There is a fresh, blank page sitting in front of me, and as I stare at it it seems to stare back. ‘It’s always so hard to get started’, I think. ‘I just wish I could get over the hump without climbing the hill. I feel like Sisyphus, every time I think I’ve gotten to the peak I roll back down to the start.’ I put my pen to the pristine white page and pause. Thinking. Agonizing over what sort of approach I will take this time. Will I be too eager? Will I lose interest? Is it going to be long enough, short enough, authentic or intelligent enough? Black ink has begun to pool where the pen’s tip is still pressed…

‘Hey, girly! I’ve decided to start selling cosmetics.’ I groaned as I read the text message. When a girl you haven’t spoken to since high school, Kimmy in this case, sends you a message like that, it means they’re trying sell you on some MLM BS. My phone buzzed again, and despite my better judgement, I checked it and braced myself to read the words ‘boss babe’. Instead, I was surprised at what I read. ‘I need help figuring out my formulations for my products before I can take them to market, and I would love it if you would test some out. They’ll be free product in it for you!’ I was immediately intrigued. Kimmy had always been a…

The game was almost over, but things didn’t get easier. I knew that the Rot wouldn’t let me win this. I had to plan ahead. I could tell that judging from the last 2, the final candles would both be in one of the main areas of the park: the circus, and the rides in the center of the grounds. I checked my map, looking to see which was closest, and from what I could tell, I was just between the two areas, between whichever hell I would suffer through first. I peeked my head out of the door of the shack, which I had opened a few minutes earlier to let the light in, and carefully weighed my options.…

TAG…YOU’RE IT!! The Graveyard Game Ten people. Ten people in ten different places,  doing ten different things. But all sharing one single thought… “What if it really works?” It seems an unwritten rule in tiny little spit shot towns all across the country that each has it’s own tall tales and legends of old, whispered through the ages and shared from one generation to the next, just as it has been since the beginning of time and as it will continue to be. This is simply the version of one of those tall tales and legends as it’s known here in our little town. You see, in the little town of Sawnhurst, California, there is an age old tradition tied…

Paramedics are incredibly superstitious. It’s surprising how much people will argue with me about this simple fact. “Oh, definitely not. They’re too reasonable, too smart, too calm in a crisis to engage with something as irrational as superstitions.” Some will even fight with me about it, for an absurd amount of time. As if I wouldn’t know. Me! An EMT myself, four generations of emergency medical professionals in my family, with both of my parents working for decades as paramedics, and a long list of other relatives that work either in the hospital or in an ambulance. And they think I wouldn’t know! It’s never a matter of source, though. They don’t doubt for a second that I know what…

I’m usually a ‘take things slow’ kind of girl, but there was something about her in the bar that night. I was sitting at a table in the back, watching my friends’ coats and purses while they were out on the dance floor. This was my usual role, and I suspected it was the only reason they still invited me out. One second, I was cringing at the bitter taste of my drink, and in the blink of an eye, she was right in front of me, smiling brightly. Despite the little shock her sudden presence gave me, her dark green eyes had me fixated immediately. “Van Gogh!” she said enthusiastically. I blinked twice. “What?” I asked, feeling confused, but…

Sol 5111 A voice awakens me to darkness. Terrifying darkness. The voice is concerned. Concerned about my well-being. Who am I? Who is the voice? Whoever it is must be a friend. Why else would they be worried? Yes, they must be a friend. It is a kind voice. But what is it worried about? Why is it dark? It must be a storm. Yes, it must be a storm. I am cold. So very cold. The voice tells me to check my heater. Vaguely, I can make out my old, weathered body. There’s the heater, but it’s broken. The air is cold. This cold… it makes me feel tired. I want to sleep. I want the voice to tell…

I wandered through the stalls a bit, trying to use my map to figure out where I was, and the quickest way to get to the lake. The way I saw it, I wouldn’t have to struggle as much to put the candle out since it would already be surrounded by water, but first, I’d have to actually navigate my way to the lake. After a few hours worth of figuring out where exactly in the park I was, I began my trek to the lake. Usually, a walk like this would take hours back when the park was open, especially because of the crowds. Not to say it was popular, it was just that the park wasn’t really designed…

