Bring Me the Head of
Stingy Jack
R. Dell Walker
Millhaven sat on the west bank of the Illinois River. Its muddy water rose high in spring and left its mark on porches and on fence posts before drawing back, leaving the soil rich and black with river silt that let the pumpkin vines grow thick and green all through summer.
Every third Saturday in October, once the pumpkins were in, the town gathered at the volunteer fire hall for the auction.
Trucks stood nose to tail along the county road outside the hall, with dead vines trailing from their beds, and inside the hall, firemen set out chairs beneath orange streamers. Coffee burned in the urns and cigarette smoke rose against yellowed ceiling tiles.
The women’s auxiliary sold sheet cake from card tables as children wandered the aisles in cheap plastic masks, their sweat-dampened faces hidden behind guises of witches and skeletons and television cowboys.
Sheriff Glen Barlow kept near the back door, holding coffee he hadn’t wanted. He was a broad, pale man in his early forties, with thinning brown hair and a face that looked older than he was. The badge required appearances at such things, though Millhaven usually managed its own peace. He nodded to farmers in seed-company caps and watched Lyle Weber move through the crowd.
As president of the volunteer fire association, Lyle had charge of the auction. The auction money would help patch the fire hall roof and stock the Methodist church pantry. He kept telling the crowd there was honor in bidding high, and many bid higher than they ought to.
The jack-o’-lanterns crowded the table with white tags tied to their stems, most carved by the firemen. At the center sat the big one, broad as a washtub, with a cruel, narrow grin cut deep into its face.
They called it Stingy Jack.
Glen had heard the name since boyhood, but nobody ever explained why. It belonged to the auction as much as the sheet cake. Children circled the table and sang.
Bring me the head of Stingy Jack.
Bring me the head of Stingy Jack.
Some adults smiled at the memory of chanting it themselves. Others stayed turned away, as such things were best left to children.
Mason Shaw had supplied the big pumpkin this year. He stood by the coat hooks with his hands in his jacket pockets, not quite watching and not quite looking away.
Hal Cready started bidding at thirty dollars and stayed in after sixty. By then, the room had turned to watch him. The Creadys had started with the feed store, but over the years they began lending money against farms, and broad swaths of the country around Millhaven passed into their hands through debt settlements. Hal sat two pews from the front at Methodist and liked generosity best when it had witnesses. At seventy-five dollars, Lyle slapped the table and declared him the winner.
“For the church pantry,” Hal said, though no one had asked.
He put one hand on the pumpkin’s stem and turned toward the room. The children took up the chant again.
Bring me the head of Stingy Jack.
Bring me the head of Stingy Jack.
Hal lifted the lid, and the smell came out.
It wasn’t the rot of the ditches and dead raccoons on Highway 24. It was closer and warmer, trapped in wet pulp and candle wax. The first row drew back.
Glen set his coffee on the windowsill and moved through the chairs where people now stood. Hal remained beside the table with the lid in his hand, not quite able to move.
Glen looked inside the hollowed pumpkin, and packed among strings of pulp was a man’s severed head. Wax had run along one cheek and hardened under the ear, and the mouth hung slightly open.
The eyes, too, were open, turned up toward the fluorescent lights.
“Back up,” Glen said.
No one did at first. They either leaned in or froze. Then Glen put one hand against Cready’s chest and pushed him away.
Men lifted chairs and dragged them crooked, and women gathered children by the shoulders. A boy in a skeleton mask cried because he had dropped his sack of candy. Outside, another vomited. The photographer raised his camera and Glen pointed at him.
“Any closer, I’ll put you in the car!”
Lyle stood near the coffee urns, white in the face.
“Lyle,” Glen said. “Get the children out. Everybody else stays until I say different.”
“I didn’t have a thing to do with this,” Hal Cready said.
“I didn’t ask you yet.”
“I bought a pumpkin. In front of half the town.”
“We saw, Hal.”
That was the trouble. The pumpkin had been grown, cut, hauled, carved, and opened under fire hall lights. Children had leaned over it. Firemen had moved it. Hal had lifted the lid himself. If there had ever been a clean scene, all of Millhaven had walked through it.
Glen sent Deputy John Rooney for the Polaroid and told him to radio the county. Then he used the fire-hall phone to call the coroner.
His first notes went on the back of an auction sheet: Mason Shaw had supplied the pumpkin and brought it that morning, but no one knew who hollowed it out or carved it, and no one had watched the hall in any useful sense.
By the time Deputy Coroner Nora Kessler arrived with the county ambulance, the fire hall smelled of nothing but the thing on the table. Rooney took Polaroids while adults stood along the wall pretending not to look.
Nora put on gloves and bent over the pumpkin. Together they lifted the head into an enamel pan from the kitchen. There was little blood, though wax had pooled around the stump of the neck.
Nora covered the pan with a white towel.
“It’s real,” she said. “But it’s not fresh.”
*
By morning, Millhaven had solved it four different ways.
At the diner, it was a mob killing from Chicago. At the elevator, it was a teenage prank gone too far to back out of. Two men outside Cready Feed said it had to be a river drifter who’d crossed the wrong people. By noon, somebody had made it a grave theft, though no one could explain why a grave robber would leave his prize in a pumpkin.
Glen spent the morning between the sheriff’s office and Grant’s Funeral Home, where Nora had arranged the head on a metal slab under better light. The county had no proper place for such a thing on short notice.
Glen sent the description out on the radio: White male. Age uncertain. Gray hair. Heavy weathering of the face, with an old burn scar near the left ear, and bad teeth. No body recovered.
Probable homicide.
There were no missing persons in Millhaven, nor in the next town over. Nothing from the hospitals in Peoria or Springfield. No reported grave theft. No funeral home had lost a body. State police said they would pass the description along, but Glen could hear in the trooper’s voice that the facts sounded absurd when spoken aloud.
Nora put the man between fifty and seventy.
The face was old, but not in a natural way. The skin had a waxy set to it, gray in places and near-fresh in others. The burn scar by the ear looked healed years before death. The teeth were poor, but not like a man who had gone completely without dentists. The neck gave her nothing useful. Too little blood. Too much candle wax. A cut that seemed clean in one place and ragged in another. As if by two different instruments.
Nora laid two Polaroids side by side on Grant’s desk.
“Look at the mouth.”
Glen looked. In the first picture, the face sagged under the fire hall lights. In the second, taken minutes later, one corner of the mouth had lifted.
“Angle,” he said.
“Maybe.”
“Light, then.”
“Maybe.”
“Then maybe’s all it is.”
Nora didn’t argue and put the photographs back in their envelope.
Glen tried to learn who carved Stingy Jack, but nobody claimed it. Each man he asked had assumed somebody else had done the work.
*
Mason Shaw lived west of town, beyond the elevator. Glen drove with the heater on low and the window cracked against the smell of his own cigarettes. The road ran between fields cut down to stubble, with black soil showing through in damp strips. A drainage ditch followed the fence line, carrying brown water toward the creek.
Shaw was in the machine shed when Glen pulled in. A rusted cultivator sat outside with weeds growing up through the frame.
“You come about that pumpkin,” Mason said.
“I come about the head inside.”
“I don’t know nothing about that.”
“Then let’s start with the pumpkin.”
The patch behind the house had been picked over and trampled, with a few culls left softening in the rows.
“This where you grew them?”
“Most.”
“Not the auction pumpkin?”
“No.”
“Where then?”
Shaw gestured and started walking. Glen followed him past the shed and along a tractor path toward low ground. The creek lay beyond brush and bare-limbed willows. Near it stood the remains of an old tenant house. One wall had folded inward, and the roof was gone. A brick chimney stood by itself, black at the top, and sumac grew around the base. Closer to the ditch was a low square depression where some other outbuilding had been pulled down.
“There,” Mason said.
Glen looked at the weeds and dead vines near the old foundation. “You planted pumpkins out here?”
“Nope. I first saw the vine in August. Had no business there. Ground hadn’t been worked in years. I figured an animal dropped seed, or something.”
“But you watched it.”
“One pumpkin on the vine,” he said after a while. “No others. Got big fast, too. Animals left it alone.”
“How fast?”
“Fast enough.”
Glen looked from the foundation to the black soil along the ditch. “And you cut it.”
“Lyle called, needing something big for the auction.”
“You had pumpkins in the field.”
“Not that big.”
“So you took the one growing where nothing had been planted.”
