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Summer in Colorado Springs was exceptionally hot that year. Jim, Jack, and their younger sisters, Judy and Jill, were spending their time carelessly, playing in the front yard. One day, their parents went out shopping, leaving the siblings with strict orders not to wander off and to watch the house. As the shopping took longer than expected, the boys grew restless and decided to go for a short walk in the woods. Their sisters followed them.

I'm a lucky guy. I've been fortunate all my life, ever since my birth in the heart of Manhattan's Upper West Side, a storied locale steeped in success and privilege.  Opportunity was my birthright, as illustrated by my attendance at Phillips Exeter Academy; there, I nurtured the awareness of just how fortunate I was to swim in such an elite milieu.  Every day there felt like a testament to the luck which had graced my life.

Around me are the sounds of panic and horror. Gunshots fill the once silence air and people in white lab coats are screaming and running past my room. I know they are because I can see them through the reflective wall that shows my own reflection. How is this possible you might ask? Well, I was once the hope for humanity. This is how it began. I was thirteen and still had some sort of life stitched together if you could call it that. My father was nonexistent and my mother trying to form a…

You lay in your bed, comfortably, staring at your ceiling. Your air conditioning is whirring, allowing you to completely relax and slowly drift into sleep. Just as you start to fall asleep your air conditioner cuts off. You can hear everything. You have a relatively large room. You're starting to become uncomfortable, but instead of moving to get into a better position you lay still. Almost frozen.

A Lucid Dream is when the dreamer knows that he or she is dreaming at the moment. This powerful knowledge can make the dream seem more fun, with the dreamer being able to control everything. Meanwhile, an Out of Body Experience is when the dreamer is not dreaming, but they sometimes believe that they are currently in a dream. However, what happens when a dreamer believes that he is in a dream but realizes that he cannot control it? That my friends is called a Lucid Mystery. Story

The first thing I feel as I regain my consciousness is the cold lumpiness of soggy soil wrapped around my hands, like handcuffs made of the ground I lay on, as if the earth itself wants to imprison me. I try as hard as I can to move or open my eyes, but despite all my efforts I remain transfixed to the ground, unable to even twitch a toe.

“Gabriel! Gabriel!” I screamed. “Who is Gabriel?” the police officer in front of me asked. I was in the police station’s interrogation room. My neighbors called the cops on me, saying that I “went crazy” and that there was “an insane lunatic running down the street in a t-rex onesie, screaming ‘Gabriel!’” The cops showed up, handcuffed me for “public disturbance,” and put me in the back of the cop car. “Answer the question, Spencer!” the officer yelled at me.

His friends kept calling out, but Sara was nowhere to be found. They decided to split up. Suddenly, Tom spotted a curious exhibit: a large, double-sided rotating mirror. At first, he saw only his own reflection, but a moment later... he saw Sara. "Sara, what are you doing? You gave us a real scare. We were so worried about you. We were afraid something had happened." "I’m sorry, but this is just so... incredible," she replied. "Ah, women," Tom muttered under his breath.

Sorrow Hill is a place shrouded in mystery. Tourists from all over England and the far corners of the world flock to the castle hill, drawn by the legend of a ghost that appears at the stroke of midnight. They hear screams, wailing, and the desperate sobbing of a woman. Some claim to have seen a figure dressed in a long, black mourning gown, gliding through the castle corridors. Fans of fortresses, spirits, and dark tales stand in long queues at the ticket office, eager for a glimpse of the…

My name is Eliot, and I live in the middle of nowhere. I don’t mean that in the way that I have other people living near me. No, I don’t live in a small town. I mean it in a real, isolating way. My house is about an hour’s drive to even the nearest small town, surrounded by miles of thick and tall trees, even the grass was a bit too tall, where roads seemed to stretch forever before fading into nothing. There are no neighbors for miles.

There is a level of great genius one may reach that far surpasses that of burning madness. There is madness, and there is animo. In a frigid, foreboding cave, a hypogeum of petrified stillness, disguised carefully as a luxury property, hidden somewhere within deep glacial valleys of scenic Swiss mountains, you can find a mechanical man, with a mechanical plan.

The wind is cold. The late autumn night wind drilled through the battered glass window of the small eatery, scraping against faces with a dull, lingering ache. The diner's old incandescent bulb flickered erratically. Its light fell upon two bowls of steaming rice on the table, and also onto the bowed head of the student. No one knew that this seemingly silent high schooler, always wearing a washed-out school uniform, was already rotten to the core.

Not by much. You would not notice it walking through. You would notice it if you were sent to fetch something and had to count the doors, and the count came out wrong, and you stood there with your hand on the light switch, doing it again. Four doors on the left. Three on the right. The hallway had been built in 1962 and there had never been a fourth door on the right. My mother said this the way you say a thing you have said a hundred times. The sound came from that wall.

The note was folded into eighths, small enough to sit in a coin pocket, and it was in the shirt I had just hung up. I found it because I do a stupid thing: I check pockets twice. My mother did it. Now I do it, and the second check has never once caught anything. That night it caught a note in my own handwriting. Do not take the 7:40. Wait for the 8:05.

The widow, Laura, walked into the garden. Cracked Stone walls surrounded her, their green vines slithering toward bushes plump with blood-red berries. At the center of the garden stood a rectangular stone basin shaped like an angel. It knelt before the pool as if to deliver water from its mouth. Yet what flowed was bleak black water, filled with sticks and the smal bodies of dying insects. When she was younger, she remembered tossing coins and watching them sink into the water's darkness.…

Amitriptyline, 25 mg. Her dose. Her name on the label, spelled the way only she spelled it, with the small accent she'd added at the DMV and never let anyone drop. I hadn't refilled anything. I hadn't opened the app since the funeral. But the receipt said the order was placed five days ago, from my account, and the pickup was authorized with a short code I did not remember choosing.

“HELP!” I yell, at least I believe I’m yelling, the feeling of my skin bubbling, is it bubbling… I don’t know. I can feel it, but I don’t know if it is what I think it is. I am or at least what I believe I am… I don’t know. It’s cold wait what does cold feel like again sigh I think I sighed. My body grows old and decayed, my flesh turning a colour I cannot perceive, my hair falling out of my grotesque scalp or what’s left of it. He… no, IT did this. My senses have been stripped away from me, I…

“Be one second smarter!” whispered Kippy-Kip to the viewers, leaning in. His face filled the entire screen. After licking the camera lens and leaving it drenched in slobber, Kippy-Kip jumped backward three times, stepping away and leaving the rest of his crew to show off and do their juggling tricks.

"What are you gazing at...? What's there outside the window...?" "Outside the window...? Nothing." "Nothing? Looking at nothing?" "It's her... my... my ghostly girl." Beloved women... They, like a sudden downpour, come, turn you into themselves, and vanish… leaving you… leaving you alone with your own shadow called sorrow.

The email from Becca arrived at 3:14 AM, blinking on the screen like a dying pulse. It contained a single, corrupted video file and a trembling plea: “My little sister Kaylee went missing after she found that tape. Please... find her. Don't let them put her to sleep.”