They kept sending us money, that was the problem. Even after the drugs which made your mind spiral into rainbow hell, and the noxious smelling salts, and the obscure rituals, they never cut funding. Even when we got desperate, they still kept pumping in the surplus of our good taxpayers. It wasn’t just money either, they kept us in good stock of all sorts. This included the drugs, obviously, alongside the sleek and sinister machines, chrome-plated man-made horrors. They kept us in good stock of all sorts of horrible things, yes, but arguably the worst things they kept sending us were the kids. More hypersensitive and/or strange children from all over the country than you can shake a menacing middle-school…

You hear all the stories about the big two.. heaven and hell… Either you’re a sinner and are ready to go down to the fiery abyss to suffer or.. you float to the clouds ready for eternal salvation-.. what if I told you that it’s all a lie? There is one place I never want to end up again-.. One place where the souls who have something they left behind.. those who are missing something.. purgatory. Yeah I went there myself before I was brought back to life, let me tell you now.. everything you have been told is all a lie.. there is no salvation waiting for you.. only pain, fear and the void.. Let me go back, so…

Nobody remembers when they appeared, some think they have been here since the beginning of time and space, or at least since the first human existed, others think they came into existence more recently. I personally don’t care where they come from, or how they got here, I only really care about keeping myself alive. The copycats, that’s what we call them. Most of the time they look almost human, trying to copy the appearances of their last victims. I say almost, because they often appear as tall as the streetlights, or have big bulging eyes and smiles with too many teeth. Some of them can speak too, sort of as a way to lure us out. In reality, most…

Sunday I’m not sure why I’m writing this down on paper and not on my computer. I guess I’ve just noticed some odd things. It’s not that I don’t trust the computer… I just… need to organize my thoughts. I need to get down all the details somewhere objective, somewhere I know that what I write can’t be deleted or… changed… not that that’s happened. It’s just… everything blurs together here, and the fog of memory lends a strange cast to things… I’m starting to feel cramped in this small apartment. Maybe that’s the problem. I just had to go and choose the cheapest apartment, the only one in the basement. The lack of windows down here makes day and…

Let me start off by saying that Peter Terry was addicted to heroin. We were friends in college and continued to be after I graduated. Notice that I said “I”. He dropped out after 2 years of barely cutting it. After I moved out of the dorms and into a small apartment, I didn’t see Peter as much. We would talk online every now and them (AIM was king in pre-facebook years). There was a period where he wasn’t online for about five weeks straight. I wasn’t worried. He was a pretty notorious flake and drug addict, so I assumed he just stopped caring. But then one night I saw him come on. Before I could initiate a conversation, he…

You take the pills to keep them away. That’s what we were told when we were first brought down here–down through the sterile white halls with their flickering fluorescent lights, and our small, Spartan cells. Down into the nightmare. Why would we agree to this? I was tired of being homeless. I was tired of smelling like urine. I was tired of the looks that people gave me, like they knew I was there, but if they could just avoid eye contact maybe I wouldn’t talk to them, wouldn’t show up later, in their dreams, tugging at their consciences. I was tired of sleeping on cold concrete every night. I was tired of being so fucking hungry all the time.…

For me, life was a whirlwind of lights and smoke, music and men. I lived in a beaten up shanty close to North Edsa, crammed in a closet-like room with a bunch of other woman. We slept on mats on the dirt floor and shared the space with mange-infested dogs, flea-bitten cats and cockroaches. My wardrobe consisted mostly of skimpy skirts, tank tops and the cheapest high heels you can buy in Quiapo. After a hard night at the bars of dancing and exposing myself, sometimes spending time in a back room with a heavily drunk man and my eyes like a dead fish staring at the ceiling, I earned enough cash to go to the thrift shop. The weather…

