#paranoia

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.

We moved in on a Tuesday, and by Friday I had learned the house repeated me. Not everything. It was selective, like a bad line that only keeps the important words. I would be at the sink and hear, from the landing above, my own voice at low volume, finishing a sentence I had not started. The first time I thought it was a phone, a radio, a neighbour's television bleeding through the wall. We had no neighbours. The house was the last on the road and the woods did the rest.

The listing said SLEEPS 2 in capitals, the way you write a warning before you understand it. Mira found the cabin. Four hours north, at the end of a gravel road that gave up and became a suggestion for the last half mile. No neighbours in any direction. A woodstove, a hand pump over the sink, and two mugs on the shelf. Two chairs at the table. Two plates, two forks, two towels folded to the same width. Two of everything, arranged like an answer to a question nobody had asked.

I I wished it with my whole being, which is to say I wished it with something I didn't know yet was a cage. Let me tell you about Delia first. Not because she's the main point—she isn't—but because you need to understand my obsession. Delia is the kind of pretty that makes pretty people feel plain. She wakes up, and her hair is already in order. Her laugh hypnotizes you and puts you in a trance. People lean toward her as plants do toward light, without even knowing it.

"The last few nurses we've hired have all flaked on me," Jim said with an exhausted sigh. "Please tell me you don't plan on flaking."

It was Halloween in the year 2015. I remember waking up at 7AM, feeling stoked for Halloween and watching Charlie Brown. I saw people from outside my neighborhood decorating at the last minute because a lot of people like slacking on Halloween.

My brother could wear my voice before he could find his own. Our mother would call us down to dinner and he would answer in my throat, and she would set the table for one boy twice. At nine I heard him explaining me to our father. Not reporting. Explaining, the way you explain weather. He used my voice, and the words were mine, arranged the way I would never have arranged them, and he was right about every one. I asked how. He said, I listen. I am always listening.

“That caint be the number. Just caint,” Wes said, taking off his faded John Deere hat and slapping it against his leg. “I dried the corn before I hauled it over. I know what the moisture level is!” “Wes, I’m just the messenger. The machine checks and gives back a level.” “Well, your gosh-darn machine must be broken!” “It’s just recently been recalibrated. I can run another sample if you want.”

I was five when the man in the wolfman mask scared the shit out of me. No, he didn’t eat me. No, he didn’t kill me. He just gave me one good Halloween scare.

This story is meant to scare people. It's a little different from what i do. Even tho it is fictional it is a very hard creepypasta and i suggest to be careful while reading it. Have fun. Alaska. Monday December 12 1768. 9PM.

Mark Fischer was infamous in his hometown. Much to his own disdain, he was largely harmless. Even still, he had a notoriety similar to that of a local serial killer that violently forced their way into a place's history. The act that earned him his infamy was not violent, though it did have a certain aggressiveness to it. His act was that he walked every day. He made it his mission to be a one-man parade for the residents of his hometown. He didn’t want to go out every day but didn’t need to…

“How do you eradicate death itself?” There was a strange life in this apartment complex, one that practically begged you to look the other way. From the outside, the place offered nothing. It was just a decrepit gray structure looking as if it would collapse under a single harsh gust of wind. It stood out solely because within a fifty-mile radius, no other human life existed. Questions went unasked. Certain answers were better left unknown, and if ignorance was bliss, so be it.

I never really did want to go to that Christmas party, but I have to say it turned out all right in the end. The Christmas party was to be held on the great stage at the Opera House downtown, and it was open to all employees of the law firm Goble & Mundorff and their immediate families.  That last part was a problem for my brother Henry and me, because our mom was a paralegal at G&M, and she’d made it clear that she expected us to put in an appearance.

I. The House With No Sound It began with a hum.

Lainy held her cup of coffee to her chest, tried to trap its warmth inside her body. She should've dressed warmer. Autumn had arrived and it was forcing its chill through her body. Logan was twenty minutes late. She tried not to hold it against him, but her nose was starting to run. They had matched online, exchanged only a few messages before he asked her out on a date. It was bold but he was attractive enough, plus the cafe was filled with people. What could go wrong?

This is another I posted on /r/nosleep several years ago. I wanted to write something in the style of the horror anthologies I enjoyed as a kid in the '90s, such as Ask the Bones, The Scary Story Reader, or the classic Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark. ----

No, he wore that outfit last time and felt overdressed. Something more casual would be better. Just not too casual.

Note: This is a story I posted on Reddit's nosleep around 2021. They removed it for being "not horror" but I disagree. Yeah, it's comedic. I was a comedy writer for several years and wanted to try writing something funny and creepy. I think it turned out well. -------- A weird thing happened to me recently, and I've struggled with how to talk about it. Basically, there's no way to do it without sounding bugfuck insane, so here it is: ALF spoke to me through my television.