The Haunting (Short Stories)

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And like good American? Sandy and Tenie yearn to stay together like any married couple. So, Conjure Woman Tenie turns Sandy into a tree. Then Master Marrabo wants lumber. Sandy is chopped and built into a kitchen, where the grief-wracked Tenie dies. Chaon is the master of modern unease. His characters chafe against domestic duty until they detach, lash out, or vanish. In this story, even words disappear from the page as three sisters wonder about the night their father tried to kill them. Are they dreaming their future as they wait for the gunshot?

Why Are We Here? The streets overspill with garbage; at home, Colson is unwashed, the stove is dusty. This world needs looking after. Is the narrator here or not here? Like the narrator, all we want, most urgently, is to know. Three testimonies converge in this suspenseful murder-mystery-ghost-story: Bierce lets us play detective, judge, and jury. What can you do? This is the ultimate teacher-anxiety nightmare. He climbed into the drivers side of the truck, putting on his seat belt and getting ready to pull out of the parking spot directly in front of the house, when one of his friends asked " Hey wait what about your brother, isn't he coming with us?

He went to work early tonight, he is already gone, do you see his car anywhere? The next question they asked "So then who was walking behind you when you were leaving the house? One night, when I was maybe , I had trouble falling asleep. My bedroom was the entire top floor of our house with my bed and such being on the left side and storage closets and a play area being on the right. I was lying in bed when I heard a noise from the other side of the room and see a rocking horse begin to rock.

It was sitting just outside one of the storage closet doors. It proceeded to rock its way halfway across the room and stopped dead under the ceiling light. At this point I was freaking out and just buried my head under my blankets and never peeked out again until morning. It was all confirmed to not be a dream as the rocking horse was still in the middle of my room when I woke up. Furthermore, I got a stern reprimand from my parents for being up out of bed playing with my toys well past my bedtime.

I lived with her once for about 3 months, and so much weird stuff happened in that time. All my sister would say to me when I mentioned it was that her ghost "didn't like me being there. Things like going to bed with everything locked up and switched off and waking up in the morning with the back door open, lights on and the kettle switched on. One night my sister and I were getting ready to go out and I'd asked to borrow her liquid foundation. I used it and put it back where she kept her makeup.

Ten minutes later she's asking me for it and it was nowhere to be seen. She accused me of taking it and made me buy her a new one and refused to listen to my side of the story. About a year or so later when she was packing to move to a new house, she found the makeup in a shoebox with some old letters. The shoebox was in a zipped up suitcase that was underneath her bed. But probably the most scared I ever felt was one afternoon when I was the only one in the house which never happened as four other people lived there.

I'd arrived home from work and headed straight to the bathroom. I was standing in the bathroom and started squeezing a pimple on my chin when a female voice in the hall said "stop picking your zits! So I laughed, told her to "fuck off" and asked what she was doing for dinner. I stuck my head out into the hall.

I searched the house top to bottom and there was no one home.

I sat out on the front porch until someone else got home because I didn't want to be in there alone. This is much more of an interactive experience than anything else on the list. As you read through this WhatsApp conversation you have to manually click enter to make each new message appear.

It's as close to a text-based horror movie you'll find. This is a story I do not often tell.

I promise, sincerely, that this has scarred me for life and although I have looked into psychological explanations for what I heard and natural explanations for what occurred, they remain unsatisfactory. When I was a child, I was scared of the dark. I swore to my mother I heard voices in it.

They were not evil, but they were not familiar and so they scared me.

It was not uncommon in the middle of the night for me to wake up and hear "whispers" as I would call them when asking my mom. She figured they were just "bumps in the night" and typical kids nightmare material. I tried often to explain to her that it was more than that; that they sounded different from one another the way people's voices do. On some nights I would get so scared from these "whispers" that I would sleep in my mom's bed with her.

