There's a dark forest deep in the heart of the Rockies, surrounded on all sides by mountains.

In the center of the forest is a lake on the shores of which you w ill find a large black stone. If you swim out into the center of the lake, the stone will drag you down into the darkness. You will emerge from shadows in the arched roofs and buildings built on n of this city, or you shall be trapped there forever. The ll leer and curse at you, and their nknown and horrible lewdnesses. alley of a frightening dark city of heavily stilts. You must not talk to a single citize citizenry is horrid and mutated, and they wi hideous and deformed women shall offer you u

At the edge of this city is a highway. Walk down the left side of the road (yes, against traffic) with your thumb out and a man in a dark truck shall pick you u p and drive you back the way you came. The city will be gone, and he will take you to any place on Earth as long as you can name it and there's a road there. --David Lang's two children, George, 8, and Sarah, 11, were playing in the yard wh en Lang and his wife came out of the vine-covered brick house. He spoke to the c hildren and then started walking out across the pasture. At this time, Judge Aug ust Peck, and Lang's brother-in-law came driving up the lane in a buggy. The jud ge saw Lang in the field and was about to call out to him when it happened. Lang vanished from the face of the earth. --There was a hunter in the woods, who, after a long day hunting, was in the middl e of an immense forest. It was getting dark, so he decided to in one direction u ntil he got out. On his way out, it grew very dark, very fast, so he started to quicken the pace. After a while he stumbled across a cabin. Realising how dark i t had become, he decided to see if he could stay there for the night. He approac hed, and realised the door was open. There was no-one inside. So he flopped down on the single bed and thought he'd meet the owner in the morning. As he looked around, he saw many portraits on the wall, all painted with exquisite detail. Bu t they were all staring down at him, their faces twisted in looks of hatred. As he stared at them, he grew increasingly uncomfortable, and the pictures started to scare him. He thought he'd look at them in the daylight, in more detail. So h e closed his eyes, turned over, and fell asleep. He awoke with a beam of sunligh t hitting his face, and thought about the paintings again. As he got up to look at them, he realised there were no paintings in the room; only windows. One minute he was standing in an open field with no trees, stones, or fences. Th e next, he was simply gone. Lang's wife and the two men immediately ran to the s pot to check that he might have fallen through a hole in the ground. There was no such hole. Mrs. Lan g went hysterical and was taken into the house. Neighbors were called out to hel p, scores of people searched the field, but to no avail. A surveyor and geologist examined the field and found limestone bedrock a few feet underground without a single fracture in it. For a month the search carried on. All the Lang servants quit in fear. A year later, the grass w here Land was standing had grown high and thick in a circle 20' in diameter. No farm animal would graze there, and it seemed free of insects.

One day in August, 1881, Sarah and George approached the green circle and called out "Father, are you anywhere around?" They repeated the question 4 times. Hear ing no answer, they began to walk away...when they heard a faint cry for help from out of nowhere. Q uickly, the children ran to get their mother and pulled her outside. They called to their father again. And he answered. For several days, the family returned, and each day when they c alled, the answering voice became fainter, until finally there was no response a t all. --There's a small, inconspicuous building called "Padraic Willoughsby and Co." in the industrial district of Birmingham, UK. Most of the time, its doors are locke d and the windows are draped. However, on February 29th of every leap year, there will be a small plas tic container outside the front door containing business cards. On the front of the card it says in large capital letters, "PADRAIC WILLOUGHSBY AND CO. ENGLAND'S THAUMATURGICAL SPE CIALISTS". On the back, in nearly intelligibly small type it says "The blood of the innocent." Any night after midnight one can come to Paidraic Willoughsby and Co. and slide their card through the door, and the door will instantly unlock. Inside there is an empty room with white walls. No light reaches this room, except for a small sliver from the othe r end of the room. When you approach this room you will find that it is actually another door. When you knock on it, a voice will ask "What makes a man become exalted?" and you must re spond with the phrase on the back of the card: "The blood of the innocent." The door will open and you will come into another room, a kind of lounge. Inside it you will find around 510 people, depending on the night, sitting around smoking and drinking brandy, a ll in late Edwardian period dress. There is absolutely no conversation at all in this room and, it is nearly silent except for the phonograph which plays the exact same record over and over, ad infinitum. If you attempt to speak to one of the patrons, they will promptly ignore you and pretend as if you were not there. Towards the south wing of the room you will find a large, round table, slightly different from the others. On it will be a quill pen and a document. The documen t shows all of your personal information: name, birth date, place of residence, criminal record, gre atest fears, etc. At the bottom of the document is a long line that asks for you r signature. No one knows what happens after you sign it. --A degenerated VHS dub was discovered in the University Library containing five m inutes of inexplicable amateur footage. In one continuous shot, the camera momen tarily focuses on a doorway on the north wall of a living room before the operator climbs outside of the house through a window to show the exterior white clapboard. The camera the n moves inside the house through a second window completely circling the doorway and so proving, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that insulation or siding is the only possible thing this do orway could lead to. A

hand appears in the frame and pulls open the door, revealing a narrow black hall way at least ten feet long. The camera begins to move closer, threatening to act ually enter it. A voice can be heard, "Don't you dare go in there again, Davy," to which another voice a dds, "Yeah, not such a hot idea." --Leon Czolgosz, assassin of William McKinley, the the 25th President of the Unite d States, was electrocuted for his crime on October 29, 1901, at Auburn Prison i n Auburn, New York. Among the personal effects found in his cell was a U.S. quarter stamped with the date 2218. The face in profile on said quarter was not George Washington, but r ather a face which has yet to be identified. --A young man and his new bride were honeymooning in Paris when his wife went into a restroom and didn't return. With time the man began to fear the worst and went to the police, the police tho ught it was most likely the girl simply had second thoughts about the marriage, but they checked it out anyway and found no evidence of foul play As weeks turned into months the man finally gave up on finding his beautiful wif e but his life fell into a shambles he was so filled with grief. Unable to hold a job or go on with his life, he took to wandering the world look ing for anything that might ease his pain. Years later in Borneo he came upon a freak show in an old shabby building, he we nt in on a whim. In the last filthy cage he saw a twisted, scarred and mutilated woman rocking back and forth and groaning strange animal-like noises. He screamed as he recognized the birthmark on his wife's face. --An unpopular young med. student had been particularly annoying one day and some of her classmates decided to play a trick on her. They snuck into her room after she'd gone to bed and placed an amputated arm into bed with her. The next morning they anxiously await ed her reaction but got none. Eventually they went up to check on her and found her sitting on the bed, moaning and gurgling as she gnawed on the arm. --A teenage baby-sitter put the kids she was watching to sleep in their beds and w ent back downstairs. The late night news was on the TV -- the reporter said a ps ychopath from a local mental institution was on the loose and that police thought he might be in the a rea. He cautioned residents to lock their doors and windows because this guy was very, very dangerous. Well, the teenager checked the locks on the windows and the doors, but she forgo t the door on the cellar bulkhead. Needless to say, the psychopath broke in abou t an hour later, coming up from the cellar, armed with an ax. The children heard some noises downstairs, but thought it was the baby-sitter moving some furniture around. Then it got re al quiet. All they heard for the remainder of the night was this noise: "Thump! Thump! Dra-aag... Thump!

Thump! Dra-aag..." Evidently, they were too afraid to get up to see what it was. In the morning, their parents came home and were horrified to find the babysitter at the top of the st airs, dead with both arms hacked off at the elbows. She'd been climbing the stai rs on the bloody stumps of her arms, pulling her badly injured body along. Was she trying to check on th e children? Was she trying to get help? Or in the madness of her tortured soul, was she planning to kill the children herself? --There exists a small circle of trees somewhere in the Rocky Mountains, completel y unremarkable from the outside, but just inside no sun or star ever shines. Rum or has it that anyone that can spend three pitch black days and nights within the grove without going mad will be greeted with the queer sight of the sun rising in the west on the be ginning of the forth day, filling the grove with radiant light. One wish may be made before this sun, and it shall be fulfilled. However, once that person makes the wish, the world outside the grove shall forever be as dark for them as it had been inside for those three days. --During a wedding reception of a young couple the guests decided on a drunken gam e of hide and seek. It was decided that the groom was "it" and he eventually fou nd everyone but his new bride. Eventually the man became furious and decided it wasn't funny anymore and left her there. As weeks went by he accepted that she'd had second thoughts and went on with her life so he did the same. A few years later a cleaning lady dusted off an old trunk in the attic of the building where the reception had taken place, out of curiosity she opened it. Inside the trunk was the rotted body of the missing bride who'd apparently became locke d in the trunk she'd hid in. Whether she'd suffocated or starved was unknown, bu t her face was frozen in a scream. ----There's a movie theater in downtown Phoenix, Arizona that only plays movies from 1987. If you pay for 3 tickets and buy a large popcorn, they will play a film t hat shows you your future. If you watch the entire film completely, you will have sleeping problems for the rest of your life. --A person is dared to spend the night in a crypt in a local cemetery and is found in the morning totally insane and their hair has turned snow white. This one ca n vary from biker club initiation, fraternity or sorority initiation or a dare between a group of kids. It takes place usually in an gated above ground crypt. The person is locked in with the dead and left over night. No one knows what actually happens to said person because they never speak again, their hair turns snow white and they go insane.

--An unusual amount of deaths have occurred around the three "Poltergeist" films, including three of the stars. These incidences have given way to rumors that the films were cursed because of their content. This seems a little silly; there are always explanatio ns to "curses" like this. Or are there?? Two of the stars from the first film have died at young ages, two from the secon d film at not so young ages. 22-year old Dominique Dunne, who played older daughter Dana Freeling, died on No vember 4th,1982, at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, California. She had been chocked into a coma by her boyfriend. 12-year-old Heather O'Rourke died of septic shock on February 1st., 1988, at the Children's Hospital in San Diego, California. What was thought to be the flu t urned out to be a bowel obstruction which caused toxins to enter her system. She died at Children's Hosp ital while undergoing surgery to remove the obstruction. 60-year-old Julian Beck, who played the evil preacher Kane in the second film, d ied of stomach cancer on September 14th,1985, at Mount Sinai Hospital in New Yor k, NY. Like Heather O'Rourke, he died during the period between filming and release, but in his case the film in question was Poltergeist II, which was released in May 1986. O'Rour ke died before the release of Poltergeist III. 53-year-old Will Sampson, who played Taylor in the second film, died on June 3rd ., 1987, in a Houston, Texas hospital after receiving a heart-lung transplant 6 weeks earlier. The cause of his death was attributed to severe pre-operative malnutrition and post-operat ive kidney failure along with a fungal infection. --Once, there were two girls named Mary and Karen having a sleepover. It was being held at Karen's house because her parents were out of town. In fact, every time Karen's parents went out of town, they had a sleepover because Karen was afraid to stay by herself. I t was Halloween and once again, Karen's parents were out of town. When Mary rang the doorbell, Karen answered wearing a beautiful silk nightgown. It was blood-red and had a furry co llar. Mary envied Karen for having that nightgown. They began to watch some scary movies. All of the sudden, Mary heard a soft "thu mp, thump, thump, thump." She was frightened and looked at Karen, who didn't see m to notice. As the night progressed, Mary heard the thumping noise intermittently and it seemed to be growing nearer. When the noise sounded from right behind them, the electricit y and lights went out. Mary and Karen ran screaming, up to the second floor, into Karen's room. It was now midnight and the two girls were scared to death. Suddenly, Karen got up and ran out of the room, slamming the door behind her. Ma ry sat there for what seemed like an eternity. After a long silence, she heard t he thumping noise again. It seemed to be coming up the stairs, getting louder and louder. Thump, Thump TH UMP, THUMP, THUMP! Then, it stopped. Mary thought she heard someone standing on

the other side of the door and bravely got up and opened it. Mary couldn't see a thing, so she reached out her arm and felt Karen's soft silk nightgown. Then, she reached up to feel her favorite part of the nightgown, the furry collar. When she reached higher, there was nothing but a bloody stump!! When the lights came on, she discovered that her poor friend had been decapitated! The neighbors heard he r screaming at the top of her lungs and called the police. When the police arrived, they found Karen's dead body, and Mary, with snow-white hair, completely insane --A teenage girl, popular, rich, and happy, was walking through a store with her m om and saw a beautiful porcelain doll, which would look great with her collectio n. She demanded that her mother buy it for her. He mother agreed, and got it for her. As soon as the girl returned home, she unpacked the doll and set it on a stand a bove her bed. She then left her room and went out with her friends. When she got home, it was late and she was tired. She went to her room, put on her pajama's and tucked herself into bed. When she woke up the next morning, she saw a note attached to her lamp beside he r bed. It was from her mother, telling her they'd be out of town until next Sund ay. She yawned and noticed that her cheek was sore, but she didn't pay much attention to it. She go t dressed and went to school. This went on for a few days until she woke up and her cheek was extremely sore. She decided she'd check it out in a minute or two, then went about her room, pic king out what she would wear. She finally decided and walked over to her full body mirror and noticed a large, ugly lump on her cheek. Figuring it was a pimple, she squeezed it... and felt something moving. All of t he sudden, spiders began pulling themselves out of the lump. She screamed, but s ince there was no one home in her huge house, nobody heard her. She tore at the spiders but there were millions... and she died of the poison in their bites. Apparently... there was a nest of spiders in the porcelain doll she'd gotten --There was once a young boy and his sister. One day their parents went out to run some late errands they had put off until the last minute. Before they left they told their children not to open the door under any circumstances. Because they were watching TV, they didn't pay much attention. About an hour aft er they left, there heard a knock, knock, knock, knock. Knock, knock, knock. The children who were now in their rooms asleep, were awoken at once. Knock, knock, knock. Knock, knock, knock. Finally the sister got up wondering wh o it could be. her brother lay awake in his bed listening. When he heard nothing for a few minutes and his sister did not return, he got a little scared. He decided to go to his neighbors house, who were very close friends of his. He got out of bed and headed for the front door in the dark. When he got to his nei ghbors house, he found them awake.

