Creepypasta origins (Finished)

Full size candy bars

There's a point in your life when the things that have happened to you just become stories. I don't mean that they are less important or that they didn't happen, but they just turn into that thing that happened once. No matter how much it affected you, it's just a story.

Even if you're the one who survived.

Five years ago, when we were 15, my best friend Andy and I decided to go trick-or-treating one more time. I know we were probably too old and the adults in the neighborhood would roll their eyes when we showed up, but we figured they would give up the candy because kids our age were more likely to mess with their house if they didn't get free chocolate.

Andy and I weren't like that at all, but it didn't make us any less likely to embrace the idea. Free candy is free candy.

Being of that age when lazy becomes an art form in itself, Andy and I weren't just going to go out only to find that we were getting crappy stuff like butterscotch candies or the sort of stuff you'd see in grandma's candy dish. Leave that for what our parents did. This is the digital age.

If you know what to look for and with even basic social media skills, you can actually get your route mapped out for you in advance. Even four years ago, kids were all over Twitter posting pics and putting up hashtags were the really good candy was. It's probably more Instagram now.

We looked for #fullsize. While it sounded like a good idea at the time it also led to more than a few pictures of dudes naked below the waist. It wasn't a foolproof way to find the candy, but it worked at least a little bit. We were able to find a neighborhood not too far from Andy's house that had four different stops with full-sized candy bars.

We each had three different masks, you know, the cheap thin plastic kind that gets held onto your head by an even cheaper and thinner piece of elastic or rubber band? They were only a buck a piece at the local dollar store and we got more than that back in chocolate just from those few houses. Sure, by the third time the parents got the clue, but what difference did it make?

By the time we actually went out, only about an hour had passed until most of the houses were turning off their lights or blowing out the candles in their pumpkins. We went out a bit later than other kids because we were older and of course that meant we couldn't be out at the same time as the little kids.

Andy was scrolling through Twitter trying to see if there were any other houses close by that we could hit up and wasn't having much luck. I was looking through what had turned out to be a pretty epic haul when he nudged me with his elbow and held out his phone for me to see.

"Hey, there's one more," he said, his voice muffled behind his white skeleton mask.

I looked at the screen and saw a picture of three full-size Snickers bars on a picture with the hashtag #fullsize. Andy scrolled his thumb across the screen and showed the address. It was about two miles away, which, where we lived meant that it was out in the middle of nowhere near the edge of the woods.

"Dude," I said, "that's way out there. We won't get there before they go to bed."

Andy shook his head. "Nah, check it out," he kept scrolling his thumb to all the people who had replied to the picture. No one was going out there, everyone saying it was too far away or too creepy or whatever. "If they went through the trouble of getting full-sized candy bars and barely anyone showed up, they are for sure gonna wait up. I bet it's some lonely geezers who just want people to remember they're alive."

I hesitated. I really didn't want to go that far out. It was cold out and I watched as the thick clouds of breath came out from behind Andy's mask.

"Two miles?" I asked.

Andy proceeded to goad me with some of the more off-color insults I'd ever heard. None of which meant anything to me until he pointed out that if no one was going there, then they would probably just give us a bunch of candy without needing to do the mask routine.