Results from the October Sage Challenge
The October 2025 Sage Challenge centered on Halloween Tales – aka Spooky Stuff. Think “Speculative Fiction” meets Robin Williams and the Addams Family. Below you will enjoy a variety of perspectives on ghosts, goblins and other things that go bump in the night.
Thank you to all our participants and we hope you’ll all continue to send a plethora of diverse tales to the monthly Sage Challenges.
Below you will find several varied points of view on the matter from the following SWW members:
The Reaganing by Maralie Waterman
The House Between the Brownstones By Dita Dow
The Depths of Dreamers by Callie MacSaylor
LIFESPAN by C.L. Nemeth
The Reaganing
by Maralie Waterman
Julia and Remi weren’t what you’d call “country people.” They were podcast-listening, plant-parenting, Door Dash-dependent millennials. Roughing it meant the Wi-Fi was down. But their rent in the metro, not to mention student loan payments, had pushed them to rethink city living. When they found a small house an hour outside of town listed as “Charming pueblo style with Presidential History,” they thought they’d hit the jackpot.
“Maybe a Kennedy slept here,” Julia joked as they dragged their U-Haul up the gravel driveway.
“Or Nixon plotted Watergate from the toilet,” Remi suggested.
They both assumed “presidential history” was just marketing. An opportunity to make the property stand out. Yet, there, above the fireplace, hanging in an oversized gilded frame, was a disturbingly vibrant color photo of Ronald Reagan.
Not a painting or a fun retro 1980s poster, but a high-resolution, straight-from-the-loins-of-Reaganomics photo. The Gipper was grinning like the Berlin Wall had just fallen and he’d cut funding for something important.
“Okaaay,” Julia said slowly, tucking a stray curl behind one ear and looking around at the otherwise empty walls. “Why?”
“Whaathe…” Remi squinted, moving close to study the portrait. “Is it like, bolted to the wall?”
The rest of the house? Big grandmother who talks to dolls energy. A faint odor of mold permeated and flowered wallpaper peeled like it could be trying to escape. Appliances had been purchased when avocado was the color of the year. Still, it was cheap, quiet and had a fireplace.
Remi pointed at the photo. “Hun, the Gipper’s watching us.”
“Let’s take it down. I don’t need Ronny judging my wine consumption.”
They tried. Oh, how they tried. Remi tugged, and Julia used a spatula and some WD-40. It wouldn’t budge.
“It’s probably cursed,” Julia said, only half joking.
“Or maybe the house runs on free market principles,” Remi suggested, “and it won’t allow interference.”
They laughed. Then the jellybeans started.
That first night, they woke up to the sound of pitter patter from the front room. The entire floor was covered in jellybeans. Multicolored. Sticky. Endless.
No container. No explanation. Just… jellybeans.
They both turned slowly toward the mantle. Reagan’s grin seemed wider.
The next day, Julia wandered into the bathroom for her morning shower and found a Cold War-era missile diagram drawn in her favorite wineberry lipstick on the mirror. She screamed. Remi admired the accuracy.
“You’re not actually impressed?” she asked.
“I mean… if this is like, a haunting, it’s a thematically consistent haunting.”
At dinner, Remi started humming old campaign jingles.
“Are you humming “Morning in America?” Julia asked, nonplused. “You weren’t even born.”
“There you go again…” Remi replied and saluted the microwave after heating up the tofu scramble.
By the second week, they’d tried covering the photo, ignoring the photo and apologizing to the photo. They draped a towel over the frame and went to bed. The next morning, the towel was neatly folded at the foot of the fireplace, and Reagan was now wearing a cowboy hat.
“Where did the hat come from?” Julia whispered.
The photo winked. They were pretty sure of it.
One afternoon, the fireplace lit by itself while Julia was on a Zoom call. The Reagan photo glowed behind her. Her coworkers noticed.
“Is that Ronald Reagan on your wall?” asked Cheryl in accounting.
“Yes. He lives here,” Julia responded in monotone. Why not simply accept that their roommate was a dead president? There was silence on the Zoom call as Julia added, “He likes jellybeans.”
“Hell. Girl. Move,” Cheryl said.
They brought in Father Tim. He took one look, dropped his incense burner, and backed out the door. “Vatican policy. No supply-side hauntings.”
They called Donna, a local psychic who arrived wearing twelve scarves, Birkenstocks and a permanent expression of wide-eyed dread. Donna entered the living room and took one step toward the mantle. She paused to gaze at the Gipper and immediately projectile vomited jellybeans onto the rug.
“He’s still here,” Donna whispered. “He never left.”