It was an added bonus that the bathroom was directly outside of her bedroom door for my late-night tinkles. I should add at this point that when walking out into the hall to go to the bathroom, you looked directly down the stairs that would lead you into my living room on the first floor as my mom's bedroom was on the second floor.

On one such night, around Christmas, I awoke and felt the need to relieve myself. I walked out from the door and distinctly heard the phrase "Look! The light had no other source, it was by itself, and I was transfixed by it. How else could he get into my house to know I was being a good boy? I was so excited I began walking down the stairs to greet him, picking up my pace after the second step as it began to creep off the wall and fade into the darkness in my living room. That's when I heard him.

A very strong, masculine voice. Different from the first. Not at all like my father's not to say he isn't masculine, it was just distinctly different. Go back up those stairs. After reaching the top of the stairs, I heard a very loud CRASH that sent me running back to my mother's bed where I jumped straight under the covers and stayed there the whole night. When we awoke the next morning, the poinsettia lights little Christmas flower lights that glowed red my mother had put on the railing down the stairs were pulled straight down to the bottom of the stairs, some broken from what seemed like a forceful tear, laying in a single pile.

The dry sink in my living room had fallen from the wall. My mother could not explain it! My father was worried we had been the victims of a home invasion. My sister was crying. There was nothing missing, nobody had broken in, there did not seem to be any reason this had happened. And then I saw it, and I kept quiet about it because I was so afraid that I could not force words out of my mouth. There, on the edge of the wooden dry sink which had been facing up, were three indentations where the finish on the wood had been worn, almost as if in a forceful grip.

That was what the bang was. After that day I never heard a single voice again. I do not like to imagine what was waiting downstairs for me that night, if it was anything at all, but I can tell you that the reality was that something had physically acted upon two things in my house near the bottom of that stairwell. After this, I had never heard another whisper again. Which is sad, because in some ways I would have liked to thank the man masculine energy? This happened when I was 7. I am 20 years old now, and because of this incident I am still afraid of the dark.

My grandfather told me this story about how one time he was sitting in a chair in front of the house, when he heard his wife repeatedly calling him from inside the house. The thing is, my grandmother passed away a few years before that. But he told me that the voice was so pressing that he actually got up to look inside the house, and as soon as he got inside he heard a loud crash behind him and turned around to see that the chair he has been sitting in moments ago had been crushed by the cast iron gutter that fell on it.

If he hadn't come inside the house he would have probably been seriously injured. I don't know if it's paranormal or not, but every time I think about it it sends chills down my spine. I was babysitting my niece once while I was staying at my brother's place, and they had the baby camera setup so I could see her on the little TV it came with. I was studying and started dozing off when I heard some whispering and realized it was coming from the monitor.

I initially thought it was some feedback or something, but when I looked at the TV there was a dark shadow near my niece's crib. I have never been more terrified in my life, but the shadow was clearly there where it had not been before. I ran to my niece's room and looked around and saw nothing, but I took her the hell out of there. I went back to the TV, and the shadow was clearly gone. I told my brother what happened and he pulled me aside and told me not to mention it to my sister-in-law because she'll freak out, but that he had seen that same thing several times now, with the same whispering.

They stayed in that house for about four more years and when my niece was just learning to talk she would tell her mom about her 'special friend. When they moved out, my brother told me my niece had become inconsolably sad because she would miss her 'friend. We have never to this day told her about that damn shadow, and she apparently never saw it. I didn't know that's what it was called until much later.

I was living in a house in Laguna Beach that had been there since the s. In it's history, it had been a speakeasy, a brothel and a house for smuggling illegal immigrants. One day, my new wife and I were having an argument. I can't even recall what it was about. She walked down the block to get a cup of coffee and cool off, and I was alone in the house. The way the place was built was incredibly haphazard.

