Topic of the Week: Halloween
One of an occasional series that spotlights one part of the Pentrace archive for readers who haven't explored the whole site yet.
A Carter's Inx “Ma Carter” penhead ink bottle. (Photo: George Kovalenko)
Every October, Pentrace writers put down their repair manuals and price guides and told each other ghost stories. There are haunted Vacumatics and cursed Duofolds, inks with terrible recipes, a pen shop that should have stayed closed and a storage locker with thirteen pens in it. Most came out of the site's Halloween contests, which ran from the 2001 drabbles to the 2010 Scary Story Contest. This page gathers them in one place, year by year, in time for Halloween on Oct. 31.
Start here
If you only read a few of these, start with the following:
- The Case of the Haunted Pen
- A hard-boiled serial from the autumn of 2000, in six chapters: a private eye, a silver-blue Vacumatic Major with a fine flex nib, and the spirit of its last owner.
- The Little Pen Shop of Horrors
- Five Pentrace writers each took the same title somewhere different, with a frame story and a closing poem by Bernard Glassman.
- The Most Frightful Nonsense
- Ray Blake's businessman finds a perfect 1933 pen in an antique shop for 200 pounds, and everyone he writes to with it is dead by Halloween night.
- The Thirteenth Pen
- Kurt Hammerbeck's storage-locker auction: thirteen pens in a rack, each matched to a killer.
- Really a True Horror Story
- The newest, from Len Provisor this month: a flea market at 4:30 on a winter morning, and a horror story he says he can prove.
Every Halloween story, by year
Everything in the archive for Halloween, in date order:
2000
- The Case of the Haunted Pen: Chapter I
- The Case of the Haunted Pen: Chapter II
- The Case of the Haunted Pen: Chapter III
- The Case of the Haunted Pen: Chapter IV
- The Case of the Haunted Pen: Chapter V
- The Case of the Haunted Pen: Chapter VI
- Hey! It's Halloween… So What Pen and Ink Are You Using? — a message board thread
2001
- The 2001 Pentrace Drabble Collection — stories of exactly 100 words
2002
- Halloween Scary Stories — Johan Thole, Nicola Mallik and Stuart Williams
2003
- The Little Pen Shop of Horrors: Halloween 2003 — Bernard Glassman and others
- The Halloween Scary Stories 2003 — Marc D Smith and Ron Dutcher
2004
2007
- The Halloween Scary Stories 2007 — Stuart Williams, Will Thorpe, Keith Grubb, T. Michael Weddle and Andy Abbott
2008
- The Halloween Scary Stories 2008 — Jean Buchser, Allan Hall, Pablo Perez Trabado and Nikolaos Syrigonakis
2009
- It Was a Dark and Stormy Night — Len Provisor
- The 2009 Pentrace Scary Story Contest — Pat Morgan, Kurt Hammerbeck, T. Michael Weddle, Jean Buchser and Will Thorpe
2010
- The 2010 Pentrace Scary Story Contest — Kurt Hammerbeck, Pablo Perez Trabado and Vicki Hillis
2012
- The Thirteenth Pen — Kurt Hammerbeck
2014
2016
- The Most Frightful Nonsense — Ray Blake
2026
- Really a True Horror Story — Len Provisor
Every page tagged Halloween is also on its topic page. Looking for something this list doesn't cover? Browse all pages.