She looks out the window and wants so badly to see a picture-perfect town in New England. Like in her paperbacks. When the leaves on the trees are golden and red and it’s the week before Halloween. She imagines she’s a heroine in one of the stories; they’re all the same: a young woman on […]
Granny always says not to drink from the well, she reckons it’s got the taint about it. She shakes her head disapprovingly whenever we’re close. “Never should’ve placed dead bodies so close to the Lord’s water,” she says, making her tut-tut sound, and the sign of the cross. Great Uncle Raymond is the nearest dead […]
Can ghosts bleed? Keith woke up and knew the house was empty. He slipped out of bed and stood up on shaky legs. The floor was cold under his feet. He blinked the sleep out of his eyes and shuffled into the en-suite bathroom to pee. On his way there, he heard a burst of […]
Sooner or later it might have occurred to students to resurrect the Ghosts & Ghoulies club on their own, but it was a major donor to the university who made it happen. Harry got involved not because he believed in paranormal phenomena, but because it was the ostentatiously-named Carrington Quickenden whom the university chose to […]
Every so often, there’s a chance for reversal. For a thread pulled to drag things backwards. For the drowned places to rise. For the dead to walk again. To breathe air rather than water. Sometimes, there’s a chance. Adie Kane came home last week—just as she has done once a year for a decade of […]
In time, the dedicated Spelunker will grow to instinctively recognize unreal architecture, senses picking up the minutiae that others miss. Wind coming from impossible directions; shadows cast at awkward angles; a dearth of wildlife; a strange doppler effect to sound, as though distance between source and listener stretched like taffy. Details and nothing more, but […]
There were stories about Wicker Bridge Estate, always had been even before there was an estate. So many stories and for so long that it was hard to tell if what you were being told was new or old. Something that smacked of urban legend might well have its roots in ancient tales of demons […]
Five children have gone missing since the school year began. The youngest, only six; the oldest, no more than ten. They all went to school together, but all in different grades. The only thing they have in common is that they all rode the school bus together every day. Richard McGinty reported the first child […]
The body in the bathtub is starting to smell. I have been staring at it for hours, trying to forget that not too long ago the body had been he and not it, but that does not seem to be working. When he died I dragged it into the bathtub, leaving a trail of blood […]
When Jentri was ten her father, having run out of things to say, told her about the name he’d once found written in pencil on the wall above the basement sink, and about how he’d often wondered if it was still there. “Maybe you should look,” she said, and he did, and she followed him. […]
