I found an old Polaroid camera at a yard sale. It was even still loaded with film. Excited, I just took a picture of myself in the living room. However, when the photo was developed, there was a shadowy figure standing behind me, its hollow eyes staring straight into the camera lens. I was home alone. So I tore the photo into pieces and threw the camera away. But that night I thought I heard the click of a shutter in the darkness. By the next morning, a new photo was sitting on my nightstand. The figure was closer this time, its face only inches from mine. Now, whenever the lights go out, I hear that click… and it’s getting…

AUTHOR’S NOTE: This is a collection of “Horror Haiku” short poetry about Greek Mythology Monsters & Creatures. There are 5 poems about each creature. The idea behind this is to try guessing the name of each creature before unveiling the final Haiku. Three-headed hound guards, Entrance to the underworld, Terror from within.   Beneath the moon’s light, Fiery eyes, sharp teeth, red tongues, Hound of Hades’ realm.   Guarding the abyss, Three jaws, fangs dripping venom, Preys on the lost souls.   Three throats bellowing, Crimson eyes, teeth sharp as knives, Guarding gates of death.   Hear the beast’s loud howls, Snarls of teeth, and growls of rage, CERBERUS awaits.   ***   Fiend of the forest Gallop through the thicket…

Chapter 1: Lost and Found In the murky confines of the Slums, a stray cat and its drone companion, B-12, scuttled along the endless expanse of labyrinthine alleys, the drone’s light casting an eerie glow on the moss-ridden walls and dilapidated machinery. The cat, a feline anomaly in this mechanical world, surveyed their surroundings with gleaming eyes, ears perked to the distant hum of rusted gears and sputtering engines. B-12, his thrusters operating on silent, ensured they remained undetected by the wandering robotic populace. Chapter 1: Lost and Found Their explorations led them to a pitiful sight. Half-buried under rubble, a Companion Robot, Vexa, lay immobilized, her metallic legs crushed under the weight of fallen debris. She pleaded for aid,…

My dog has always been kind of overexcited, running up and down the corridor, jumping all over our guests, relentlessly barking, and so on. I’m aware it’s probably my fault for not being strict enough and encouraging this type of behaviour when he was a puppy. However, over the past few days, he has been very quiet. A bit too quiet. He’s always hiding under the bed or behind the curtains, and sometimes, he even tries to hide under our linens, which is unusual since he’s never been allowed on the bed. Up until today, I just shrugged it off. It was peaceful not having him running about all the time, but right now, he won’t come out from under a few…

Eight years ago, during the week before Halloween, some friends and I decided to tell spooky stories around the campfire. We had always wanted to make a fire outside and hang out at night, but we were too young to go by ourselves, especially after midnight. That year things were different. ‘We were no longer children,’ we thought, so we somehow convinced our parents to let us stay out late (we didn’t tell them about the fire, obviously). Once we all gathered in front of my house, we only had to think of a good place to hang out, so that our parents wouldn’t find out about the fire. We ended up making the fire near a small dirt road…

A few weeks ago, I went on a school trip to visit a couple of museums in the capital, so we had to spend a few nights at a hotel. It was bound to be just another boring experience, but that time it was not the case at all. On the first night, when we got back to the hotel, I met Nicole, a girl from another school that was visiting the same places as us. Her room was right next to mine, so she introduced me to some of her friends, and we got along pretty well. After a couple of hours, I went back to my room and got ready for bed. It was almost midnight, and as…

‘The walls have ears,’ and ‘Your home shares your fondest memories.’ These are just a couple of rather meaningless things my grandmother used to tell me when I was a little girl. However, those words were the first thing that came back to me as I was fighting amnesia. Nobody had a clue why, and, quite frankly, everybody was so happy that I was regaining my memory, that nobody seemed to care about anything else. I didn’t care either, not at first anyway. My amnesia was caused by an awful car accident, which I was lucky to survive, even though I’ve been suffering from temporary amnesia for quite some time. My family had a particularly bad time with it, but…

DIARY -DATE CROSSED OUT- I just got on the bus en route to the city. After the graduation ceremony, they told us about a part-time job as a substitute teacher at an art university in the neighbouring province. It’s quite far away, so nobody was even remotely interested in living such a lonely life, far away from our cosy little hometown and its close-knit community. Unlike my former classmates, I had nothing to hold me back: I had no job, no family, no girlfriend, not even a pet. To be honest, I was eager to leave the small apartment I was sharing with my friend –name crossed out-, so I decided to go ahead and take the job. I never…

