Ladies and gentlemen, readers of all ages, welcome!

Last year I inaugurated the Haunted Blog Crawl, an opportunity for many and various indie authors to promote themselves and hone their writing skills by sharing a spooky story for Halloween. It was a bit of a last minute idea and, although I did my best to promote it, only two other authors took part. This year we’re getting an earlier start.

So what is the Haunted Blog Crawl? Simply put, it’s an opportunity to do a fiction exchange. Each participant will write a story and post it in whatever venue they maintain on the Internet, be it a blog, Wattpad or Substack, and link to it in the comments of this post. Then, on Halloween proper, they will post a complete list of all the available stories to that same venue as the 2025 Haunted Blog Crawl. That’s it! That’s the process!

Okay, a few more guidelines are probably going to be helpful. Here are a few things to keep in mind.

• The story should be a minimum of 2,000 words. That’s the baseline for a solid short story. Not to say you can’t get a good story out of less but good 10-15 minute read is generally ideal for a spooky story. It’s hard to maintain the mood for longer. By the same token there’s no upper limit to the length, since this isn’t being published in print, but I would suggest an upper limit of about 8,000 words for a story intended to be finished in a single sitting.
• The story should be spooky. It could have a ghost, werewolf or other classic monster. It could turn out to be a man in a rubber mask. We could discover that the evils of men are the most frightening things there are. The exact form isn’t that important so long as the story could send a chill down your spine.
• Try to keep things PG-13. Halloween stories have a bit of an edge to them but my hope is that this project will be available to readers of all ages. Restraint in ghostly tales is generally the better way to get the desired mood anyway.
• Have your story completed, posted to your blog, Substack, Wattpad or similar publishing platform and linked in a comment on this post by Friday, October 17th. That will give me plenty of time to put all the stories and links together into a master list.
• Return to this blog on Friday, October 24th and I will post that master list.
• Remember to post that master list to your blog, Substack, Wattpad or similar publishing platform as the 2025 Haunted Blog Crawl on Friday, October 31st.

If you have further questions please ask them in the comments. I look forward to hearing from you all!