What’s unnecessary is for you to be so rude. You aren’t being asked to critique a novel. This isn’t even a yelp review. I’m sorry for whatever shittiness currently exists in your own world, but spreading it around never  helps.

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.

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…

Ice Storm

When I was 14, I went camping with my Boy Scout troop in the mountains in summer time. This was in a campground with several sites you could rent, each separated by each other by some distance and trees - and with a common outhouse building at some remove. For our site, it was up a trail about a quarter-mile or so…

My ex husband owned a house when I met him. It had been abandoned when he bought it, left unlocked even, although a squatter lived in a bungalow in the backyard not the main house.

First of all- Squeeeeeeeeee! My favorite article/comments section of the year! Now, on to the story...

The time my oldest’s friends from school came to spend the night. They were a brother and sister who were both undersized for their age - like you’d think they were a good few years younger than their actual ages.

Years ago, in late fall, we moved our young family from a house in the city to my grandmother’s old home, which was rural and secluded. My grandparents had passed on, and so had my mother, but she grew up in that house. It’s a two-story farmhouse with hidden rooms, and it’s more than 150 years old. When we moved…

The Watcher

I always love staying at historic hotels, which usually come with at least one ghost story. I was psyched when my spouse’s friend had a wedding in Lewisburg, WV and booked a block of rooms for guests at the historic General Lewis Inn. Of course I googled around for ghost stories in advance - the hotel is known to have…

This story belongs to my dad, but I was present for it- albeit in my mom’s belly. My dad worked transporting buses across the country and taking odd jobs for a big part of his twenties, and by the time he married my mom, he’d experienced more strange happenings than the average person. But this story happened in his…

When I was 12, every night for close to two months someone would knock on my bedroom window. It was usually after 11 p.m. and before 2 a.m. and, at the beginning, would wake me from a dead sleep to where I thought I was dreaming. A few times I even heard the knocking in my dreams and then woke up and the knocking was…

My folks bought a large farm house built in 1924 the summer before I started 3rd grade (1984ish). My mom, brother and I had been gone all summer at her folks on the east coast, and my dad and some friends moved us in while we were gone.

When I was in fourth grade, my mom and I moved a few hours away to live with my grandma. I was an only child and painfully shy; all my friends had been my friends since forever, and I had no idea how to talk to these new kids at school.

In 2005 I spent the majority of the summer hitchhiking. I had just graduated from college and wanted to try something completely unfamiliar to me, and I insisted on making it a challenge. I lugged everything I had in two large backpacks, one carried on my back and the other on my front, filled with…

Back when I was on dating apps, I match with this guy and he’s really cute. He had a shirtless mirror selfie as his profile pic which was usually a hard pass for me, but he seemed sweet/nerdy so I talked to him. He tells me how he’s really worked on his body because he was a nerd and really awkward with women.

I am active at the local theater. Our building is just over 100 years old, and its history includes the owner’s mother living upstairs, a particularly mischievous actor pulling pranks onstage, and other stories that add up to the place being really hecking haunted.

I was maybe 10 or 11. My Dad was out of town at a conference and I was home with my Mom. She was preparing to go take a shower when suddenly we both heard this horrible hissing noise coming from the bathroom. To her credit, my Mom carefully went to investigate. When she came out, all the color had drained from her…