Russian researchers in the late 1940s kept five people awake for fifteen days using an experimental gas based stimulant. They were kept in a sealed environment to carefully monitor their oxygen intake so the gas didn’t kill them, since it was toxic in high concentrations. This was before closed circuit cameras so they had only microphones and 5 inch thick glass porthole sized windows into the chamber to monitor them. The chamber was stocked with books, cots to sleep on but no bedding, running water and toilet, and enough dried food to last all five for over a month. The test subjects were political prisoners deemed enemies of the state during World War II. Everything was fine for the first…

It started when I was six years old. I was in school, it was the middle of a reading lesson, and I needed to pee, badly. At that age, actually, a fair few kids still wet themselves, and I always got paranoid about embarrassing myself in public like that. I stuck my hand up and told Mrs. Zebby that I needed to use the bathroom. After the usual speech about how I “should have gone at break”, she gave me the key to the Disabled-Access toilet (as it was the closest one to my classroom). It was the middle of fifth period, and the corridors were empty and seemed cavernous to me: I was a short, scrawny thing back then.…

We had just moved into a little ranch house in the suburbs. Storybook neighborhood – quiet, friendly neighbors, picket fences, the whole nine yards. Suffice it to say that this was supposed to be a new start for me, a recently single dad, and my three-year-old son. A time to move on from the previous year’s drama and stress. I viewed the thunderstorm as a metaphor for this fresh start: one last show of theatrics before the dirt and grime of the past would be washed away. My son loved it anyway, even with the power out. It was the first big storm he’d ever seen. Flashes of lightning flooded the bare rooms of our house, imparting unpacked boxes with…

Do you ever watch other people in the subway? It’s so strange to have to ignore someone who’s right up there in your face. A can of sardines springs to mind, except passengers aren’t joined by a bond of thick oil or brine. Instead, they’re stewing in a miasma of sweat, cologne and annoyance. Everybody absorbed in their own little worlds, warm little cocoons. There, whizzing through the bowels of the city at a brisk clip, you’ll find people reading books, newspapers. Maybe on a Playstation Portable. Maybe on a smartphone. Except me. I’ll always be looking through the thick glass windows at the flickering blackness just beyond. Sometimes, late at night, I hope I’ll get on the same train…

I cannot describe to you how I feel right now. What I’m experiencing is so detached from the normal, I’m almost convinced I’ve finally gone insane. Almost. My wife, Bea, died during childbirth. She was gorgeous, funny, intelligent – stubborn. A woman whose laugh was so loud, eating in restaurants was a challenge. A woman whose stare was so intense, it made my hands shake. I lost her as she gave birth to our daughter. Sam. Of course, I could have resented Sam. For taking away what was once mine in a way nothing else can be. For taking what was so truly and utterly pure. But I didn’t. I knew Bea wouldn’t have wanted any resentment. She wouldn’t have…

It was a nice summer day, my 5-year-old son James was playing outside in the backyard of our suburban home. James has always been a quiet boy, he plays by himself mostly, he never had many friends, but he has always had a wild imagination. I was in the kitchen feeding our dog Fido, when I heard what sounded like James talking to someone in the backyard. I’m not sure who it was he could be talking to, could he have finally made a friend? Being a single mom it’s hard for me to always keep an eye on my son, so I decided to go outside and check on him. When I went into the backyard I was a…

Some of you may have heard that the Disney corporation is responsible for at least one real, “live” Ghost Town. Disney built the “Treasure Island” resort in Baker’s Bay in the Bahamas. It didn’t START as a ghost town! Disney’s cruise ships would actually stop at the resort and leave tourists there to relax in luxury. This is a FACT. Look it up. Disney blew $30,000,000 on the place… yes, Thirty Million Dollars. Then they abandoned it. Disney blamed the shallow waters (too shallow for their ships to safely operate) and there was even blame cast on the workers, saying that since they were from the Bahamas, they were too lazy to work a regular schedule. That’s where the factual…

