It was just like any other day when I received the call. I had been sketching the horizon for the past hour when my phone began ringing with an unfamiliar number. I would have ignored it if the call hadn’t been from my home town. Fast forward 24 hours later, and I’m sitting in a…
Though written about in fiction occasionally, the mirror box is quite an old invention. Being inside of one can be enlightening or traumatizing for the witness who bears its burden. The procedure is simple, though finding and preparing the materials required might take some time. The materials to construct the box are: -Six square metal…
I remember Phantasia Forest. I bet I’m one of the few people willing to admit that, and I’m probably the only person who remembers it for all the good instead of all the bad. I’ll never forget the summer it opened – the summer of 1954. I knew I was in for something special when…
When I was seven years old, I awoke in the middle of the night. I ordinarily wouldn’t have thought anything of it; it happened rather often. I would wake from nightmares and stay upright in bed for a short while before coaxing myself back to sleep. My parents had quite the tendency not to be…
Mitch, Bill and I knew this church well. We all grew up going to it. Now of course we had all ‘fallen away’ so to speak. It is not a hard church to get into. The second floor windows were never locked and there was no one in the neighborhood ignorant of how to get…
You awaken with a high pitched ringing in your ears. Gradually, the sound becomes softer, like the humming from your refrigerator, and eventually, it stops completely. Even after a peaceful night’s rest, your eyes are not ready to open. Your instincts urge you to KEEP THEM CLOSED, but you find no reason not to open…
Two years after his passing, my husband’s grave still remained adorned with jewelry and flowers. Sasaki Tomonaga’s final resting place had become so decorated, one may believe him to be a noble instead of a lowly gokenin. He will always and forever be remembered for protecting our village from utter destruction. Alas, the legacy of…
My basement has never exactly been a welcoming place. It’s unfurnished; there’s no carpet and the walls consist of boring, exposed bricks. There’s a set of old wooden stairs on one end that creaks whenever anyone uses them. Behind the stairs is a storage area that begins about four or five feet off the ground…
Somewhere in the world, there is a collection of books. Perhaps it’s in a dusty, unpainted shelf in the back corner of someone’s attic; perhaps it’s in a set of musty boxes in the basement of some tiny, obscure library. It contains a few hundred volumes, all handwritten, ranging from leather-bound volumes with yellowing pages…
“Another pint should put just the right color on the day,” I half-whispered to myself as I rationalized ordering another creation of Arthur Guinness’s brilliance. As the pub’s barman slid my libation past the ashtrays and napkins, a sniveling, and seemingly inebriated, derelict skulked past my stool and leaned his filthy frame over the bar…
The Intruder is a silhouette and similar in shape to a Siamese cat. When sitting, it is about 7.5 feet tall. It has two overly large, slanted eyes, which glow a bright fluorescent green, and have no pupils. It blinks these eyes occasionally. Other than the eyes, it has no other discernible facial or body…
Bright white light dapples the faces of the young, pretty music circles and echoes around the ears, fingers feel the lush dew of early morning grass, the crunch and tang of an apple excites the tongue and the nose is filled with the sweet aroma of that indefinable smell that haunts happiness. I feel my…
I don’t know how long I’ve been running, nor do I care. I just know I have to get away, escape from the creature and its rancid, hot breath. I can almost hear its heavy paws giving chase, snapping the slender branches on the ground as it covers the distance between us. The hair on…
Think of a drop of dark red ink falling towards a sterile marble floor. It splashes into a crown and branches into threads of alternating lengths, ejecting droplets into the air. The droplets too skim across the floor, and eventually, the drop is gone. The crown settles in the image of a shining sun, but…
I never believed my friend Steve until I experienced it myself. You see, Steve had told me this outrageous story about an entity he refers to as “The Gray Woman” that has been haunting him since he was young. I didn’t believe a word of it. Not because I don’t believe in the paranormal per…
The Waterfarmer Tonight he had purpose. The number was to be twenty…twenty of the best. Or at least the best he could find. The twenty were to be found in the water; in their place of rest. They will be part of the offering; an offering that must be made. Out to sea he realizes…
I knock on the door for the third time, the noise of my fist banging hollowly off the door and into the house beyond me. I wait. No answer. It’s weird. My father told me that he and my family would be here for when I got home. We haven’t seen each other for over…
It is said that there are parts of this world that no human man, woman, or child can ever see or enter into. These places exist at the bottoms of oceans, in the centers of mountains, or just above storm clouds. Every once in a great while, there is a glitch in these places’ matrix…
This actually happened to me a few years back at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia. My sophomore year, I roomed with a girl named Kara. She was a jazz vocalist, but her main interest was opera. We had a small room on the sixth floor of a dormitory called Juniper Hall. The walls…
The events in this story occurred on a warm & humid night in late August of 2008, the night after Tropical Storm Fay ripped through our town in Gadsden County, Florida. Looking back on this, I will say that the terror of that storm was nothing compared to what followed the night after the storm…
Orange light flickered and danced in the center of my vision. The dying heat barely reached me now, but there was no going back out there for more fuel at this point. At least it had stopped snowing. I had always been told not to stare into the fire at night. Keep that night vision…
Stories are often wrought in the darkness, the immeasurable sea of the unknown. Man becomes irreversibly convinced that here lies his demise, here lies his doom and his defeat. Such is his nature that he rarely pauses to consider the other, the light, the known world. It is not in the night that this story…
Tiny goosebumps. Ice tingling up the spine. These sensations lingered; the only means of knowing that someone was watching. No, not watching… stalking. For how long? He didn’t really know, but he became aware of this presence not a few hours ago. In that little cafe, with the clever wooden sign that hung above the…
A recent study by the National Psychiatric Institute in Boston, MA, concluded that no activity can account for the phenomenon known as nightmares. Whereas many dreams come from unconscious desires, most nightmares seem to come from an outside source independent of the individual. In fact, when subjects are asked to recall nightmares they are almost…