My New Neighbor Called Me “The Creepy Lady” And Sent The Police To Stop My Halloween Popcorn Balls. The Officer Who Got Out Of The Car Had Trick-Or-Treated On My Porch For 10 Years

Viola Tran read it to me off her phone on the twelfth of October, standing in my driveway with her reading glasses on the end of her nose and her little white dog tugging at the leash.

“‘PSA for Sumac Street parents,'” she read. “‘Please, please do not let your kids take unwrapped homemade treats from the gray house at 412 this Halloween. I don’t want to be dramatic, but an older woman who lives alone with the curtains closed all month, handing out homemade food to children? It’s honestly a little creepy. We don’t know her. You can’t be too careful. Let’s keep our kids safe!’ And then,” Viola said, squinting, “there’s a little picture of a pumpkin with a frowny face.”

I was holding a ten-pound bag of popcorn kernels from the restaurant supply store. I set it down on the hood of my car.

“Who wrote that?”

Viola scrolled up. “Tori Wickstrom. The new girl across the street. With the doorbell camera and the white SUV.”

“I’ve never even met her,” I said.

“Well,” said Viola, who is eighty-one and has never softened a thing in her life, “she’s met you now.”

Forty-Four Octobers

I’m seventy-three. I’ve lived at 412 Sumac Street in Tarentum, Pennsylvania, since 1979, when my husband, Sherman, and I bought it for thirty-one thousand dollars with a loan from his uncle. It’s a narrow gray house with a big front porch, three steps up, and a railing Sherman rebuilt twice.

Every Halloween since 1982, I have made popcorn balls.

I want you to understand that I don’t mean a few. I mean three hundred, give or take. Molasses, butter, a little brown sugar and a pinch of salt, cooked to the soft-crack stage on the back burner in the same dented aluminum pot my mother used. You butter your hands and shape them while they’re hot enough to make you say a word you’d never say in church. Then you let them set up, and you wrap each one in a square of wax paper and twist the ends and tie them with orange yarn.

They take me eleven days. I do about thirty a night.

Sherman built a wagon for them in 1986 out of plywood and an old lawnmower axle. It’s painted like a pumpkin, with a lid, and it sits at the top of my porch steps every Halloween with a battery lantern inside so it glows. Sherman used to sit in the rocker next to it wearing a rubber gorilla mask and a cardigan. He’d growl at the teenagers and whisper “Happy Halloween, sweetheart” to the little ones who were scared. He passed in March of 2022. I still put out the wagon. I still sit in the rocker. I don’t wear the gorilla mask, but I keep it on the porch rail where people can see it.

The curtains Tori mentioned are closed all October because my front room is full of popcorn balls. Every flat surface, on cookie sheets and wax paper, for eleven days. Sunlight softens the molasses and makes them sticky. That’s the whole secret. That’s my creepy little mystery.

The Doorbell

I am not someone who lets a thing fester. My mother used to say, “If you have a problem with a neighbor, walk over and knock.” So on the thirteenth, I put six popcorn balls in a basket with a typed card that listed every ingredient, plus a note with my phone number, and I walked across Sumac Street to the house with the white SUV.

Tori Wickstrom opened the door about eight inches. She was maybe forty, with very straight blonde hair and a fleece vest, and she held her phone against her chest like a shield. Behind her, a little boy of about six in pajama pants peered around her leg.

“Hi,” I said. “I’m Thelma Yardley. From 412. I think we got off on the wrong foot, and I wanted to say hello properly. These are the popcorn balls. There’s a card with everything that’s in them.”

She looked at the basket. She didn’t take it.

“That’s really nice of you,” she said, in the voice people use for sales calls. “But we just don’t do homemade food from people we don’t know. It’s a family rule. I’m sure you understand.”

“Well, now you know me,” I said, and smiled.

“It’s nothing personal.” She was already closing the door. “We just have to be careful. Wilder, go inside.”

The little boy didn’t move. “Is that candy?” he asked me.

“It’s popcorn,” I said. “With molasses.”

“Wilder.” The door closed.

I walked home with my basket. Viola was on her porch next door, pretending not to watch.

“Well?” she called.

“She said they don’t do homemade.”

“Hmph,” said Viola. “Her husband was over at the Yablonskis’ block party in August eating their kielbasa off a paper plate like a man rescued from a desert island. I saw him.”

The Group

I’m not on Facebook. Viola is, and so is everybody else, apparently, and over the next week she gave me reports like a war correspondent.

Tori’s post had a hundred and forty comments. Most of them, Viola said, were people defending me. “Mrs. Yardley’s popcorn balls are a Sumac Street tradition!” “I’ve been getting these since I was five!” “She’s the sweetest woman on the street, what is wrong with you?”