There was a bedroom and living room on one side, then a bathroom with two entrances. On the other side of the bathroom was a hallway that had windows in one side and two bedrooms on the other. From my bedroom, I could look across the hall into the bathroom, then through the bathroom and down the other hall. I was standing at my dresser, and I just noticed movement out the corner of my eye, and looked down there. It was maybe three feet tall, and it was only vaguely humanoid. There was no sound that I could remember. Then it noticed me looking at it.

I can't say it turned around, it just, focused on me I guess. THEN I was scared. I yelled for my wife. I went the fuck outside, into the daylight, and didn't go back in until she got home about 10 minutes later. I don't believe in ghosts. I don't believe I saw something supernatural, but I know I saw something.

I don't know what it was. How did The Princess take control of our message board, if only for a few seconds? It didn't make any sense. Our message board wasn't a video game. Our message board pulled all its information from the Internet. The Princess was already inhabiting a game at the same time. All the rules we thought we knew, all the things we thought kept us safe had failed us.

Could she have done this at any time? Could she do it again? Were there any real limits to what she was capable of? We looked through all the data we'd collected.

We tried to find some common thread we'd been missing. There must have been some way we could have known. There had to be more answers than what we were seeing. We finally realized the truth. It was so obvious. The Princess had been in our message board the whole time. She was on every page. She was on every forum list. She'd been staring at us, watching us for years and we never even saw it. She was the banner at the top of the forum.

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She was every screenshot we'd posted, every video we'd uploaded and every piece of fan art we'd drawn. Every image of her is her. Every image of her, when observed, gives her power. She's not a ghost. She's not a computer virus. When we all watched that stream, banded together and gave her all of our attention all at once, we made her more powerful than she'd ever been before.

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We made her strong enough to manifest through the images we'd posted on our message board and speak directly to us. We took down all the images. From what we speculate, it's enough to simply never look at them again, but we deleted them all just to be certain. However, it may already be too late for us. I've been losing contact with other members of the society.

I can't tell if something's happened to them or if they've simply gone into hiding, but at this point only a fool wouldn't consider the worst-case scenario. I'm not completely heartless. I know she's fighting for her survival, now. For her, being forgotten is death. She does what she does in the hopes of keeping her memory alive. To that end, perhaps my telling her story to the world is a small act of mercy.

Maybe the thoughts I've lent her will ease her pain somewhat. I don't know, but either way that isn't why I wrote all this. What I've told you could put you in great danger, but it could also save your life. You're a target now, and in the months and years ahead she may well come for you, but I've also given you all the knowledge you need to keep yourself safe. It is my sincere hope that I've given you all the answers you want, so you won't make our mistake and try to investigate further.

There is one and only one thing you need to do to be safe:. My friend took this picture of his cousin in their new house. He says it was just the two of them there but that's not what it looks like. A friend of mine showed me how to use Google Maps. I'm sure you've seen it. It lets you use satellite images to look at locations all over the world. A few years ago, I was in a car accident.

Since then, I really don't leave the house that often. It's difficult, and the idea of a seeing a car drive by me makes me feel lightheaded. I was fascinated by the fact that I could see all over the world, almost like being there. I could virtually walk down the streets, and it almost felt like I was really there. I became instantly hooked.

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It gave me a real eye on the world. I could go to almost any major city, and I did. I'd seen streets in China, Japan, Germany, and England I'd even gone to tourist attractions like the Great Barrier Reef and Dracula's castle. My favorite was to go to random places in major cities and see how many people and animals I could find. The faces of the people were always blurred to protect their privacy, but it was still enjoyable to see them out there, enjoying their life, walking like it was no big deal.

I zoomed in closer and noticed the grey bag she carried on a grey and purple shoulder strap. She was walking in a relaxed manner, one hand trailing the wall beside her. I bet if I could have seen her face, I would see that she was smiling. I began to feel a little sad. I let my hands fall onto the arms of my wheelchair and looked at her for a minute more.

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I wished that I could be there, walking so carefree with her. That wouldn't happen though, until I died. I was stuck in this chair. I sighed and zoomed out of Tokyo.

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