That was enough for Julia.
“We’re leaving,” she said, grabbing her overnight bag.
“But the deposit…” Remi began.
“We are being haunted by Ronald-freaking-Reagan, Remi. I don’t care about the deposit!”
They fled. Stumbling down the driveway, the house behind them glowing faintly red-white-and-blue, they heard a whisper moving through the cool, evening air:
“Mr. Gorbachev… tear down this wallpaper.”
They never went back. They didn’t even cancel the lease. Their bank account seemed to mysteriously unsubscribe from capitalism.
The house is still on the market. The listing now reads: “Charming Pueblo-Style. Fully furnished. Reagan included.”
Some say if you walk by at night, you can still hear the crackle of the fireplace and the faint rustle of jellybeans falling gently… endlessly… to the floor.
The End
The House Between the Brownstones
By Dita Dow
Down a narrow lane of echoing feet,
where lamplight leans and whispers meet,
there lies a house, not quite in view,
tucked between brownstones, faded of hue.
Its shutters sigh with the evening’s breath,
its windows dream of lives and death,
and though no one lives there now, they say,
its door still opens once a day.
Children hurry past its gate,
counting steps to tempt their fate,
“Five to the fence, six to the crack,
seven and the ghost will follow you back!”
But the ghost is kind, as ghosts may be,
bound by time and memory.
She walks the hall at half past three,
with candlelight for company.
Her dress is made of sighs and thread,
her heart a rhythm long since dead,
yet in her chest there softly burns
a longing no rest ever earns.
Once, she waited at that stair,
for a knock that never met her there.
Now every dusk she hears it still,
soft as rain upon the sill.
A whisper of letters unsent, unread,
float like dust where her footsteps tread.
She hums a tune, both sweet and low,
of what was, and what none know.
And sometimes, when the moon is round,
her song drifts gently through the town.
Cats pause mid-prowl, the clock hands slow,
for even time leans close to know.
Those who’ve passed that place at night
speak of flickers, not of fright
a glimmer there, a friendly face,
a warmth within that lonely space.
And if you’re quiet, if you believe,
you may feel her hand upon your sleeve,
not to pull you down, nor make you stay,
but to thank you softly, then drift away.
The Depths of Dreamers
by Callie MacSaylor
He accuses me of forgetting this place… forgetting him. Perhaps that is true. There are many things I can not recollect in this moment.
Somewhere far away, yet dangerously close, my body lays forgotten and disregarded in my apartment in the Bronx. The surgeons went through a lot of trouble to pull it apart, adjust, and repackage it for my benefit, but it doesn’t feel like me anymore. I am the bride of Frankenstein. The metal pins and rods along my spine have straightened me out, but am I less deformed for it or more?
Tonight, my twenty-six year old body is drifting in an opioid-assisted sleep. But I do not know that. I do not not know that a stitch has popped open. I do not know that blood is soaking through my bandages onto the sheets.
Those worries are no longer a part of me.
Here, everything feels more real than real, light and airy. I am conscious of being inside a Midwestern lake house with sunlight streaming through the massive windows. Six panes of glass take up the majority of the far wall and scale up to a tall pitched ceiling. The windows are so brilliant that one cannot see the wildlife outside.
Luckily, the wildlife has come in.
A deer stands gracefully in the sunken living room. Squirrels and chipmunks run playfully along the log mantel piece of a robust stone fireplace, while birds fly to roost in the rafters.
“What is this place?” I ask.
“Try to remember,” he says, smiling kindly.
The boy next to me is in his teens with golden curls and pale un-freckled skin. He is naked and natural. Everything feels natural…but not familiar. He senses my lack of recognition and wilts, looking away from me toward the animals.
“You used to come here all the time,” he says, his voice wistful and sad.
I search my memory, but it is loopy and fuzzy.
This is a dream, I think.
The young man whips back toward me.
“No,” he says, sternly.
The animals are suddenly gone. The room is empty save us. My memory feels watery. I do not remember this man. How did I arrive here?
He can sense my thoughts and his angelic face darkens. “You forgot about me,” he says.
The room is now shadowy and hostile.
“I’m sorry,” I say, backing away, sensing danger.
Distantly, my heart begins to race. It is time to wake up.
When I was five years old, my exhausted mother had taught me to lucid dream. I had been a sensitive child: prone to nightmares. Though, if your father sprinkled holy water on you every night after bedtime prayers, compelling away demons at your windows, you too might become fearful of the unknown and unseen.
I reach without arms, paddling my mind to the conscious world.
The dream is fraying at the edges.
No, he says in my mind. You are not leaving.
