Now that Halloween is coming up, I’ve been visiting different stores to put together my costume. I never want to buy anything from Party City that’s already been put together because it’s not unique enough. And it’s not cheap enough.

I would rather spend weeks visiting thrift stores and dollar stores and even garage sales to make a more affordable costume that I can brag about creating myself.

This year, I’ve decided to go as a zombie version of Elsa. I bought a long, draping, blue dress that looks like it comes from the Victorian period. I sewed a floor-length shawl to the back. And I’ve splattered blood across the skirt with a giant wound in the chest, so it looks like a shard of ice has impaled me.

I also crafted a crying, beheaded snowman out of foam balls and am planning on displaying it on my front lawn. What can I say? I like scaring children. It’s the one day of the year I can get away with it. And it’s not like their parents are going to mind. After how many times they’ve had to hear Let It Go on repeat, I’m sure they’ve thought about stabbing the ice queen themselves.

Even though it’s still a few weeks until Halloween, I’m pretty much ready to go. At least, I thought I was ready to go.

The other day, I bought a cheap bedazzling kit. I wanted to add sparkles to the sides of my dress to make the fabric sparkle like ice. But when I opened my closet to grab the dress, it wasn’t there. It wasn’t hanging in the guest closet either. It wasn’t anywhere.

I live alone. No one has a key to my apartment. I rarely have any friends over because most of my time is spent working — or planning for my favorite holiday of the year.

There was no way someone had been inside my home, no way someone had taken my dress.

Now, I might be big on horror movies, but I’m not big on ghost stories. I’m the person in the movie who would deny there’s a haunting, stubbornly stay in the cabin at the woods, and get murdered first.

That’s why it took me a few days to call up the owner of the secondhand shop where I had bought the old, Victorian looking dress. I asked about the gown he had sold me. He told me he wasn’t allowed to give out private information. But he let a few details slip.

It only took me an hour to track down the woman who owned the dress before me. Once I learned her name, I did some research on her. And found an obituary. She had died three days earlier, the day I’d noticed my dress was missing.

I went to the wake. I don’t know why. I didn’t know her. And it’s not like she would be able to give me any answers about my missing dress. But something compelled me to visit.

When I walked up to her open casket and saw her for the first time, she was wearing the blue dress. It couldn’t have been my blue dress because the shawl wasn’t sewn onto the shoulders. The chest wasn’t covered in blood. But it looked identical.

I backed away, wanting to get the hell out of there, but I ran into her husband on the way out the door. I made up a fake story about knowing her from a friend of a friend. Before I left, I summoned the courage to ask him how she had passed.

He told me he wasn’t sure, he was still waiting on a report from the coroner, but he had found her bleeding out in their kitchen. Something had been impaled straight through her chest.