NetNostalgia Forum – Television (local) Skyshale033 Subject: Candle Cove local kid’s show? Does anyone remember this kid’s show? It was called Candle Cove and I must have been 6 or 7. I never found reference to it anywhere so I think it was on a local station around 1971 or 1972. I lived in Ironton at the time. I don’t remember which station, but I do remember it was on at a weird time, like 4:00 PM. mike_painter65 Subject: Re: Candle Cove local kid’s show? it seems really familiar to me…..i grew up outside of ashland and was 9 yrs old in 72. candle cove…was it about pirates? i remember a pirate marionete at the mouth of a cave talking…

In 1983, a team of deeply pious scientists conducted a radical experiment in an undisclosed facility. The scientists had theorized that a human without access to any senses or ways to perceive stimuli would be able to perceive the presence of God. They believed that the five senses clouded our awareness of eternity, and without them, a human could actually establish contact with God by thought. An elderly man who claimed to have “nothing left to live for” was the only test subject to volunteer. To purge him of all his senses, the scientists performed a complex operation in which every sensory nerve connection to the brain was surgically severed. Although the test subject retained full muscular function, he could…

I’ve been lying down for hours now. It’s 5:35AM and there’s not much I can do. You know what the worst part about my situation is? I’m in the same room with my parents. They keep looking at me, and I can’t help but look back and try not to cry or scream. Their eyes are focused on me and their mouths are wide open. There’s the strong scent of blood and I feel so paralyzed with fear. Here’s the thing. The second I make any hint that I’m not asleep anymore, I’m completely fucked. I will die and there’s nobody around to save me. I’ve been trying to think of a way out but the only idea I have…

“The year is nineteen-ninety-nine.” That sentence brings me back to my senior kindergarten class when I was five years old, where we used to read out the date on the blackboard every single day. The year 1999 exists as a stain in my mind however, as a memory that will not go away no matter how I try to forget it. 1999 marked the year I lost my first tooth, my first time on a plane, and unfortunately the early loss of my childhood innocence. That one memory that refuses to be wiped, it all started with that new (or old) TV. At that time Pokémon was the latest fad to hit the school. Pokémon cards, games, stickers, and the…

It’s Christmas Eve in snowy 1800’s London, England, and in a small house at the edge of town, there lived a lonely, 7-year-old boy named Isaac. Isaac was a sad child with not a friend to his name. While most children were spending time with their families and eagerly looking forward to opening the presents that were placed with care beneath a beautifully decorated Christmas tree, little Isaac spent this most holy of nights alone, in his cold, dusty attic room. Isaac’s parents were very poor, his mother was a strict crow of a woman who stayed at home and schooled Isaac. His father worked long hours down at the London harbour to support his family, although a large portion…

Post #1 (Sept. 7, 2010) Okay, /x/, I need your help with this. This is not copypasta, this is a long read, but I feel like my safety or well-being could very well depend on this. This is video game related, specifically Majora’s Mask, and this is the creepiest shit that has ever happened to me in my entire life. Having said that, I recently moved into my dorm room starting as a Sophomore in college and a friend of mine gave me his old Nintendo 64 to play. I was stoked, to say the least, I could finally play all of those old games of my youth that I hadn’t touched in at least a decade. His Nintendo 64…

I’m sure that all of you on /r/nosleep are used to the cry for help type stories by now. Help me, help me, blah-blah-blah. I won’t bore you with another. Even if I wanted your help, you couldn’t give it to me, because your help is useless. Why? Because you’re not a member. I just wish that I wasn’t either. It all started innocently enough. With a phone call. I’d been up for a few hours, unpacking and cleaning, waiting for the plumber to call. I just moved into a cabin and the contractors fucked everything up. Because of that, I now have the wonderful task of making calls to competent people that can fix what the original contractors did…

The devil on the fiery porch. He was back again that year, the same as he had been for five years running, keeping the majority of Trick or Treaters behind an imaginary line of uneasiness drawn at the edge of the curb with his Hell-red grin and burning cauldrons. It was a scene from Faust, only this was no play; this was my neighborhood. It wasn’t just kids who lingered apprehensively in the street, but parents as well. In a place where the definition of Halloween was more like cardboard skeletons and plastic jack-o-lanterns, a guy with a penchant for fire and pitchforks could be extraordinarily scary. Really young children were hurried past the residence altogether via lawns on the…