless.

I excused myself to the party host and didn't have time to explain before running home. When outside I also just noticed that I no longer had socks on my feet. I arrived to my door and it was locked. How the hell? Luckily, I had the keys with me.

I searched the entire house but found nothing out of place. Nothing except that all of my socks were missing!

The next day we met at a gathering to talk about the incident. Miss Spencer started crying when the grey sweater was mentioned. Then mister Spencer explained that their son, little Dave, had disappeared a year ago during winter.

He was so obsessed with Christmas that even during Halloween he was hanging every sock he found to be ready to find gifts in them. The day he disappeared he was wearing the gray sweater but he wasn't wearing any pumpkin head.