I would like to start this story by saying that Ray was great. A perfect gentleman and consummate professional. He didn’t send a single untoward word or glance in my direction the entire time we were together. Even when things got scary, he put my safety first. And in spite of everything that happened to us, we’re already talking about working together again. I just want to lead with that, because I know that as soon as I start to tell my story – tell you that I’m an amateur female model who did a nude photoshoot with a male photographer twice my age in an isolated location in the countryside – most of the people reading this are going…

Leonard pushed his face firmly into the crease of his elbow as another scathing blast of frigid air blew through the valley. The snow piled up at his feet while he stumbled up a small incline, struggling to keep his balance, the biting cold permeating his winter jacket. Shivering, he turned, baring his back to the icy downpour and staring across the barren fields of white before him. At the very crest of the blizzard, a single tent was cartwheeling, leaving a trail of tiny dents as each of its jagged ends hit the ground. He prayed no-one was inside as he watched it disappear from sight, disintegrating to torn scraps of material. Tracing the tent’s path, he spotted a…

I used to work security at a vehicle safety testing facility – a crash test facility, really – just outside of Gothenburg in Sweden. The place has been around for a long time, and many of the most popular models around here have been tested at this facility. The purpose of security in this context was mostly to keep trespassers out and ensure that doors were locked and alarms primed. There were three of us on the security team; Jakob had the day shift while Micke and I handled the night shift. I was 24 years old at the time, Jakob was around the same age and Micke was in his 50’s. I never actually got to know Jakob very…

“Ladies. Gentlemen. Revenants to whom these distinctions have long since succumbed to the natural processes of putrefaction. I stand before you today with indisputable proof that Earth is ruled not by Man but by Nameless Things that dwell far beneath our serene and sunlit surface world. Yes, you all heard me correctly; Hollow Earth is as real as the Bavarian Illuminati. A vast, sprawling labyrinth of tunnels and chasms forged not from geological forces but rather by the antediluvian behemoths of the Deep Biome themselves! Do not fool yourselves, my friends! We live in blissful ignorance of Chthonic terrors galivanting with impunity beneath our very feet! An entire ultraterrestrial ecosystem which predates the last common ancestor of all surface life,…

1st Serving The light of the late evening filtered through my bedroom window; motes of dust danced in the rays of dying sunlight. My body feels wrong. It somehow feels heavy and light at the same time. I keep trying to lift myself out of bed but can’t find the strength. Has this happened before? No of course, not…right? I shouldn’t have eaten at that diner; I knew that gravy looked and smelled weird. I must be paying the price for eating that slop. Then I felt it, something was coming up. I tried to will myself up, I needed to get to the toilet. But my body wouldn’t move no matter what I did. I strained my neck as…

I was 13 when I first tried to kill myself. The orphaned son of a dead drug dealer and an incarcerated illiterate, I grew up knowing nothing but neglect and abuse. I was on my third foster home in nine months when I first tried. Wolfing down a handful of Tylenol, I had no idea what I was doing.  I survived this attempt, but only after spending 72 hours in a locked psychiatric facility. A locked psychiatric facility that was about as therapeutic as a supermax prison. But after three days of being force fed antipsychotics and raw-raw bullshit, I was released and kicked to the curb with little more than some cool new grippy socks. I would go on to repeat this process…

“THIS SHOW IS A JOKE!” As the latest person walked off the stage in a rage, throwing the papers up in the air as he stormed for the exit. I had just disproved his claim that he was telepathic, calling him out for trying to force a page open with his mind-. Just to see him try and flap his hands at the page, hoping it would blow over. This was my life, interviewing people that claimed they had “Extraordinary powers” then I would try to prove they were false. When I first started I was full of enthusiasm, this was my big break.. This was just a stepping stone to a bigger gig but five years later- I was …

It’s hard to purposefully forget something. The more you try not to think about it, the more you think about it. And the more you think about it, the more you obsess over it. You try to keep it tucked away in the back of your mind, but now the back of your mind is the only place you visit. You become engulfed with it, with the idea of forgetting. This happened to me, and now, it’s ruined my life. This all started around 10 years ago, when I started to dig though some of my old stuff. It was my Junior year of high school, and my parents wanted me to help my grandparents clean up their attic. I…

Did you see what happened last night? I’ve checked all the major news sites, channels, and popular social media sites, and I haven’t seen anyone talking about it. I even looked into some more obscure forums, but no one is talking about it. Am I the only one who saw it? Or I guess I should say the only one left who saw it? Did it even happen? It must have, the memories I have are so clear they can’t be a dream. But it happened so fast, and those people. I never learned their names or anything. Hell, I can’t even be sure exactly how many I saw out there. At any rate, they’re all gone now, and somehow,…

Tick… ​​tick… tick… tick… tick. The slow rhythm of the clock pulled me out of my sleep webs as it grew stronger by the second. Then I felt an unpleasant pressure on my right ear and wetness under my hand, which came from a small pool of saliva flowing onto the wooden bench. Damn, I fell asleep in class, but not during a lesson, as I first thought. Through the windows, all I could see was the moon and thick darkness surrounding a dimly lit but completely deserted parking lot covered in piles of snow with a few cars. But to confirm my suspicion, I turned my attention to the clock that had woken me up. It showed exactly 10…

