No, we underestimated just how brazenly racist and misogynistic our country is. We all knew America was this racist and sexist, but we thought it was too embarrassed of it to actually admit it to the world and elect someone like Donald.

This isn’t my story, personally, but it’s one that has kicked around my family for so long that it definitely feels like it’s mine. It’s been told and re-told, but I do think that the central details are very solid.

This took place when I was about 10 years old. My mom had rather quickly filed for divorce, but she only had a part-time job and made very little money, so finding a place to stay that was affordable and available immediately was tough. A friend of hers told her that she and her husband had…

Okay, so this may not be the scariest story ever, and none of you will ever see it because I’m as gray as they come, but it is 100% true and you can make of it what you will.

I submitted a story last year about the road I used daily to get to my crappy job when I was young. The following story is from that job itself:

My father grew up in Florida. His mother died when he was a teenager of lung cancer and in the fullness of time his father was remarried to the woman I would know as my grandmother.

She entered the marriage with a house that had been passed down to her in the middle of an old-growth orange grove. It was a classic old…

When I was about twelve, I went snooping through a closet and found photos of a little girl that looked like me, but seemed to have been taken a good 10 years earlier. I took the box to my mom, who told me that we would talk about it later, and to go outside to play. When I brought the pictures up later, she denied I…

I have three, all having to do with the house I grew up in.

Once, when I was in high school, a bunch of girlfriends and I decided to play Ouija during a sleepover. My friends were an odd mix - social outcasts who banded together over being the weirdos. So we had the stoner punk girl, the nice and quiet religious girl, the slacker girl, the goth girl, the two twins whose mom…

We had a friend of the family named Ruth, who had been a college friend of my grandmother and very close to our family. She wasn’t married and didn’t have kids, but she was an infinitely sweet and generous woman who was a very dear auntie to all of us. Ruth also had an amazing house: a sprawling stone house with Tudor…

My husband and I bought our house about four years ago. We knew at the time that the former owner died in the house, but it didn’t really bother us, as we’re not the type to believe in spiritual things.

We moved into our dream house in the country about a year ago, and shortly thereafter discovered that the curiously bent tree near the driveway is a Ute prayer tree, most likely pointing the way toward the grave of a warrior or other important tribe member. Being history buffs, we were pretty thrilled by this…

OMGGGGG I have literally been waiting all year for this. Excuse any typos, as this was typed at my desk in a moment of extreme excitement!

Back story: My mom is English and didn’t move to America until she and my dad married when they were 21. When she was 16 and still living in England, there was one particular night that scared the mess out of her. My grandmother (mom’s mom) had been at a friend’s house that night and played with a Ouija board. My…