Little T & Mr. Conductor

I wake up to the sound of the toddler babbling in his bed in the next room over. My phone informs me it’s 7:15 AM. Saturday. A sliver of sunlight creeps around the window curtain’s edge. A slight turn of my head to see my husband snoring softly in the warm space next to me. A little flutter in my heart, love,…

Absolutely no part of this story is exaggerated, and I still don’t know what to make of it. Until I was five, I was raised in a teeny tiny town. My small neighborhood was more like a compound, where all of the people who worked in the clinic next door lived. There was a big garden in the middle of the neighborhood…

I knew the stories. Voices in the master bedroom. The girl in the Victorian frock bouncing her ball in the front parlor. The mysterious fire in the attic. Most of my family had seen or heard something unearthly in the house.

When I came home for the summer after my freshman year of college, I got a summer job organizing the new home of an elderly woman who was a friend of the family. She was very wealthy, and had downsized from a large house to an...honestly still pretty big house, but there was an enormous basement full of old gowns,…

The Red House

I wrote this up last year, intending to share it on here, and then I never did for some reason. A year later and I’ve decided it’s time.

At the end of this summer, I had quite a decent Facebook Marketplace addiction, and I was sporadically zipping out to drop off or pick up random items.

Not exactly scary and will probably get stuck in the greys (can I please be ungreyed?) but here goes:

Not paranormal or supernatural at all, and in the end more funny than scary, but it was extremely scary at the moment it happened...

Growing up my family moved a lot. All within the same town. My parents had their own business building custom homes and for our family they would build a nice house and we would live in it until it sold. By the time I was 18 I had moved 30 times, mostly in the same town. Just from house to house. I mention this because…

I posted this story last year, but I was sort of late in my submission and it ended up buried about 5,000 comments down. Now, two days into the contest and there’s already 365 comments! Well, here’s hoping it gets seen this year.

I grew up in a small historic town in New Jersey and have a couple ghost stories, but this is the one I’m going to share: In high school and college I worked at a restaurant that was originally an old inn from the 1700s. One Sunday afternoon, I picked up the phone at the hostess station and had a chilling conversation…

Santa Rosa Screaming

“The Dancing Doll”

I’m an actor in a local community theatre. All of our members must take part in some form of service for the theatre so for two years, I was the treasurer. It was my job to make sure all the bills were paid and to process income. My theatre is a lively place with people around much of the time which is wonderful, but s…

This story is absolutely true. When I was a teenager in the late 70s, my parents had a back-to-the–land phase and bought an old farmhouse in the country. Although our main residence was still in the city, we would spend weekends and summer vacations at the farm, growing vegetables, renovating the old house, and…

“Her Name is Meg”

This is — I hope — a story about a dream.

For years after this, I had insomnia. I would go days without being able to sleep because I was never able to feel safe in bed.
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I would sometimes sleep with my eyes open when I was a child and well into my teens. It’s a real phenomena, and it’s mostly irritating because I had dry eyes almost always. It…