But some of them weren’t. A woman named Shay, who’d moved onto the block two years ago, wrote, “Honestly, I agree. You hear stories.” Somebody else wrote, “Better safe than sorry, I’m keeping my kids on the other side of the street.” A man I didn’t know wrote, “The gorilla mask on her porch freaks my daughter out every year.” That one stung more than it should have, because I’d always thought of that mask as Sherman waving.

And Tori, Viola reported, kept responding. Politely. Relentlessly. “I’m just saying we don’t know what’s in them.” “I’m not attacking anybody, I’m asking a safety question.” “Why is everyone getting so defensive?” She posted a link to an article about tampered Halloween candy from 1982.

“1982,” I said to Viola. “That was my first year making them.”

“Well, maybe you were the tamperer,” Viola said, deadpan, and I laughed for the first time in a week.

Here’s what I didn’t tell Viola. I started second-guessing myself. I’d stand at my stove at eleven o’clock at night with molasses on my hands and think, maybe she’s right. Maybe it’s a different world. Maybe a seventy-three-year-old widow with closed curtains and her dead husband’s gorilla mask on the porch rail looks like the start of one of those podcasts my granddaughter listens to.

I made thirty popcorn balls a night anyway. Because what else was I going to do? Stop?

The Bus Stop

On the twenty-second, I walked down to the corner of Sumac and Third to mail a birthday card, and I passed the school bus stop.

There were five or six parents standing there in the cold with travel mugs, and Tori was in the middle of them. I heard her before I saw her.

“No, I’m serious, it’s the gray one. With the creepy lady. The curtains are shut all month and there’s like a monster mask…”

Somebody cleared their throat. Tori turned around and saw me.

For a second, she looked embarrassed. Then her face set.

“Good morning,” I said to the whole group, and kept walking. My hands were shaking so hard I could barely get the card into the mailbox slot.

Behind me, I heard one of the dads, a big fellow in a Steelers hat, say, “Tori, come on. That’s Mrs. Yardley.”

“I’m not saying anything that isn’t true,” Tori said.

And the thing is, she wasn’t, exactly. I do live alone. My curtains are closed. There is a mask on my porch rail. It’s amazing how many true things you can put next to each other to make one big lie.

Halloween Afternoon

On October 31, at 3:15 in the afternoon, I was on my porch setting up.

I’d wheeled Sherman’s pumpkin wagon out of the garage and up the ramp he built for it, and I was lining the inside with the last of the popcorn balls, three hundred and four, wrapped and tied. I’d hung paper bats along the railing. I’d put the battery lantern in the wagon and tested it twice. I had on my black cardigan and my witch hat, which is felt and floppy and older than Tori Wickstrom.

That’s when the police car pulled up.

It was a Tarentum Borough cruiser, black and white, and it stopped right in front of my house with the engine running. I saw Tori’s front curtain move across the street. Of course it did.

I stood there holding a popcorn ball in each hand like a woman caught with stolen goods.

The driver’s door opened, and a young officer got out. Tall, maybe late twenties, dark hair cut close, a little gap between his front teeth. He had a notepad. He walked up my front walk looking at the house the way police officers look at houses, and then he looked at the wagon.

And then he stopped walking.

“Ma’am,” he said slowly. “We got a call from a neighbor about a suspicious person planning to hand out unlabeled homemade food to children.” He paused. Then he pointed at the wagon. “Is that Mr. Yardley’s pumpkin?”

I stared at him.

“It is,” I said.

He took his hat off. “Mrs. Yardley,” he said. “It’s Xavier. Xavier Soto. I lived in the yellow duplex on Fourth Street. From 2003 until we moved in, like, 2013.” He laughed, a little helplessly. “I was the ghost. Me and my sister Zuri. Two ghosts. Every year.”

I put the popcorn balls down on the porch rail very carefully, because my hands had gone useless.

“The bedsheet ghosts,” I said. “Oh, my Lord. Sherman made those.”

The Bedsheet Ghosts

It was 2004. That October, Xavier’s mother, Teresa, was working nights at the Giant Eagle bakery and days cleaning offices, and money was very short. She’d brought the two kids out trick-or-treating on Halloween in their regular coats, because there wasn’t anything for costumes.

They got to my porch at about seven. Xavier was six and his sister was four. Sherman, in his gorilla mask, leaned down and asked them what they were supposed to be.

“Nothing,” Xavier said. “We’re just us.”

Sherman took his mask off. He went inside without a word. I heard him rummaging in the hall closet. Ten minutes later he came back out with two old white bedsheets from our linen closet and a pair of my sewing scissors, and right there on the porch, under the lantern, he cut eyeholes and fitted them over the kids’ heads and tied them loose at the neck with orange yarn from my popcorn ball basket.

“Now you’re ghosts,” he said. “Go scare somebody.”

They came back every Halloween after that in those same sheets until they outgrew them. Teresa told me once that Xavier wore his to bed for a whole winter.

“I still have the yarn,” Xavier said now, on my porch, in his uniform. He held up his key ring. There, between a car key and a little plastic badge, was a short piece of faded orange yarn, knotted twice.

I sat down in Sherman’s rocker. I didn’t decide to. My knees just did it.

“Known to This Officer”

“So,” Xavier said after a minute, flipping his notepad open and clearing his throat in a very official way. “I’m required to follow up on the call. Can you tell me what’s in these?”

“Popcorn, molasses, butter, brown sugar, salt,” I said. “And there’s a typed card on the wagon.”

He walked over and read the card. He nodded seriously. Then he picked up a popcorn ball, untwisted the wax paper and took a big bite right there in front of God and the whole street.

“Mrs. Yardley,” he said with his mouth full, “for the record, these are still the best thing on Sumac Street.”

He wrote something on the pad and showed it to me. *Call cleared. No violation. Resident known to this officer.*

“Known to this officer,” I said. “That’s one way to put it.”

“I’m also supposed to speak to the complainant,” he said, and his face got a little harder, the way young men’s faces do when they’re trying to look older. “I’ll do that now.”

I watched him walk across Sumac Street and knock on the door with the doorbell camera. Tori opened it all the way this time. I couldn’t hear what they said. I saw her point at my house. I saw Xavier shake his head and say something long and patient. I saw her fold her arms. I saw him hold up his key ring.

He was over there about six minutes. When he came back, he was trying not to smile.

“I explained,” he said, “that the borough does not regulate popcorn balls, and that I personally ate one and am still alive. She said she’s still not comfortable. I said that’s her right.” He paused. “Then I told her I’d be back tonight. Off duty. With my daughter.”

Viola’s Post

I didn’t know what Viola did until much later.

Viola had been standing on her porch with her little dog the whole time, and she had her phone out. She took a picture of Xavier eating the popcorn ball in his uniform in front of Sherman’s wagon. Then she went inside, dug through a shoebox, and found an old photo from 1987: Sherman in his gorilla mask and cardigan next to the brand-new pumpkin wagon, with a crowd of kids in drugstore costumes behind him.

She posted both of them in the Sumac Street group at 4:02 p.m. with one sentence.

*The creepy lady’s porch opens at 6. Bring your kids. Bring your grown kids. Bring anybody who ever got a popcorn ball.*

Six O’Clock

By 5:45, there were people on my sidewalk.

Not trick-or-treaters. Not yet. Grown-ups. A woman about forty in a grocery store fleece came up my walk holding a toddler dressed as a bumblebee. “Mrs. Yardley? I’m Trina Vukovich. I was a cheerleader every year from 1992 to 1997. You told me my pom-poms were the best on the street.” She was crying a little. “I drove in from Butler.”

A man in a Steelers jacket with three kids dressed as superheroes. “You won’t remember me. I was the kid who threw up on your azaleas in 1994. My mom made me come apologize the next day. You gave me another popcorn ball.”

“You were a cowboy,” I said. “With one boot.”

He stared at me. “How on earth do you remember that?”

“I remember the azaleas,” I said.

At 6:00, when I turned on the lantern in Sherman’s wagon, the line went down my front walk, along the sidewalk past Viola’s, and around the corner onto Third Street. Somebody had set up folding chairs on Viola’s lawn for the older folks. A high school boy I didn’t know set up a speaker on my porch step and played the “Monster Mash” at a respectful volume, then “Thriller,” then “Monster Mash” again. Someone brought me a thermos of coffee. Someone else put a battery candle on the porch rail next to Sherman’s gorilla mask, and then someone else put another one, until there was a row of them flickering all along the railing.

People had brought their kids. Their grandkids. Their old high school friends. A woman brought her mother, who was eighty-six and had come to my porch in the 1980s with her own children.

Xavier came at 6:30 in jeans and a hooded sweatshirt, carrying a little girl of about four in a bedsheet ghost costume with eyeholes cut slightly crooked.

“I made it myself,” he said. “Zuri told me Mr. Yardley’s were better.”

“Mr. Yardley’s were terrible,” I said. “One of yours had the eyeholes on the side of your head. You walked into my porch post.” And I knelt down, my knees complaining, and tied a piece of orange yarn around the little ghost’s neck. “What’s your name, sweetheart?”