Shaw bent and picked a burr off his trouser leg.
“It was a pumpkin, Glen.”
Wind moved through the dry weeds, making a sound like paper being rubbed together.
“What in the hell does Stingy Jack mean?” Glen asked.
“It’s just an old name.”
“For what?”
“For Halloween. Something the Irish talk about.”
“That ain’t all it is, though.”
“It was before your time.”
“Most things are. Tell me anyway.”
Mason looked toward the tenant house. “There was a man. Folks called him Jack. Maybe John when they were being proper. He had a claim out here, or thought he did. Wouldn’t let go of what he figured was owed.”
“Owed by who?”
Shaw looked back toward the house and at the fields beyond it.
“Dead people, mostly.”
“Creadys?”
Shaw said nothing.
“Hal’s been wanting this piece?” Glen asked.
“Hal’s been trying to take back what I can’t pay on.”
“That why you didn’t want to talk?”
“That’s one reason.”
Glen left him standing by the old foundation.
Near the drainage ditch, a few small pumpkins had come up in the weeds, pale and hard-looking. One had split along its side in a narrow curve.
It looked like a mouth.
*
The dreams came from a common darkness.
Nobody walked into the sheriff’s office and said the dead man had visited them, but Glen heard it at the diner first, from two women who went quiet when he came in. Deputy Rooney heard it from his wife’s sister, and Lyle asked whether anybody else had mentioned a turnip with a candle in it, though he said never mind before Glen could answer.
The stories matched too well.
They described a man at the kitchen table. A man at the edge of a picked field. Muddy boots on clean linoleum. Coins counted into a calloused palm. A lantern made from a carved turnip. A vacant face seen through candlelight. And the words came with him.
Who kept what wasn’t his?
Glen wrote down none of it. Dreams weren’t evidence. If anybody wanted to report trespass, they could report trespass. If they wanted to report a dream, they could tell their pastor.
Then the pumpkins started changing.
Mrs. Landry called first. Her youngest boy had carved a jack-o’-lantern with square teeth and one triangle eye because his knife had slipped. By morning, the mouth was longer, the teeth jagged and both eyes drooped at the corners like an old man’s. The boy swore he hadn’t touched it.
Glen believed him.
He went because the Landrys had never called him for foolishness. The jack-o’-lantern sat on their porch rail. It didn’t look exactly like the head from the fire hall, but it had the suggestion of it in the sag of the eyes, and the tired pull of the mouth. Wet pulp shone along one cut like something exposed under skin.
By supper, there were others. One on Maple Street had taken on Hal Cready’s narrow mouth, and another had a dark blemish near the left ear where no knife had gone.
Glen found no footprints, and no fresh shavings. Some pumpkins had been outside. Some behind locked doors. The children were the worst of it. They didn’t act proud or guilty. They stood behind their mothers and stared at the changed faces with the insulted fear of children whose own work had been covered over by another hand.
That night, Glen dreamed of the fire hall, empty but lit bright. Stingy Jack sat alone on the auction table. Inside it, the head opened its eyes.
The mouth didn’t move.
They want the wrong man’s head.
Glen woke before dawn, reached for the pad beside his bed and wrote the words down before he could stop his hand.
*
Glen started with names.
Jack wasn’t enough. Neither was John. Half the county had been named John at a time or another, and the ones who weren’t had brothers or cousins who were. He spent the morning in the courthouse basement with deed books, tax rolls and a clerk who kept telling him the old indexes weren’t arranged for that kind of search.
“Murder isn’t arranged for convenience,” Glen told her.
She left him alone after that.
By noon, he had three Johns who had died properly, two who had moved away and one who had vanished in October of 1933.
John Bell.
The clipping came from a bound volume at the Millhaven Reporter office, its pages soft and smelling of dust and deteriorating glue. The headline didn’t call him missing. It said LOCAL LABORER NOW BELIEVED GONE FROM AREA. The story called Bell itinerant and quarrelsome. It said he had been seen drinking outside a tavern and had likely left after making accusations against “a respected local concern”. There was no mention of a search.
The courthouse records told a different story. Bell had paid taxes on a narrow creek parcel west of town for three years. Not much land, but land no less. In 1934, it passed into Cready hands through a debt settlement filed two months after Bell vanished. The signature on the release looked cramped and uncertain. The witness was a Cready cousin. The notary had been dead since 1949.