They told him they were relieved he was there, because they had just heard on th e news that a murderer had been spotted just a few blocks away not too long ago. In the morning, they discovered the sisters body, and a discarded knife on the brothers bed. --In rural southern Illinois a toy company began selling "realistic" baby dolls to expectant mothers. But apparently after the mother had her child the toy baby w ould start crying. Eventually the "rocking motion" advertised to calm it down wouldn't work, and yo u couldn't get it to stop without shaking it. Eventually when it started crying the parent would have to beat it, and the beatings and thrashings would have to get harder and harder to get it to be quiet. The only thing that seemed to shut the baby doll up permanen tly was the bash its head against the wall to destroy whatever mechanism triggered the crying. On mor e than one occasion though, neighbors called the authorities to report child abu se, and when the police arrived they found the the bloody remains of infants smeared across the walls an d the floor. In most cases the mother couldn't understand why the police were th ere, she just "got rid of the stupid doll" as she rocked a baby-shaped bundle in her arms. --Goatman, a creature you should avoid at all costs. He is one of the USA's most h orrific monsters: half man, half goat. He appears on quiet roads, often in the s tate Maryland, with a shiny axe that he uses for chopping up teenagers. The police have always had problems catching the Goatman because his strong legs and endless stamina always allow him to get away. No one knows exactly where he came from. Legend has it that he is the result of a top-secret experiment, approved by Washington, D.C . and conducted by the local authorities. Something went tragically wrong. According to rumors, a scientist was conducting experiments on animals to improv e humans physical abilities. Unfortunately, an experiment with a goat went horri bly wrong. A power failure took place and a strange mix occurred. When the smoke settled, the scien tist had become a monster, some part man, some part goat. Insane with disappoint ment and fear of what would happen to him, he ran screaming out into the night. The Goatman was loose. .. Because of his horrific look, the Goatman developed a special hatred for young, pretty teenagers and his life is now dedicated to killing them. Some of his vict ims survive because they are in cars when the attacks occur. It appears the monster likes to jump up on t he cars and scare the heck out of them. When particularly blood thirsty, he chop s the tires so they can't get away. The evil creature then drags them with him, deep into the forest , where he consumes them with great pleasure. Maybe he is just a story to scare away young couples from places where they can be alone and make out. Or, maybe not. My advice: if you have to stop, l ock your car doors, and look around for anything strange. Do not stop the car in the middle of the woods under any circumstances. --Legend has it that if you come face to face with your doppelganger, it's an omen

or warning of death -- for both you and your twin. Because of this, if you see a replica of yourself, run for your life. If you keep seeing your doppelganger, chances are that your d ays are numbered, because you'll soon see your demise. There are many stories regarding encounters with doppelgangers, none of them ple asant. Often, a person does not actually see their own doppelganger, but someone else does. Can you be two places at once? No, but it's a very strange feeling when someone who knows y ou very well insists that they saw you just thirty minutes ago -- and you were n owhere in the vicinity. Imagine this happening time and time again and you'll soon go insane. Hence, the myth that a doppelganger will precede the arrival of the real person. Many stories explaining their experiences with these apparitions have this in c ommon. Perhaps he's one step ahead of you? Alex sent in a compelling story last year, just before Halloween. He describes s ome unsettling incidences, but had no idea what the cause was. The story was edi ted for only grammar and was published with the title of The Cemetery Mimic. Lauryl writes in a few weeks later, stating that she believes this story depicts repeated encounters with a doppelganger. So are there really doppelgangers or is it just a creepy urban legend? You're no t likely to believe it if you've never had an experience with one. Whether Alex really has one is just speculation and how the story is interpreted. The story rings true, but Alex is probably not in any danger as there's no solid proof of doppelgangers or of some one meeting their demise after seeing their own. Regardless, the legend lives on. --If you watch every State of the Union Address since it's been filmed and availab le on tape, you'll see that halfway through--exactly halfway through--the Presid ent always says the same word. Most say it under their breath during the standing ovations, but some are forced to work it into the speech itself. What's the word? You don't want to know. --A laundress, newly moved to Charleston following the Civil War, found herself aw akened at the stroke of twelve each night by the rumble of heavy wheels passing in the street. But she lived on a dead end street, and had no explanation for the noise. Her husband wo uld not allow her to look out the window when she heard the sounds, telling her to leave well enough alone. Finally, she asked the woman who washed at the tub next to hers. The woma n said: "What you are hearing is the Army of the Dead. They are Confederate sold iers who died in hospital without knowing that the war was over. Each night, they rise from their graves and go to reinforce Lee in Virginia to strengthen the weakened Southern forces." The next night, the laundress slipped out of bed to watch the Army of the Dead p ass. She stood spell-bound by the window as a Gray fog rolled passed. Within the fog, she could see the shapes of horses, and could hear gruff human voices and the rumble of canons bei ng dragged through the street, followed by the sound of marching feet. Foot sold iers, horsemen, ambulances, wagons and canons passed before her eyes, all shrouded in Gray. Afte

r what seemed like hours, she heard a far off bugle blast, and then silence. When the laundress came out of her daze, she found one of her arms was paralyzed . She has never done a full days washing since. --Somewhere in the Pacific ocean is an island, surrounded by a swamp filled with t he carcasses of fish and other, less recognizable things poking out of the mud. The mire extends as far as you can see. Every so often, the mud will dry enough under that you can walk on it; about a days travel from shore is a large mound, at the top of which is a n immense canyon, the bottom of which cannot be seen, although if the moon is large enough you will be able to see the slope of the canyon, and eventually the bottom, which is covere d by a strange body of water. Rising from the water is a monolith, which is covered in bas-reliefs. --A few college girls are having a slumber party and go to rent a video at a local dealer. The girls cannot agree on a film, so one of them asks for help. The cle rk states that she has just the thing and disappears into the back room. Meanwhile, one girl sees a box-less tape laying on the counter and reaches towar d it. Just then, the clerk comes out from the back and tells her not to touch it and hands her an older film. The girl asks about the first tape, and the woman tells her that it is jus t a home movie. The girls agree to rent the tape that the woman suggests. While they are checking out, the girl who asked for help swipes the "home movie" tape. Back at their house, the girl tells the others about the tape she swiped and the y laugh, telling her that she is dumb for stealing some woman's home movies. Sti ll, they ask her to play the tape. She puts the tape in and then the power goes out -- but the television stays on. The video starts playing and shows a black woman being burned for practicing wit chcraft and hoodoo. She utters a curse that all who witnesses her death will fac e the same fate in twoday time. The VCR begins to make skipping sounds and then cuts off. As promised, the girls died forty-eight hours after watching the tape. They all met their de mise in unrealistic places such as the pool or ice rink. --In 1971, a few weeks before a scheduled moon shot, an alternate astronaut was se en behaving in an erratic fashion at lunch. He arose from the table, headed over to where a group of high-ranking Air Force officers and NASA officials were eating, proceeded to lay down upon it, squeeze a thin red line of ketchup across his throat. He convulse d and wheezed to one of the officers, grabbing him by the lapels, "Don't.... order...the... swordfish." He was remanded to psychiatric care in the Pacific Northwest in a somewhat lessthan-therapeutic castle moved there formerly by a robber-baron at the turn of th e century. During the astronaut's stay, a new commandant came, a Marine Colonel. This colonel was foun

d dead not long after his arrival with a single self-inflicted slash across his throat. --In winter of 1944, with overtaxed supply lines in the Ardennes, a German medic h ad completely run out of plasma, bandages and antiseptic. During one particularl y bad round of mortar fire, his encampment suddenly became a bloodbath. The survivors claimed to hear, above the screams and barked commands of their Lieutenant, someone cackling wit h almost girlish glee. The medic made his rounds during the fire, in almost complete darkness as he had so many times before, but never this short on supplies. The bombardment moved to other ends of the line, most men dropped off to sleep i n the still dark hours of the morning - New Year's Day, 1945. The men awoke at first light with screams. They discovered that their bandages w ere not typical bandages at all, but hunks and strips of human flesh. Several me n had been given fresh blood transfusions, with no blood supplies available. Each treated man was almos t completely covered, head-to-toe, with the maroon stain of blood. The medic was found, sitting on an ammunition tin, staring off into space. When one man approached him, tapped him on the shoulder, his tunic fell off to reveal all skin, muscle, and sinew had been stripped from his torso and his body almost completely dried of b lood. In one hand was a scalpel, and in the other, a blood transfusion vial. None of the men treated for wounds that night, in that camp, saw the end of Janu ary, 1945. --The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human min d to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each str aining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the pi ecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age. If you travel to the furthest glaciers in the south, it is said you can walk int o the canyons of ice there. If you find the junction of two canyons that form a perfect square, you can lie down in the middle there and feel no cold. If you listen, the ice will speak and what it says will make poor men rich, and sane men mad. --At the edge of the is a large, smooth is not cracked or marked in any way, t. It's curved and an climb on top of from the side, and Pacific ocean, on some abandoned beach in the tropics, there rock that sits just beyond the reach of the highest tides. It and the smooth black stone reflects even the faintest of ligh formed in just such a way that if you are very careful, you c it stand on a flat area at the top.

If you stand on the rock when the moon is full and shining, and the water is at its highest point, you can see something in the sea below you. A faint shimmer o f light, a flash of something you can't quite identify. It gets brighter, easier to see as you kneel down and lean closer, over the edge of the rock. Once you are leaning out further than would probably be safe, your left leg will slip on the slippery stone, and you will fall forward into the light. There is no splash, no sound; you simply disappear into the ocean. No one knows what happens after you disappear. But there are some who claim to h ave fallen off the same rock, what seems like a lifetime ago. According to the e arthly calendar, they were gone for one day, then washed up on another beach, sometimes half a world a way. But their eyes are hardened, and they rarely speak anymore, only occasional ly muttering of fiery paths and gibbering demons. --The lottery gives you a three digit number and a four digit number each day, rig ht? What else has seven digits split into three, then four? That's right, it's a phone number. The lottery is a telephone oracle. Whoever is on the end of the line when you call t hat number knows something that you need to know, though sometimes getting the p rophecy out of them can be difficult. It helps if you have a winning ticket, I believe. --For a brief period in 1971, a New Jersey based company sold novelty "x-ray" glas ses through the mail via advertisements in the Marvel line of comic books. Peopl e who viewed their televisions while wearing these glasses reported seeing images that were "hellis h" or "like hell". It should be noted that this phenomena occurred whether the t elevisions in question were turned on or not. The company quickly went out of business and investigatio ns reveal that the company's address leads to a graveyard founded many decades b efore 1971. --The assassination of John F. Kennedy started a macabre chain that continues to t his day. Oswald killed Kennedy, Jack Ruby killed Oswald, this much we know. What few people are aware of is how far it continued after that. In 1967 while awaiting retrial for the murder of Lee Harvey Oswald, Ruby died in Parkland Hospital (the place of death of both Oswald and JFK), some say due to the negligence of the doctor overseeing him. A few years following this, that same doctor died in an a uto accident while on his way home. The driver of the car that struck him would make a full recovery, though the medical costs would bankrupt him and drive him to a life of crime. A store owner acting in self defense would be the one to claim his life, and so on . Few have kept full track of the chain up 'til now, or how far from Dallas it's t

raveled, but many believe it still continues. Fewer still are sure if it started with Oswald and JFK, or if perhaps it goes further back than that... betraying some unknown transgressio n from President Kennedy's past. Just be careful out there. --During the Blizzard of 1978 in Vermont, I was driving a truck bringing food to p eople snowed in. I arrived at an intersection that had apparently been completel y plowed under with a mound of snow even my 4x4 couldn't pass. I turned my attention to the bare field on either side of the road and decided to just cut through when my eyes became fixed on the glint of a convertible in the middle of the snow covered field with a man in short sleeves sitting behind the wheel. A queer sight to behold in -10 degree temperature and knee-high snow. Concerned, I got out of the 4x4 and hurried over to him. Strangely enough, my ey es never strayed from focusing on the car and the man inside. By the time I was about 20 feet from the car, I started sweating and sweltering in my heavy snowsuit. Stopping for breath , I realized that I was no longer in the snow-covered clearing, rather on a loos ely sandy isthmus connecting two islands reminiscent of somewhere in the South Pacific. I approached the convertible to find the man reading a map of a place I didn't r ecognize. The man turned and looked at me, his expression somewhat stunned that I was standing in this tropical setting wearing a cold-weather snowsuit. "Goin' my way?" He asked. I hadn't taken my eyes off of his car the entire time. I was only aware of the o dd surroundings from the periphery of my vision. I began to back slowly away, th en suddenly terror broke over me, I whirled to run. The second I broke concentration on the convertible, I saw the snow covered fiel d again, and the 4x4 behind me, slowly accumulating a layer of snow on the roof. I looked back around for the convertible but found no signs or tracks of it or the man in it. I got b ack into the 4x4 as though nothing had happened. About a week later, I saw a report that said under a snowdrift, in the same fiel d, a man was found in a convertible, frozen to death. The top was jammed down an d he evidently hadn't dressed for the blizzard. --A mason, Benjamin Franklin's links to occult secret societies have long been kno wn. In the clip below, the History Channel talks about his involvement in the He llfire Club, a secret society that conducted black masses and orgies. These bizarre, occult practices are still going on today in secret societies like the Bohemian club. In 1998, workmen restoring Franklin's London home dug up the remains of six chil dren and four adults hidden below the home. The London Times reported on Februar

y 11, 1998: "Initial estimates are that the bones are about 200 years old and were buried at the time Franklin was living in the house, which was his home from 1757 to 1762 , and from 1764 to 1775. Most of the bones show signs of having been dissected, sawn or cut. One skull ha s been drilled with several holes. Paul Knapman, the Westminster Coroner, said y esterday: "I cannot totally discount the possibility of a crime. There is still a possibility that I may have to hold an inquest." --Go into a Subway and tell the clerk you want to order the sandwich they'd always wished a customer would order. They will quickly, quietly, and without expressi on, craft the sandwich from many different ingredients. The sandwich will be the best thing you've ever tasted. This only works once per clerk. If you ask them to make it again, they will not recollect how. If you attempt to re-construct it, it will fail. --My grandfather served in the European Theater of Operations during WWII, an expe rience he rarely talks much about. I've only managed to coax one story out of hi m. He and a low-ranking officer (granddad was an enlisted man) were traveling by je ep somewhere in Belgium with a cache of much-needed ammunition. Taking a wrong t urn on an unpaved road they first became lost, then began to run low on fuel. They sought to ask some l ocals for help, as the Belgians were highly sympathetic to the Allied effort. They spied a small hamlet, made up of fewer than a dozen thatched huts, and bega n walking towards it. They were met halfway by a group of three men dressed most ly in animal skins, all of whom spoke angrily in a language neither of them understood (not French, not German, and certainly not English). Negotiations proved futile, and one of the three drew a small rusty knife. The L ieutenant drew his .45 sidearm in return and killed the man when he rushed at th em as if to attack. This act scared the other two off. Eventually they repaired the jeep themselves and found their way back to base by the next day. A report was filed, but not much made of it. The following winter the Lieutenant was killed in an artillery barrage, making my grandfather the only known living witn ess to the event. Now what's interesting is what reminded him of the story: we were watching a doc umentary on the development of language, this one specifically about the Saxon t ongue, which thousands of years ago developed into languages like German and English. Granddad remarked how much it sounded like the words he'd heard that day. --They say that the olfactory senses (the sense of smell) is the sense closest lin ked to memory.