“Sofia,” said the ghost.

“Happy Halloween, Sofia.”

The Second Batch

I ran out of popcorn balls at 7:40.

I’ve never run out before. Not once in forty-four years. I stood at the wagon looking at the bare wax paper on the bottom and felt my face go hot, because the line was still down to the corner.

“Oh, no,” I said. “Oh, I’m so sorry.”

That’s when Viola, who had appointed herself crowd control, stood on my top step and shouted, “Anybody got molasses?”

I’m not making this up. Within fifteen minutes, three women had driven to the Giant Eagle and back with molasses, butter, brown sugar and two big bags of microwave popcorn. Trina Vukovich and the man who threw up on my azaleas and two teenage girls I’d never met were in my kitchen with their hands buttered, shaping popcorn balls on my counter while I stood at the stove with my mother’s dented pot, calling out “too hot, wait, too hot, now!”

We made sixty more. They weren’t pretty. Nobody cared.

The Astronaut

At about 8:15, I saw him. Wilder. Six years old in a silver astronaut suit, standing at the edge of the sidewalk across the street, holding his father’s hand.

His father was a tall, mild-looking man in a quarter-zip. I’d learn later his name was Stellan. He looked across the street at my porch and the line and the candles, and then he looked back at his own house, where Tori was standing in the doorway with a bowl of individually wrapped name-brand candy that no one had touched since six o’clock.

Stellan said something to her. She shook her head. He said something else.

Then he walked Wilder across Sumac Street and up my front walk, and the line, I swear, made a little room for them.

“Hi,” Stellan said. He looked mortified. “I’m Stellan. Tori’s husband. This is Wilder. He’s been asking about the popcorn for three weeks.”

“I know,” I said. “He asked me at your front door.”

Wilder held out his pillowcase. I took one of the lumpy second-batch popcorn balls, still a little warm, and set it in. Then I tied a piece of orange yarn around his wrist.

“What’s that for?” he asked.

“So you’re officially a Sumac Street kid,” I said. “You have to come back every year now. That’s the rule.”

He looked at the yarn like I’d given him a medal.

Across the street, Tori was still in her doorway. I lifted my hand and waved at her. After a long moment, she lifted hers back, just barely, and then she went inside and closed the door.

November First

She came over the next morning at ten o’clock.

I was on the porch in my housecoat, untying the paper bats from the railing. Tori came up the walk in her fleece vest without her phone in her hand, which I noticed. She stopped at the bottom of my three steps.

“I owe you an apology,” she said.

“All right,” I said.

She looked at the gorilla mask on the railing. Then she looked at me. “We moved here in April. I don’t know anybody. Stellan works from home, and I work from home, and Wilder’s in first grade, and I just… I sit in that house and I watch the street on the doorbell app, and I guess I decided I had to be the one who kept everyone safe. And then I posted that thing, and suddenly a hundred and forty people were talking to me. I know how that sounds.”

“It sounds lonely,” I said.

She looked at her shoes. “The officer told me about the bedsheets.”

“Sherman would’ve liked you,” I said, and meant it, which surprised me. “He liked people who were scared of the gorilla mask. He said it meant they were paying attention.”

She laughed, a short, wet laugh, and wiped her eyes with her sleeve.

I went inside and came back with an index card. My mother’s recipe, in my handwriting, with all the stages and temperatures. I handed it to her.

“What’s this?”

“It’s what’s in them,” I said. “All of it. Since you were so worried.” Then I let her have just a little bit of the bite I’d been saving for three weeks. “Next October you can come over and make them with me. Eleven nights. Thirty a night. You’ll find out exactly how creepy I am.”

She looked at the card for a long time. “Is it hard?”

“You’ll burn your hands and say a word you’ve never said in church,” I said. “Wilder can tie the yarn.”

The Curtains

That afternoon, for the first time in forty-four years, I opened my front curtains on November first instead of waiting for the third. The front room was empty, just a few crumbs of popcorn on the cookie sheets and the smell of molasses that never quite leaves.

I sat in Sherman’s chair and looked out at Sumac Street, at the candle stubs on the railing and the orange yarn somebody had tied around my porch post in the night, and at the house across the street, where a little boy in pajama pants was standing at the window with a piece of yarn around his wrist, waving at me.

I waved back.

Some people will always see a closed curtain and think the worst. I used to think the cure for that was to keep your curtains open. Now I think it’s to keep making the popcorn balls, and let the people who know you do the talking.

I’ve already bought next year’s molasses.

If there was a porch on your street like mine, or a neighbor who made your Halloweens, share this so they know somebody remembers.

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