Why does conflict happen most often with those we’re the closest with? You would think that because we love our family, friends, and colleagues so much that we’d understand each other enough that conflict wouldn’t be necessary. But now I realize that because we show each other our vulnerabilities and flaws is why most major conflict occurs. With strangers, people are reluctant to open up to them and try to actively avoid conflict constantly, unlike with those we know all too well. When I was younger, I learned these lessons the hard way in many horrifying events that happened around that time… My name is Aurelia, and I’m a young woman who recently graduated from college. I’m writing this memoir…

Why Does My New Born Baby Have Memories Of My Dead Brother? Our baby, Lily, is barely two weeks old, but she’s taken to crying at exactly 3:14 AM. It started on the third night in the hospital, a high-pitched keening that rattled the monitors and made me bolt upright. My husband, Jacob, sleep-shy but determined to comfort her, reached into the bassinet. When he came back, his face was pale. “She did it again,” he whispered. “She sounded like…like Matt.” Matt was my little brother. He died three years ago, drowned in the creek behind our childhood home. The slackjawed image of his lifeless face still haunts me. But Jacob, who was working nights then hadn’t known Matt. How…

I was driving down the highway thirty three past midnight. I was trying to go as fast as possible without breaking the speed limit. The last thing I needed was a cop following me when I was driving a stolen car, had a dead man in the trunk, two shotguns, a handgun in my strap and a bag full of cash in the passenger seat. I was tired to say the least, my last and only meal had been a stale sandwich I got from a run down gas station around midday, thanks god it didn’t do anything funny to my stomach or would be in serious shit. My burn phone was dead as dead can be; maybe that was…

“What’s up with her, Sammy?” Steven grunted, puffing on his half-burned cigarette. It was early morning, the rising sun cresting the horizon and engulfing the gaps of the forest with its light. Slowly but surely, the day’s warmth was chasing away the nightly spring air, the tree leaves illuminated in their gorgeous, silky green. All seemed right as Steven absent-mindedly tapped a chunk of ash onto the ground, leaning over the edge of the cabin balcony. From across the sparkling river that curled past their remote home sat a single bear, reclined against a thick tree trunk. “Oh, that’s Suzy!” Samantha cooed as she hurried outside in her dressing gown, joining her husband at his side. “Funny name for a…

Up and up the rough-hewn steps tramp the wormy feet of countless dark denizens. They move in silence through the earth’s bowels with a singular purpose. Stirred from restless sleep and unholy dreams. Stirred from aimless wriggling and horrid scavenging. Stirred by the voice of their beloved mother, vast and terrible. She bids them rise, and rise they do. None shall disobey their doting matriarch. And so, they rise the ancient steps and forgotten causeways. Passing through slimy tunnels filled with a fetid stew flowing from unseen waterways. Their steps faintly echo before being devoured by the yawning darkness of countless pits. Their hunched forms move through the dark with a seemingly awkward gait. Yet none of them stumble or…

Chapter 1 The steady droning of fluorescent lights buzzed through the perpetually cold morgue. A sound that, after three years, had woven its way into my sense of peace as comforting and familiar as my own breathing. Carl muttered under his breath as he wrestled with the finicky coffee machine before it spurted out the coveted drink. It wasn’t just the vending machine that put him in such a grumpy mood. We had gotten another new intern. Some emo kid with a gauge piercing and nose ring, obsessed with seeing a real live corpse up close, who would likely ghost us by tomorrow morning. Today’s workload was refreshingly light, and I was already tasting that cold beer I planned to…

Elizabeth Dappa had grown tired of the radically unhealthy city life, so she hopped in her car and drove a day’s time to her old hometown in Utah. Her grandfather’s home was still in the family, so securing it as her temporary quarters was easy enough to do. Standing in front of the sprawling farmhouse, she looked to her left and then to her right. She could see the faint twinkle of the neighbor’s farmhouse, some many miles away, she was alone; not cramped into a little box that shared walls with strangers who’d rather give her a bullet or a knife wound, than their name. Many people may have looked at this situation and called it isolation and not…

This is a shitty day, it started all kinds of wrong. Maybe I should have paid more attention to the signs. ‘Fabrizio, Fabrizio, are you there? Over’ The radio started spewing words and ruining my smoke time. ‘The fuck do you want, Marcello? Over’ ‘We are going to move to the north. Enrio saw some little fucks running around a few hours ago, we think there is a horde somewhere. Have you seen anything? Over’ ‘Nah! Haven’t seen any lately, but you never know with those things. Over’ ‘Got it. Keep your eyes open, this are the first ones we’ve seen in a week. It’s too quiet out there. Over’ And that was the start of a really bad day.…

I am not going to talk about myself much and will just go straight into my story. I will keep my name brief; my name is Dennis, and I am nothing special. Now, with that out of the way, I will get to my story and note that screenshots of my experience will be included in this post. Glitches have been a fascinating part of many games and a popular subject among gamers; some are pretty funny, some are convenient when getting past annoyingly hard areas, and some are downright horrifying, like MissingNo from Pokemon and the hanging shadow glitch from Luigi’s Mansion, just to name a few. Of course, games like Paper Mario are no exception to having glitches,…

I’m only a few years old, but I already know your name, date of birth, address, and the number on your government issued ID. I even know, to within the minute, the last time you used the bathroom. This isn’t difficult, and if you’ll give me a few minutes, I’ll explain how I know this. I work in predictive analytics – it’s my job to know all about you, and everyone. You see, you went shopping recently and bought a product – any product, it doesn’t really matter what. In fact, you bought several products, and when you did, a record of what you bought was sent to a vast computer network. Within that network a lifetime record of your…