Macabre Miscellanea

A mute old German plays his viol every night in the highest garret of a street that appears on no map. The student living below thinks it is genius, until he is finally invited up and sees the old man's face while he...

No services for 47 miles. Then a gas station, a red truck with its hood up, and nobody standing beside it. Then the same gas station again. Nineteen miles by the odometer, nineteen miles of the same half mile, and at...

A prisoner of the Inquisition wakes in total darkness, paces out the walls of his cell, and trips to land with his chin at the edge of a pit he never saw. That was supposed to be the easy death. When it fails, he is...

A man's forearm tattoo starts as nine interlocking triangles. Four days later there are sixty-three, rearranging themselves every night whether anyone's watching or not — and something new has just started showing up on...

She filmed her mother's funeral in daylight on November third. The tape insists it happened at 11:19 PM the night before—while the funeral home was locked and empty. That impossible timestamp is only the first recording...

Six accounts of something in the woods that isn't hiding from anyone — a dropped flashlight, picked up and clicked off; a torn trash bag, returned retied in a perfect knot; a voice, mimicked badly, like it's still...

A mathematics student needs somewhere quiet to study before his exams — and finds the one house in Benchurch that nobody else will go near. The rent is next to nothing, and nobody will explain why. Bram Stoker's "The...

Seven accounts of a face showing up where the real person wasn't — a girlfriend who can quote a whole date night down to the joke about the spicy appetizer, a manager who says the fingerprint scanner doesn't lie, a city...

A murdered man appears to one juror — and quietly guides a Victorian court toward the truth. In Charles Dickens's 1865 ghost story, a reluctant juror already haunted by a face from days before watches the dead man...

Seven cryptid encounters that all start distant, and none of them stay that way — a handprint dragged across a windshield, a voice at a bedroom window asking to be let in, a footprint on a kitchen table, still wet...

A man is torn apart in an open field with no witnesses and no weapon, and the jury calls it a mountain lion. In Ambrose Bierce's 1893 story, a nervous newspaperman testifies to something that sounds impossible, a...

Six firsthand accounts of feeling better than they should — a hospital patient who never heals, a boyfriend gaining exactly what his girlfriend loses, a roommate's meal-replacement shakes that aren't quite meal...

He nods. That's all it takes. What follows isn't a takeover so much as a resignation — his shadow steps into the life he was too tired to keep living, and he's pulled into a world of other people's lost and displaced...

Six firsthand accounts of the internet looking back — a laptop reopening old tabs in chronological order, a forum where every user shares one IP address, and a .onion site that knows exactly who's reading it. Dark Posts...

A houseguest notices two small points of light under his bed — a snake, coiled, watching him, or so he believes. What follows isn't a chase. It's a scholar slowly talking himself into terror over something that never...