I awake with a start on the twin mattress of the converted walk-in closet my roommate and I generously call a room. I get up and switch on the light to the combination kitchen and living room, but it doesn’t come on. Moonlight glows through the lace curtains above our small kitchen table and I float toward it.
There is a soft chuckle behind me.
I whirl around and he is here, standing in the corner of the living room. I know it is him though he is much changed. His naked skin is no longer pale, but translucent, like a plastic bag filled with a dark field of stars.
I am afraid.
Then I am next to him.
He holds out his wrist to me and I see a galaxy swirling through his veins.
“I will show you,” he says.
But, it is too vast…too inexplicable and I am falling into it.
No!
My feet find the bottom of the lake and I push off, breaking through the surface into wakefulness.
This time, it is real. But I must confirm it. I run to the lace curtains near the kitchen table, feeling the fabric under my fingers. I note the intricate patterns and details. Real.
Another malicious laugh—a presence behind me.
“No,” he says.
And I should have known. Didn’t something happen to my body? I cannot run…I haven’t fully healed.
With the practice of a frightened child, I force myself awake.
This time I am in my bed, but immobile, stiff as a corpse.
He is in the doorway, starless and human, looking down on me beatifically. His curls have turned white, like moonlight…like lace curtains.
He directs his pity toward me.
This will keep happening until I remember something.
“Remember me,” he insists possessively.
No!
I cannot move my body, but I remember how to. That’s the key. I must remember my body…remember its pain…my pain. There is nothing more real than pain.
So, I hold my breath like the drowning woman that I am. My lungs try to take control, but I stop them. Pain shoots like lightning, cracking apart the dream.
His face is sad, regretful.
Then it is gone.
Gasping, I awake in my bed, tucked in by pain. The nerves from the nightmare jingle inside me and I childishly wish I could run into my parents room, dive under the duvet, and let my father anoint my forehead with holy oils.
There are too few pills on my bedside table and I am chilled to discover my mistake.
It is a wonder that I woke up at all.
The boy…the dream…the demon has never visited me again. More than a decade later, my surgery scar has faded into a pale silver line, but the memory of him shines true. That night, I stubbornly clawed myself out of the depths, but I wonder…
Without an antagonist, would I have chosen the pain?
At my life’s true end, will I say to him: I remember…
LIFESPAN
C.L. Nemeth
Halloween evening, the weather was cold, but little wind. About five, or maybe six, of us teen age boys were out Tricking & Treating. We had stopped at eight, or so, farmhouses. We were welcomed with everything from Hot Chocolate and cookies, to Cider, Apples, pie, cake, all in all, a good night’s haul.
It was now about Ten, school tomorrow. We decided to visit one more farm before we ended the night. Dale Konzen, a farmer that some of us had worked for had his family farm. As with most of the farms there was no modern toilet facilities. Dale’s place sported a three-hole outhouse, very near top drawer as outhouses go.
We had tipped over five or six that evening, but this one was the largest and we decided we would fix old Dale up and tip his privy.
Most of these buildings were small and they were not fastened down. We had no difficulty in lifting and tipping them over. But this one was about eight feet by six, most likely the Taj Mahal of privies in Saint Joe County.
All of us stooped and grasped the bottom and heaved. Nothing happened. We heaved again, still nothing. My buddy, Delbert, was easily the biggest of we High School Juniors, is feet and 180 labs. He pushed me aside in the center and stooping down, gave a large groan, the privy began to lift. At that point all gave extra effort. Suddenly the privy went over so suddenly Delbert, who had been providing most of the muscle, went with the tipping edifice. As the privy went over Del went with it. He had his arms out and by effort was able to reach the other side of the hole. There it was stretched out, full length. Toes on one side and fingers on the other.
All of us stood gaping. No one moved. Delbert let out a loud yell,
“I need a little help here.”
That galvanized us into action. Several on his hands and two by his feet, lifted Delbert and stepping sideways, carried him to safe ground. Then the laughing and hooting began. We must have made a hell of a racket. Dale Konzen, the farmer, had heard the commotion and he appeared suddenly with a shotgun in hand. Things got serious at once.
Now Dale, like most farmers of that time, expected privy displacement on Halloween. He grinned as he said,
“Boys, you’re supposed to be quiet when you are tipping privies. You woke me up. What’s all the laughing about.” When we told him about Delbert he roared with mirth.
“The next time I dig a privy I’ll have to make the hole about six inches wider.”
We helped Dale right the privy, it suffered no harm. As we left, we could hear Dale laughing. Delbert and I would bring up this incident every fall and it never failed to make us laugh
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