Belief is a powerful thing. Well, not your belief: your opinions couldn’t be less important. But there is someone, and there always has been someone, who can control the universe by his powers of belief. You see, at any given moment the universe is controlled by what one particular man believes. All things, right down to the laws of physics, are subject to instantaneous change as soon as one dies and another is chosen.

Amelia Earheart?

Disappeared when the new Believer couldn’t fathom a female aviator. Ever wonder why Newton’s seemingly obvious laws of motion took so long to come around? Well, for thousands of years all the Believer’s put their stock in Aristotle’s physics. Believers don’t even know about their powers, and it is flat out impossible to tell who is one.

Somewhere in the middle of the Desert in Nevada, there’s a place where, if you look to the west at sunset you’ll be able to make out a tiny, house-shaped structure in the far distance, Wait for the sun to set completely and then you must WALK straight towards that structure without deviating.

As the night wears on, you will hear groans and cries of pain in the distance. Ignore them. You must continue to move towards where you saw the building. The night will seem much longer than any normal night, but if you continue walking until the sun comes up again behind you, you’ll find yourself suddenly in front of a battered, dusty shack. Inside, you will find no windows or doors (including the one you just came though) and in the center of the room will be a body. Reports of the decay vary from recently dead to a skeleton with clothes.

You might recognize the clothes or possibly the face. This body is yours. You can inspect it for as long as you dare. Check it for wounds or clues to your death… check its pockets for clues about your future if you wish. But you must figure out how to leave the room and do it before your corpse awakens. If you make it out of the room, you’ll find yourself back at the edge of the desert where you started. But if your corpse stirs before you can find the way out, you’ll be trapped in that room for eternity while your corpse is allowed to roam free. What does a corpse do with a second chance at life, you ask?

Well, remember those groans and cries you heard crossing the desert? A reanimated corpse has to eat, too…

Prominently displayed in the children’s section of the Houston Downtown Public Library, among several others of the same title, My First Cookbook appears as a run-of-the-mill children’s cookbook, complete with large print, simple instructions, colorful, friendly illustrations and a somewhat disproportionate desert section. In fact, the only major deviation from this theme is an article near the end of the book entitled “A Recipe for Success”. This is a complex, macabre ritual involving human sacrifice, self mutilation and sacrilege, as well as more curious and innocuous practices such as walking down a stair case with a prime number of stairs taking them two at a time and then up it taking them three at a time. It’s written in the same cheerfully simple prose as the rest of the book and accompanied by the same helpful, pastel drawings.

There exists a spot in all forests, called “The Devil’s Circle” which is ubiquitous and yet nowhere at the same time. You may find it one day, for it to be gone the next. The spot is nothing more than a circle of evenly spaced stones, however, nothing lives inside of these stones-it is just barren dirt. During the day, it’s OK to touch it, and even stand within the circle. If you plant something in it, the next day it will be dead.

The real secret to the circle is if you put someone’s hair within it. Then the next day, they will die. Perhaps they die mysteriously in their sleep, or maybe even a car accident. However, in doing so, you give up your soul to the devil.

You ask yourself now “Is this true?”, but the more important question you must ask is, “Is it worth it?”

There was this woman whose husband was acting very strange one day, very paranoid, she asked him why and this is what he told her:

“Twelve years ago to this day a whole bunch of my friends and I went to an old haunted house downtown to stay the night because we thought it would be fun. We were all settled on the bottom floor of the house and we were fine for the first few hours. We began to hear things that sounded like foot steps pacing on the floor above, and scratching on the walls.”

“We sent Jimmy, who was the oldest of us, up to have a look so he grabbed his flashlight and we watched him head up the steps. His foot steps seemed to stop towards the last few steps where he was no longer visible to us and slowly his light faded from view, we called after him but there was no reply.”

“Afterwards we sent Matt, the second oldest up to find him, he walked up the steps and the same thing happened. At this point we thought they were joking, and out third eldest, Jason went up to look shouting that he knew it was a trick and to give it up, at the last few steps where the other guys had vanished his shouting voice became distant before vanishing completely.”

