Tag: hauntings

All Stories, Fantasy

Timeless Sympathy by Hana Carolina

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Our house was what dreams were made of—a hazy vision of lost grandeur, countless rooms, and long corridors leading to an airy parlour. A crumbling gilded ceiling glittered in the light seeping through tall windows. A polished table with a deep, glassy sheen, where I sat my laptop, stood on the elegant curve of Queen Anne’s legs. Georgian bookcases were crowded with dusty oil lamps, their glass chimneys catching the cold, sterile shine of fairy LED lights. A heavy marble fireplace, its mantle cluttered with birthday cards, roared into the night.

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All Stories, Fantasy

The Witch House by David Calcutt

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Once more I see myself, 11 years old, standing at the corner of the lane, and gazing through the wire-mesh fence. My three companions stand beside me. It’s late summer, early evening, the sky a bold and ever-deepening blue, the day seeming to go on without end. But gathering in the alleys and in the eaves of the houses, around the doorsteps and the feet of the lampposts, shadows are thickening, and already a scent of autumn sharpens the air. And before us, harbouring its own shadows, stands the witch house.

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All Stories, Fantasy, General Fiction

Are Ghosts Real? By Katelynn Humbles

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It’s not the kind of question you ask at breakfast. It waits. Lurks. Slinking into the places you’d rather not be: in the mildew-laced corners of motel rooms, the backseats of rental cars with traces of stale breath and strangers, the forgotten pews of ruined chapels where the wind mumbles louder than God.

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All Stories, General Fiction

The Night the River Sang by Claire Massey

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Prelude: Native American legend has it that the Pascagoula tribe preferred death by drowning to lives of enslavement by their enemies. According to one “mist of time” story, men, women, and children were heard chanting to their ancestors while walking en masse into this Mississippi coastal river. Receptive listeners, recreating on these waters, have long reported phantom music. In 1985, historians successfully lobbied for a name change, from the Pascagoula to the Singing River.

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All Stories, General Fiction

The Ghosts at Horseshoe Creek by Tom Sheehan

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A soft, steady breeze, with no puff to it, lifted over the edge of Horseshoe Creek and carried with it the sooty odor of a dead fire, a dank, drifting smell that came like the death of an animal a man has long known, perhaps a favorite horse, like a black stallion unseen at night but a dark star in the sunlight. Another person might say the odor was of an old market in a corner of town or an old home left to rot in the wake of a hundred battles that raged around it, the inhabitants, a man and his whole family, gone to dust in one of those fierce battles, so that their essence alone remained of them. One could almost see the house as it stood decorated with gardens, pet animals, and lusty children bouncing with life. Yet the odor, despite various images passersby would have, remained the cold, dank ashes of a fire long gone into night’s realm, thus it came back each and every nightfall thereafter.

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All Stories, Fantasy

Whispers in the Grass by Tom Sheehan

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At first, long before he became aware of whispers, the stones in the cemetery trembled at his touch; not all of the stones, but only those on graves belonging to people he had known in life: comrades, teammates, family members, girlfriends, lovers – or the stones memorializing those who hurt him in life or those he had hurt. Once in a while he never knew what the difference was.

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All Stories, Fantasy

The Otherworld Hiding Place by Michael Bloor

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Schiehallion, aka The Faery Hill of the Caledonians, is a magnificent, isolated, rugged, limestone ridge in Highland Perthshire, in the plumb-centre of Scotland. I’ve climbed it many times in the past, but now my arthritic knees deny me that pleasure: the jarring of the knees taken all the enjoyment out of hill-walking. So what the hell am I doing now, struggling along Glen Mór, on the south side of Schiehallion, in the November sleet, with a giant ship-in-a-bottle in my rucksack?

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All Stories, Fantasy

The Cormorant and the Misophonyx: A Feeble Fable of the Fantasmagorical by Leila Allison

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Prelude 

There are three music Spirits. First you have the Tintintinabulator. Tins were classically trained pianists in life who haunt specific keyboards (pianos, organs, harpsichords, etc.) in death. Tins are generally friendly, but being artists they are hypersensitive to criticism and require reassurance full time. Next we have the Chimespeak. Best described as self-taught travelling minstrels/buskers in life, Chimes are nomadic Spirits who wander from here to there and affect anything from the grandest church bells on down to kazoos fashioned from handkerchiefs and combs. Tastes aside, these two Spirits classes are equally talented even though the Tins tend to look down on the “prolish” Chimes, who in turn wonder how a Tin can look down on anything with “its” head so firmly tucked up its own buttocks.

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All Stories, Fantasy

Peeving Pandora the Pantrydraft: A Feeble Fable of the Fantasmagorical by Miss Renfield Stoker-Belle, noted Supernaturalist (Leila Allison)

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A Learned Introduction

Spirits can’t lie. Still, as it goes in both life and the afterlife, honesty does not mean accuracy. That’s the trouble with telling the truth. In the living world, a great deal of truth telling is dedicated to giving air to erroneous beliefs, mindlessly echoing hidden agendas and giving credence to hallucinations in general. The same holds true at the Otherside. For instance, if you tell a Spirit that the Earth is flat, she might believe otherwise and will tell you so. In this regard, a Spirit is even more stubborn than a mortal when it comes to shedding ignorance. The dumb shit they believe in stays believed in, no matter how much compelling evidence you may present to the contrary.

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