Pretty Little Liars’ Halloween episodes have arguably become as central to the mystique of the series as the overarching mystery surrounding the identity of “A,” which is rather surprising, given the fact that only three spooktacular holiday episodes have aired throughout the teen drama’s seven-season run. Serving as one of the rare times in PLL’s history where we definitively knew what month it is on the show, the trio of episodes were nothing short of insane, with all five of our Liars being subjected to their usual amount of physical and emotional distress — but this time, with costumes. To get into the Halloween spirit, we revisited all the crazy, bad things that have happened in Rosewood on October 31. They’re just as insane as you remember.
Season 2, Episode 13: “The First Secret”
Alison, the worst babysitter of all time, scars a child for life with a Halloween story.
About a blonde twin who stabs her other blonde twin in the chest with a kitchen knife, after her sister refuses to share a doll with her. Her parents send her away to a home for the criminally insane, until she escapes and vows to return to Rosewood to haunt trick-or-treaters.
Alison receives her first text message from “A.”
This is the first “A” text message anyone receives on the show, chronologically speaking, and Alison receives it in a Halloween store! It reads: “I’m watching you.”
Aria catches Byron and his student mistress, Meredith, making out in his car.
With Alison there, no less, and on a secret Rosewood side street. Bad dad of the year.
“A” sends a disturbing voodoo doll to Alison at her home.
With a note pinned to its head that reads: “It’s my turn to torture you.” She stashes the note in a secret box that she hides in the air-vent.
Officer Wilden drops by the Marin household to continue flirting with Ashley.
He says things like, “I’m sure it’s not easy to adjust to not living with a man in the house,” and “Be careful on the roads, people can be unpredictable,” in his signature eerie drawl. Ashley shuts it down immediately by calling him a “horny cop.”
This delightful weirdo stalks the Liars as they’re getting ready for Noel’s Halloween party.
Alison blackmails Aria with the information regarding Byron’s cheating.
She won’t tell anyone unless Aria stops “being a downer” and goes to Noel’s party. Aria goes to the party.
Alison and Jenna show up to Noel’s Halloween party in the same costume.
And exchange a few heated words about it.
Alison orchestrates an elaborate scare for the other Liars at a creepy haunted house.
They’re rightfully angry after she and Noel (in a masked costume) make it look like Alison is being attacked and murdered with a knife. But it turns right around on Alison when Noel reveals he got held up and never made it to the house, which means someone genuinely did try to hurt (or kill) her.
After these events, Alison gets her second text message from “A.”
The highly cryptic: “Dying to know who I am? You’ll find out. — A”
Season 3, Episode 13: “This Is ‘A’ Dark Ride”
Mona does some super-eerie plotting.
While institutionalized at Radley, she paints a scary papier-mâché mask while singing “The Teddy Bear Picnic.” She then gives a monologue to a masked “A” operative and says, “I love Halloween. All the dressing up, being other people. Tricks and treats. Treats that turn into tricks. It’s better than Christmas. More makeup.” The scene ends as Mona gives the mystery person a handful of bullets and pills, presumably for use against our Liars on the Halloween Ghost Train.
The girls get harassed by a prankster exploiting their dead friend’s death.
Clifford Yeardley, a local jerk, sets up a coffin in his front yard’s Halloween display that has Alison’s name painted on the front. In a super macabre move, Clifford jumps out of the coffin wearing a dress and blonde wig to frighten the girls.
Garrett Reynolds commits even more crimes after getting out of jail.
Garrett decides to leave Veronica flowers by breaking into her home to drop them off on her kitchen counter.
The first stalker sighting occurs.
A creeper in a baby face mask leers at the girls from across a room.
Adam Lambert torments the Ghost Train attendees.
With performances of “Cuckoo” and “Trespassing” while dressed as a vampire in one of TV’s most uncomfortable staged dance scenes of all time.
A sexual assault happens.
A masked man gropes Hanna as the baby-mask creeper keeps leering from a distance.
A ghost child makes herself known.
A pale trick-or-treating waif shows up in Mrs. Marin’s kitchen asking to call her mom.
A second sexual assault happens.
The masked groper returns to accost Hanna, but it turns out to be Caleb in disguise carrying out a terrible joke meant to test if she’s capable of protecting herself.
There’s a party drugging.
Another creeper, this time in a harlequin mask, drugs Aria’s drink with a white powder hidden in a ring.
The second stalker sighting occurs.
Another creepy stalker, this one only seen as a hooded silhouette, lurks on Emily and Paige while they make out in a train car.