“The rest of us got scared and went home to call the police who checked it out the next morning and found blood smeared up the sides of the stairwell. They searched the entire house and never found a soul. The house was eventually knocked down and not one body was found. Every year on this day one of us remaining from that house has disappeared going from oldest to youngest.”

Her husband was not seen again after that day. Police held an brief investigation, but nothing came of it.

During the summer of 1983, in a quiet town near Minneapolis, Minnesota, the charred body of a woman was found inside the kitchen stove of a small farmhouse. A video camera was also found in the kitchen, standing on a tripod and pointing at the oven. No tape was found inside the camera at the time.

Although the scene was originally labeled as a homicide by police, an unmarked VHS tape was later discovered at the bottom of the farm’s well (which had apparently dried up earlier that year).

Despite its worn condition, and the fact that it contained no audio, police were still able to view the contents of the tape. It depicted a woman recording herself in front of a video camera (seemingly using the same camera the police found in the kitchen). After positioning the camera to include both her and her kitchen stove in the image, the tape then showed her turning on the oven, opening the door, crawling inside, and then closing the door behind her. Eight minutes into the video, the oven could be seen shaking violently, after which point thick black smoke could be seen emanating from it. The camera then continued to stationary point at the oven for another 45 minutes until the batteries apparently died.

To avoid disturbing the local community, police never released any information about the tape, or even the fact that it was found. Police were also not able to determine who put the tape in the well.

…or why the physical stature of the woman on the tape did not in any way resemble the stature of the woman found in the oven.

In Berlin, after World War II, money was short, supplies were tight, and it seemed like everyone was hungry. At that time, people were telling the tale of a young woman who saw a blind man picking his way through a crowd. The two started to talk. The man asked her for a favor: could she deliver the letter to the address on the envelope? Well, it was on her way home, so she agreed.

She started out to deliver the message, when she turned around to see if there was anything else the blind man needed. But she spotted him hurrying through the crowd without his smoked glasses or white cane. She went to the police, who raided the address on the envelope, where they found heaps of human flesh for sale.

And what was in the envelope? “This is the last one I am sending you today.”

In 1990, a small meteorite was sighted in the night sky by the Hubble telescope. It appeared to be on a collision course with earth, but calculations showed that it was far too small and moving far too slowly to be a threat to our home planet.

In 1997, the long-forgotten meteorite entered the atmosphere.

It did not burn away, as scientists predicted; it barely even grew warm. Even so, it landed without drawing much attention on the outskirts of a village in the middle of Africa, on the edge of the Sahara.

Three months later, a safari expedition vanished while en route through the jungle. They never reached their checkpoint, within walking distance from the desert.

A research team in 1998 happened on the impact crater of the meteorite by chance. They detected high levels of radiation in the crater, though they could not identify what element had caused it. They drove to the nearby village to warn the locals of the danger, but the settlement was completely empty.

Not a soul nor a body could be found for miles around. The only evidence of life left, current or past, were the long-abandoned grass huts, and a great number of footprints leading into the sands of the Sahara. None of the footprints could be matched against any living creature on record.

There is a demon of great evil, that will be able to walk upon the Earth if someone is told of its existence and does not repeat the name to another. To the best of my ability, his name roughly approximates “Jkqxxllyuo”.

This was told to me by a rather unkempt man on the street; if you have not noticed it already, I just told it to you.

The lottery gives you a three digit number and a four digit number each day, right? What else has seven digits split into three, then four? That’s right, it’s a phone number. The lottery is a telephone oracle. Whoever is on the end of the line when you call that number knows something that you need to know, though sometimes getting the prophecy out of them can be difficult. It helps if you have a winning ticket, I believe.

In winter of 1944, with overtaxed supply lines in the Ardennes, a German medic had completely run out of plasma, bandages and antiseptic. During one particularly bad round of mortar fire, his encampment suddenly became a bloodbath. The survivors claimed to hear, above the screams and barked commands of their Lieutenant, someone cackling with almost girlish glee.

The medic made his rounds during the fire, in almost complete darkness as he had so many times before, but never this short on supplies.

The bombardment moved to other ends of the line, most men dropped off to sleep in the still dark hours of the morning - New Year’s Day, 1945.

