The closest thing to a "haunted" house in my neighborhood was a little cottage that most likely just belonged to an artistic recluse.  They had let their garden run wild, overgrown with weeds, tall grasses, and dead sticks.  They had even replaced the house number on their mailbox with a sign that simply read "entropy" in a basic font.  On Halloween, we always knew better than to bother them, not because we were scared but because it would be rude.  After all, they never bothered any of us.  Besides, there were plenty of other houses to get candy from.

However, there was an old abandoned church a few streets over and up the hill from our neighborhood.  Surrounded by old Victorian mansions in the "used to be rich" part of town, it was as close as we could get to anything haunted.  After a long night of trick-or-treating, we would run back to my best friend's house who lived closest to that end of the neighborhood, dump any of the more cumbersome elements of our costumes, then dash through her back yard and up the hill.  When we got to the church, we would always try the door, which was always locked.  It was sort of a tradition by that point.  Anyway, since none of us had learned to pick locks back then, and we certainly weren't about to smash any of the beautiful stained glass windows, we would just go around back and sit in the graveyard telling ghost stories.  Being in a graveyard at night might sound like a terrifying annual activity for a bunch of kids, but we had our lanterns and we were all together, so it wasn't actually that bad.

I don't remember exactly how the conversation that led us there started, something along the lines of "it's sad that we don't have a real haunted house in our neighborhood like in the movies," but I can proudly say that going to the old church that first year was my idea.  My best friend takes the honor of finding the graveyard out back and telling the first ghost story.  Every year we would have a casual sort of contest where we would all compete for who could tell the best one.  Sometimes we had a tie, so we ended up giving out different awards for different kinds, like "scariest" or "most clever," though the better ones were usually "borrowed" from older siblings or camp counselors. Then, when we had all run out of stories and our parents had run out of patience (usually around midnight), we would go back to my friend's house and sort through our candy.  She was obligated to give some to her little sister, who had come back home earlier and therefore had less, so there was never any fighting over who had to take the worst candy, because we would simply dump it all on her.  She was just overjoyed at the heaping pile she got, and over the years I think it trained her to actually have a taste for that stuff, and it became another annual tradition.  Then we would stay up even later to watch a scary movie, before separating out into separate rooms for a sleepover.  By that point, all the sugar from our candy had worn off, and we were so tired that we were asleep before our heads hit the pillows, dreaming of flying like a witch or solving a spooky mystery.

As we got older, we usually had a more elegant party for most of the night, but we never replaced trick-or-treating entirely, always making sure to do a round and say hi to our favorite neighbors, the ones who gave out homemade treats like hot cider and donut holes, caramel apples, or even setting up a small firepit to toast s'mores.  And of course we would always visit the old church for a scary story or two.