The courthouse led him next to the Methodist church basement, where Glen found a photograph.
It had been shoved into a cardboard box with old supper programs and Sunday school lists. The picture showed thirty or forty people standing outside the church in work clothes. Someone had written HARVEST SUPPER 1932 across the back. Near the rear of the group, half hidden behind a taller man, stood a thin fellow with deep-set eyes.
He took the photograph to Nora. She laid it beside the Polaroids on Grant’s desk and moved the lamp closer.
“Is that him?” she asked.
The young man in the church picture resembled the head in the pumpkin the way a relative might. The mouth seemed right only if Glen looked away first. The burn scar was absent, but the left ear had the same bent look.
“Close,” Glen said, though, to himself, he thought not close enough. But it was enough to take the question to Hal Cready.
Glen found Hal Cready at the feed store, standing behind the counter while two farmers pretended not to listen.
“You ever hear of John Bell?” Glen asked.
Hal’s hand stopped on an invoice.
“No.”
“Jack Bell?”
“No.”
“Your family took his creek land in 1934.”
“My father and grandfather handled land business. Not me.”
“Bell vanished before the transfer.”
Hal glared at the farmers, and they found reasons to leave.
“People lost land in those days,” Hal said. “Hard times made for hard bargains.”
“That doesn’t make it clean.”
“Doesn’t make it murder, neither.”
“I didn’t say murder.”
Hal folded the invoice into a small square.
“A man can’t be blamed for what he inherits.”
“No,” Glen said. “But he can be blamed for lying about it.”
*
By the next morning, the words were on the side of Cready Feed:
BRING ME THE HEAD OF STINGY JACK
They had been smeared across the white clapboard beneath the Purina sign in letters two feet high. The morning was cold and colorless, with a low sky. Last night’s rain still darkened the gravel. Glen stood in the lot with Deputy Rooney and Hal while drivers slowed their trucks on the road to look.
“It’s paint,” Hal said, knowing the substance didn’t resemble paint in any meaningful way.
Glen touched one letter with the end of his pen. The smear was thick and fibrous, orange in some places, black in others. Pumpkin pulp, soot and black soil worked into the wood grain.
Hal saw Glen notice.
“I want somebody watching my house tonight.”
“We’ll come by.”
“That isn’t what I said.”
“It’s what I’ve got to offer, Hal.”
Hal called three times before dark. Once, a truck had slowed in front of his place. Another, he thought he saw someone in his yard. And another to say the sheriff ought to know his duty. Glen drove past after nine and saw nothing but Hal’s porch light and Hal himself standing behind the front curtains.
After midnight, the call came from Mrs. Landry, crying so hard Glen could barely make out the words.
Down Lincoln Street, children walked, quiet and fixed-eyed, and with grave purpose.
Lincoln Street ran beneath bare maples hung with the last dead leaves, its porches adorned with glowing jack-o’-lanterns and paper ghosts. Glen found the children two blocks from Hal’s house. Nine of them were moving in a loose line under the bare maples. Some wore pajamas. Some wore coats over nightshirts. Two had Halloween masks pushed atop their heads. The children carried candles, hollowed turnips and jars with trembling flames inside.
They didn’t look at Glen when he pulled across the street.
“Stop there,” he said.
They kept walking.
He took the nearest boy by the shoulders. The boy’s eyes were open but empty, fixed on Hal Cready’s porch. From the others came a low mumble, not together at first. Then the words found their rhythm.
Bring me the head of Stingy Jack.
Bring me the head of Stingy Jack.
Glen shook the boy once, harder than he wanted.
“Tommy! Wake up!”
The boy blinked and began to scream.
The rest broke the same. Candles dropped, and children cried for their mothers. Porch lights came on down the block and parents came running in robes and slippers, calling names into the night.
Hal watched from behind his curtains. In that narrow gap of yellow light, he looked like a scared animal that had heard brush breaking around its pen.
When the street cleared, Glen climbed Hal’s steps. A carved turnip sat by the door, hollowed small, with a candle guttering inside.
He picked it up by its stem. The wax had burned down into the shape of a little white skull.
*
Glen went back to Mason Shaw before breakfast and found him in the barn, pitching straw. The stalls were empty but the fork moved fast anyway.
