Cats are on the prowl to usher in the long nights of fall, and the entries in this year’s Honolulu Star-Advertiser Halloween Fiction Contest included several scary feline tales. Irene Tanaka’s “The Bell,” about a farmer’s encounter with a trio of supernatural “obake-neko,” or people-size cats, won first place and a $250 cash prize. It was the second win for Tanaka, 39, whose “The Kappa” took first place last year.

“The inspiration for ‘The Bell’ came about because of a neighborhood cat who kept using our garden as its litter box,” said Tanaka, a Wahiawa resident who teaches ninth-grade English at McKinley High School. “We’d find paw prints everywhere. My husband said that someone should put a bell on it.” 

“The twist came unexpectedly,” one judge observed. “And there’s an unusual mix of anxiety and sympathy for the reader.”

Tanaka tells her students that rather than gore and violence, horror is about making readers “imagine what is going on, because what the mind comes up with is more horrific than anything.”

As a parent, she said, she writes as a way to “confront and conquer” her own greatest fear, that of losing a child.

In an uncanny coincidence, second place and $100 — for the second year — went to Donald Carreira Ching of Wahiawa, for “The Coca,” about mischievous children who are cursed by a neighbor.

“When I was growing up in Kahaluu, there was an old woman who always came out to scold me and my friends about cutting through her yard,” said Carreira, 29.

“I liked that the writer brought this traditional (Portuguese) ‘boogey man’ to a Hawaii story and that the narrator was at fault (and knew it),” wrote one judge. Another judge said it brought back his own childhood fears.

“What works really well is (the way) the Coca’s rhyming verse builds the scariness,” the third judge wrote, adding, “This story would be great as a read-aloud.”

The judges for this year’s contest were Carol Abe, director of publicity and advertising at University of Hawaii Press; Lee Cataluna, Star-Advertiser columnist, playwright and author of “Three Years on Doreen’s Sofa” and “Folks You Meet in Longs”; and Donovan Kuhio Colleps, author of “Proposed Additions” and a Ph.D. candidate in creative writing and Pacific literature at the University of Hawaii at Manoa.

Today section staffers liked “Hana,” by Keith Okazaki, so much that we decided to award it a third, unannounced prize of $75. A story about a tattooed woman who lives by the Wailuku River and collects koi, its revelation quietly slithers up on you.

“The casual indifference in the way the supernatural is delivered in this story really made it for me,” one judge wrote.

The idea for “Hana” came from his own childhood, said Okazaki, 49, who lives in Mililani and grew up in Hilo near the river. “We would go swimming at Boiling Pots, and we would hear stories about the mo‘o, or dragon, that hid behind waterfalls that would sometimes snatch children underwater.” When his own two children were younger, he used to make up spooky stories, “not so much to scare them, but to get their imaginations going.” You can read “Hana” online at staradvertiser.com.

In all, more than 100 adult contest entries were received and read. Other finalists included “The Seaweed Lady,” by Joe Gaynor, “Samaritan,” by Lisa Yamada, and “The Discarded,” by Susan E. Wright.

As to whether there’s something supernatural in having three winners from Wahiawa and neighboring Mililani, we leave it to our readers to judge.

Look for the student winners in Saturday’s Kalakoa section.