Most read stories

“Pretty Penny: The American Slit-Mouth Woman” Ohio can be a frightening place, with scary legends jumping out from around nearly every dark rural corner. Some though remain extremely obscure, and deserve perhaps a second look. In a true case of east meets west I give you Pretty Penny, America’s own Slit Mouth Woman.

One There were originally nine of us scheduled for the spelunking expedition, but Murphy’s Law dictated that two of the group had to pull out due to various issues. It was a disappointment having fewer members to share in the experience, but then again, there were benefits – less logistical problems, more space and so on. I, personally, wasn’t that affected by it; while most of us were close friends, I hadn’t known those two well.

It was a few weeks ago that the hay bales started creeping slowly away from the house. Every morning when I woke up, each had moved a few hundred feet from where it was before. I assumed it was pranksters with nothing better to do, and I so I ignored it. Within a few days, though, the bales began to approach the boundaries of the farm. I was tired of the whole game by then, and decided to move them back. It took a tedious hour to bring them all from where they were to over near the house again,…

My name is Harold Granderson, and I've been the director of the Cleveland Opera for 39 years. I'm sure that doesn't sound like much, what with the picture of Cleveland as a post-industrial wasteland deprived of fine culture, but I can assure you we don't harbor talentless hacks. I make sure of that. Admittedly, it's difficult to attract equally discerning ears. We live in the shadow of the Rock-and-Roll Hall of Fame, where the off-key caterwauling of drunken pseudo-poets is worshiped. Even the…

The following are the final excerpts from the journal of Dr. Arnold Richards, who, at sixty-seven years old and in perfect health, was found dead in his bedroom, lying in a pool of his own blood, a single sleeping pill in his hand. The incidents surrounding the events reported in his diary were investigated thoroughly, but the case was never solved.

Truth and trust are like a disappearing faith within some people now a day. People’s minds are clouded with darkness. Needing a lie to cover up their mistakes. With all this technology, people can have all different ways of hindering the truth from coming out. Think of it as this…. The mind covers the truth, as the shadows cover the light. The darkness in people’s minds is an unknowing truth, a truth that has no trust. Trust is like this; A lie that has become the truth…. It’s a losing battle.

The Journal of Harry Rellic The following; a series of the most recent excerpts from a private journal of ‘Harry Rellic’, a 22 year old found dead in his apartment this evening. Apparent death by overdose on cyanide. … I wake up at ten in the morning to my phone ringing. I pick up, expecting Hannah to be on the other end, but instead I hear her sister, Mary. She is in hysterics. I ask her what the problem is, trying to calm her down; she tells me Hannah is dead.

A few weeks, my wife and I took a vacation to Florida. We decided to drive, due to the price of airplane tickets around holiday season. On our way south, we passed through Tennessee as well as a large portion of Georgia. Unfortunately, there was a large accident that occurred on the turnpike, so we decided to take a short detour and then get back onto the turnpike after we passed all the traffic.

The summer of 1986 was for the most part pretty typical. I was ten years old at the time, so we were doing the things ten year old boys love to do like swimming, riding around on our bikes and playing little league games. The area I grew up in was very rural; populated mostly by farmers and their kids. The nearest town was Deweese with a population of under 100 and while it didn’t offer much for kids to do, we usually didn’t have a hard time making our own fun.

The black light in my hand told me things I should have never known, word by word over a month’s grim fascination.

Everyone has heard it. The voice in your mind that comes from nowhere, bringing absurd thoughts that you have to shake off. The voice urges us to pull into traffic, jump from deadly heights, and reminds us just how easy it would be to take someone's life. This phenomenon has been labeled as Intrusive Thoughts - Unwelcome involuntary thoughts, images, or unpleasant ideas that are upsetting or distressing, and can be difficult to manage or eliminate.

One month ago, on a rain-slicked street My mother and I got a bite to eat But on the way back, I slipped and fell And I suppose the car coming didn’t see me well Because the next thing I knew, as I lifted my head I was staring at the sheets of a hospital bed! I could not move my legs, nor my right arm My left was okay (it escaped from harm) My mother came in, with a frown, and then Said “honey, I’m afraid you’ll never walk again.” A feeling came over me, not sadness or hate

In the summer of 1996, the town of Newport Bay was struck by an odd and gristly phenomenon. Earlier that year, the employees of a small animal shelter had been found mauled and eaten, by what appeared to be a rather large animal. The location and severity of the wounds added to the already powerful feelings of dread, fear and paranoia the residents were experiencing. Being eaten alive is often thought to be one of the worst ways to go, and while everyone has their own opinions on the worst ways…

Nobody who ever met Ludovic Caesar could honestly say that he didn’t strike them as a reasonable and polite young man. He was strangely intelligent for his twenty three years, and there was something about the way he spoke that drew people to him. He pondered his choice of words carefully before speaking them, and when he did, they were beautiful and fluid, like poetry. Ludovic Caesar was a man who mostly declined the company of other beings, a man who was more content with his work then with…

I laughed as I embraced my younger cousin, I hadn’t seen her in a month. She smiled at me and we went upstairs to her room to talk about how her first week of school was, it got dark quickly. See, my cousin, Mackenzie, was in seventh grade, the grade I had been brutally bullied in two years before- unfortunately Mackenzie faced the same fate. She started crying and I held her close to me, I hated to see my best friend like this. She looked up at me with her hazel eyes, I brushed the caramel…

Back in the 1980’s there was a phone prank that my sisters and I used to do when we were kids. It was known around the neighborhood that if you were to dial your own phone number, replace the first three digits with “555”, and then press the receiver down 3 times, the phone would ring back on its own. It had to be on a touch tone which were common back then.

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 would seem that all cities, even small towns, have their own ghost stories and urban legends. Living in Devine, Texas for 5 years, I always heard about the Salt and Pepper lady of the Devine Projects. Friends would speak of their experiences with this very strange and disturbing specter. If you grew up in the Devine Projects, your parents wouldn't allow you to be outside whatsoever after dark, which was less due to the gangs and drug problem and more out of fear of the Salt and Pepper lady.

Moving to a new place was a big thing for me. 3 hours away from home, 3 hours away from the town I loved, the house I grew up in and the ex boyfriend who had been the thing to drive me away. In a way I was looking to escape. New start, new life, new me, that was what I decided when I moved away.

Death comes for us all. The intricate design of Death's web spares no one. It is the inevitable reality we all face someday, some sooner than others. But not all of us are unwary of our demise. Not all of us are fortunate enough to live in blissful ignorance, unaware of our own mortality. But once you are caught in the web, like a hapless fly watching as a spider descends upon it, you will see how finite life is. For as easy as life is granted, it can just as easily be taken away.