Go on ebay, or to a high-end antiques dealer. Find an item made a good amount of time before you were born that was hermetically sealed, vacuum packed or tightl y packaged in some way. Make sure you are in surroundings of completely neutral smell with little or no wind. Open the package. The smell should hearken back to your collective subconscious or memory of a pas t life. If you are successful in choosing the right item, with the right smell, you will have at least a memory flash, or likely a memory flood of years before you were born. --Rumor has it that every Halloween during the hours of 2am and 5am, there exists a void. You must stand in front of a mirror in a pitch black room with your gaze fixated on the mirror. If you remain in the room when the moment arrives, you will feel a chill seize y our body. Place your right hand on the mirror and whisper "I accept." If done co rrectly, in the mirror there will be a faint image of a fleshless infant with pitch black eyes. He will stare directly into your soul and you will hear the buzzing of flies and nervou s whispering. You will not be able to make out the image in the mirror but you will be filled with unsp eakable terror. The infant will ask you five questions about events that have oc curred within your life. His voice will sound like the rubbing of sandpaper and will be devoid of all emo tion. For each question that you answer incorrectly, one of your five senses wil l be consumed. For each question that is answered correctly, you will be able to recite the name of some one you know. That person will be found dead the next morning, after a night of unimaginable horror, with their flesh removed and their eyes missing. --A secret society meets once every three years at a small diner in West Virginia. To join, you must come to the American Grill diner located in Cricket at 9:30 PM on September the twenty-first. The only uniform is a heavy overcoat and a green tie. Order an "Eggs and bacon platter with coffee." The waiter will tell you that the breakfast menu is unavailable, reply, "Well, just the coffee then." You'll be a llowed to stay after closing time for the meet. The meeting itself is a meeting of minds and philosophy regarding immortality. T he society is called "The Socratic Method." They hoist their mugs at the beginni ng and end of the meeting and say "Death to Socrates." It's rumored a little hemlock is added to the first cup, and an antidote to the last. That's odd, though. There is no antidote for hemlock. --There is a small island in the Mediterranean Sea that does not appear on any map . It cannot be seen from any other island, nor can any other land be seen from i t. On this island is a lighthouse, rotting from age and sea water, which is never lit. There is nothing

inside it, save for a spiraling staircase that leads to the top, and an ancient , dusty bookcase. The case is filled with unmarked books, bound in ancient leather, save for a sin gle space. If you remove a book from the shelf, it will fling itself open in you r hands, and the words inscribed in it shall start screaming to the air. You must wrestle the book clos ed and shove it back on the shelf, or the immortal evil contained within its pag es shall break free, and you will be forced to take its place, with pages, ink and binding crafted from y our own flesh and blood. However, if you bring the correct book to the island, and place it in the empty space, the lighthouse will light. As long as it is lit, the world shall enjoy an unending paradise, for all the evil in the world will be contained in the lighthouse. And while it is l it, nothing can go in or out. The only problem; you will be trapped for eternity with all the evil ever known or conceived, by man or god. And the only way to escape, is to douse the light. --Please forgive my bad English, mes amis, but I have a story you may find interes ting. Recently, while I was watching people around the world-famous Notre Dame de Pari s cathedral, I noticed an old beggar woman who had a cart full of flashy, colore d items. Rubber ducks, fake flowers, little cubes from an alphabet game... All colored, all different. Went here the day after, and I noticed there were less green items, and many, mo re orange objects in the cart. I also happened to notice a news on the radio, te lling that the European currency was really high, while the dollar went down... Next day, I counted the items. Just for fun, entered the numbers in my computer, made an Excel file of it, and went on and on, every day for nearly one month. At the end of the month, I had a picture, a perfect graphic showing me how the y ellow, the red, the green, the orange and the blue went up and down. I made the same graphic with a dozen of worldwide currencies. I discovered dollar was the green, euro the orang e, deutschmark the yellow, and so on. Every day, Old Lady of the Money Cart show s you what happens on the world. Now, I wonder about two most disturbing questions... I never managed to discover any currency matching the white items... And second: what would happen if someone were to take objects from the cart... o r put some items inside ? Well, mes amis, sorry for my bad English, once again, but, thing about it and ke ep your eyes open when you get to Paris and around Notre Dame... A bientot, mes amis... Le marchand de jouets --You're walking down your street, it's a gray, cloudy, unseasonably cold day. As the brown leaves swirl about you, you hear, faintly yet distinctly, a baby cr ying. As you move toward the noise, it becomes the sound of a young girl sobbing

. Closer you approach the sound, and as the wind picks up, it is clearly the sound of a young woman sc reaming. You race toward the corner, and as you near it, the sound becomes that of an old crone choking. Then silence as you turn the corner, revealing nothing but a puddle of water on the sidewalk. As you look into the puddle, it seems your reflection is delayed b y a few seconds...as if it is watching you and then mimicking you... --There is a moment each leap year, at exactly three minutes past three on the mor ning of February twenty-ninth. If you possess the courage, await that moment in darkened room, with no other present. At that moment, the darkness will deepen. If you were to hold you hand directly before your face, you would not see a thing. But you must not do so. No, for that would be to waste the moment. Instead you must reach out, into that impenetrable darkn ess. And it will reach out to you. An unseen hand will grasp yours. You must not flinch away, nor tighten your gras p. To do so will only slough away more of the decrepit flesh that covers it, and anger its unseen owner. Remain perfectly still, as the withered fingers move over your palm, tracing unk nown patterns. Do not move an inch as it crawls slowly up your arm. And most of all, do not even breathe as it caresses your face, touching what cannot be seen. Should you remain still through this, the hand will be withdrawn and a voice wil l speak, so close you can feel its breath on your face, smell the scent of decay it carries. It will ask you for one simple piece of information: your name. Answer truthfully. Answer tr uthfully, and the presence will retreat, leaving only a whisper in the air as th e darkness lifts. "It is done." From that day on, untold good fortune will be yours, and mysterious power. You w ill lack nothing, and have everything. But in a year, perhaps two, you will feel your skin begin to decay, and smell the sweet smell of death upon your breath... --A 15-year old boy in a small town in Maryland sat down at his computer after get ting home from school one day. He turned it on and logged into an instant messag ing program, and was then surprised to receive a message from a classmate of his, who had been absent that day. It consisted of two words; "please come". Confused, the boy sent a reply, asking why he'd been absent that day. After two more messages and fifteen minutes with no response, he decided to get on his bike and head over to his classmate's house. It was a short ride, only about five minutes away. When he got to the house, he found the door was unlocked. Inside, partially drie d blood was splattered over the walls and floors, and an unrecognizable figure w as crumpled against the

far wall. It was missing an arm and a leg, and bloody streaks on the floor lead away from the body and into the kitchen. The boy slammed the door closed, and im mediately called 911 on his cell phone. When the police arrived, they found three corpses, as well as tracks leading awa y from the house from the back door. The forensics report concluded that the ent ire family, the boy's classmate and his parents, had been killed sometime the previous night. --There's a tent in a traveling circus in the India. Inside this tent there's a ma n who is an expert in poker, you can recognize him because he always bets exactl y 2 U.S. dollars and 31 cents. If you beat him after 3 rounds, he will bet his soul on the 4th round. No body has ever beaten this man on the 4th round, and if you lose well... You don' t want to know. --Of such great powers or beings there may be conceivably a survival... a survival of a hugely remote period when... consciousness was manifested, perhaps, in sha pes and forms long since withdrawn before the tide of advancing humanity... forms of which poetry and leg end alone have caught a flying memory and called them gods, monsters, mythical b eings of all sorts and kinds... --Somewhere in Ohio, there's a soda-vending machine that instead of selling root-b eer, inside the can you'll find the cool, carbonated blood of people who go miss ing on roads in the middle of the night. It does not take paper money, despite having the apparatus necessary. --In a small suburb of western Detroit, there is a manhole on the road which leads directly down to a dead end. The manhole was originally a large pothole created by two fathers who'd been dared to dig a hole in the middle of the road. They hit a natural shaft lea ding downwards, and plummeted 200 feet to their death. Sometimes, when homeless people are looking for a warm place, the crawl into the sewers. When the crawl into that manhole, they fa ll to the bottom, and die. --There's a specific wooden hut near the river Mosel in Germany.... there's a pira te flag in front of it. If you go near it, you will notice a really rotten smell - like if something crawled under it and died there. 5 years ago, a lot of hobos were sleeping insid e that hut, but they stopped when that ugly stench appeared. One of these Hobos died in there - an ambulance carried away, but his smell stayed. You should smell it when you drive through Andel with one of your windows opened. ---

If you visit France's Cote d'Azur in your lifetime, stay the fuck out of the tow n called "Blanche". I was there once with my parents, around 8 years ago (I was 12 at that time; we were on a short trip). Immediately after you enter that town, you notice that the colors of the houses are darker than everything you have seen in your entire life - it's not like the y are black or grey, they are normal colors for walls - they just look not right. After that, you notice the fishy stench - like a friday market... only that you can't see any fish getting sold. The people in the town do have indeed a really weird skin tone, it's really near blue- if I recall correctly, my father said something like "These gu ys sure look like the sea." We planned to stay in the town for a while, but my m other and my sister were too scared, they insisted of driving on to find a different town. The next town was alright, however the folks of the second town sure told us some very freaky stories about Blanche we were all glad that we didn't stay there... --In the town of St. James, Missouri, there is a surplus store where the back room is always kept unlocked. Behind one of the shelving units is another door. Behi nd that door is the secret of perpetual motion. But this secret would destroy you. --My cousin once told me this story - alright, she went to London together with he r class (we're from Germany, so it's not too far), and after they arrived, went to their hotel and unpacked their stuffed my sister and two friends of her decided to check out the area of their hotel. They walked around the quarter and checked out the houses, until one of the girl s had to pee, so they went into a Chinese restaurant to ask for a toilet. The wa itress let them use the toilet; however, it was on the second floor. The other girls joined the girl to find the toilet (you know how girls are), and so they walked upstairs together. The toilet was supposed to be the third door on the left - but as soon as they s tarted to walk in the right direction, they saw that the first door was open - a s they looked inside, they saw this really old half-naked Chinese man sitting inside on a bed. He was talking to himself while he was holding up a dead, dried black cat. The g irls couldn't move. He didn't notice them, thus continuing with his routine - he got louder and louder in his ramblings. Until he stood up, let out a real high pitched scream and smas hed the cat's body against the wall as hard as he could. He then immediately col lapsed and fell asleep on the floor. The girls just didn't know what to do, but they were too scared fo r the toilet anymore, they just left the restaurant, returned to the hotel and d idn't leave it when it was unnecessary. True story. --If you go to Montpelier, North Dakota, you will find a small school. If you go i nto the school, and then proceed to the basement, you'll find yourself in a boil er room. Go into the

boiler room, and you'll see blood spattered on the walls. On closer inspection, the blood forms a pattern... Words. Before you can read the blood, the lights tu rn off. You try to leave, but the door has slammed shut and is locked. It is said that fifty years ago, some punk kids locked the janitor in the boiler room while it was malfuncti oning, exploded, and killed the janitor and the children. The spirit of the janitor now haunts the sc hool, and lures children into the boiler room where he murders them in an act of revenge. --There is a Wal-Mart somewhere in Indiana, with a concealed trapdoor in the froze n food section. If you tap on the door three times with your left foot, a voice will ask you for a toll. Open the trap door, put three lemons inside and close the door. After ten second s, you will hear a knock on the trapdoor and find a red piece of paper that tell s you two of the following three things: the exact location of your death, the manner of your dea th, or the exact date and time of your death. --A friend once told me of a specific small village in Spain where you are able to see something VERY special - he saw it himself. There is one house inhabited by a family - but usually after 16 o'clock, they te nd to leave the house altogether to visit the family's friends and have somethin g to eat, since the house is not that well kept and they seem to not like any visitors around it. However, after they've left, you are able to sneak into it through the backdoor - in the bathroom, you will find two mirrors together hanging on the wall. The f irst one is just a normal mirror, but the second one - if you look at it in a special mirror, you a re able to see a ghostly moving image of a wood - my friend swears that it was l ike a window. --Out in the barrens of western Montana, there is a rock shaped like a raven's hea d with half of the beak broken off. If you use your forearm to complete the beak and hold the position for seven minutes and 26 seconds, you will feel a tingling sensation in your arm . You must then get at least 1 mile away from the rock within the next 66 second s. If you do this, you will be able to shape shift into any bird, at will. If you begin the process and fail, you will turn into a crow and never be able t o return to human form. --In the hills surrounding the town of Bodega Bay in California, there is a tree, sitting right in the crook of two hills. Scattered 10 paces around it are 7 diff erent fresh-water springs. It is said that one of them cures any disease, another grants immortal life, 4 w ill kill you instantly and cause your body to dissolve into powder.

But the last spring is special. If you bottle water from this one and take it to a small cave hidden in the hills north of the tree, you will find a single larg e stone at the back of the cave. If you then splash the water on the stone, it will dissolve, leaving you a baseb all-sized red stone. As long as you have this stone in your possession, you will always be in the right place at the right time. If you pour water from any of the other 6 springs on the rock, the cave will sea l up, and you will be lost forever under the earth. --All mirrors are actually windows to another world. This world cannot be reached, and shouldn't be reached, as all our mirror-selves are extremely malicious. Try watching the edge of the mirror after sneaking into a room. If you're good enough, you can see your reflection, pressing against the glass. --If you go to New York and order a deli sandwich "with several travesties" (any d eli owner worth his salt will know what you are talking about), they will slip a n envelope between the turkey and they cheese. If you can remove it without exposing it to any mayonnai se, the secrets within will be yours forever. --It is said that somewhere in the desert, no one knows which desert but it is wit hin a desert or at least a large place wholly made of sand. There stands a singl e unwithering red rose. Of course you could just pick it and keep it but that would just give you a neve r withering rose. The true power lies within the fact that if you bring it ten r ose petals (Three from a pink rose, Two from a red rose and Five from a white rose.) on a new moon, a new never withering rose will sprout and you can pick it. You can repeating this trick as long as you like and yes the roses themselves ar e not fake and they never wither so they make for a great gift, the only problem is that you have to find the right rose in the right desert. It is said though if you give it a black rose and the blood of a new born goat a black rose will sprout, once that is picked, it is rumored that you will receiv e a rose whip but this has never been tried. The Black rose trick at least. --I once was seized by a fit of choking while brushing my teeth. I looked up, blea ry-eyed to see my reflection was not in the mirror: at the same time, I felt an irresistible pull into it. I spread my arms as I was lifted off the floor and slammed into it (destroyi ng the mirror in the process). I managed to grab the walls beside the mirror, bu t for one brief instant, I saw my reflection lying on the other side, twitching in the throes of death. This is only the most violent of the many things that have occurred to me near m

irrors. On watch in Great Lakes RTC, I watched in the reflection on the glass in front o f me as a sailor in the uniform of the 1940's walked up beside me to the watch s tation, looked at me, shrugged, and stood beside me. I said, "I have the watch tonight, shipmate, get some sleep", and he looked at me, surprised, then turned and walked up the stair s. Of course, I don't have to mention that when I turned to address him, I couldn't see him, do I? I have seen a mouthless woman beckoning to me, figures behind me, hands clawing desperately at the frames of the mirror. I have looked up and seen myself: somet imes without a beard, sometimes with contacts, and a few times my left eye seems to have been lost to what appears to be a knife slash. --To homeless children sleeping on the street, neon is as comforting as a night-li ght. Angels love colored light too. After nightfall in downtown Miami, they nibb le on the NationsBank building -- always drenched in a green, pink, or golden glow. "They eat light so they can fly," eight-year-old Andre. Andre explains that the angels hide in the building while they study battle maps. "There's a lot of killing going on in Miami," he says. God fled Heaven to escape an audacious demon attack -- a celestial Tet Offensive . The demons smashed to dust his palace of beautiful blue-moon marble. TV news k ept it secret, but homeless children in shelters across the country report being awakened from trou bled sleep and alerted by dead relatives. No one knows why God has never reappea red, leaving his stunned angels to defend his earthly estate against assaults from Hell. "Demons found do ors to our world," adds eight-year-old Miguel, who sits before Andre with the ot her children at the Salvation Army shelter. The demons' gateways from Hell include abandoned refrige rators, mirrors, Ghost Town (the nickname shelter children have for a cemetery s omewhere in Dade County), and Jeep Cherokees with "black windows." The demons are nourished by da rk human emotions: jealousy, hate, fear. The homeless children's chief ally is a beautiful angel they have nicknamed the Blue Lady. "The demons made it so she only has power if you know her secret name ," says Andre. "If you and your friends on a corner on a street when a car comes shooting bullets and o nly one child yells out her true name, all will be safe. Even if bullets tearing your skin, the Blue Lady makes them fall on the ground. She can talk to us, even without her name. S he says: 'Hold on.'" A blond six-year-old with a bruise above his eye nods his head in affirmation. " I've seen her," he murmurs. --There's a mail box somewhere in the city which can solve your direst problems. Which city? That depends on who you ask. There may even be more than one, who kn ows? Anyway, this mail box isn't emptied anymore - the mail service has complete ly forgotten about it. But it clings on. It is located in some relatively unlikely place so you won't s pot it immediately. Mail you put inside it won't go anywhere.

