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Owen was my pal. Maybe the best one, if I had to rank them. One of the good guys. He didn't have many friends. We met in high school, drawn together by a mutual love in turn based strategy games. Master of Orion, Heroes of Might and Magic. Owen was an absolute beast at those games. He had a queer talent for memorizing patterns, statistics and maps. He'd devour games like a man possessed, teasing out exploits and secrets while the rest of us were cursing and swearing at the cheating, conniving…

The doctor told me it was a figment of my imagination. A hallucination. A phantom limb. Cut off, but the ghost of a feeling remains. The doctor tutted and prescribed me a different pill. I've lost count of how many pills I've tried. There was the yellow one. And the red and white capsule. And the green one. They have succeeded in giving me incontinence, nausea and hair loss. But they haven't taken my girl away.

I guess I won’t escape the water on this spring evening. As rain pounds on me with the rhythm of an icy waterfall, the pain of the cold is warming me more than my nightgown ever could. The warmth of my breath fights through the bitter darkness of the evening only to be beaten back by the unrelenting frigidity of the wind at my face. Perhaps the warmness of the gulf would radiate just enough to find some comfort in this depressing storm.

The flames are in full force now. Glass is shattering from the heat generated from this inferno. Even the charred wood is beginning to splinter, unable to withstand the weight of the 2nd and 3rd floors above. You know, it is fires like these that made me want to become a fireman. To see raging death dance across the floors, walls and ceilings is an incredibly beautiful and mystical sight. Don’t you agree?

“Oh look baby, the price of gas is a whole dollar cheaper at that gas station! Pull in and top off.” “Awe bay, it’s packed over there. It’s gonna take twenty minutes to just to get to the pump.” “So what? The money we save right now pays for your lunch tomorrow. Don’t be so lazy!”

When I was younger I used to work as a night auditor for a very popular hotel chain in New Orleans. This particular hotel was once an old warehouse in the Central Business District. It had a long history that dated back to the Underground Railroad where tunnels built throughout the building were used to secretly lead slaves to boats on the Mississippi River. When the hotel owners started to demo the property to convert it into a hotel, they found old distillery equipment used during the…

It started about a year and a half ago. I was on the internet reading about Libya, Gaddafi and the Arab Spring when I felt a sensation on the back of the neck. At first it was just a slight itch but it progressively became more and more intense. It felt as if a little itty bitty ant was crawling up and down the back of my neck. The only way to stop it was to slap the back of my neck. Sometimes it felt like it was burrowing into my skin. Once it burrowed in, I had to itch it away or else it…

James had just moved to upstate New York and he knew no one except for a few flaky work associates. One night during a January blizzard, he heard a faint “meow” emanating from the nearby alleyway adjacent his apartment. He ventured into the snowstorm and found a half frozen, gaunt kitten in the alley next to his apartment.

He uttered a curse under his breath, as he had realized he left it at his friend's house. It was his phone, an iPhone 3G to be more specific and it was a device he used almost every hour. His friend's house was maybe three blocks away, and he had an important call he was expecting later that night. He would have to go get it, but there was one severe impediment preventing him from doing this. He had horrid achluophobia, fear of the darkness. It was about ten o' clock now, and it was almost…

In the fall of 2011, a man hung himself in a bottling factory of a popular over the counter sleep aide company just outside Chicago. The man worked as a quality control manager and had just been laid off to save the company money. In the morning, the cleaning crew found him swaying in the breeze from the air conditioning system with a note in his breast pocket that read “sleep tight.”

Bedtime is supposed to be a happy event for a tired child; for me it was terrifying. While some children might complain about being put to bed before they have finished watching a film or playing their favourite video game, when I was a child, night time was something to truly fear. Somewhere in the back of my mind it still is.

I used to be fearless. Horror movies never really scared me. Scary books had no effect. Haunted houses are meaningless. I was never a child who slept with the covers over their face, or with a night light. As a little girl, I never felt the need to crawl into bed with my mother after having a nightmare. I never really had nightmares to begin with, and the few that I did, most would never consider a nightmare at all.

Found the shit on my porch one night… Fucking ding-dong ditch or whatever. A little baggie with two blue capsules. And a stupid note with two words… “Do try” I figured it was some shitty prank from my “experimental” friends from down the street. We’ve tried nearly every reasonable drug there is, trying to get the most psychadelic trips, maintain the best highs..

Until my mid-teens I hadn’t lived in one house for more than I year. Though I’ve now been living in this house the longest, and my family thinks of it as home since we pay mortgage on it, I’ve always felt that my earlier houses were home. The “Yellow House” wasn’t one of those. I lived there before I entered school so my memory of the pale yellow house fuzzy, but almost all of my memories in that house took place upstairs in the converted attic where my siblings and I had our rooms. The house…

I’d actually seen him on our way home from school. He looked dirty and disturbed, and stared straight at us as our bus went by. We even made jokes about him, probably as our way of pretending we weren’t afraid. He was incredibly out of place in our middle class suburb, so his mere presence felt threatening… thus our panic when the three of us got off at our stop and saw him at the corner, about to look in our direction.

In Corona, California there once was a road known by most locals as the Never Ending Road. Specifically, the road’s true name was Lester Road. Now, over twenty years later, the landscape of Corona has changed, and the Never Ending Road is no more. However, years ago, Lester Road was an unlit road that people claimed became a never ending road when driven at night. The people who made such a drive were never seen from again.

During a period from 1946-1952, in a small town in western Germany, the residents heard what resembled a six-gun salute on the fifteenth of March every year. Some residents made frequent trips into the surrounding hills in hopes of finding the source of the noise, but to no avail. The townsfolk eventually coined the area as “Gunpowder Hill.” The children of the town even created a legend about it, stating that soldiers, who in that time were missing but presumed dead, had been killed in an…

It started with my friend in Japan. He was a hacker and pirate and always left his computer on, along with AIM and MSN. When he logged out on both, I assumed his computer finally died from overload. It was then I noticed all his posts on our favorite sites were gone. All his accounts, all his videos, all his comments.

Why do you do it? You don’t know why, but you do. You make sure the windows are locked, you check the other side of the door, and your closet…You even check under your bed. Why do you do this? Does ripping open the shower curtain and seeing nothing there make you feel safe? Does scoping the area with your eyes after reading a scary story reassure you? Well, it shouldn’t. Because by the time you’ve looked, I’ve already hidden.

Ever wake up in the middle of the night, or randomly check your watch in the daytime, to see the same thing following you around? For me it’s 11:17. I would say one out of every 3 times I check my watch it’s 11:17. You may have another one, like 3:33, or 12:50. If you don’t have one, count your blessings and stop reading. If you do have a time that you can’t seem to shake, follow these instructions.