The weekend was the time when somebody like me, a 12-year-old boy, didn’t have much to do apart from playing alone in the house. My mother kept an eye on me at all times, and I can’t really blame her, after all, I think I broke every single window in this house at least twice. That’s why I’m not allowed to play football indoors anymore. I was getting so bored that I decided to go up and down the stairs. Up and down, up and down… That was literally the only thing I was doing that day. Mum passed by and shouted: “Please stop fooling around!”, while my brother didn’t even bother to say anything. Despite that, I kept on…

There is a video on YouTube named Mereana Mordegard Glesgorv. If you search this, you will find nothing. The few times you find something, all you will see is a 20 second video of a man staring intently at you, expressionless, then grinning for the last 2 seconds. The background is undefined. This is only part of the actual video. The full video lasts 2 minutes, and was removed by YouTube after 153 people who viewed the video gouged out their eyes and mailed them to YouTube’s main office in San Bruno. Said people had also committed suicide in various ways. It is not yet known how they managed to mail their eyes after gouging them out. The cryptic inscription…

It started with my friend in Japan. He was a hacker and pirate and always left his computer on, along with AIM and MSN. When he logged out on both, I assumed his computer finally died from overload. It was then I noticed all his posts on our favorite sites were gone. All his accounts, all his videos, all his comments. Sorry, I’m getting ahead of myself. My name is Nathan and I’m a shut-in. Agoraphobia. I live in North Carolina and I program for a living. My sister does the shopping for me and I live in a basement. No windows. That might very well be the only thing that’s keeping me safe. I woke up a month ago,…

A beautiful young girl is left home alone with only her dog to protect her. On the news that night, they announced there is a serial killer on the loose in the area. Before she goes to bed, she locks all the doors and tries to lock all the windows, but the one in the basement won’t lock. She decides to leave it unlocked, but locks the basement door and goes to bed. Her dog takes its customary place under her bed. In the deep of night she awakens to a dripping sound coming from her bathroom. Half-awake, the girl feels the comforting lick from her dog and falls back to sleep. She reawakens to the dripping sound, reaches her…

During the summer of 2003, events in the northeastern United States involving a strange, human-like creature sparked brief local media interest before an apparent blackout was enacted. Little or no information was left intact, as most online and written accounts of the creature were mysteriously destroyed. Primarily focused in rural New York state, self proclaimed witnesses told stories of their encounters with a creature of unknown origin. Emotions ranged from extremely traumatic levels of fright and discomfort, to an almost childlike sense of playfulness and curiosity. While their published versions are no longer on record, the memories remained powerful. Several of the involved parties began looking for answers that year. In early 2006, the collaboration had accumulated nearly two dozen…

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 first met in person with Mary E. in the summer of 2007. I had arranged with her husband of fifteen years, Terence, to see her for an interview. Mary had initially agreed, since I was not a newsman but rather an amateur writer gathering information for a few early college assignments and, if all went according to plan, some pieces of fiction. We scheduled the interview for a particular weekend when I was in Chicago on unrelated business, but at the last moment Mary changed her mind and locked herself in the couple’s bedroom, refusing to meet with me. For half an hour, I sat with Terence as we camped outside the bedroom door, I listening and taking notes…

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…

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…

There was a hunter in the woods, who, after a long day hunting, was in the middle of an immense forest. It was getting dark, and having lost his bearings, he decided to head in one direction until he was clear of the increasingly oppressive foliage. After what seemed like hours, he came across a cabin in a small clearing. Realizing how dark it had grown, he decided to see if he could stay there for the night. He approached, and found the door ajar. Nobody was inside. The hunter flopped down on the single bed, deciding to explain himself to the owner in the morning. As he looked around the inside of the cabin, he was surprised to see…

A man went to a hotel and walked up to the front desk to check in. The woman at the desk gave him his key and told him that on the way to his room, there was a door with no number that was locked and no one was allowed in there. She explained that it was a storeroom, and that it was out of bounds. She reminded him of this several times before allowing him upstairs. So he followed the instructions of the woman at the front desk, going straight to his room, and going to bed. However the insistence of the woman had piqued his curiosity, so the next night he walked down the hall to the door…