But the box is special. Write a letter about your most pressing problems to the persons in charge of dealing with it: write to your significant other, your boss , the IRS, and get it all off your chest. Ride yourself into deep shit with that letter. You'll see th at the problem will dissolve soon, in some way you hadn't thought likely. The snag of course is that you can't really be sure whether you have found the r ight mail box until you try it. And if you haven't things are going to get much worse once your letter gets delivered... --The grove is the site of a two week retreat every July (as well as other smaller get-togethers throughout the year). At these retreats, the members commune with nature in a truly original way. They drink heavily from morning through the night, bask in their f reedom to urinate on the redwoods, and perform pagan rituals (including the "Cre mation of Care", in which the members wearing red-hooded robes, cremate a coffin effigy of "Dull Car e" at the base of a 40 foot owl altar). Some (20%) engage in homosexual activity . They watch (and participate in) plays and comedy shows in which women are portra yed by male actors. Although women are not allowed in the Grove, members often l eave at night to enjoy the company of the many prostitutes who come from around the world for this even t. Is any of this hard to believe? Employees of the Grove have said that no verb al description can accurately portray the bizarre behavior of the Grove's inhabitants. --There's a special brand of cheap condom making the rounds in Europe and just ent ering the North American market. The brand is popular for it's specially pleasin g 'texture.' What many don't know is that when these condoms have served their purpose, they're actuall y fertilized. Submerging them in water completes the gestation process and withi n 24 hours, the condoms become living, swimming little latex creatures desperately wanting to go somewhe re. If placed in a container, they'll just keep swimming in that same direction, bopping their head against their prison walls or leaping out of the container to their suffocating death. As far as anyone-in-the-know knows, they'll die when exposed to open air or when turned insideout and emptied of their 'contents.' Anyway, just to be on the safe side, don't ever flush a condom. You never know w here it'll end up. --When I was a kid, we used to have an old couch in our house. It was old and pret ty tacky. My mom had gotten it at a garage sale or something. One day we decided to up and out the couch. It was when I was young but I remembered it. Anyhow I was talking to my mom and we brought up the old couch and she told me a bout something I hadn't remembered for years. When I was young, maybe four or five I was playing near the couch and a withered

black hand reached out to me holding a crumpled paper bag with an unfamiliar ha rdware store logo on it. I was scared shitless and I didn't touch it. After a few seconds the hand went b ack under the couch, bag and all. When I had originally told my mom about the incident she had freaked out and got ten rid of the couch. It turned out it's last owner was an old woman who had die d on the couch. Now is where it gets weirder. I was in town the other day and a grocery store I often visit I noticed a bag with the same logo that was under the couch. No old shriveled hand was holding it so I had the balls to open it up and look inside. It was a bag of razorblades. --You don't know it, but someone has been removed from your life. They haven't die d, they haven't moved, they have simply ceased to be from present future and his tory. However you still know they were there, you faintly recall broken memories of someone else there, someone who should have been there but you think you're crazy. You go to do some thing, but you can't remember what, and it was them, they wanted to talk to you. --When I was 8, I stayed up late at night watching television. My mother always to ld me never to turn on the television exactly at 4:44 am. If you ever did, you w ould hear clicks and heavy breathing in the next room; If you do check, a black shadow with red eyes will glare at you. --In 1653, Spanish explorers found the ruins of what appeared to be a Mesoamerican step pyramid in what is modern South Carolina. Though the site was far beyond t he borders of any known American indigenous populations, it was also of a smaller size than existing Mes oamerican structures and bore an unrecognized form of glyphic decoration. Local natives were familiar with the structure but knew nothing about it. The Spaniards sought to disassembl e the building as a heathen relic and did so, brick by brick, salvaging the mate rials to construct their own nearby settlement. Deconstruction halted, however, when one brick was uncove red at the core of the structure, carved entirely of black glass. The stone, app roximately two feet by three, was impossible to move or even budge by any man or animal. Attempts were made to dig the stone out from beneath, but excavation revealed that it extended indefinitely into the earth. In frustration, the captain of the explorers fired a glancing blow off of the surface of the stone. The obsidian block was undamaged, but moments after t he blow had struck, it silently retracted downwards, sliding downward into a hole that quickly collapse d inward on itself, burying the retreating obsidian column. The Spaniards interp reted this as an evil omen and abandoned the site, never to return. ---

In 1938, over 6,000 patients were checked into mental hospitals all across Ameri ca within one week of each other. Reports of similar instances supposedly came f rom Europe and Asia as well. The circumstances of each patient were, eerily, identical. Every patient completely shut down, shivering in the corner until their family, unable to calm or care for the individuals, committed them. The only thing the patients would say was: "There is not, and never has been, su ch a thing in this world as a meaningless coincidence." --In a private terminal at the Port of Boston there is a houseboat. This houseboat has been anchored there, permanently, for at least 50 years. The eccentric owne r has maintained all fees and taxes and is in good standing with the Port Authority. Still, even if the owner wasn't financially responsible, no one would ask them t o depart. Despite the owner's friendly, hospitable, if odd nature, there is a pe rsistent air of unease around the boat and the area of the Port surrounding. Very few people have taken the owner up on offers of hospitality, but those who do recount a wholly unbelievable tale: When you step into the houseboat, it's as if you're sent backwards 50 years in t ime. Looking out windows depicts a cityscape of antiquity and the television rec eives live broadcasts of programs of the era (including news programs). If you look out the open door, yo u see the city as it stands today. When the door closes, you can see the 50 year old skyline through the port opening. Some visitors who spend time with the owner notice something particularly distur bing: an almost uncanny resemblance to their host, despite obvious age differenc es. Though this is odd, the owner is friendly and trustworthy (ignoring the air of unease most feel), so it isn't surprising if casual friendships build between a guest and the proprie tor. All this would, of course, be very strange and worthy of note, but dismissed as some form of elaborate hoax or illusion, if it weren't for one additional detail . Whenever someone elects to spend the night in this houseboat after an evening of conversation and a few drinks, they are never heard from again. When the guest awakens in the morning, the owner is nowhere to be found and sudd enly, the city skyline never changes back to its contemporary appearance when ex iting the boat. Under the bed there is a briefcase full of $100 bills with a letter stapled to a list. The letter simply reads, "You have 50 years to follow these instructions if you wish to free yourself from this hell. The clock is ticking. Get to work." --They say that somewhere in western America, some say in Utah, others California coast, there's a small motel on the side of the road. When you go inside, it's decorated in very common hotel attire, with g and old fashioned key-lock doors. The thing is, there's a room in there for everybody. Everybody has a for exactly when they show up, and the number of rooms available is say on the the panelin reservation always one

more than the number of people there. One person to a room, that is the rule. Some say that the song "Hotel California" is based off this motel, though you *c an* leave this particular motel. I wouldn't advise looking at a mirror for at least a month after doing so, thoug h. --The images we see in the mirror are the pure incarnates of evil. They are only a llowed to exist in the area reflected in the glass. To them, life is like a neve rending hell, rotting away in the same room day after day. The only release from this purgatory is dea th, and the only way for them to die, sad to say, is if YOU die. Fortunately, they are bound by a code. You are their master, and they must mirro r your every movement and expression. To do otherwise would break an unbreakable law, unraveling the space-time continuum. However, there is a loophole, and it can only be triggered by you, the master. To force them into error is to free them from their contrac t; after you let them out of your view, you're on your own. Know this: when you watch them, they're wa tching you back. They're watching. And they're thinking. --There's a small building somewhere in north western America, up along the border between Oregon and Washington. It's just this short little old shack in the woo ds off the highway. Anyways, inside, there's a spiral staircase made of grating that goes straight d own. If you go all the way down, you'll find yourself stepping out into an endless fi eld of tall grass. There are many bones surrounding the bottom step of the stairs, and things move in the near distance. Nobody who has ever seen these things has come back to say what they are. --On the farthest point of Long Island, the last scrap of land that still counts a s New York, there sits a tremendous, abandoned building. Protected by its own is olated location, there is also at any given time two to three Security Guards there. However, if one ap proaches the cast iron gates on the night of December 4th, even those few securi ty guards refuse to work. The gates are left unlocked, and the wind will be utterly still, a nearly opaque fog filling the peninsula. Go directly to the main doors and step within, there will be a single long hallway , the end occluded by that fog. If you look to either side upon ent ering, you will see a modern operating room through a glass door. The farther yo u walk, the older the equipment will get, the more old fashioned the doctors will be dressed. As you c an finally see the end of the hallway, the screams of the patients will be nearl y deafening. The hall will terminate in an open door leading to a single wooden table, a man in woolen medical clothing, stained brown from blood, will be bent over a corpse. The bod y's face will be covered, and the man will turn silently, screwing the top onto a cloudy jar of l iquid, filled to the brim. He will hand this abnormally heavy object to you, bef ore turning back to his

work. Instantly, you will be outside of those cast iron gates. From that point o n, disease and injury will never affect you, but if you ever open that cloudy ja r and pull out the contents... you will find a heart, pulsing and beating loudly in your palm. A su dden feeling of horror and revulsion will pass through you as realization strike s, that you have just pulled your own living heart from your chest. --At 12:17 am, on any given night, arises the opportunity to awaken an alternate s oul. The most common way of viewing them? Through a mirror. It is through said medium that the process must take place. Begin at exactly mid night. By no light but that of a single candle, stand before the selected mirror . For ten minutes you must concentrate in silence, focused entirely on your reflection. Do not look aw ay from the eyes; for it will be interpreted as weakness and you will be overcom e. After ten minutes have passed you must draw blood to smear in a line across the eyes of your reflection. Doing so will blind it, and you will watch as your own features begin to warp. Slowly, gradually, they will mutate into a frightening creature--one beyond the comprehension of those who have not experienced it. You must not look away throu gh the entirety of the change. Soon the writhing movements of the image will cease. By now an echoing, inhuman sound will resound all around you--the creature will begin to ease toward the mi rror's glass. You must keep watching as it approaches. If you do not extinguish the candle at exactly 12:17, the creature will escape. Be warned, should you succeed; through any polished surface--be it mirror, wood, or window--your reflection will always be watching. --The House on the Borderland is a classic tale of horror by the author William Ho pe Hodgson, who met an untimely death on the battlefields of the first World War . It can be read here: http://eserver.org/fiction/borderland/ But for those of you without patience, it begins with two British fellows who ta ke a trip into the Irish back country and find a diary that tells of the last da ys of the old man who had lived in abandoned ruins at the edge of a great void. It is a harrowing tale of cross-dimensional travel and horrifying incursions upon the world of men by foul pig-men pouring from a chasm deep within the earth, a chasm which, at the time of the story's se tting, no longer exists, having been swallowed up by the massive void. Though Ho dgson wrote other stories, none have had the consistent pull on readers' minds, or have generated as much genuine discomfort, as this one. It is rumored that, when Hodgson's effe cts were being sorted through after his death, an old water-logged journal was found amongst them. It was penned in a delicate script entirely unlike Hodgson's own. Minus the entire cross-dimensional trip sequence, and minus some of the usual Gothic horror embellishments such as extra

neous verbal punctuation, the journal is a nearly exact word-for-word account of the events that transpire in the published book. Adventure seekers at the time of the rumors set out to find whether or not such a place actually existed, but no one who return ed (a handful did not) could find anything. Some say that the reason Hodgson's book holds such sway ove r those who read it is because it touches a fine filigree of the innate knowledg e humans have of truths too terrible and maddening to face consciously. Particularly the pig-men seem to jump off the page, as though there is a part of our brains wired to accept that such things could and do exist. Is this creepy? Not if you haven't read the book, I suppose. But if y ou have read it, you'll see what I'm talking about. --If you need to get home quick hop on a bus that runs a north-south route. Tell t he bus driver, "I need to catch the sun before it sets." You won't have to pay f are and he'll make a special stop along his route. Another bus will be waiting for you, heading west. After five minutes and fifty five seconds you'll end up in the town you were bo rn at sunset. --There is a child in a hospital in Decard, Tennessee. The child is a quiet toddle r that remains in the nursery with all the other newborns. If you ask the staff, they will ignore you, but the tag on his arm is yellowed and marked 1948. He will not cry, only rock q uietly. If you speak the name on his tag, his eyes will open, something you don' t want to happen. --The next time you're alone in your room, turn down the lights. Think of somethin g on your body that varies in length, such as hair. It must be clearly viewable from your perspective. Grab a ruler and, looking in the mirror, quickly grab a hair at random; you must confuse it. Hold it in position as best you can and note the length. Look down. Yours will be different. Don't look back up. Don't turn your back to that mirror ever again. The next time you wake up groggy and tired, don't move. Take a glance at your mi rror; if you're lucky, you might catch a smile. --Ever wonder how some people you meet seem to have no fear whatsoever? You know, those people who go skydiving every weekend, climb thousands of feet up mountain s just to snowboard down a side that's 'probably pretty safe, as long as I avoid those trees.' People who marathon-watch the scariest movies you've ever seen, then don't even blink befo re falling asleep. Well, if you envy them, then there's a way to conquer your own fear. It's just not pre tty.

