#paranormal

There was this tiny indie horror movie that basically nobody had seen. I don't even remember how we found it. Maybe TikTok, or maybe someone on Reddit recommended it. It had one of those titles that sounded way cooler after you finished watching it than before, and it looked like it had a budget of maybe twenty dollars. Somehow it still worked. It wasn't really scary in the traditional sense. There weren't any monsters or cheap jump scares. It was just... unsettling.

“Hey y’all, it’s Red, White, and Ruin here with a new ghostbox urban exploration for you to watch from the safety of your home. Lucky you! Today, we’re walking through the dead Cherry Hill Mall. Let’s take a look, huh?” I said in my chipper announcer voice. I hit stop on the video I was recording and sighed. Being this perky all the time was exhausting. I sighed, took in my surroundings, and frowned. “Jesus, what a dump.”

She walks into my life after dark—and disappears before the world wakes up. I rent a tiny one-bedroom apartment in a quiet coastal town just outside San Francisco. I work from home doing overnight tech support for a major software company I’m not allowed to name. Most of my calls come from system admins in Europe or Australia — people who get locked out of their accounts or freak out when syncs fail. It’s not glamorous, but it pays the bills. Anyway, I’m Nate.

There’s a floor in my apartment building that doesn’t exist. Not Thirteen. That would be too cliché. Although, it doesn’t have a thirteenth floor, but not for supernatural reasons. It just doesn’t go that high. Some of the residents call it Floor Three and a Half, or Three and Three-quarters to invoke a Harry Potter vibe, but both of those are far too whimsical for my tastes. I just call it the Dead Floor, which I know isn’t any less cliché than floor Thirteen, but it feels appropriate.

It was a dark, foggy night, as it really should be whenever something eerie happens. I was walking from my dad’s house over to my mom’s. I’d had a fight with my dad about something, the topic of which I’ve since forgotten, and realized at 17 years old that I was old enough and capable enough to walk alone back to my mom’s house, instead of stewing in my room at dad’s. Besides, both of my sisters were asleep already, so I wasn’t worried about them not getting their homework done or needing help…

“It’s going to happen, Jack. Nothing we can do about it. The wheels are already in motion. Higher-ups tell me I need to release the staff by the end of the week.” “Then ‘AM 640 - Talk of the Town’ becomes what, exactly?” Ron sighed. “Another DJ-less, auto-programmed, adult easy listening station.” “Aww, Christ on a bike,” I said. “They’re stealing the soul of this industry. Our Arbitron numbers grew last ratings cycle.”

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."

When I was a kid I used to play down by the creek that was behind my house. I'd throw rocks, play with plastic army men, make little houses out of mud and sticks having them sink into the creek. On a particular hot day in July when I was about nine I was sitting by the edge of the creek. I had my feet in the water trying to cool down as the day was unbearably humid. I had my eyes closed and didn't hear her walk up. "Hello" I heard an older voice say. I open my eyes and see a thin middle aged…

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.”

“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 remember that night all too vividly, as if the memories were etched into my very soul. It was a cold, moonless evening, the kind that sends shivers down your spine and makes you wish for the warmth and safety of home. But little did I know that home would offer no sanctuary from the horrors that awaited me.

I’m a trucker. Been one for almost twenty years. I’ve seen a lot of strange things on the road—but nothing like this. It happened during my early years, when I still ran long international routes. The kind that cut through nowhere, threading across mountains and ghost towns. I was somewhere in northern Spain, driving through the Babia y Luna Natural Park, heading toward Portugal.

“Wanna hear about the weirdest goddamn thing I’ve ever seen in the ocean?” Harvey, the old salt who lived at Neptune’s Net, asked me one night. “Buy me a sip of Cutty Sark, and I’ll tell you something only a handful of people have ever heard, and all of them are dead,” he said, jabbing his finger for emphasis. His gravelly voice gave the ancient mariner a gravitas you wouldn’t expect from a drunk at the end of the bar.

Most people have never heard someone die. The moaning. The crying. The pleading. The last tortured breath before they go quiet. Most people will never hear those things. I do. Daily. No, I’m not a serial killer on a hellbent mission to cleanse the Earth. I’m a 911 operator. When I took the job ten years ago, I assumed I’d more or less be like an air traffic controller, but for emergency response teams. For a large portion of my job, that’s true. That’s the easy part. Death is harder.

My fingers shake involuntarily as I slouch like a giant insect and type this on the computer. I don't want to write it, but I have no choice but to document what happened here. I could write it slowly, thoughtfully, and clearly, but I can't—I've never been a writer, and I'm in no position to turn this into a professional essay. After all, I have to hurry, we all have to hurry. The pieces of plaster that have fallen from the walls are starting to move like little cockroaches, which means I don't…

I've been talking to this cute punk girl online for a few months, and eventually I asked her to move in with me. This was 2008, and websites like Myspace were in full swing. We met on a site called VampireFreaks.com, which was basically Myspace for emos, punks, goths, and metalheads. I stood at the Greyhound station, excited to meet my once-online, now real-life girlfriend, and really hoping she was who she presented herself to be. The moment she stepped off the bus, I melted.

The morning came gently, the way it often did in late spring - without urgency, without noise, as if the world itself had decided to stretch before speaking. Sunlight spilled across the small street in soft, slanted lines. It touched the rooftops first, then the windows, then slowly made its way down to the pavement where it shimmered faintly like water. Somewhere in the distance, a bicycle passed, its wheels clicking in a steady rhythm that faded as quickly as it arrived.

I still don't know why my father drove away before sunrise. For years, I believed that was the part of the story that would never make sense to me. I was wrong. I was too young to understand it then, and every time I asked my parents about that morning, they either laughed it off or admitted they couldn't remember it at all. Sometimes I wonder if forgetting is easier than remembering.

I sat in the corner of the bar, sipping at my white wine and soaking in the rural atmosphere. It was nice to sit and relax. Work had been crazy as of late. The duties of a Paranormal Investigator seemed almost never-ending. "Hey, I know you," an old man with a long scraggly beard and red suspenders pointed at me from across the room. "Ain't you that Hadley Trivett from 'Ghosting'?" He slithered from his stool and began limping toward me.

One time, near Prescott, Arizona, I witnessed a ghostly wagon train rumble across the scrub brush for nearly an hour. Kept pace with my truck as I screamed down the highway. The driver even doffed his cap to me. I returned the favor as he evaporated into a fine mist.