“Can you put that down?” Glen asked.
Shaw looked at him, then at the fork in his hands, and leaned it against a stall gate.
“John Bell owned the creek parcel. This creek parcel.” Glen said. “Creadys took it after he vanished. Then sold it to you nine years ago. Hal’s got you under the same debt as Bell was under. That pumpkin grew from the same ground.”
“I didn’t know what was in it.”
“I know.”
Shaw’s expression softened a little.
“But you knew it wasn’t right.”
“My daddy worked for the Creadys on this land right after the war. He told me not to fool with this place,” Shaw said.
Shaw looked past Glen to the open barn door. Beyond it, the fields lay flat and brown under the morning.
“My daddy said Bell was cheated. Interest on interest. Usery. Bell had proof, or said he did. He was going to Macomb. Said he’d put it in front of a judge.”
“But he didn’t.”
“No.”
“Because he vanished,” Glen said.
“After that, the story belonged to the Creadys,” Shaw said. “Bell was a drunk. Bell was a thief. Bell was too stingy to pay what he owed. Folks let it stand because Cready’s store carried half the town through winter.”
“So, they called him stingy for wanting what was his. That was the joke?”
“And the town kept telling it. Didn’t sound like the same joke after a while. Just sounded like Halloween.”
“Hal came around in June,” he said. “Had my balances written out. Said foreclosing the creek field could settle matters clean.”
The barn was quiet except for a pigeon moving in the rafters.
“Where is Bell?” Glen asked.
“Probably in the old smokehouse depression. My daddy said not to dig there.”
“Well, this is still your land right now. You give us permission to dig?”
By noon, county men were at the creek with shovels. Shaw stood apart by the tenant-house chimney and watched. Hal Cready’s car rolled once along the road but didn’t stop.
They found the bones shallow, folded under black mud and roots. The wrists lay close together. A cracked rib showed white when Nora brushed dirt from it. There was no cloth left, and no skull.
At Grant’s, Nora examined the bones under a gooseneck lamp while Glen stood across from her.
“The size is right,” she said. “Age could be right. Time in the ground, near enough.”
“But?”
“That head can’t belong to bones buried forty years.”
*
Glen found Hal behind the feed store after dark, feeding paper into a burn barrel.
The fire had already taken most of it, and ash lifted in small gray pieces, blowing against the loading dock. Hal stood over the barrel in his dress shirt and good shoes, one hand full of ledger pages, the other working fast, feeding the fire.
Deputy Rooney stepped out of the cruiser behind Glen.
Hal saw them and shoved the papers down.
“Step away from it,” Glen said.
“This is private business.”
Hal didn’t move until Glen took him by the sleeve. Rooney kicked the barrel over, and sparks scattered across the gravel. He stamped out what he could and pulled half-burned pages from the edge of the ash.
Most were old accounts. Names with numbers beside them. Jack Bell’s name appeared on three scorched pages.
There were newer papers, too. Mason Shaw and past-due balances.
Glen held the pages up.
“You knew.”
“I knew there’d been old trouble.”
“You knew the land was dirty.”
Hal looked toward the road, where two cars had slowed to watch.
“Dirty land still grows corn. You think clean paper fed anybody in ’33? Men signed what they signed. Some paid. Some didn’t. Some lost what they put up.”
“Bell was going to court with proof.”
“Men make noise when payment comes due.”
“He was murdered.”
“You don’t know that.”
“There are bones in that field.”
“There are bones everywhere if you dig long enough.”
Glen didn’t look away from Hal.
“You were going to foreclose on Mason Shaw.”
“Was I supposed to give it to him for free?”
Hal’s voice flattened, and nothing came out after that. When it finally returned, his voice had lost its anger and held only the fear beneath it.
“You can’t let dead men run the living. My grandfather is dead. My father is dead. Bell is dead. Whatever happened, happened when I was sixteen years old.”
“And still you’re burning the books.”
Hal looked at the spilled pages as if they had betrayed him by surviving.
“This way it stays settled.”
Glen understood him now. Hal believed time had laundered it. He believed enough years could turn a stolen field into an inheritance.
Glen thought of the chant then and, for the first time, understood it, even if the children who sang it didn’t.
They didn’t want Jack Bell’s head.
*
The fire hall filled before Glen arrived.
He had brought Hal there because the sheriff’s office was too small and half the town had gathered outside it after word of the bones reached State Street, lined with its brick storefronts decorated in black cats and die-cut skeletons for Halloween. Lyle opened the hall without being asked. By eight o’clock that night, the folding chairs were out again, set in crooked rows under the same orange crepe paper.
The auction table remained at the north end of the room.
Someone had put jack-o’-lanterns on it. Glen didn’t know who. Their carved faces sat dark and empty, but nobody went near them.
Hal stood beside Glen, sweating through his collar.
“This is wrong,” Hal said. “You ought to have me somewhere secure.”
“They’re your neighbors, Hal.”
“That’s what I’m afraid of.”
“Listen to me. There’ll be no trouble here,” Glen said as he stepped forward. “County men are on their way. Until then, everybody keeps still, and nobody puts their hands on anybody.”
The room held the flat quiet of a church before a funeral.
A jack-o’-lantern lit with no match struck, and a small yellow glow appeared behind its carved eyes. Another lit beside it, and then another. Around the room, people drew back from the table. The faces settled slowly, as if softening under the heat. Mouths lengthened, and teeth narrowed. Eye corners pulled down. One by one, the carved faces seemed all to turn toward Hal.
A child whispered first.
“Bring me the head of Stingy Jack.”
His mother put a hand over his mouth, but the words had crossed the room. Another child said them. Then Mrs. Hanley, weeping as she spoke.
“Bring me the head of Stingy Jack.”
“Stop it,” Glen said.
The chant thickened.
Bring me the head of Stingy Jack.
Bring me the head of Stingy Jack.
Glen turned on them.
“I said stop!”
For a second, some did. Others went on, their faces confused and frightened, as if the words were being pulled from within them.
The largest pumpkin split with a wet crack.
People cried out, and Glen moved toward Hal, but the crowd pushed back at the same time, leaving the table clear under the fluorescent lights for a moment. The pumpkin opened along its grin. Inside were scraps of blackened deed paper and old coins, green at the edges, encased in candle wax. Pale seeds looked as though they had been set in rows like teeth.
Hal clutched his throat, and Glen caught him before he hit the floor. Hal’s body convulsed, then slackened. His eyes stayed open. His face had gone waxy, and his mouth drew into the narrow shape Glen had seen in the Polaroid.
The jack-o’-lanterns flared brighter, but soon the room went black.
When the security lights came on, a new pumpkin sat on the auction table, small, hard, and deeply carved, with Hal Cready’s face on it.
The chant stopped all at once, and no one wanted to look at the table.
*
The report never came clean.
Hal Cready’s death went down as heart failure under extreme distress. The old bones went to Springfield. The creek parcel went into court. The head from the pumpkin went nowhere useful. By the time state men asked after it, there was too little left to call evidence.
State police took statements and left with copies of Glen’s notes. His final report called it a probable homicide, unidentified. It left out the children walking, the pumpkins lighting, and the thing on the table after Hal died.
Nora read it at Glen’s desk two days later.
She knew he had left most out but handed the report back without argument.
Glen kept one Polaroid locked in his bottom drawer. Depending on the light, the face looked like Jack Bell, then Hal Cready, then no one at all.
*
The next fall, a vine came up beside the fire hall. No one had planted it. The pumpkin was small, pale and hard.
Glen saw it himself one morning. He stood over the vine for a long time, then ground the pumpkin under his boot.
The crunching sound it made wasn’t that of seeds.
R. Dell Walker is an author of horror and crime fiction from the Appalachian Mountains. He is the author of The Vermilion Carnival & Other Horrors. His fiction blends Southern Gothic, supernatural horror and the narrative drive of the classic pulps. He is currently writing his debut novel, Level Green, a work of cosmic horror. He lives with his wife, children and the ghost of an old hound dog in Virginia. You can find him on Instagram @r.dell.walker.
© 2026 R. Dell Walker. All rights reserved.
Without in any way limiting the authors’ and publisher’s exclusive rights, any unauthorised use of any part of this story to “train” generative artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to generate text is expressly prohibited.
This story is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons, events, locations or general circumstances is entirely coincidental and/or used in a fictitious manner.
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