The house appeared in her search results on a Tuesday morning, nestled between listings that were either too small or too far from town, and Abby had stopped scrolling. She looked at the pictures for a long time. A craftsman-style two-story in Ridgefield, Washington. Good bones, the listing said, and […]
A Door To The Basement Read More »
The bus reeked of fast food wrappers and recycled air. Benjamin had been sitting in the same position for so long that his lower back had developed a dull, grinding ache he was certain would never fully go away. He shifted in his seat, pressed his forehead to the cold
A Restaurant On The Cliff Read More »
The apartment was quiet at 5:47 in the morning. The kind of quiet that sits in a room like a held breath, broken only by the quiet drone of the refrigerator and the distant moan of traffic on the street below. Clarissa moved through it the way she always did,
A Mirror In The Bathroom Read More »
I don’t know what I saw in that damn chapel. I don’t even know if it was real or not. I sure as hell hope not. So, I came here to tell my story. Maybe someone could help me. Maybe just telling it will make me feel better – help
They come in the snow. Always in the snow. Always when the snow is deep and the woods are quiet. So very quiet. At first, it was just one or two who came. Silently moving up the pasture toward the house. They didn’t come too close back then. I thought
Ever since I was a child, I’ve dreamed of flying. Soaring high above the world, a thousand feet from any other person, with no limits or obstacles in my way, seemed like the ultimate form of freedom. When my parents would send me out to play with friends, I preferred
By the time Jean-Luc finally arrives, the only things awake are the moon and me. It sits in the sky a perfect, silver half-slice, dewy in the way all things get around dawn. It’s cold out. My breath fogs around my cigarette, and I hear the bus before I see
I learned very early that people are softer than they pretend. Not emotionally—physically. Socially. A human being is a structure held together by habits and assumptions, and habits collapse under pressure. Mine just happened to be… efficient. Skin-to-skin contact. That’s all it ever took. A handshake held a second too
My family was always a little bit strange. We owned a failing antique shop in my town for as long as I could remember. My father was quite eccentric and collected various knick-knacks and assorted artifacts. I saw them mostly as junk and still had no idea how we were
The Cry of The Fox Read More »
I grabbed Olivia’s shirt collar as she scream-laughed — that awful sound that always made my spine twist. I hated when she did that. In all fairness, I thought she was actually screaming. Earlier, when I’d been in the shower, it came through the phone like a murder scene —
My grandmother died at 3:33 AM on a Tuesday, and her TV wouldn’t turn off. Not wouldn’t—couldn’t. We unplugged it. We cut the power to her room. We even took a hammer to the screen, but it kept playing, the jagged cracks creating a kaleidoscope of images that shouldn’t exist.
I used to love horror films. It started when I was eight, sneaking out after bedtime to watch Halloween with my older brother Simon. Cross-legged in front of our boxy old TV, Carpenter’s eerie piano theme tapping out across the room, I was hooked. I didn’t sleep for a week,
He noticed it first in the way people looked at him. Not with fear or suspicion, but with something more primal. Animals were the first to sense it—dogs that used to bark playfully at him now whimpered and hid behind their owners. Birds stopped singing when he passed. Even the
The envelope was thick, cream-colored, and addressed to me in elegant, unfamiliar script. It arrived on a day like any other – a Tuesday, rain slicking the windows of our tiny apartment, the air inside smelling faintly of stale cooking and damp laundry. Lily was colouring at the chipped Formica
Her Horrific Inheritance Read More »
The town of Ashford was like any other—quiet, unassuming, the kind of place where nothing extraordinary ever happened. It was nestled between rolling hills and thick forests, the kind of town where everyone knew everyone, and secrets rarely stayed buried. But there was one place that no one spoke of
The House That Calls Read More »
Mike and his mother Sarah lived in a sharply white two-story house about eight miles from the city and half a mile away from a red diner which worked throughout the week and the weekend. The house was adjacent to naught else but the road and the forest. Mike was
The Man in the Attic Read More »
I think, looking back on it all, I had a very gothic upbringing. By age ten, I had attended two family funerals and no weddings, I felt that I ‘identified’ with the colour black, and I found graveyards to be an excellent place to relax. They remain one of the
When you’re asked to rate a person, irrespective of how crass that request is, you expect to be rating an individual who, though they can be offended or hurt by your assessment, will move on from the exchange relatively unscathed. Especially when you’re still in college, you never expect any
I remember well when I came across the strange sequence of events in the odd case of the cellar underneath the Winemaker’s shop. The things I saw that night, I fear I will never forget, nor come to peace with. However, with the strength of my faith and my understanding
The Copper, the Collar, and the Glimmering Blade Read More »
Time is almost up for Simon; he lies in his hospital bed waiting with each passing moment the same as the last. He shares a room with other elderly people, waiting for their number to be called. He is dying. The dull room has no form of entertainment, the TV
Tommy was lying in bed when he heard heheard a gunshot ring out in his Nebraskan home.. Gunshots were not an unusual sound for Tommy. His pa was a esteemed gun collector and living on the farm his pa had often fired the gun as pesky predators that have tried
Night One Hello, I am Sally, or Sal for short. I have a story for you that happened about a year ago. I need to tell someone because it is a tale that has been gnawing away at my mind. It is a story that still haunts my nightmares today
While others can find forests unsettling in the dark, I’ve always found that there is something uniquely tranquil about walking through a forest at night. There would be no one but me and the sound of the wind through the trees, the rustling of small animals through the leaf litter
Don’t Look, Don’t Listen Read More »
The sound of the doorbell echoed through my empty house like a banshee’s wail. It was Halloween night, and I was alone. Not by choice, but because it was my ex’s turn to take our kids, Lily and Ben, trick-or-treating. The custody agreement was part of the divorce proceedings. Though
The Unanswered Doorbell: A Halloween Nightmare Read More »