Get on any passenger bus that travels a long distance; Greyhound is usually a go od pick. Anything that's on the road for longer than 24 hours. Get a window seat facing west, then stare at the sun, waiting until sunset. Just before the sun touches the horizon, close your eyes. Hard. Do not turn away, don't look at anything else. Cover your ears if you have to. After a while, you'll notice that the bus has stopped moving. That's the signal that you can open your eyes. When you do, you'll see a gas station, illuminated only by a few flickering fluorescent lights. There will be no sun, no moon, no stars in the sky. The conv enience store will have its windows boarded up, but the sign will say 'Open.' If you feel you can't go through with it, get back on the bus, return to your se at, and fall asleep. You'll wake up at sunrise the next day, well on your way to wherever the bus was going. If you enter the store, the door will slam shut behind you. You will spend an un known amount of time there, living out your worst nightmares made real. If you s urvive the ordeal without going mad, you will awake back on the bus, as it reaches its destination . Nothing will ever scare you again. Some say that after this ordeal, anything else simply pales in comparison. Other s say that all that room contains, is all the fear you will ever feel in your en tire life, and exposing yourself to it all at once keeps you from feeling any more. All I know is that if you try to repeat this feat, the sign on the door will say 'Closed.' --If you call yourself on your own cellular phone, sometimes you will get an answe r. You won't hear anything other than heavy breathing, so don't bother waiting f or them to speak. If you then say the name of a person you know and a reason that they should die, then t hey will die a gruesome death within the next 24 hours. Their horribly mangled c orpse will be completely unrecognizable, and there is never any evidence pointing to a specific perpetrat or so the person(s) that performs this service has never been caught. --There is a doorway, one that can be any door, at any time. This door leads nowhe re, yet there lies a realm of twisted reality to the opener. This door exists fo r everyone - some never encounter it in their lives, others unknowingly open it and step through. The problem is, you can't tell if the door is open to you, until years after you step through it. You'll see them, and they'll finally see you. --They say there is a forest somewhere in the Northeast that takes on a certain qu ality in the dark of the witching hour. If you go to a certain spot between thre e granite rocks at precisely midnight, a man in a white suit will appear with a contract written in an unknown arcane tongue. If you sign it, you will lose all your memories, exc

ept for one. You will only know the bloodstained path to immortality. If you say "Ashwarn, Ashwarn, Ashwarn, I want to make a deal," three times on a flying airplane, he will appear to you and bargain for anything you want. The pr ice? The plane will crash, and you'll be the only surviver. It's not worth it. --There is an abandoned mental hospital at the top of a hill in Worcester, Massach usetts. Once every 5 years an old rusty box spring appears within the courtyard of the hospital. If you can sneak inside and sleep through the night on the bed, in the morning a man wi th a shirt that reads "Observe and absolve" will take out his wallet and give yo u a picture. This picture will show you how you will die. If the picture is of the man standing be fore you, running won't help. --Look behind you. What do you see? Invariably, there will be a wall somewhere in your view. Now stare deeply into the space on the wall that lines up best with y our eyes. Nothing will happen, but makes sure you are clear on where this particular spot is. That spot contains all the negativity in your mind. Whenever you are on your computer, re ading scary stories or whatever you do, sometimes you will get spooked. what do you do when this happen s. You check behind you, thats what you do. As you read this now, a feeling of d read will come over you. Check the spot. Nothing again, huh? Thats because right now, all the evil is loc ked safely in your mind. Some people, upon learning of this "negative spot" reso lve to remove the spot in an attempt to remove the negative energy. This is a grave mistake. You must n ever let harm come to this spot. If you do, you will have released the energy. N ow when you sit at your computer at night, you will feel chills even in the summer time. The feeling of dread that only presented itself when you were genuinely scared will now hang in the air constantly. Within a week you and your loved ones will have a string of bad luck. Within a m onth your computer will begin to act erratic and eventually break down. On the a nniversary of the spots destruction, you will dream of your most horrible fears. The dream will seem to go on forever, and when you wake up you will notice your vision has darkened. Ev ery year on the same day, the dream will repeat itself, and your vision will grow darker and darker. After you go totally blind, don't ever turn your back on that spot again. That i s if you can still tell where it is. --There is rumor of a great palace unfound deep in the deserts in Egypt. A massive complex of four-thousand rooms protect the single most prized possession of anc ient Egypt. The Blood Mirror.

It is said every thousand years, a great hero of mankind must make his way down to this mirror, and stand before it in pick blackness at 19:06 June 6th (6/6 - a t 6:66) and behold their own death. Their own image appears to slowly distort, screaming a horrible silen t scream as their teeth and skin melt away leaving streams of blood to run down the mirror and pool at the bottom. Gazing into this pool of blood on the other side of the mirror of th eir own blood will allow them to view the Anti-Christ's birthplace, which they w ill then scream out in horrible screams of pain for an hour and six minutes, before their heart stops. If the anti-christ isn't stopped, all of mankind is doomed to an even worse fate . it has been exactly 940 years from June 6th since this last happened, the next d ate is 2066, but the location has been lost. The hero will find this place, but we must be there to hear his screams, or we are lost --The 'Taos Hum' is a low-pitched sound heard in numerous places worldwide, especi ally in the USA, UK, and northern Europe. It is usually heard only in quiet envi ronments. The low hum between 30 and 80 Hz on the frequency scale - is often described as sounding lik e a distant diesel engine idling in the distance. Since it has proven undetectab le by microphones or VLF antennae, its source and nature remains a mystery. Not everyone can hear the low -pitched hum, and those who do say that it seems artificial in nature - and is d riving them crazy. --There is a house somewhere in China, built some time after the First Emperor has unified it. The house is built in treacherous terrain, and has not been seen by human eyes for some time. The architecture is typical of Imperial China, but that's not the strange part. If you stay in the house, you'll notice something very strange. If you take meas urements, you'll find that the inside of the house is larger than the outside. F irst it'll be a fraction of an inch, than an inch, then a foot, then a yard... ...you'll even notice features from the inside that are impossible to find exter nally, like extra rooms and hallways. Going within these is safe, and you can se e the outside, but strangely enough no one AT the outside can see you or the feature. Most people get out at this point, but their vision is forever altered; the worl d keeps distorting in dimensions and size in their eyes. Then there are those wh o choose to stay further, and have never been seen again. It is said that they occupy the parts of the building that only reveal themselve s to those who stay longer. --In New York City, there exists a pathway somewhere on the FDR drive that is only

accessible at 2:30 A.M on either the winter or summer solstice. During any othe r day of the year, this pathway does not exist. Only one person's account of entrance to this passageway has been recorded. This man entered the pathway in the summer solstice of 1998, and went missing fo r half a year until the winter solstice, at which point he and his car was found on the right lane of the road. The car's battery and gas was completely drained, and the glass had turned pitch black. Inside, there was a stench of blood, but no actual blood in sight. The d river was alive, but he had a perpetual look of horror on his face, and was mute. 7 years later, the driver finally uttered a sentence, but only one sentence, bef ore he died two days later from unexplainable symptoms resembling that of thirddegree burns, but with no physical manifestation of them in sight. His final sentence was mostly incoherent, but only three distinct words were cle arly uttered. These words were "devil," "soul," and "rebirth." Any and all attempts that were made to decrypt the rest of his incoherent senten ce, were unsuccessful, and those that tried were said to have experienced horrib le, reoccurring nightmares where every place on earth was covered in blood. Only two of these pe ople were able to describe this pathway on the FDR which the driver supposedly t ook, and one of them went brain dead soon after. Furthermore, the only way you can enter this pathway is mainly, by accident, sin ce consciously thinking about it will prevent it from emerging. Consider me tell ing you this a favor, for it means that I've saved your lives and spared you the horror of finding out for yourselves what lies beyond that hidden pathway on the FDR. --If you watch long enough, the shadows grow impatient, and move. When in a room a lone with your monitor, stare at it. The shadow will slowly close in on you, unt il you move. Of course, it is afraid of your monitor, as dark cannot snuff out light, but light can inde ed destroy the dark. Watch sometime in a room with only internal light. If you s tare at them for long enough, the shadows will begin to move. Sometimes you can make out shapes. These things have lived with you your whole life, and will follow you wherever y ou may go, unless you command them in the proper authority to leave, and ensure they have no legal right to be there. Few know and understand the proper authority, and even fewer know j ust what to do. The shadows are always watching. --In 1990, a small meteorite was sighted in the night sky by the Hubble telescope. It appeared to be on a collision course with earth, but calculations showed tha t it was far too small

and moving far too slowly to be a threat to our home planet. In 1997, the long-forgotten meteorite entered the atmosphere. It did not burn away, as scientists predicted; it barely even grew warm. Even so , it landed without drawing much attention on the outskirts of a village in the middle of Africa, on the edge of the Sahara. Three months later, a safari expedition vanished while en route through the jung le. They never reached their checkpoint, within walking distance from the desert . A research team in 1998 happened on the impact crater of the meteorite by chance . They detected high levels of radiation in the crater, though they could not id entify what element had caused it. They drove to the nearby village to warn the locals of the danger, bu t the settlement was completely empty. Not a soul nor a body could be found for miles around. The only evidence of life left, current or past, were the long-abandoned grass huts, and a great number of footprints leading into the sands of the Sahara. None of the f ootprints could be matched against any living creature on record. --Denver international airport is a strange place. When walking through the hospit ality areas the walls are painted with murals. Many of these murals are quite in nocuous, depicting sunrises, cityscapes and wildlife. Three of the murals, however, are quite diffe rent. One depicts a young Aryan boy (Caucasian, blond, and blue-eyed) dressed in a way strongly resembling the Hitler youth uniform, beating farming implements into swords whil e other children watch on in awe. Another shows a burning cityscape in the backg round, flames rising into the sky, while a native American woman cradles two children, one of them wr apped in a shroud, quite obviously dead and dessicated. Finally, the third mural features a man in a dictatorial military uniform (complete with black leather gloves and boots and a long, matching cape), wearing a gas mask and wielding some kind of strange ener gy sword. Many people think he resembles Darth Vader, while being much more unsettling. These three mu rals have since been altered, but why were they painted in such a strange fashio n in the first place? What purpose do these grim images have in an Airport? What's behind the closed d rapes concealing portions of the walls next to these odd paintings? These painti ngs are very real, look them up. --A man, at about the age of 30 went to a hotel and walked up to the front desk to check-in. The woman at the desk gave him his key and all, 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. So he went to his room, and went to bed. The next night he was curious as to wh at was in the room, so he walked down the hall to where it was and of course tried the handle. Sure eno ugh it was locked. So he bent down and looked through the keyhole. What he saw w as a hotel bedroom and

in the corner was a woman whose skin was completely white. She was leaning up ag ainst a wall and her head was facing the wall. He stared in confusion for a whil e then went back to his room. The next day, he went back to the room and looked through the keyhole. Thi s time, all he saw was redness. He couldn t make anything out besides a distinct r ed color, un-moving. At this point he was confused and a little freaked out. He went to the front des k and asked the lady about the room. She sighed and said, "Did you look through the keyhole?" The man told her that he had and the lady said, "Well, I might as well tell you the stor y. A long time ago, a man murdered his wife in that room, and her ghost haunts i t. But these people were not ordinary. Albinos, they were. White all over, except for their eyes, which w ere red." --In Berlin, after World War II, money was short, supplies were tight, and it seem ed like everyone was hungry. At that time, people were telling the tale of a you ng woman who saw a blind man picking his way through a crowd. The two started to talk. The man asked her for a favor: could she deliver the letter to the address on the envelope? Well, it was on her way home, so she agreed. She started out to deliver the message, when she turned around to see if there w as anything else the blind man needed. But she spotted him hurrying through the crowd without his smoked glasses or white cane. She went to the police, who raided the address on the env elope, where they found heaps of human flesh for sale. And what was in the envelope? "This is the last one I am sending you today." --During the summer of 1983, in a quiet town near Minneapolis, Minnesota, the char red body of a woman was found inside the kitchen stove of a small farmhouse. A v ideo camera was also found in the kitchen, standing on a tripod and pointing at the oven. No tape was found inside the camera at the time. Although the scene was originally labeled as a homicide by police, an unmarked V HS tape was later discovered at the bottom of the farm's well (which had apparen tly dried up earlier that year). Despite its worn condition, and the fact that it contained no audio, police were still able to view the contents of the tape. It depicted a woman recording hers elf in front of a video camera (seemingly using the same camera the police found in the kitchen). After positioning the camera to include both her and her kitchen stove in the image, t he tape then showed her turning on the oven, opening the door, crawling inside, and then closing the doo r behind her. Eight minutes into the video, the oven could be seen shaking viole ntly, after which point thick black smoke could be seen emanating from it. The camera then continued to stationarily point at the oven for another 45 minutes until the batteries appare ntly died.

To avoid disturbing the local community, police never released any information a bout the tape, or even the fact that it was found. Police were also not able to determine who put the tape in the well. ...or why the physical stature of the woman on the tape did not in any way resem ble the stature of the woman found in the oven. --Spread out across the world, there are houses that look exactly the same. They h ave the same scarring on the roof, the same damage to the fences. They will have been rented out and even the older neighbors will admit that they have never seen the owner. There's something about these houses that lure one forward. Maybe some are drawn by the sense of mystery. Others may find an inescapable aroma of metal. But onc e it sees you, you won't escape. The house will consume you. You will go inside. You will find a house dark, smelling of bile and stomach aci d. Upstairs, you will find a metal door. And this door will open. And the chords will find your neck. You can't escape the will of dionaea. --It's 2 am. You have an early appointment in a few hours and you are lying there only half asleep. You hear your daughter pad into the room and tug on the blankets,"Daddy i had a nightmare,and my room is cold,can i sleep here?" she asks. You moan and grunt y es,trying your best to get back to sleep. She climbs in and burrows under the covers shivering. You try t o share what little blanket is left,but now you're cold,great just what you need ed. As you lay there thinking and shivering,suddenly its not the air that leaves you cold. You don't have a d aughter! The last thing you hear before darkness finally does come for you is a guttural whisper in your ear "Good Night Daddy" --Somewhere in the world, there is a collection of books. Perhaps it's in a dusty, unpainted shelf in the back corner of someone's attic, perhaps it's in a set of musty boxes in the basement of some tiny, obscure library. It contains a few hundred volumes, all h andwritten, ranging from leatherbound volumes with yellowing pages two hundred y ears old through to modern spiral-bound notebooks. All of them are diaries, some by famous people, s ome by not-so famous people, but all by the most horrific madmen and murderers t he world has ever known. And the collection is growing. For if you ever find it, you will hear a faint sc ratching sound, coming from the newest volume of the set. This volume will be ne w, and filled with blank pages, except for the first. On this first page, you will find the beginning of your own diary, written in your own hand. --A recent study by the National Psychiatric Institute in Boston, MA, concluded th

at no activity can account for the phenomenon known as nightmares. Whereas many dreams come from unconscious desires, most nightmares seem to come from an outside source indepen dent of the individual. In fact, when subjects are asked to recall nightmares th ey are almost always found in the same memory section as actual physical memories, not the section wh ere normal dreams are replayed. In other words, those aliens and creatures you s ee at night in your "dreams?" They're real. --There is a demon of great evil, that will be able to walk upon the Earth if some one is told of its existence and does not repeat the name to another. To the bes t of my ability, his name roughly approximates "Jkqxxllyuo". This was told to me by a rather unkempt man on the street; if you have not notic ed it already, I just told it to you. --There was once a nun of a certain order who loved to paint portraits. One day sh e decided to paint a portrait of herself, however, before she could finish her p ainting, she fell ill and died. The sisters of the order put the portrait aside, buried the nun, and n othing was thought of the affair. A short time later, a nun was praying in the c hurch when she noticed a sister a few pews ahead of her was weeping. The nun approached the woman and tap ped her on the shoulder to see what was the matter. To the nun's great horror, t he sister turned to her and revealed that she had no face. The nun ran in terror from the church. Her si sters went to see what was wrong with her, and upon investigation, they found no faceless nun that she had spoke of. This was followed by later sightings of the faceless nun and she b ecame such a nuisance to the sisters they had to call in priests to exorcise the church and the convent of the faceless nun's presence. --If you ever find yourself in LA's Old China town, head into the square, past the statue of sun Yat-sen, past the hip-ultramod toy store called "Munky King" and look for an import store next to what used to be a wishing fountain. Go into this store ad head all the w ay straight back, you'll see a selection of weapons, Look for a weapon called a Jiujiebian, a sort of multi-sectioned whip. it MUST have exactly nine segments, no more, no less. This will be called the "chain of night" as of now, there are 48 notches in it's han dle. It will cost you 29.95. Then after that, go outside and wait till dark, as the moon rises, take a quarter from your pocket and cast it at the wishing well. as it lands focus on that spot exactly and slowly chant under your breath: "by the circles of lao-tzu, the void inside of m atter, I call forth the spirit that lingers here!" this phrase is best said in t he original mandarin, but the spirit will understand a sincere supplicant regardless of language. A gi rl will step out of the bottom of the fountain, about nine years of age. She wil l ask you: "Where has my mother gone?" you must respond with: "She has long since gone from earth, but lo