The baby-mask creeper accosts Spencer in a train car.
It turns out to be Garrett, who snuck onto the Ghost Train to tell Spencer everything he knows about the night Alison “died.”
A fake attempted murder comes up in a flashback.
Years ago, Garrett fakes beating Alison to death with a field-hockey stick to impress Jenna. (Since she can hear the impact sounds but not see them, he just strikes a tree.)
Byron gets even shadier in another flashback.
Garrett tells Spencer he saw Byron talking to Alison behind her house the night she disappeared, when Alison threatens to expose Byron for an unknown transgression. Oh, Byron, when will you ever learn?
A threatening “A” text message pops up on the Ghost Train.
Spencer and Hanna get a text saying Aria won’t make it to the end of the train line.
Aria gets kidnapped.
She wakes up from the drugs and is bound and gagged in a wooden box.
A third sexual assault happens.
Someone on the train has shown up in a copy of Caleb’s mask and Hanna gets groped again, this time by an actual stranger. Underneath the copied mask is an additional mask, this one of Alison’s face.
An attempted murder occurs.
The harlequin stalker jumps on Spencer, beats her, and tries to strangle her to death.
There’s psychological torment with a corpse.
Aria continues to struggle in the wooden box and realizes she’s been trapped inside it with Garrett’s dead body.
A second, more dramatic attempted murder occurs.
An unknown number of people whisper to each other as they try to shove Aria’s coffin out of a moving train car with her and Garrett inside.
A dead body is discovered.
Toby and Noel get into a fight, knocking over the drink cooler, which tips over to reveal a full body bag hidden underneath the ice and drinks. Did Rosewood High provide no security for this goddamn Ghost Train party?!
Season 4, Episode 14: “Grave New World”
Mrs. Grunwald appears and acts like her normal, creepy self.
She snatches Emily by the arm and warns her that all of the Liars need to leave town immediately and not attend a Halloween party in Ravenswood.
Aria pursues a stranger in a graveyard.
Specifically, to see if she can get answers about Alison, but she loses track of the woman and instead gets grabbed by the ankle in the middle of the misty graveyard. It turns out to be the woman in question, who was pushed into an open grave.
The Liars explore some mysterious crypts …
As the girls descend into the subterranean tunnels of a mausoleum, the cement door is slammed behind them.
… and things immediately go awry.
After a windstorm sweeps through the catacomb hallway, the girls realize Hanna has vanished. Hanna is separated from the herd and finds the words “Help Me” written on a tunnel wall. She gets startled by a nest of rats before taking shelter in a spooky house, where a person in a vintage soldier’s uniform appears to be waiting to stalk her. (Note: Ezra was spotted in the same uniform earlier in the evening while watching the girls from afar.)
PLL tries to make Ravenswood happen by throwing a bunch of supernatural scares at us.
Hanna gets trapped inside an old-timey phone booth that’s inside the spooky house. The few lights in the house all quickly shut off before the old-timey phone rings, playing old-timey music on the other end of the receiver.
The girls are tormented by the screams of their presumed-dead best friend.
The rest of the Liars finally get inside the spooky house to find Hanna, only to discover a red liquid dripping onto them all from the ceiling. To cap it off, they hear Alison’s voice yelling at someone on the other side of an open door.
We get a potential Alison sighting.
While Hanna remains trapped in the phone booth, she sees Alison through the frosted glass, but then Alison is absconded by the masked soldier.
Two of the girls are almost impaled.
As Emily and Aria try to escape the spooky house through an open window, they barely escape a large falling shard of glass because they’re distracted by Alison’s screaming voice in the distance.
Spencer is attacked in a sun room by the man in the soldier’s uniform.
He knocks her unconscious and stands over her body ominously holding large pruning shears.
More Alison-related mind tricks ensue.
Emily, Aria, and Spencer hear Ali screaming in the distance again and chase after her, but the girls only find a tape reel playing a recording of Ali screaming about someone trying to kill her.
Disturbing insights from a psychic don’t exactly calm anyone down.
Mrs. Grunwald tells the girls one of them has been “touched by the one Alison fears the most.”
Alison is, in fact, alive!
She makes her grand reappearance and tells the girls it’s still not safe for her to come home. Then Ezra steps out from the shadows.
Caleb finds his own grave and it even has a picture of him on it as proof.
He’s apparently been buried for years in the Ravenswood cemetery. Ravenswood was a terrible place and a terrible idea.
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