[TW: Domestic violence]

Also likely to be hidden in the greys but here it is. (Content warning: harm to children.)

Not sure if I’m submitting too late, but I just stumbled upon this contest, and I have a story to share that has stayed with me since childhood.

This is a story about a blanket. It’s not scary — or I, at least, wasn’t scared — but it sure was bewildering. So if someone has an explanation for me, I’d love to have one after all these years.

I live in a big open loft apartment. There’s nothing creepy about it or the building that houses it and 30 other identical…

My mom and I have what she refers to as “the Sight.”

Two short stories - both told to me by the folks it happened to in NYC, and for some reason I found super creepy.

1 - My friend “Mickey” had some time to kill one afternoon so he went into a well known midtown Irish pub for a pint of Guinness (or 2 or 3). As he is leaving the bar, he notices a disheveled older guy…

My then boyfriend (now husband) and I stayed at a remodeled “poorhouse” in Oregon - McMennamins Edgefield. That night, I had a vivid dream or something where a woman was standing above me, telling me she would “see me in hell” for being an adulterer. She was wearing tattered clothing from the early 1900s. I have never…

Roommates Unwanted
I moved to New Orleans over 15 years ago for grad school and like many before me immediately fell in love with the food, culture, and people. It is a very intoxicating and romantic place. The historical homes with their antique fixtures and furniture make it to easy to imagine people from a different…

When I was 20 I moved into a house that all of us living there simply called “The Flat” and all I know is that there was something wrong with it.

“Transmissions from Beyond”

Why are all of the entries so aggressively awful this year? Are they always this bad? Half of them have nothing to do with spooky Halloween stories. My kid ran off for a minute at the store? Really? That’s your spooky Halloween story? Ffs...

Back in early 2018, my fiance & I bought a house to rehab into our home. It was a foreclosure, halfway between our respective workplaces, in rural western Pennsylvania. Nice property, nice neighborhood, but house needed a LOT of work. Think all new wiring, plumbing, gas lines, drywall — you name it. The house was…

When I was 19 and trying to make some money for college, I worked part-time as a personal assistant for an interior designer whose office was located in an old Victorian style house in the downtown district of my hometown.

I don’t know exactly how I came to submitting anything for this contest, but my daughter is a huge fan and reads every year, and I’ve developed an unfortunate habit of going down Internet rabbit holes since I retired.

This is my family’s ghost story. My great-grandfather was a sea captain out of Leith, Scotland; during WWII he was the pilot of a steamer, the Dresden, that carried cargo between Great Britain and continental Europe. This was dangerous work, as the English Channel and the North Atlantic were both patrolled by German…

I spent the first few months of this year living in a small residential treatment center for eating disorders. I’m grateful for the experience; I was suicidal at the time and going there quite literally saved my life. The treatment center was in an old Victorian house in a small mountain town. The kitchen, dining…

Every now and then I need to travel for work, and because of the nature of my work, it’s usually to places in the middle of nowhere. I fly out of the capital city I call home, at the crack of dawn, and two flights later, I’m driving out to the countryside towards my destination - a small town with a population of…

In March of 2021, I was returning home from an overnight camping trip. It was a Saturday afternoon, so still light outside. For context, I live in a two-bedroom apartment situated in the downtown area of a fairly small, rural Pennsylvania town. I live on the bottom level of the building that houses four other…

Here’s what’s unintentionally scary about your story - a few years ago, someone wrote about an apartment they were living in New Orleans (also a hot spot for voodoo practices!!!) where the same kind of statically, slow, jerky entity would move slowly across the room toward their prone body until it was leaning over…

Voodoo dreams