I had a paper route. This was in the mid 1980’s. At the time I was a typical ten year old boy living in the suburbs of Cincinnati, Ohio. We lived in a two story house near the end of a cul-de-sac. My mom and dad and me. I’d taken over the paper route from a friend at the beginning of summer, thinking of earning some…

Whew! That last sentence, man. Also, one of the scariest parts of this year’s contest for me is that I keep reading stories on here that go, “way back when, BACK IN THE 1990S” and I’m like, “What? That was yesterday!!!”

No Running (in the Hall)

When I was 10 my mom and I had to drive through the Colorado Rockies in the middle of the night. We were going home from a family reunion and on the last leg home crossing six states, she said we had enough money left for gas or to stay overnight in a hotel room, but not both. Everything on the trip had cost more than…

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.

This is a long story and will probably end up buried, but honestly I just want to tell it. This seems like a good place. It involves me making some very poor decisions - if my life had an absolute nadir (so far) it would probably be the week this happened. Please remember that as you read. It is also *slightly*…

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.

The one that stuck with me from last year was the story about the kid wearing headphones and doing his homework with his back to his open door, and then finding the words LOOK AT ME written on his door along with a captains log for the hour prior. Freaked me the f**k out.

What’s even creepier is that since my brothers and I hung around with the neighborhood kids, and there were 10 kids in the family (the murdering son being the youngest) we may have hung out with them.

I think you might be thinking of Sorcia McNasty’s The Haunted Truck, which is one of the all time greats. Go to google, plug in Jezebel, Sorcia, Haunted Truck and it should come right up. Hang on, I’ll try..

This proper upset me because I had my own old, clingy senior citizen situation this summer! We even met the same way, he fell at the end of the my drive and cut his hand really bad, and actually our postwoman (I live in a rural town, we know who delivers our mail) came to my door to ask if we could help bc she knows…

What did you do, Ray?

You forgot to include the line after the unnecessary description of the house layout “This will be very important later, trust me.”

Mine’s short and sweet. Not so much a ghost, as a visitation.

Mom was always a birdwatcher and particularly loved cardinals. She would repeat as often as she could that they mated for life. We had a series of them nest in the forsythia bush outside our porch and watched several generations of babies raised while I was…

SCARY STORY TIME!

This happened pretty recently. I found an old neighbor on the street one day with a bloody face. He had fallen over while walking his dog and couldn’t get up. I called 911 and hung around to see if he got admitted to the hospital, offering to keep his dog if so. He didn’t but I checked on him a few days later, worried…

I know many of you are here for the truly terrifying scary stories (me included!), but I’ve got a heartwarming one that I’ve been aching to share for years. Please stick with me, as I promise that there is a payoff after the setup! And with that, come along with me and travel back to a tour bus full of exhausted…

Not my story - I ‘witnessed’ it, but was a baby at the time.

Hooray! Mine’s not-so-scary, so you can read it while your underwear is in the wash: