The rain beat a steady rhythm on the asphalt. In the dark sky above, the rumble of distant thunder rolled slowly toward us. “Daniel.” The sound of my name pulled me from my reverie. I turned my head away from the drenched playground and toward Miss Wasson. “Are you with […]
In the heart of a second-growth piney-woods jungle of southern Alabama, a region sparsely settled by backwoods blacks and Cajuns—that queer, half-wild people descended from Acadian exiles of the middle eighteenth century—stands a strange, enormous ruin.
Bill Tanner, a retired USPS mail carrier, ran a local haunted house that had become quite well known in the city where he lived. Established as a terrifying and fun way to unleash people’s greatest fears upon them, it was aptly named “Tanner’s House of Horrors.” People came from miles
Laughing in the Dark Read More »
After a short time of exploring the Oklahoma territory where they were forced to go, a group of Native Americans stumbled upon a mysterious plant while hunting. This plant looked like a gnarled tree root, with so many twists and turns within its seemingly fragile length that one could barely
The Roots of Wewoka Cemetery Read More »
“Halloa! Below there!” When he heard a voice thus calling to him, he was standing at the door of his box, with a flag in his hand, furled round its short pole. One would have thought, considering the nature of the ground, that he could not have doubted from what
They gave me a million bucks to keep my trap shut, and I did, for fifteen years. But last night I was making the rounds, and I saw the professor again. I had a heart attack three years back, and I tell you, when I saw him standing there in
The Harvard Wormhole Experiment Read More »
Part 1 I was nineteen years old in the late summer of 1997 when my maternal grandfather suddenly became ill and passed away. He was seventy-two years old. In the span of only five short but grueling weeks, he was diagnosed with a particularly aggressive form of pancreatic cancer, went
In central Vermont you have to drive to get just about anywhere. In high school, once I had my own car, I built up a mental map of roads good and bad, this giant web linking my house, my school, my friends’ houses, my mom’s work, my dad’s house, my
The Strigil Institute Read More »
I’m writing this down to A) help me process what happened and B) create some sort of written record. I’m a Disneyland employee—have been for 5 years. I started running a concession stand, moved to ride operator, then into resort operations. All the while, I was a pursuing a degree
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My name is Oliver Stricc. I’m a 52-year-old biology teacher from a small town in northeastern Nebraska, and I have been for almost 14 years. I’ll be the first to admit that lecturing to a bunch of uninterested high school students wasn’t what I had planned to do after getting
My Students Are Disappearing Read More »
Part 1 My father spent 14 years locked behind the thick steel doors of the Barry Telford State Penitentiary located right outside Texarkana, Texas. Recently I took an interest in the darker events that have happened to various family members and sat down to ask him if he had any
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I moved into my apartment complex two months ago. I started hearing things a week later. It was subtle at first. Sometimes, in the middle of the night, I would wake up to a faint scratching sound from somewhere behind the walls. I thought it could be mice. Or rats.
The Empty Apartment Read More »
This story is part of the author’s Heavensville series of interrelated stories. If you enjoy it, the author invites you to click here to read the other tales in the series. Heavensville was stunning to look at, with tall and lush trees lining the sidewalks, beautiful forests and lakes surrounding almost
My neighbors are disappearing.. I’m not sure when this all started, but it seems that everyone in this town already knows. I moved here just over a year ago, it’s lush with green in every direction, townsfolk greet each other on the streets, and children play on every block and
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PART ONE At the edge of our town, there’s a shitty gas station that’s open twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. If you were to go inside, you’d see row after row of off-brand chips, cookies, potted meats and ramen. Expiration dates suspiciously missing from canned goods like
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John sat with his grandmother on the balcony terrace overlooking West Bay Road and the lower Hampshire valley. The lush green fields from springtime were now singed-brown; the lack of rainwater that summer was turning the place into the Mojave Desert. A screaming hawk flew overhead, much like John it
I’ve always been a creature of the city. The cold, hard streets. The tall, luminous sky-scrapers. And the people. All self-absorbed in their own little stories to be concerned with person next to them on the subway, or the person they just rammed into trying to get where they needed
Jack Mckay huddled in the cold midnight street with a pale green sleeping bag encasing his lower half. Spindled trails of light reflected off the gleaming roads from damp lampposts. But the cold wasn’t what gave Jack his nightly jitters—not by a long shot. The small flame bewitched his green
The Molendinar Burn Read More »
“Better Run Through the Jungle” My name is Michael Hasford. I am seventy-two years old and I have terminal bowel cancer. I haven’t told anyone this story in nearly fifty years, the last time being before I was made to sign the State Secrets Act and bound to silence by
The Only Vietnam Story I’ve Never Told Read More »
Hershel King had been driving a big rig since the age of eighteen and that was nearly thirty years ago. He liked to tell people that he didn’t know how to do anything else but anyone that knew him worth a damn saw right through that. The truth was he
I’ve never really considered myself to be much of an explorer or even a particularly brave man, however that hasn’t seemed to stop me from getting in the predicament I’m in now. It was around 3 months ago that my girlfriend of 4 years left me for another man, and
There’s Something in the Fields Behind My Apartment Read More »
Chapter 1 It was a cold and lonely night as I drove mile after mile on barren roads that seemed to drag on forever and lead to nowhere. I had been driving for hours since i left home and ran away with my dad’s car. I don’t know what i
“Why don’t you go ahead and tell me what happened..” God I hate that woman’s voice. I never really got along with my therapists, they always seemed so… apathetic. Its like they don’t care about the patient, rather just eating up time with their bullshit “grounding techniques” in order to
The Basement of Saint Andrews Read More »
It was 2:05 AM when I did it. Everything around was completely quiet, not a single person in sight. I grabbed the folding ladder out from my garage and neatly placed it right under the light post in front of my house. I quickly ran back inside and came back
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