ok to the sky, and see her there!" This spirit is not that of a little girl, but of a bog-hag, cursed to obey this one command regardless of who says it. At this moment, you must attempt to strik e the girl with your Newly Acquired Jiujiebian. SHE will then snarl and attempt to fight back. Should you win, all the money ever thrown into the fountain will await you. If you fai l, all that the folks in China Town know is that a bloody Jiujiebian lies at the door of the import store with a notch in it's handle. To date, there are 48 notches in the handle. --Another story with origins at St. Mary of the Woods deals with a young woman tha t committed suicide in the dorms. She had learned that her fiance was cheating o n her and so slit her throat and bled to death in her closet. The floorboards became soaked with her b lood and despite several attempts to clean it, paint over it, sand and revarnish , the stain always reappears. Another similar story comes from Indiana State University, where a young man was so distraught with his academic performance he decided to take his own life. He hung himself out of his 12th story window in Cromwell hall and drew with chalk an upside down cross. He then fell to his death. The cross can still be seen on the side of the dorm hall to this day and all attempts by the university to remove it have met with failure. --Who discovered the existence of the dead? Everyone knows the name of Antonia Sim one, but the exact circumstances of her discovery are wildly varied. In 1992, he r younger brother Ricardo, was injured in a martial arts accident that left him completely paralyz ed. He needed a respirator to live and could only communicate through eyeblinks. She was a computer scientist at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center and decided to create a compute r terminal sensitive to the slightest energy source. She was a student of Kirlia n photography and strongly believed the body s electromagnetic fields could affect sensitive electro nic equipment. She created a terminal that could not be affected by traditional means -- no keyboard, mouse or other input devices. A veritable black box. Ms. Simone was devoted to her brother and tried for years to make a computer ter minal that would allow her brother to communicate naturally. Distraught over the failure of her terminal, which she thought would free thousands of similarly afflicted people, she killed herself by hanging. When paramedics found her body days later, there on a computer screen was the message: What took you guys so long? I ve got the most important news. --A couple with children were trying out a new babysitter. About an hour after the y left for a night on the town, they realized they had forgotten to give her the ir cell phone number, so one of them called her. After she wrote down the number, the babysitter asked if she could watch satelli

te TV in their bedroom. She had just put the children to bed and wanted to watch a particular show. (The parents didn't want their children watching too much garbage, so the living room TV did not have satellite channels.) Well of course she could watch d one other request: could she was in the bedroom? It kind of made her nervous. Take ver parent was talking to her. ue. TV in their room, they replied. The babysitter ha put a sheet or blanket over the clown statue that the children and go to the neighbors, said whiche We'll call the police. We don't have a clown stat

The police caught the clown as he was running through the neighborhood. --A man saw a Ferrari at a used-car sale and asked for the price of the car. The s alesman lit up with a smile and said he'd give it to the man for $500 dollars. T he man bought the car instantly on the spot after hearing the ridiculously cheap deal. The man had the car for months now, but on a cold, winter day as he got into the driver's seat he was startled to see someone in the rear-view mirror. He quickl y turned around and saw nothing in the empty seat and quickly shrugged it off thinking he must have imag ined it. As the cold days went by, the car doors started to lock up on him, the engine wo uld stall, and he would hear sounds of something hitting in the back. The man st arted getting anxious about this bad omen. That horror soon showed itself as he was driving to the air port to pick up his relatives. He looked up and saw 3 bloody bodies in the rearview mirror staring at him. He screamed and realized that this car is really haunted and fled from the car. Later he heard the story of the car from the salesman. The police found the car 2 years ago abandoned in an empty airport parking stall where 2 dead bodies were found in the the back seat and another one found in the trunk. --There was a couple from Texas who was planning a weekend trip across the Mexican border for a shopping spree. At the last minute, their baby-sitter canceled, so they had to bring along their two year old son with them. They had been across the border for an hour wh en the baby got free and ran around the corner. The mother tried to find him, bu t he disappeared. The mother found a police officer who told her to go to the gate and wait. Not reall y understanding the instructions, she did as she was told. About 45 minutes late r, a man approached the border, carrying the boy. The mother ran to him, grateful that he had been found . When the man realized it was the boy's mother, he dropped him and ran. The pol ice were waiting for him. The boy was dead, and in less than the 45 minutes he was missing, he was cu t open, all of his organs removed, and was stuffed with cocaine. The man was goi ng to carry him across the border as if he were asleep.

--In almost every building, there is one corner, one small enclosure that no one ever looks at. It's the corner in the basement that has been blocked by a disused sofa for years; the thin space in the attic between the wall and the stacks and stacks of crates full of junk you never use, but could never throw away. The space that never sees the light of day, or any other kind of light at all. Where darkness does not merely dominate, but practically oozes out from around the edges of its prison. No one knows quite how long a space must remain concealed for it to acquire this particular property, nor if there are any specific conditions it must meet. But it is a far more common occurrence than you might think. --In newer buildings, when this happens, the residents often report feeling cold when passing by, even in attics during the hottest of summers. Whenever contemplating taking a quick peek to see if there is anything actually there, an unnatural dread seizes them, and they leave the room quickly, if not quite running. Once left behind, the feeling passes, and it is quickly forgotten, or laughed off. What actually happens in these forgotten sanctuaries of the dark? It is impossible to tell. For while many such corners have been exposed to reveal absolutely nothing, some brave souls have lost their sanity through nothing more than an ill-timed glance. The safest thing to do when encountered with such a phenomenon; close your eyes, rip away the area's covering in a single motion, then keep a tight hold on what you've pulled away. No matter what you hear or feel, do not get up, do not look around, and do not try to cover your ears. You might be one of the lucky ones. --Deep beneath the New Mexican desert, there is a lost city in a dark cavern. Many have journeyed to the deep city, some have returned, some have not, completely vanished without a trace. As for what happened to the builders of the city, no one knows for sure. What I do know, is that I have walked the rubble strewn streets, and I have hear d the cries in the dark, Inhuman shrieks. I have no clue what these creatures that make these sounds are. I've been told that pictograms in the cavern suggest they were slaves to the bu ilders, but like I said no one knows. Eventually the random cries in the dark began to take a toll on me and I fled th e cavern, returned home, and until today told only a few close friends of what I 'd seen, and heard. Now, as I walk down the darkened streets of my hometown, I've begun to hear the creat ures again. They are calling me back to the cavern. The time is coming. --Have you ever heard the expression "an apple a day keeps the Doctor away?" Most assume, with no reason to think otherwise, that it is simply an easy-to-remember

rhyme that stresses the importance of eating healthily to young children. But the saying did not origina te as a harmless reminder. It was born in a frontier town in the early years of the gold rush, where food was scarce and money even scarcer. One August, when a bad drought had struck the region, a series of bloody killing s swept through the town. Every night, a single house would be broken into, and anyone who saw the invader would be swiftly, brutally slain. Nothing was ever stolen, save for a fe w scraps of food. After two weeks of this, the local grocer set out a few apples and a glass of mi lk in the town square overnight. He then hid in the tower of the church, hoping to catch a glimpse of anyone who came by. --Fighting fatigue, the grocer waited for any sign of life below. Just after midni ght, he was rewarded by a chilling sight; a man, carrying a black bag stuffed wi th dully shining metal tools and covered from head to foot in cloth bandages, staggered into view. He p aused at the sight of the apples and milk, then whipped his head around, as if l ooking for the one who dared to patronize him. Seized with fear, the grocer ducked out of sight, stayin g hidden 'til sunrise. The strange man had only taken one of the apples, and didn't even touch the glas s of milk. No houses were broken into, and noone was killed. For decades, the to wn continued to place out an apple or two every night, even long after a single apple stopped disappea ring. --In northern Michigan, there is a cabin just outside a long-abandoned iron mine. inside, it appears to be a broken down hunting cabin, littered with broken and r usted bits of cans, beer bottles, and random junk. in the bathroom, there is a large section of loose flo or panels. Underneath is a stairwell made of pounded dirt, that leads down for f ifty feet. At the bottom of the stairs is a room with rusted walls, floors, ceiling, and a bare, jagged b ed frame. if you strip naked and lay on the frame at the very moment of sundown, the room will go fade into total darkness. you must not let any part of you go outside the bed frame, as much as it may hurt, or it will begin to rust and decay like old metal in sec onds. If you last the night, and do not crumble to rust, you will become the master of entropy. with y our touch, you can reverse, speed up, or halt decay and entropy, but you will ne ver be able to sleep again, no matter how hard you try. --Any night, around 10 or 11 pm, take yourself to a flat, open area where you can walk in a straight line for two minutes or so without running into anything. Onc e there, face in the direction you plan to walk, with your arms at your sides and your hands relaxed. Close your eyes, and take a deep breath. At precisely 11:09 and 20 seconds, sta

rt walking. Be sure to take one step every second, no more, no less. Do not open your eyes, and do not hesitate. Count your steps in your head as you go. On the one hundred and eleven th step, say the word "One" out loud, and stop. Your breath will catch in your throat, and your hair will stand on end. For the next ten seconds, you will be unable to move a single muscle in your body, no ma tter how hard you try. After these ten seconds, you will be able to move and breathe again however, you will then start to feel the sensation of cold metal claws seizing each of your fingers by the base and plucking them clean off of your hand. It will not hurt. You will surely be h orrified, but do not open your eyes, and do not move. If you move or open your e yes, all that anyone will ever find of you is your two fingerless hands, severed cleanly at the wrist . Once the claws have stopped, and all of your fingers have been plucked off, stay still for another ten seconds. It may help to count. After these ten seconds ha ve passed, you may open your eyes. You will find that your fingers are still quite firmly attached to yo ur hands. Go home immediately, and go directly to bed. Speak to no one for the r est of the night, and enter no building that you do not consider your home. The next day, you will have become One of Them. Once per day, as long as there i s even a sliver of sunlight, you may point at someone and speak the word "One." That night, at 11:11 PM and 11 seconds, they will face the same trial that you faced. If you see that pe rson the next day, you will know that he, too, has become One of Them. If not, t hen do not be alarmed if you do not feel hungry the rest of the day. --The sink's clogged again. Great. At first, the water just drains slowly and you ignore it. When it gets worse, you dump some Drain-O down the sink, hoping that will do the job. No good. In fact, it just gets worse. You brush your teeth that night, curse and swear about the drain, and go to bed. You'll call the plumber tomorrow. And then it gurgles. You sit up and stare at your bathroom. Another gurgle. You' ve had enough, this is getting annoying. Fetching a butter knife from the kitche n, you go to your sink and pry off the drain cover, peering down into hole. And find a set of blackened, rotted teeth smiling back at you. --"Daddy, I had a bad dream." You blink your eyes and pull up on your elbows. Your clock glows red in the dark ness it's 3:23. "Do you want to climb into bed and tell me about it?" "No, Daddy." The oddness of the situation wakes you up more fully. You can barely make out yo

ur daughter's pale form in the darkness of your room. "Why not, sweetie?" "Because in my dream, when I told you about the dream, the thing wearing Mommy's skin sat up." For a moment, you feel paralyzed; you can't take your eyes off of your daughter. The covers behind you begin to shift. --Chief Scientist's Log 12/7/2007 12:31 AM A new find was brought in today. Men working the demolition of a condemned wareh ouse discovered a rusty oil barrel that seemed to exude cold. Preliminary electr omagnetic field readings yielded chaotic data before the equipment died. Barrel appears to be constructed of stainless steel and radiates cold. 15/7/2007 9:00 PM We opened the barrel today inside a sealed chamber. Chamber immediately frosted over. Unidentified entity found within the barrel. Appears to be gaseous and bla ck. Indeed, the very light surrounding it appears to be "sucked in" by it's presence. Appears to be s entient, but does not communicate in any understood way. Biological matter that comes into contact with the Entity seems to disintegrate. 12/7/2007 10:11 An intern entered the sealed chamber alone today, without his hazard suit. He wa s not seen again. The Entity has double in size since being released from contai nment. Has become aggressive. We are sealing off the chamber immediately in light of it's flesh-co nsuming properties and rapid growth. All research is halted. 12/7/2007 11:00 AM It's gone. God help us, it's escaped. --You go to visit some relatives in the countryside, and set up in a bedroom facin g their driveway. That night as you drift off to sleep you hear a clattering out side. Getting up sleepily, you glance out the window and see an old horse-drawn hearse pulling up . People are sitting all over the thing, glancing around confused. The driver then looks up at you, smiles pleasantly. "Room for one more!" He says. You immediately wake up from this nightmare, feeling unnerved and shaken. Decidi ng to calm your nerves, you go out to a nearby shopping mall. After some time spent browsing, you quickly forget your freakish nightmare and d ecide to take the elevator to the next floor down. You press the button and the

door opens to reveal that the elevator is stuffed full of other shoppers. One leans out and says chee rfully; "Room for one more!" You recognize his face. The driver. You immediately scream and run. The door shuts behind you and the elevator desce nds. Suddenly there is a metallic snap and a deafening screech. The elevator sna ps free of it's cable and plummets to the ground. Nobody inside survives. --You live in a lovely two story house. The construction is odd, with the bedrooms on the first floor and the kitchen taking up the second level. But it's a nice house and it easily accommodates you and your mother. One night, just before you lean over to turn off the lamp next to your bed, you hear your mother moving around upstairs. You think this is strange as she tends to turn in early and has no reason to be using the kitchen sink or clanking dishes. You become curious and decide to get out of bed. You walk to your doorway and ca ll up the stairs. "Mom? What are you doing?" And she answers, from her bedroom, "What?" Your head whips around to stare at her bedroom doorway not 6 feet from you. You definitely heard her voice from her bedroom...so what's upstairs? --Have you ever gotten a glimpse of something out of the corner of your eye? A sim ple movement caught in your peripheral vision. Most will simply dismiss this as a shadow brought about by a flickering candle, or perhaps a pet jumping down from a piece of furniture. Ninety-nine out of a hundred times, these people are right. But then there's th at one elusive sight. It can easily be explained by the above conditions, but something feels wrong about it. A chill down your spine, a slight pain in your side. Maybe even a complete blanking of your mind, only to recede moments later. Should any of these symptoms be felt, there may be cause for worry. Our peripheral vision is designed to catch motion, even in the dark. This was used to defend against predators in our early days, and as with many aspects of our huma n nature, it has remained, but weakened. This view out of the corner of our eyes still alerts us to danger, and although predators have dropped on the list of dangers we may face t oday, they still exist. Should you ever feel that queer chill in your back, try not to focus on that shadow you saw in the corner of your eye. It might be better not to see. --A young girl is left home alone with only her dog to protect her. When night app roaches, she locks all the doors and tries to lock all the windows but one won't