The men awoke at first light with screams. They discovered that their bandages were not typical bandages at all, but hunks and strips of human flesh. Several men had been given fresh blood transfusions, with no blood supplies available. Each treated man was almost completely covered, head-to-toe, with the maroon stain of blood.

The medic was found, sitting on an ammunition tin, staring off into space. When one man approached him, tapped him on the shoulder, his tunic fell off to reveal all skin, muscle, and sinew had been stripped from his torso and his body almost completely dried of blood. In one hand was a scalpel, and in the other, a blood transfusion vial.

None of the men treated for wounds that night, in that camp, saw the end of January, 1945.

Somewhere in the Pacific ocean is an island, surrounded by a swamp filled with the carcasses of fish and other, less recognizable things poking out of the mud. The mire extends as far as you can see.
Every so often, the mud will dry enough under that you can walk on it; about a days travel from shore is a large mound, at the top of which is an immense canyon, the bottom of which cannot be seen, although if the moon is large enough you will be able to see the slope of the canyon, and eventually the bottom, which is covered by a strange body of water. Rising from the water is a monolith, which is covered in bas-reliefs.

Those who have seen in related that everything carved onto the surface of the great monolith was a depiction of every major event that happened from the beginning of time: From the destruction of the dinosaurs to the black plague, all the way up to 9/11 and the Iraqi war. Even stranger, people have stated many seeing depictions of events that had not yet happened. When questioned further, the majority would merely shake their head, refusing to elaborate.

However, the others who dared speak would all say something [mostly] similar to, “Just let it happen. It can’t be stopped, anyhow.”

A laundress, newly moved to Charleston following the Civil War, found herself awakened at the stroke of twelve each night by the rumble of heavy wheels passing in the street. But she lived on a dead end street, and had no explanation for the noise. Her husband would not allow her to look out the window when she heard the sounds, telling her to leave well enough alone.

Finally, she asked the woman who washed at the tub next to hers. The woman said: “What you are hearing is the Army of the Dead. They are Confederate soldiers who died in hospital without knowing that the war was over. Each night, they rise from their graves and go to reinforce Lee in Virginia to strengthen the weakened Southern forces.”

The next night, the laundress slipped out of bed to watch the Army of the Dead pass. She stood spell-bound by the window as a Gray fog rolled passed. Within the fog, she could see the shapes of horses, and could hear gruff human voices and the rumble of canons being dragged through the street, followed by the sound of marching feet. Foot soldiers, horsemen, ambulances, wagons and canons passed before her eyes, all shrouded in Gray. After what seemed like hours, she heard a far off bugle blast, and then silence.

When the laundress came out of her daze, she found one of her arms was paralyzed. She has never done a full days washing since.

There exists a small circle of trees somewhere in the Rocky Mountains, completely unremarkable from the outside, but just inside no sun or star ever shines. Rumor has it that anyone that can spend three pitch black days and nights within the grove without going mad will be greeted with the queer sight of the sun rising in the west on the beginning of the forth day, filling the grove with radiant light. One wish may be made before this sun, and it shall be fulfilled. However, once that person makes the wish, the world outside the grove shall forever be as dark for them as it had been inside for those three days.

A teenage baby-sitter put the kids she was watching to sleep in their beds and went back downstairs. The late night news was on the TV — the reporter said a psychopath from a local mental institution was on the loose and that police thought he might be in the area. He cautioned residents to lock their doors and windows because this guy was very, very dangerous.

Well, the teenager checked the locks on the windows and the doors, but she forgot the door on the cellar bulkhead. Needless to say, the psychopath broke in about an hour later, coming up from the cellar, armed with an ax. The children heard some noises downstairs, but thought it was the baby-sitter moving some furniture around. Then it got real quiet.

All they heard for the remainder of the night was this noise: “Thump! Thump! Dra-aag… Thump! Thump! Dra-aag…” Evidently, they were too afraid to get up to see what it was. In the morning, their parents came home and were horrified to find the babysitter at the top of the stairs, dead with both arms hacked off at the elbows. She’d been climbing the stairs on the bloody stumps of her arms, pulling her badly injured body along. Was she trying to check on the children? Was she trying to get help? Or in the madness of her tortured soul, was she planning to kill the children herself?