11 People Who Picked Up Yarn for Halloween, Like the Teen Who Crocheted a Haunted House to Hide a Secret

My stepson Ethan is 14 and barely says ten words a day, so when he started disappearing into the garage every night for almost three weeks before Halloween, I told my husband Mark I was sure he was up to something he shouldn’t be. Mark works nights at a warehouse and was never home to check, and the one time I knocked, all I got through the door was “It’s a school project, Dana, I’m fine.” I heard him slip out again in the middle of the night, and I put it down to a teenage phase because I had an early shift at the dental office. On Halloween afternoon he carried a crocheted haunted house into the living room and set it on the mantle, a shoebox-sized thing in orange and black with bat-shaped windows and a roof sagging on one side, every row of stitches uneven in the way only a beginner’s work is. I figured the garage had been a crochet project he was too embarrassed to show anyone, and I felt relieved and a little guilty. That evening, with Mark already gone to his shift, I was carving a pumpkin in the kitchen while my daughter Lily waited in the living room for the first trick-or-treaters, and she screamed. I ran in, pulled the little door open with one finger, and my legs went weak: a kitten no bigger than my hand was looking up at me from a nest of grey yarn. Ethan came down the stairs talking faster than I’d ever heard him. He had found it behind the paint cans a few weeks earlier, and because I’d said no pets after Mark’s allergy scare, he told only our neighbor Mrs. Alvarez, a retired vet tech who spent her evenings knitting blankets for the animal shelter, and she taught him to bottle-feed it every few hours and had a friend at the clinic check the kitten over. He had kept it in a box with a heating pad in the tool closet and taught himself to crochet from videos with a hook and yarn from Goodwill, because he wanted it to have somewhere warm and wanted us to meet it before we could say no. He had slipped it into the house while I was busy in the kitchen, hoping Lily would find it first. I apologized that night for assuming the worst, and when Mark got home the next morning, he sneezed twice and said he’d call his allergist on Monday.

My mother-in-law, Carol, was the kind of grandparent who loved Halloween more than any adult I’ve known, and although she had knitted scarves for her grandkids for as long as I could remember, the year before she passed she put the needles down and spent her evenings on the couch crocheting with a hook and a bag of black and purple yarn, making a witch doll for each of her grandkids and one for me. Mine had a pointed hat and two button eyes cut from an old coat of hers, and when she handed it over, she held my wrist and said, “Never forget me, Rita, and open her up if Greg ever needs it,” which I took as her usual drama. After she was gone, the doll went into a box in our attic in Dayton, Ohio, along with everything else we didn’t know where to put, and for three years I honestly forgot it existed. This October I found the box while digging out the porch decorations, and since my husband Greg had been quiet all month about his mom, I hung the witch by a loop of yarn from the porch light myself, hoping it might make him smile. On Halloween night a gust of wind came down the street while Greg was handing out candy, and the witch swung hard against the porch post and dropped onto the concrete in two pieces, which made a group of kids in the yard laugh and sent our daughter Maya running to the steps in tears, sure the doll had been hurt. By the time I got there, the head had split from the body at the neck seam, its button eyes still shining in the porch light, and a folded piece of paper was poking out of the stuffing, and Carol’s words came back to me all at once. Greg unfolded the paper under the porch light and read it twice before he said anything, and then he handed it to me. It was in Carol’s handwriting, on the back of a pharmacy receipt: “Greg, Tom paid for the roof the winter I was in the hospital and made me promise not to tell you. Please call him.” Greg had not spoken to his brother in almost three years, since an argument over how little Tom had helped her at the end, and I knew the roof was the one repair we never figured out who paid for. He didn’t call that night. He put the note in his wallet, told Maya the doll could be sewn back together, and went back to handing out candy.

