When my dad was a teenager in the late 1950s, he used to work as a dishwasher at a Mexican restaurant that was near the local cemetery. To get to work, he could either walk the long way around the cemetery, which was twice as far, or cut straight through it. More often than not, he’d opt to go through the cemetery.

A little help from the other side:

In the August of 2012 my dad killed himself. Earlier in the year he’d had open heart surgery and was never quite the same after. Then he broke his jaw and a business partner screwed him over in a major way. He’d struggled with mental health issues for years but all those things combined broke his spirit. In July it…

And here’s another tale from my mom’s time in the lab:

This happened just last Thursday, actually, and I’m still shaken up.

I grew up in a small town in central Illinois surrounded by miles of corn fields in every direction, broken only by the interstate to the east. Class sizes hovered around 80, and it wasn’t unusual to invite half the class to parties. This was especially true for kids who lived on the outskirts of town or out in the…

“Tales from an ER Laboratory”

I told this story here years ago, but I was reminiscing with my son the other night and was reminded of what happened when we lived in our former house.

So I’m a dude, and a couple years back I went on a Tinder date with a woman who had just joined the app. She seemed normal at first, but after talking for an hour or two in person she started to give off that vibe that some isolated homeschooled kids have (not that it’s a bad thing), but basically like they haven’t…

When I was fourteen, I had a super creepy dream. In the dream, I was walking down the upstairs hallway of my house heading towards my bedroom. It was dark. In my mind I just kept having this sense of dread and death. As I entered my room, I saw uncovered feet at the end of my bed, which I thought was odd because I…

Here’s a short one that I heard from a teacher when I was a kid in grade school:

Her and her husband were looking for a new home - they wanted to live out in the country and found this beautiful farmhouse. It was perfect, and it seemed like they had been there before. As they were touring the basement, something…

When I was a 10 year old girl, I was walking to the bay by myself. It was a normal thing to do at the time (small-town 1990s). One day, a brown van followed me down this long, lonely road. It had tinted windows so I couldn’t see inside, and it kept pulling into the shoulder, then creeping up behind me. Thankfully…

Back in 2015 while in grad school I moved into an apartment with a friend of a friend named Rachel. Being that this is San Diego and not many apartment buildings are *that* old, this one was built in the 20s, and was propped up over a deep canyon. My room was located in the back of the apartment, on the canyon side,…

I’ve got a story about how apartment hunting can so quickly turn into apartment HAUNTING. Muahahahaha. Seriously though, this was terrifying. It happened about ten years ago and I’m still feeling a little shaky just thinking about it.

It was probably a mistake to put my manic pixie dream girl friend in charge of…

I used to love Halloween and trick or treating, until the year I was eight years old. Up until then, I would go out on Halloween with my brother and sisters. There was a huge group of us, and we went trick or treating for hours, and came back after dark. It was a lot fun, because it was a large group, and I was…

It was winter of 2006 and I had just moved to San Francisco from the Pacific Northwest to attend college. It was my first time living away from my family, so I shared a one-bedroom apartment with my high school best friend. We were living off campus in an apartment building in Nob Hill. My first semester of college…

By 2015 my boyfriend and I had started spending most weekends together. At the time he was renting an older, kinda rundown house with a huge yard in a suburb outside of Victoria, BC. The area had traditionally be a farming community but was quickly being developed into a busy suburb. One Friday my boyfriend, I’ll call…

This story takes place in a small town, in a small South American country, in the mid-seventies. My parents are a young married couple, with two young daughters, living next door to my dad’s sister, Esther, who is also married and has two small children of her own. After being home with her boys for while, my aunt…

Apparently I’m sharing more? OK.

So I spent a lot of time growing up in my grandma’s haunted house where she still lives. When she first moved in (iirc) all the walls were dark brown or black and there were pictures of people in coffins hanging up. My grandma had no time for that nonsense so she just threw all the…

One of my best friends growing up lived in a house that was deeply haunted. When I would stay over, sometimes we would sleep in her bedroom, and sometimes, we would sleep in the living room. I always preferred sleeping in her bedroom, because when sleeping in the living room, there would always be something that…