The rental house exceeded my expectations. You may think $400 per month rent for a three bedroom, two bath, furnished house four miles from a state university suspicious, but having grown up in the foothills, I knew how rent in the mountains worked. Four-hundred dollars wouldn’t pay for a weekend […]
We Thought You Knew Read More »
Part 1 When I was about ten years old, my family moved. We ventured to a semi-suburban part of Georgia, where my parents opted for one of the older neighborhoods rather than the newer clusters of uniform homes. The neighborhood we selected—Ivy Cascades—possessed a haphazard layout, with the homes and
I don’t know how to start things. Partly, I think, that’s because I don’t know where this all…started. Began? I’ll start with me. I’m 25, working from home for a call center. It’s an alright gig. I have a client on my computer that works kind of like Skype, it
I’m posting this here, as well as on a few other forums, because I’m hoping that some tech-savvy user among you will be able to explain what happened on my iPhone a couple of nights ago. Maybe you’ll know where it came from? Maybe one of you will have seen
He was rich, rich beyond his wildest dreams, with a beautiful wife by his side and two equally beautiful children. He had everything one could want in life: money, love, happiness. I should have left it alone. I should have felt happy for him. But I couldn’t…. I just couldn’t
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The following interviews were conducted with the foreknowledge that names and locations would be kept private. Therefore, they have been changed to respect the privacy of those involved. Every night before I went to bed, I’d research odd phenomenon in small towns. Towns so small that no one would have
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I suffer from a condition called Charles Bonnet Syndrome, or Visual Release Hallucinations if you want to get more technical. It’s a condition that’s far more common than you might realize — it’s estimated that as many as half of people with gradual loss of vision will experience one or
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She had no memory of how she got here. Deep within a labyrinthine dungeon, in a multitude of cold, rocky, undulating passages, intertwining and stretching in every direction, dimly lit with torches but still somehow as dark and sinister as a moonless night, The Girl, barely eight years old, found
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The tall grandfather clock bellowed four times through the two-story house, as the county school bus pulled off from the driveway. A young girl named Jenna McLure sat on the carpeted floor of the second level, playing in solitude with each of her stuffed toys outside of her bedroom. Jenna
Jeremy Miller was never a man of God. Whereas all the other kids he grew up with spent their Sundays in their respective holy houses, Jeremy spent his Sunday mornings glued to the television. He grew on the knowledge of the Discovery channel, the girth of the internet, and the
No Such Thing As Ghosts Read More »
[For what should be obvious reasons later in the story, I’m withholding my friend’s name. I’ll just call him Matt or Matthew for the sake of privacy purposes or whatever the whole thing is.] It’s been over 10 years since it happened. When I was really little, I met my
He’s In My Head and He Won’t Go Away Read More »
”What scares you?” Josh asked looking around the table. All other conversations stopped and the attention focused on him. He sat up a little straighter and grinned; he knew he had the floor. They sat outside the bar at one of the tables by the street, so they could smoke
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Father’s Day Howard Simpkin was a quiet man, a nice man, everybody said so. Who could have foreseen the future? Howard grew up in the small town of Dakenby, the son of average parents of average wealth. In fact everything about Howard’s life was decidedly average. Even his job; an
Thomson stepped out of the old police cruiser and on to the still damp side walk. The smell of rain hung in the air, accentuating the already acrid smell that permanently hung over the town. (That’s what we get for being a coastal city), Thomson thought to himself as he
I worked in the dredging industry for quite some time now. For those of you unaware of what dredging is, it’s a sector of marine construction that involves excavating the bottom of a body of water, and relocating the material elsewhere. If you’ve ever been to a beach on the
In the wake of the 2016 American election, several changes occurred in the country. One of the more highly publicized and celebrated of these developments was California’s legalization of marijuana for recreational use. While the objective impact has thus far been quite subtle, a small number of people who live
It was supposed to be such an uneventful day, but overhead the clouds churned and plotted. Rebecca Madison saw and heard the roaring of the wind against her car, but she didn’t care. It was warm inside, so what did the fierce cold outside have to do with her? It
I’m going to tell you a secret that I don’t tell anyone. I’m a US veteran of the war in Afghanistan. I was stationed in the Uruzgan province when Taliban militants attacked our coalition base. I stood next to a man I knew since training when a RPG-16 hit the
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The Trailer The trailer always gets me. This one showed a child with brown skin and blond hair dressed in blue, sleeping under a tree. You won’t wake up, the caption reads. The child is walking, growing and shrinking. Several flowers approach it, mainly lilies. The only aggressive one is
Flowers for Fiends Read More »
I suffer from Schizophrenia. Before you jump to any conclusions about me…before that word “schizophrenia” flashes its stigma and makes you think of serial killers, mass shooters, and the like, let me dispel a few things. I am not Norman Bates. I am not Ted Bundy. As a matter of
I wake up suddenly in the middle of the night. At first, I’m not sure why, but then that uncomfortable awareness of being watched, washes over me. The hairs on the back of my neck prickle, sending an icy shiver down my spine. I roll over and see something that
There we stood, all five of us, our feet held still to the ground, not too well, because we knew with any given moment our acceleration was a necessity of escape. Reece took our first steps, a large stick, shedding bark, confidently clutched in his purposeful grip. The seemingly infinite
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I got an email from Amazon about a month ago saying that I had the opportunity to be part of a trial group for Amazon Ultra. The spiel promised access to all the regular Amazon Prime stuff, Amazon video with some extras for some of the shows, making of’s, etc.
Her name was Boppi. Boppi the Clown. I met her at my first carnival. Carnivals never held much appeal to me other than their rides and excessively sweet, fattening treats. Such limitation was probably for the best. However, my parents insisted on dragging me along knowing all too well that