I live in Paddington, Brisbane, where Halloween barely registers on our street, but my niece in Vancouver had sent me a bat garland pattern in September, and I had been crocheting it every evening, so near the end of the month I hung all the bats along my front gate. A couple of days later there was a handwritten note in my letterbox from Mr. Doyle, a grandparent who in all his years next door had complained about my bins, my hedge, and my Saturday radio, and I opened it expecting a fourth item. It said, “Your bats are the reason my grandson Oliver won’t walk past your gate. He thinks they will bite”. The note went on to ask whether I could show him they were only wool. I went over that afternoon with the smallest bat in my pocket and a basket of yarn and found Oliver on the verandah steps with his arms crossed. He took the bat, poked its floppy wing, and said it was far too soft to be scary, then asked how anyone made something like that. By the evening he had a chain of stitches and a look of total concentration, while Mr. Doyle stood in the doorway pretending to read the newspaper. On Halloween, Oliver hung his own lopsided bat, one wing twice as long as the other, in the front window facing the street. Mr. Doyle has not said a word about my bins since, though he did ask me last week whether a man his age could still learn to crochet.

“Crocheted my daughter her first Halloween costume. Presenting baby gnome!”

My husband says the only reason I finish anything is that I start it too late, and he may be right, because the crocheted pumpkin on our porch was my first project after I picked up crochet as a hobby, begun early in October and finished the night before Halloween with half the yarn ends still hanging from the stem. In the Halloweens since, the plastic pumpkins along our street have been kicked in by teenagers every single year, and nobody has ever touched mine, probably because anyone looking at it can tell somebody spent far too long on it.

For about two weeks in October, somebody was taking my black yarn, and I was so convinced it was Brenda from accounting that it never crossed my mind to look anywhere else. Crochet is my hobby, and I keep a canvas bag of black and orange skeins under my desk to work on Halloween bats during my lunch break, so every morning the black ones looked a little smaller, as if a few yards had been pulled off and the end tucked back neatly. Brenda had already joked twice in team meetings about my “little craft corner,” so on a Thursday I tied a red thread around the bag, and by Friday it had been cut. On Monday I stopped by Brenda’s desk and asked, as gently as I could, whether she had maybe borrowed some of my black yarn, and she looked so honestly confused that I knew right away I’d gotten it wrong, and before I could say another word our manager Ray, who was standing by the printer, put his coffee down and said, “It was me, Brenda didn’t do anything.” His daughter Lucy wanted to be a black cat, and the yarn he had bought at the dollar store kept splitting while he taught himself knitting from videos so he could make her a tail, which is why he had been unwinding a few yards of mine every lunch hour and meaning to replace it, planning to surprise me by asking me to teach Lucy once he could show he had really tried. He had cut the red thread on Friday without thinking it meant anything. I apologized to Brenda three times that afternoon, and she accepted once.

My grandmother Lena, a grandparent who has never once taken advice about ladders, fell off a step stool last October while hanging the same plastic spiders she had put up every year since I was a child, and after that nobody in the family would let her near one again, so she did what she always does when she is told no and found another way. She had crocheted blankets for as long as I could remember but never a single decoration, and that week she sat at the kitchen table with the hook from her sewing basket and a bag of white cotton and started on a spiderweb, working it in sections she carried out to the porch one at a time and wove through the railing herself, one slow loop after another, while my aunt stood below with her arms folded saying it might look nice but it would never survive a real rainstorm. The kids on her street, who had never paid her much attention, began stopping at the gate on the way home from school to watch it grow, and one of them told her it was the best web he had ever seen, which she repeated to everyone at dinner as if he had won an award for her. By the end of the month it stretched nearly the width of the porch, and on Halloween it rained hard enough that half of it hung in grey, sagging strips by the time the first trick-or-treaters arrived, and my aunt said “I told you” before she could stop herself. Lena looked at it for a long moment, then went inside for her hook and sat on the steps unpicking the ruined section row by row so she could use the yarn again, and when a boy in a skeleton costume asked what she was doing, she told him she was making room for next year’s.