Welcome to

Tom was used to being the center of attention. He was always making a joke, always chugging some beer, always playing a round of flip cup or beer pong. He prided himself on being the life of a party. He was the first to arrive and the last to leave, often overstaying his welcome as the party dwindled to no one but the tired hosts. He didn’t notice, or maybe he didn’t care. He just didn’t want to go home.

A journal from the first seventy days of the dead. DAY 30 I have been trying to decide whether I should start dating these entries. Not the month. The actual date. I know what day it is, obviously. The calendar is still hanging beside the refrigerator, and I have been crossing the days off with a blue pen. Today is the fourteenth. Or at least it was when I last checked the news.

Every Easter, we get ready for Big-Eared John's arrival. No one really knows how long we've been giving to Big-Eared John. Only know it’s longer than anyone in the town or even their ancestors can remember. Once in church a few years back, I saw slack-jawed Sally ask preacher man when Big-Eared John first came to our town, and he backhanded her right there in front of the whole congregation. That’s when we knew never to question how he came to be. Only that he was, and we were to do as we were…

I took the job at the local high school a few years ago. Pay is terrible, but the benefits can't be beat, and I need the good insurance for my ma since she can’t work anymore on account of her diabetes, so I can’t mess this one up. The job was supposed to be easy, just work on stocking supplies and help serve the kids their lunch. I hardly mess with any of the cooking. That's for the advanced employees.

Influencer cannibalism, demonic faucets, and the tragic rise of a bathroom-based megachurch.

A terror-comedy in three parts. You'll laugh. You'll scream. You'll question why God gave you a frontal lobe. Prologue Let me start by saying this: if you ever see a glowing outhouse in the middle of the woods, whispering in Latin, don't open the door. I opened the door. And now something made of meat and manners keeps trying to crawl into my mouth.

I've always hated my job for one simple, yet insurmountable reason: nothing ever happens. Imagine spending nine hours. NINE freaking hours. Locked inside a concrete bunker, listening to the universe breathe into your head through an oversized pair of headphones. The higher-ups like to pretend this is some kind of essential service. That my job is somehow paramount to the advancement of the human race. It isn't.

Twice a day I change June’s bandage, and twice a day she lets me.

The dark portal had not been active for more than a few seconds before Emrys materialized inside the watchtower room of his Shadowed Spire. He had little cause to believe that it would be anyone other than his daughter Petra returning from her mission, but he was nevertheless unwilling to risk an incursion into his sanctum. Whenever he sensed someone creating a portal into his home, he made sure he was there to greet them.

My name is Kyle Mercer. I'm sixteen and I live in Riverton, a mid-sized town of about forty thousand people. I'm going to tell you what happened last year. I won't dress it up. I'll just tell it.

Tap tap tap. James peels his gritty eyelids back and stares up at the blank ceiling. He considers putting something up there. A poster maybe, like he had as a child. It would make sense, given how much time he spends staring at the ceiling above his bed. Sleepless nights, bed rotting, and the three AM wake up call from some animal tapping its way through the walls.

Her head felt hazy. Something was wrong—she could feel it, the way you feel a storm before it breaks. Something bad was coming. She tried to open her eyes. Her body felt heavy, weighted down, as if invisible hands were pressing her into the floor. And somewhere close, someone was crying. Her eyelids fluttered open. A girl was lying on top of her, weeping into her chest. Panic surged through Jasmine—she shoved the girl away before her mind could catch up with her body.

I was in the schoolyard when, suddenly, my friend Christopher Satin or as i call him, Chris, told me: "Damian, I have something to tell you. I’ve known you since we were little, so I wanted you to be the first person I told." Chris was always one for jokes; his personality matched his appearance—a skinny, 5'7 guy with curly, shoulder-length blonde hair. Seeing him look so serious worried me; he’s usually terrible at acting serious, so I had a feeling he was probably not faking it.

I always liked the stories my dad would tell me, the time he met the devil, times he almost died. But one story stood out to me. In 1977 he moved in to the house we still live in, they lived peacfully for 3 years until one day on 10/20/1980 at 3:33AM my dad and his brother mele were outside in the backyard fixing the bike they had gotten from the dumpster. Until my dad saw somthing tall pale with long arms and legs, human hair, toothless, wide mouth staring into their souls behind the fence…

The year was 3042, and in the coastal town of Aethelburg, the morning of the Ceremony of Bonds dawned cold and golden. Mike Ashgrove had barely slept. He'd lain awake in his narrow bed, staring at the ceiling of his family's modest clifftop home, listening to the distant crash of waves against the harbor wall. Today was the day. The day every fifteen-year-old in Aethelburg had dreamed about since they were old enough to understand words. Today, he would receive his Circlet.

The first time I heard it, I thought it was the wind. A low, mournful hum threading through the gaps in the old farmhouse windows. My wife, Sarah, was already asleep, her breathing a soft, steady rhythm beside me. We’d moved in a week ago, seeking silence from the city. The house was a steal, a crumbling Victorian relic with good bones and a bad reputation that we’d laughed off.

An account written before the silence ends If you’re reading this, there’s a good chance I’m already dead. I’m not sick, and nobody has given me some terrible diagnosis or told me I have three days left to live. Something is coming for me, and it’s outside the room right now.

Since so many of you have been trading your own run-ins with the creepy and unexplained, I figured it was time to throw my story into the mix.

I used to think the worst part of my job was the blood. The stink of it, thick and metallic, clinging to my clothes, clogging my nostrils. It soaks into everything, wood, concrete, carpet, skin. You scrub it off, bleach the scene, pretend nothing ever happened. But doesn’t lie. It leaves stains, no matter how hard you try to erase them. It tells a story, even when no one don't want to listen. Yet, it's not the worst part, the worst it 's the silence.

Every neighbourhood has a place children are warned never to cross. A tunnel, a fence, a creek, sometimes just a street or an abandoned house. A line drawn in fear, and if you dare step past it, something bad will take you. In my town, the forbidden zone was a decommissioned storm drain at the edge of town.