Most read stories

It was the normal routine for me- wake up, get ready, work for hours, go home, eat, and sleep. By 'normal routine,' I mean 'painfully repetitive routine.'

April 23, 2000

Ever since she was a little girl, 14-year-old Nicole had a fascination of exploring unfamiliar places. For this expedition, she wanted to explore a patch of forest she recently discovered near her house. She brought along a flashlight in case there were any dark places worthy of investigation. The forest was about two blocks down her street. A small dirt path winded through it, and there was still plenty of daylight to see everything. Nicole was giddy with anticipation of what lay ahead.

The dirt path that winds down the valley outside his cabin would make him question the need to go to school. In fact; going into town seemed pointless. It was good exercise, and it was a beautiful view, but there was simply nothing to be accomplished with going to school. Still, his father made him carry out the deed, along with many other chores, such as prepping the wood and lamp oil, melting the ink, and tending to the garden. His father lived old fashioned, and the son preferred it that way.

One of the first memories I could recall was my father leaving the family. He didn’t speak a word to us, just walked toward the groves. I never saw him after that day. The part that disturbed me most was how everyone else took this. They all just stood there, watching on with knowing eyes. As if they knew that this day would come eventually.

My whole life is stuck in a routine others seem to benefit from, whereas I only suffer. Day after day, it's the same thing; Smile. Don't complain. Don't burden other people. Be quiet. Smile. Repeat. No one suspected a thing - My lie must have been pretty deceiving. But I could only hope that one day - hopefully one day soon - someone would figure it out, and save me. That day came close, so close that I could taste it, could feel it within my reach, but I messed up. I messed up, and forgot…

I was never a big fan of school. I didn’t like most of my classes in high school, barely had any real friends, and absolutely despised waking up at 5:00 a.m. Myself and my neighbor, Kelly, would get in my car around 5:45 and head to school. Before you ask, Kelly and I had a short fling when she had first moved in next door, but we just weren’t a match. Anyway, living in the backwoods in Geauga County, Ohio, we took the back roads. There isn’t much outside of main roads out here, but there were…

Have you ever gotten a glimpse of something out of the corner of your eye? A simple movement caught in your peripheral vision. Most will simply dismiss this as a shadow brought about by a flickering candle, or perhaps a pet jumping down from a piece of furniture. Ninety-nine out of a hundred times, these people are right.

Based on personal hallucinations.

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.

Kevin awoke and there was no music from his alarm clock radio, only dead air. Lucky for him, the blaring of a car alarm from the street below was loud enough to wake him. He lurched out of bed aware he was running late and hurried into the bathroom. He turned on the shower and was about to step in, when he heard the noise of a cart being pushed across the floor of his apartment floor. With the shower still running and some water dripping onto the bathroom floor, he slowly creaked out of the…

I stirred from deep within my sleep, unsure of what had woken me, but too tired to put any further thought into it. The mist of an unfinished dream swam around my head, distorted and fading with every second.

Hello. My name is Alex. To describe my life first and foremost, it sucks. Today on my terrible job as a demolition inspector, I get to go out and examine this old apartment complex (Birchwood) that has been abandoned for a year or two. You can imagine how fun that is. I wake up around noon in an apartment of my own. I start off my day waking up to this annoying old alarm clock. BEEP BEEP BEEP. I then go the door of my small bedroom. My room has a computer desk in the corner, and the walls are…

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.

When I was a kid, I was a huge sucker for Barbie dolls. Really. I didn't care for them like other girls did; giving them baths and cleaning them up and going to sleep with them, but I did like playing with them. I was usually playing around with the outfits, having them talk to each other, stuff like that.

It has been six weeks since my first sighting of the wicked old hag. I woke up in the middle of the night and went to roll over, but my entire body was paralysed. I lay there, scared and helpless, contemplating my predicament when I became aware of a presence in the room with me…a presence that I can only describe as pure evil.

“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!”

I looked in the empty room for a sign that I wasn't alone. I didn't want to feel alone. Companionship has been lacking in my life for so long and I don't even know what it means to love someone anymore. I am a metal barred door trying to close but inevitably there is the door-stopper, never allowing me to get past.

Often when my wife and I go to bed at night our dog ends up sharing the bed with us as well. He is a black dog that weighs about 100 pounds so you can imagine that he takes up a good portion of the bed at night when he decides that he wants to sleep with us. Since we have black sheets he tends to blend in with the bed making it hard to tell if he sneaks up there before us.

My basement has never exactly been a welcoming place. It’s unfurnished; there’s no carpet and the walls consist of boring, exposed bricks. There’s a set of old wooden stairs on one end that creaks whenever anyone uses them. Behind the stairs is a storage area that begins about four or five feet off the ground and goes maybe fifteen feet further back underneath the garage. The place is a dump, as my brother NEVER cleans it, and toys and tools and random things are sprawled out across the entire…