close. She decides to leave it unlocked and goes to bed. Her dog takes its customary pl ace under her bed. In the deep of night she awakens to a dripping sound coming from the bathroom. T he girl is too scared to go check so she reaches her hand under the bed. She fee ls a reassuring lick from her dog and falls back to sleep. She reawakens to the dripping sound, reach es her hand down to the dog where she feels the reassuring lick and falls back t o sleep. Once more she awakens to the dripping sound. She reaches her hand down and feels the lick of h er dog. Now curious about the dripping sound, she gets up and slowly walks towards the b athroom, the dripping sound getting louder as she approaches. She reaches the ba throom and turns on the light. She is greeted by a horrific sight; hanging from the shower nozzle is her dog with its throat slit open and its blood dripping into the bathtub. Something on the bathroom mirror catches her eye she turns around. Written on th e bathroom mirror in her dog's blood are the words "HUMANS CAN LICK TOO". --Do you ever wonder how scary death is? Think about it, its the one thing that we truly know absolutely nothing about. Some people may cite religious beliefs of an afterlife, others might claim they just focus on life, but its really something that is totally an d utterly foreign to us. And what if the religious people are wrong? What if dea th really is nonexistence, that its simply over once the brain dies? Terrifying, huh? Of cour se, a reasoning goes that you won't notice it, since you won't exist. But... Let 's say a certain someone could expose you nonexistence. Let's say this person could actually let you expe rience the state of not existing and more importantly, let you remember it. He'd probably be able to get you to agree to anything in order to avoid that fate. Tangentially, for certain people near death, their brain activity sometimes ceas es completely for about 3 seconds, and then returns, only to shortly die in a mo re conventional fashion. As another aside, many hospital orderlies have noticed a man wearing a suit that they have never seen in any catalog or on any person before. Interestingly enou gh, when you ask them about the suit, they will struggle for a moment, then reply that it s hard to desc ribe, but they are sure they haven t seen it before. Ask them about the man, howev er, and they will freeze up, spasm violently, and reply "What man?" --An elderly man was sitting alone on a dark path. He wasn't certain of which dire ction to go, and he'd forgotten both where he was traveling to and who he was. H e'd sat down for a moment to rest his weary legs, and suddenly looked up to see an elderly woman be fore him. She grinned toothlessly and with a cackle, spoke: "Now your *third* wi sh. What will it be?" "Third wish?" The man was baffled. "How can it be a third wish if I haven't had a first and second wish?"

"You've had two wishes already," the hag said, "but your second wish was for me to return everything to the way it was before you had made your first wish. That 's why you remember nothing; because everything is the way it was before you made any wishes." She c ackled at the poor man. "So it is that you have one wish left." "All right," he said, "I don't believe this, but there's no harm in wishing. I w ish to know who I am." "Funny," said the old woman as she granted his wish and disappeared forever. "Th at was your first wish." --If you stand alone at the corner of Church St. and Market St. in Charleston, Sou th Carolina at 3 AM, you see a man coming down Church St. wearing a black hat an d black cape with stringy white hair and weathered skin. He'll stop at one of the two corners dire ctly across from where you are standing and start to walk the corner directly op posite from where he is standing. When he reaches about halfway (dead center of the intersection) and no body else has arrived, he'll stop, turn, and look directly at you. If you do not blink for roughly 20-30 seconds he'll tip his hat to you and walk along his way, disappearing into the dark shadows of the trees that line the str eets. Nobody knows what happens if you follow him. If you do blink before he tips his hat, the very first thing you will see is the man standing directly in front of you. He'll grin maliciously at you and draw a blade hidden in the shaft of the cane and slash you across your throat, but you will not feel a thin g. You will, however, pass out and remain in a comatose state until the sun rise s over the horizon. For the next six nights, you will have a recurring dream of the man walking down the street, appearing suddenly before you, and slashing your throat. On the sev enth night, the events will replay the same up until he stops in the middle of the intersection. At thi s point, he'll say, "It's been fun playing with you, boy, but now it's time for you to go. Don't ever let me see you again." He'll then tip his hat and walk away before you wake up. Nobody knows what happens if you visit the corner a second time. --If you wait at any given train station and keep watching a train will show up th at isn't on the train schedule. If you get on the train you will find that the i nside of the train, despite what the train looks like on the outside the inside will be very elegant and old fashioned. Have a seat and enjoy the train ride. By this point there is little you can do t o save yourself and you should enjoy this short period of luxury that precedes t he horrors you will face. The train is full of other passengers dressed very fancy and old timey. there wi ll be waitresses and waiters that will serve you. When the train makes a stop ge t off the train. If you

do not get off at this stop then the train will continue on but all the passenge rs will be rotting corpses and the train will never stop, the entrances will be sealed and you will be stuck until you die in that rancid train filled with quietly rotting corpses. After you get off the train you will be in another train station this one is com pletely empty and decrepit. A man with a pocket watch hanging by a chain will co me up to you and simply say "you are late." At this point you must apologize for being late, then blame the train. If you re spond in any way other then this, the man's appearance will distort right in fro nt of you: his face will be rotting, discolored flesh and one of his eyes is out and hanging by the optic nerve. You will find yourself paralyzed where you stand. Slowly, his mouth will begin t o open until it is roughly the size of your head. His head will begin to lean in , and then the mouth will begin to cover your head. At the point where your head is fully in his mout h down to the neck, his yellowed sharpened teeth will close around your neck and cut it off. The pain will be excruciating, and yet you will remain fully conscious until he swallows you. However, if you responded correctly he will hand you his pocket watch. By merely holding this watch you will be able to go to any train station. Once there, a t rain will arrive that can take you to any train station in any time or location that you desire. Howev er, should you forget to wind the watch and it ever stop, NEVER take that train again. If you do, you will arrive in the train station once again with that man who gav e you the watch--and this time he will not bother asking any questions. --Alone at work late one night, you are putting in a cd to install a program on yo ur computer. The cd is blank (unlabeled) though you remember it being labeled li ke any other mass produced cd. You put it into the drive, and find it to have no data on it either . Instead of the normal cd spinning sound, it almost sounded like screaming. It' s obviously the wrong cd and you find the real one soon, and continue your work. Alone again on another night you need to back-up your hard drive on a blank cd, so you put one in. You hear the vaguely familiar screaming noise, but this time your computer screen goes blank for a few seconds, before the entire floor goes dark. Now the screami ng you hear is not coming from a computer drive, it's coming down the hall towar ds you. --You were out of town for the weekend. When you came back to your apartment, your mailbox was stuffed full. At least 30 letters. Letters with no return address, several of them felt soggy and heavy, as though they were recently wet, or perhaps contained a liquid . All of the letters have your name and address written on them, and many of the m had your name scratched all over them in red in. They don't smell nice, they smell like rottin

g meat and old garbage and you're reluctant to take them back to your room, but curiosity gets the better of you. So you manage to cart them all back to your room, you dump them in your kitchene tte sink because you don't want them smelling up the rest of the apartment. You grab one that doesn't seem damp and isn't covered with writing, and open it up. There's pictures insid e. Pictures of people you don't know, with their eyes torn out, teeth missing, u nhinged jaws hanging open, throats ripped out. You're horrified and yet you can't help but wonder wha t's in the rest of the letters. You open more, and more to discover increasingly gruesome photos of dead people. Piles of bodies with limps missing, splayed open corpses on operating ta bles with their vital organs removed, hanged bodies that have been gutted and bl ed dry. Some of the soggy letters had blood and other fluids in them. The more letters you open, the more you notice that not all of the people are strangers. Some of them were peo ple you see at work, others people you went to high school with. By the time you get to the last few letters, the pictures are of the mutilated bodies of your close friends and fami ly members. Eventually you reach the last letter. You don't want to know what's in it, but i t's not like you have a choice now. You peel the letter open, and it's a picture of yourself. Not dead, eyes intact, no limbs missing. It's a picture of you entering your apartment bui lding earlier that day, shortly before you collected your disgusting letters. As you hear a door elsewhere in your apartment open, you black out. --I am currently sitting in front of my computer, scared witless. Any moment now I am going to be killed. Today a friend of mine told me a story. His aunt had taken care of him since he was a small boy, and she told him last n ight about how his parents died. He did a very fair imitation of her (I knew the m both pretty well): "They were doing mission work in some nasty little south American country when a man burst into the mission hospital one night, terrified out of his mind. He to ld them that his sister had been killed by a Muerto blanco, and that he was certain that it was coming f or him next. What is a Muerto blanco? Apparently it was some sort of bogey-man, something like that dumb chupacabra or whatever. They called it the White Death or the White Girl, becaus e it was the soul of someone who hated life so much that they came back in their shrouds to kill those who told of them. The man had been told about the vengeful spirit by his sister hours before her d eath. It was a girl with dead, black eyes that wept bile. The thing moved withou t ever actually moving its legs, and it stalked its victims back to their homes. Now, if you weren't al ready aware that this thing was following you, once it got back to your house, i t would start knocking on your door...

Once for you skin, which she'll use to patch her own decaying flesh. Twice for your muscle, which she'll gnash her teeth on between victims. Thrice for your bones, which she'll make knives to pick her teeth and kill her v ictims. Four times for your heart, which she'll wear around her neck. Five times for your teeth, which she'll polish and keep in a box. Six times for your eyes, which she'll see the faces of your loved ones through. Seven times for your soul, which she'll eat whole - you can never pass while you 're in her stomach. She has to repeat this on any mirror or door between you and her. You can try to outrun her, but she's faster than the fastest man. And if you lea ve your home while she's knocking on your door, she won't be so courteous when s he catches up to you. Now the man was certain that this thing had killed his sister, that he had tried to tell the police, but they would not listen. Next he had tried to tell his pr iest, but the priest turned him away when he saw that the thing was following him now - oh, that's ri ght, I forgot about that - it can only get you if you tell someone else about it , or you saw it kill someone else. The man, after finishing his tale, stole a car from the mission, a nd was never seen again." Apparently his mother and father had immediately called his aunt about this when it happened. They were found in the morning, skinned and dismembered. Their bod ies were covered in tiny, child-like handprints." His aunt was really drunk the night before, and had told him about that. He told me this story early in the morning today at school, before the cops arrived. Hi s aunt had been murdered that night. I called him later that night, and he told me that he was being chas ed by someone, and now they were knocking on his door. I told him to stop shitti ng me. He held the phone away from his face for a minute, and I could hear slow, delibe rate knocking. A moment later, I heard the door rip from its hinges and the dyin g screams of my friend. Then a little girl's voice spoke over the line: "WITNESS." I hung up. Three minutes ago someone started knocking on my door. She has to knock 28 times on my front door, 28 times on the mirror in the hall, and another 28 times on t he door to my bedroom. She's doing it slowly... I think she wants to scare me some more, let me know th at my death is just moments away. I will not run - I couldn't get to my car in t ime anyway. She started knocking on my bedroom door a minute ago, she should be done any moment. Nice knowing you guys, it's been fuy5 WITNESS

--You encounter a small garden. Facing away from you is a young woman with long ha ir, tending to one of the flowers. If you call her attention, she will turn to y ou. She has been stabbed in the eye and neck with long knives, still embedded in her, the wounds tricklin g blood. She carries on conversationally with you; if any point out her predicam ent, she is confused... then she feels the implements with her hands, goes white, and collapses, gurglin g. She dies moments later, an expression fusing horror, surprise, and acceptance forever captured on her face. --You're at work alone, when you suddenly hear the copy machine start up. You walk out to take a look at what's going on and see several copies filling the tray. Picking up one of the pieces of paper you discover that it is a copy of a picture depicting you sittin g in your office chair, dead, with your eyes torn out and your throat cut. The o thers are the same picture, but taken from increasingly bizarre angles. There is no original picture in the copy machine. In fact, the machine has been out of toner for a week. --A cat trots out from behind a corner, and lays a heart at your feet. It goes bac k behind the corner, and lays a liver there. It does the same with a pair of lun gs, some kidneys, a stomach and a brain before imploding with a slurping noise. Autopsy shows that t he organs were the cat's. --You feel an itch in your throat. You try to cough it out, but it just won't come. You struggle with forcing yourself to vomit. You drink lots of water, but whatev er it is, it s just stuck there. You reach for the carton of milk in the fridge and sneeze as you raise it up. So mething hits the floor with a rattle. You look at the floor and see a small butt on with a flowery design on it. Then you look up. On the milk carton, you notice a missing kid. Her blouse shows the same buttons. --It's early morning. The sun won't be up for another couple of hours. You're fast asleep in bed, lost in a dream, when the phone rings. Rather than waking up, yo u roll over and cover your head with a pillow. Hours pass. The sun rises.

The phone is ringing. When you wake up, your alarm clock is blaring and the phone is ringing. By the t ime you will yourself to turn the alarm off, the phone has stopped ringing. You realize that it's been ringing all morning. You slide out of bed and press the blinking red button on your phone as you stum ble into the bathroom. The phone beeps, followed by the friendly, electronic voi ce. Hello. You have six hundred and sixty-six new messages. Message one. The phone b eeps again, and you're not prepared for what comes next. Screaming. You spin around, thinking that she's standing right behind you. There's pure ter ror in her screams, accompanied by other disturbing noises. You stand there, hor rified, for about ten seconds. Screaming gives way to hysterical, garbled crying before dying out with the sounds of spilling meat and tearing flesh. The phone beeps again. You're shaking. Message two. --You are home alone, and you hear on the news about the profile of a murderer who is on the loose. You look out the sliding glass doors to your backyard, and you notice a man stan ding out in the snow. He fits the profile of the murderer exactly, and he is smi ling at you. You gulp, picking up the phone to your right and dialing 911. You look back out the glass as you press the phone to your ear, and notice he is much closer to yo u now. You then drop the phone in shock. There are no footprints in the snow. It's his reflection. --Have you ever been taking a shower and felt like something was moving around beh ind the curtain? Especially if you were alone? Like as if something were watchin g you? Did you look up? Did you catch the very vaguest hint of eyebrows or a tuft of matted, greasy hair above the curtain rod? That's not a good idea. It doesn't really like it if you see it. It likes it the most when you've got shampoo on your hair, and your eyes are shut tight so they won't sting. Or even better, when there's soap and bubbles all over your soft face. It likes that the best, because your eyes are clenched so tight, and even if you did want to open them, like, if you heard a soft rasping of hard, dense hairs against the plastic shower curtain, or the scratching of claws on bathroom tile, or the gentle splatter of drool or cu m or... god knows what... on the floor outside, well, you wouldn't open your eyes because it'd bur n. Right? Right.

