Message Body: Intuitive ads. You see them everywhere now, and don’t really give it a second thought. Ads that use tracking cookies to track your browsing history or personal profile and provide suggestions that might appeal to you. You know. The way Amazon suggests new books based on what you
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Inspired by the news article: The mystery of the 132-year-old Winchester rifle found propped against a national park tree “Gid’yap, Goldie… jes’ a little farther now.” Statten Cready rolled exhausted in the saddle of his beautiful flaxen mare and tapped her lightly on the rump to get her to pick
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The grandfather clock struck eleven as the wealthy old man rubbed his eyes, tired from reading one of his many dusty books that were stacked neatly on a tall oak bookshelf near the creaky chair on which he sat. He was a collector of the fine arts, having always had
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There was definitely something wrong with the tree, thought Casper. He was not a farmer or an arborist – it wasn’t that he worried the tree was not healthy or anything like that, as he did not know enough about trees to know the difference. What concerned him is that
The audience laughed as the young man in the top hat smiled. The trick he had just completed had apparently been more than enough to please the crowd. As the man slowly walked away from the almost blindly bright spotlight, he kept his face focused on the crowd, continuing to
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I woke up in the box again. Stuffed inside the darkness, shoved against all the others. The only light coming from the thin opening near the top of the box where the walls meet against the roof, shooting a thin beam of silver moonlight in a line, covering the entire
Kneeling before the Knight, Edwin accepted the scroll with great honor. It was such an odd thing he held; one of the likes he had never experienced before. The parchment was cold to the touch and made from leather of the deepest black. It was absent of moisture. Still, it
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One of my first memories as a child was a funeral. My uncle’s funeral. He was my mom’s half-brother and considerably younger than her as he was from her dad’s second marriage. I think he was in his mid-twenties and he was addicted to ecstasy. Of course, I didn’t know
There are many stories about monsters. Have you ever stopped to think about what makes something a monster? Charybdis, Dracula, Grendel, and Slenderman are all different, yet they share some fundamental quality. I suppose you could say you know one when you see one, but do you really? What is
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When I graduated from college, my best friend Diana and I embarked upon a grand tour of Europe. Halfway through our trip, we had planned to spend three days in Prague, but had completely failed to account for poor weather hindering all of our sight-seeing plans. As a result of
Ever since I was small I’ve had a fascination with old things, buildings specifically. Something about things that rot and decay is beautiful to me, I don’t really know why. As a kid I’d get into all the dark, dusty spaces I could. The attic, the crawl space in our
It has been exactly a year now since the incident happened… The day that my younger brother, John was killed. I have tried and tried to forget about what happened but it is still burned in my mind. So I know this is rather a cliché but I am recording
I touched the button in the middle of the screen, and a quick blue flash filled the room. I turned my phone’s screen towards me, and looked at the photo I had just taken. I was smiling, and my new fluffy kitten was nestled into my arm, looking off to
Coming from the Appalachian foothills of West Virginia, where driving to town was a big to-do, I realized at a young age that people tend to lean toward the supernatural for things that they cannot understand. The women in my family were particularly guilty of this kind of superstition –
JayJay suspected herself of having a mild form of ADHD to balance out her high IQ. It was undiagnosed, if so; she had better things to spend her money on than psychoanalysis. Still, there were the occasional days like today, when her concentration was shot, and whatever was in her
My grandfather was an inventor. All his life he’s be tinkering with something, either taking something that existed and changing it, making it into something brand new (Or at the very least different) or inventing something entirely from spare parts. And while nothing he invented was ever earth shaking it
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It was your standard blue collar work day—in at 9, work for eight hours, out by 5. My dad was on his way home to have a standard blue collar evening when something not-so-standard happened. Driving home from work, his car was hit by some douchebag pickup truck driver on
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I remember the first time I ever saw Grandpa’s hand…I was a little kid at the time, and I didn’t know the story behind it. Nobody did, as I found out. It was…just a skeleton hand he’d picked up somewhere. When I first saw it, of course, I was frightened.
In autumn 2003, my first year studying at Cambridge University, a rumour began circulating about a VHS tape that was causing students to go insane. Nobody knew who had first found the tape, or where they had found it, but the stories started in October, when a history student allegedly
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“I’ll never ask for anything else again, I swear, Mom!” As kids, we’ve all said it at one point. We find something that seems the most amazing item in the world and we just have to have it, no matter what. For me, it was the newest handheld, a Game
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I’ve always been curious about the histories connected to belongings. I buy many of my things second hand from charity shops, retro speciality stores – those sorts of places. You can call me cheap all you want, but for me things have feelings. The vinyl record you listened to the
George never got sick, well, almost never. He was well into his thirties and had been working an office job for almost seven years now. It was a standard 8-5 job and he found comfort in the monotony of it. This particular Tuesday, however, George woke up from stomach pains
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Jason loved to read. Every day he would take a walk to a nice place, like the park or the beach, and sit down to read for hours. It didn’t matter what the story was about, or who the author was, because Jason just loved to read. One weekend, his
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‘The first time I heard the legend of the Mad Hangman was from another inmate in our prison. He told me that there was a man with the ability to ward off death. That he was immortal. At first I thought it was a comforting fable for people who were