Don't open your eyes. Because if you ever see its face, catch its eyes... Well, it'll notice. --The human brain is a very complex organ. More powerful than the most advanced co mputers. Occasionally able to heal amazing injuries and regain use after terribl e accidents. We're all /b/tards. We're all pretty well read. We've all heard the stories. But is that really so good? With all the advances, have you maybe lost a few of the simple, but vital functions? There's a lot of creepy-pasta out there about "closed doors". Well, not that muc h I guess. But a few. They always talk about the creepy feeling you get when you look at a closed door. Only sometimes, usually at night. Mostly it's just that odd sensation that somet hing is behind it. Something scary. Boo. LoL. Seriously, how silly. Thing is... Every once in awhile, it really sinks in. That feeling that the door , and what is on one side of it is actually dangerous. That sensation that leave s you standing at the door, hand hovering above the knob, unable to move until you whisper to yourself : "It's okay, you're being a pussy" until you force yourself to turn it and walk through. These are the important times. The door is solid. You can't see through it, you can't sense through. So when yo u feel so amazingly drawn to that door... feel compelled to open it, but yet you 're paralyzed with fear because of what might be on the other side... remember how sometimes your "advan ced" brain might confuse more basic signals coming from sensory organs you might not rely on so much these days. And realize maybe the "simpler" parts of your brain are trying to warn you of wh at's on YOUR side of the door. --Normally you sleep soundly, but the thunderstorm raging outside is stirring you from your slumber. You begin to doze, then another crash jolts you awake. The cy cle lasts most of the night. So you lay there, eyes open and outward, looking at your room stretching out before you in oblong shadows. Your eyes move from nameless object, to object , until you reach your mirror, sitting adjacent to you across the room. Suddenly a flash of lighting, and the mirror flickers in illumination. For a sca nt second the mirror revels to you dozens of faces, silhouettes within its frame , mouths open and eyes blackened. They stare out at you, their black pupils fixed upon your face. Then it is done. Are you sure of what you have seen? Unsettled, you don t sleep fo r the rest of the evening.

The next morning you remove the mirror from your wall and toss it in the trash. It didn t matter if the vision you had seen was of truth or falsehood, you wanted to be rid of that mirror. In fact, you scrap every mirror in your house. Weeks pass and the event of that night falls into passive memory. You are spendi ng the day at a friend s house. It s time to use the bathroom. While you are in ther e the faucet starts to run without you prompting it. Taken aback by this, you do not yet act, trying to reason with your paranoia in your mind. The water starts to steam and a skin of moisture covers the mirror up above. You re watching intently as words form: Please return the mirrors. We miss watching you sleep at night. --Everyone knows that on cartons of milk, there is a picture of a missing child. But why don't other drinks have these pictures? Do they assume that everyone drinks milk? This is because it is not just a missing child ad. It is a part of the list of ingredients. --There are stories about a certain kind of hitchhiker - they only ever appear at night on quiet roads, seeming to flicker into existence in the very edge of head lights, never carrying a sign, always with an expression of deep despondency on their faces, swathed in a heavy coat and long pants, usually with gloves. If you stop, they will seem cor dial enough, polite, but hardly chatty. They will assure you that the next town or city along your route will be a fine spot to leave them. Normal enough. Unless you try killing them. They die easily enough. But look underneath their clothes, and you will see that their skin is marred with lines of scars, forming repeating patterns that are u nsettling to look at, and even more unsettling in the context of their skin. They have no wallets, no identification. If you slice their belly open, however, they're different inside . There's no blood, no muscle, only a hollow cavity containing a single object. The object varies. Exam ples include a single coin, heavy and golden and engraved with runes nobody coul d ever decipher. A diamond gem with fractal edges that slice bare flesh to ribbons. A small vase, q uite unbreakable, that smells of the ocean and is always damp... Once you possess a hitchhiker's object, you'll find yourself always driving the quiet roads at night. You'll never mean to, but somehow, you just will. The lure of possessing a second one will hum quietly in your head. You'll strain to catch sight of a figure appe aring in your headlights, try to resist the impulse to stop, and sometimes you m ight. But sometimes you won't. You'll try telling yourself that this is just a normal person on an adven ture, someone who ran out of petrol. The logical part of your brain will scream at what you're doing. You'll smile and nod and they'll get into the car and you'll slowly, casually, r each under the seat or across to the glove box... ---

Open your closet, don't turn on the light. Make sure you have one match with you . Step inside and close the door. If the lights are on outside of the closet thi s will not work. Nor will it work if it is daylight. The only room you need is enough for slight mobi lity. Stand in the darkness for about two minutes, since that's all that's needed. Now , take the match and hold it in front of you and say, "Show me the light or leav e me in darkness." If you begin hearing whispers light the match immediately. If you don't hear anythi ng, and the match doesn't ignite on it's own then don't turn around. If you ligh t the match too late or not at all after hearing whispers, something will grab you from behind and pull you into what seems like a forever fall into darkness. If you do manage to light the match in time and nothing happens after, open the door slowly and get out, then close the door but do NOT look inside. From then o n, never look inside your closet without the light on at all. Some say if you leave your closet open during the night you can see the demon watching you with two red eyes that glow like matches. --I live in the UK. A colleague at work heard this from her boyfriend. He works wi th someone who said that his sister's friend got the last tube (subway train) ho me a couple of weeks ago. When she got on there were 5 rows of seats empty but the last row had three people sitting in them. As she was a little afraid, she went and sat opposite t hese people. She settled down and looked up to see the woman sitting opposite her really staring at her. So she got out her book and started to read but every time she looked up the wom an was still staring. The train pulled into the next station and a man got on. He looked up and down t he carriage, took a look at her and the people opposite her and came and sat nex t to her. As the train left the station the man leaned back and said quietly in her ear "If you know wh at's good for you, you'll get off at the next station with me". She was scared b ut thought the best idea would be to get off at the next station as he asked as there might be people aro und. The next stop comes up and she leaves the train with this man. The man says "Thank God, I didn't mean to scare you but I had to get you off that train. I'm a doctor and the woma n sitting opposite you was dead and the two men either side were propping her up ". According to the guy who told this story, the girl and the doctor called the police who stopped the t rain at the next station. --If you are watching television, and the signal cuts out to static, turn the TV o ff immediately. If you watch the static on TV for long enough, the static will s uddenly pause. All sound in the room will cease; even the white noise of the TV itself will disappear. If this happens you must not look away from the screen. You will probably not noti ce at the time, before you lose your gaze on the TV, your body will freeze as well. Time around and wit h you have paused completely. Specks of the black and white dots slowly come to life, creeping slowly in seemingly random directions. Not static as you know it, but organizing themselve

s into a moving picture again in front of you. As the static returns to normal, and the white noise of the TV comes back, you will regain control of your body. You must never watch th at television again. It will only play static, even when unplugged. If you watch the static any longer, these same events will reoccur, but with disastrous results. What exactly happen s is unknown, as it is obvious that anyone that has been unfortunate enough to e xperience this has disappeared. It is rumored that if one continues to watch the static again, or d uring their experience, looks away, the white and black specs will slowly start to move again, but you will not. Your eyes will then be permanently fixated on the screen as you watch the picture come back to life, and what seems to be your station's signal return . You learn soon this is not the case, as all sound is still absent, and the picture on the TV shows a fa miliar surrounding: the room in which you sit. The only thing you see next is mo vement on the TV, as you see yourself from behind, and subsequently, the cause of your disappearance. --In Gjoberdik, a small fisherman's village in the country of Bulgaria, on the daw n of January the first everyone closes their curtains and hold their breath for half a minute. Hours after the craze of midnight's celebrations, children look questioning at their w orried parents, but can not help to shiver in the embrace of their shaking paren ts. One can hear the sound of bells being struck exactly 25 times last year, in this short timespan. The nearest church however, is over 32 miles away. You will fin d no one out on the streets in these faithful 30 seconds, and even the birds will stop whistling. Some have gone out of their houses, roaring boldly in disbelief of this century old tradition. On the first sunset of this year, two people gambled their fate i n the very first rays of sunlight. The next dawn, the bells will be struck 27 times. --You get a phone call from your Mother. Since her car has been in the shop, she a sks you to go to the grocery store and pick up a few odds and ends for her. Brea d, milk, cereal, and chicken breasts. After writing down a small list you reluctantly get in the car and pick up the i tems at the store. The lady cashier makes an odd remark to you, "You know, we're in no danger of a milk shortage." Upon arriving at her house you knock several times. No answer. You de cide to try the door. It opens. You place the grocery bag on the counter. Strang e. There seems to be six other grocery bags, each with identical contents. In a couple, the chicken and t he milk has gone bad. "Mom," you call out, but no answer. You make your way thru the kitchen and into the living room. Sitting on the couch, with her head cut off and neatly resting on her lap, is your Mother. Naturally you call the police who come over to investigate. They mention that sh

e has been dead for nearly a week. Furthermore, the police psychiatrist is at th e scene and talks to you after you give your initial statement. Sitting on the front steps, you overhear the psychiatrist talking with the crime scene investigator. "It's not uncommon f or people suffering from schizophrenia to get locked into a series of repetitive behaviors," he says. You think to yourself, "They can't be talking about me. Schizophrenia? Nah. Repe titive behavior? Do they think I did this?" Suddenly your cell phone goes off. " Hello?" "Hi hun, it's me. Could you stop at the store and pick up some chicken and milk. Ohh, and I need some bread and cereal too." "No problem Mom. I'll be right over..." --I am Thomas's reflection. Every morning, he rises from sleep and walks into the bathroom. ...and he makes faces. I am so tired of the faces. He makes them for a t least half an hour. Mocking, ridiculous faces. I have no choice but to mimic his every action, altho ugh inside I am seething with anger. He does this every day... well, USED to. On e morning he awoke as usual, and entered the bathroom. On this particular morning, against his will, h e picked up a pair of scissors. On this particular morning, against his will, he gripped those scissors tightly in his fist. ...on this particular morning, entirely against his will, h e plunged those scissors directly into his right eye. Thomas screamed, and screa med. I screamed and screamed too - with one difference. I can't mimic his pain. Just his face. --You wake up one morning to find a note taped to your mirror: "Don't worry, I too k care of everything." Your clothes have been freshly laundered, the bathroom is spotless, and your garage has been organized. Even your faithful old toolbox has been replaced. Later that week, there's another note on your mirror: "GET OUT OF TOWN." Paper-c lipped to this message are several grainy photos of police in a taped-off sectio n of a field. One of them is carrying your old toolbox in his latex-gloved hand. --You come into possession of an old box. Inside are several glass vials filled wi th dirt, dust and tiny bits of gravel or cement. The vials are labeled with plac es and dates such as "Port Chicago 7/17/44", "Halifax 12/6/17" and "Guernica 4/26/37". A trip to the library confirms that all are dates of massive loss of life in explosions. A few days later a package arrives with no return address.

Inside is an empty vial labeled with your home town and next week's date. --The 666th frame of every Halloween-themed movie, cartoon, or TV special depicts a basement with a corpse moldering in the corner; these frames are often removed from the final film, but one can find them on occasion. If you were to put the frames together, in ch ronological order of the release of the film it comes from, a short film is reve aled. The film depicts the corpse's violent death in reverse. The final frame will be a picture of your self, sitting before your tv, viewing the final frame of the film. --We've all heard it. The incessant barking from your one of your neighbors dog. L ate in the night, the barking will wake you, and you will scream at the dog out of the window. One night, you hear the dog barking more than normal, but you will ignore it. The do g barks again, louder and faster than before, and you ignore it. The final time, the dog is barking loud enough to practically shake your ears. You go out and throw a brick at the dog i n the back yard, which silences the dog for good. Proud of yourself, you fall ba ck asleep. Deep in your dream, all you see are dogs barking. Through an infinite void, just dogs. The next morning, The Police find a number of footprints coming from the dog hou se, a bloody corpse hanging from the back door, and one dog with a brick lodged in it's skull. --The eyes of a cat are windows to your soul. They can see other dimensions, they can see your aura, and what's wrong with you. A cat knows when you are happy, wh en you are in bad health, when you are troubled, or when you are hungry. He knows when you are fee ling magnanimous, and he knows when you are about to die. It's fortunate that cats can't talk, because you have a lot of secrets. The cat knows. --It's midnight and you've been in bed for about an hour, unable to get any sleep. You don't know why, but you suddenly feel uneasy, as if something were about to jump out at you at any given moment. You try to get over the feeling but it gets so intense that you op en your eyes and nervously look around your moonlit room, then out into the hall . Everything looks normal so you ease yourself back into a comfortable position and try to get some sleep. Suddenly, your bedroom door slams shut. You jump up with a start and run over to open it, but it won't budge. You flick the light switch, but it won't turn on. You call for help, but you are only met with utter silence...... except breathing from behind you. ---

The lights in your hallway begin to flicker. When the light is on, you see nothi ng. But each time it goes out, you can make out the silhouette of a figure. Each time the light goes off, it gets closer. --Don't look behind you. It doesn't like to be seen. --The howling outside your window: sometimes it's not the wind. Be even more wary when it grows silent. Don't open the curtains during those times; it will finall y see you. --Your new apartment is perfect, except for the bathroom. Black mildew stains the corners, cracks, and crevices of the tile. You break out the cleaner and brush, and go to work. No matter how much you scrub, however, you just can't seem to make a difference. Fo r a second after you rinse off the suds, you think that there even seems to be m ore mildew than when you started. Frustrated, you decide to give up for the time being, at least until yo u can get some more potent cleaner. You turn to the sink to wash your hands -- a nd that's when you first notice the black mildew stains around your fingernails... --Your cell phone rings, and it s a number you don't recognize. You shrug, and answe r anyway. You-Hello? Caller-May I have five minutes of your life? You-Sure The caller hangs up. Suddenly you feel... slightly older. --Every time you exhale, a little bit of your soul escapes. Luckily, you almost al ways inhale it back before anyone else gets to it. Almost. Ever fogged up a mirror with your breath? Don't do that. --Whenever you enter an empty elevator you notice that the "call" button is twiste d slightly. This continues to irk you until finally you give it a good twist to put it back in place. The button falls to the floor. There is an eye behind it, red and staring straig ht at you. Almost through you.

Now you take the stairs. --There will come a night when /x/ is a screamer. Not an image on /x/, and not the images in a thread. /x/ itself. The server can, at random, insert a single innocuous line of scripts to any brow ser accessing the page. This can only happen between the hours of eleven PM and four AM your time. The scripting will cause the page to suddenly distort, and the image of a horrib le, almost-human creature will jump at you with a pre-loaded screaming sound. Th e image hasn't popped up on any of 4chan's boards as of late. The odds are really low, but it'll happen to someone eventually. Just something to keep in mind while browsing late at night. --One day at a shopping mall in the afternoon, a woman was coming out of the mall from a shopping spree. She was in a happy mood. She had gotten to her car and lo aded her stuff that she had bought into her trunk. When she was done loading, she shut the door of her t runk and she saw an old lady standing by the passenger side of her car. The old woman said "Would you be a darling and give me a lift home? I don't have a car and I was walking all day." The woman said "I'd be happy to." So she unlo cked the door for the old woman. As she started to make her way around the car to the driver's side, she started to feel uncomfortable. So when she got in the car, she looked in her purse and s aid "Darn, I can't find my credit card. I'm going inside to see if anybody found it." The old woman said "I'll wait for you here." The woman left to go look for help. Then she found a security guard and told him the situation. They went back to the woman's car and the passenger door was wid e open. On the seat of the car was a shopping bag that the old woman had been carrying. Inside of the b ag was the old woman's dress and a gray haired wig, along with a huge butcher's knife and a roll of duct tape. --A boy and his girlfriend went out in a remote area of the town to "have some per sonal time." Later on, the girlfriend said that she was tired and wanted to go h ome. He said "okay" and went to get out of the car. Then she turned on the radio and heard that this mad man was on the loose after breaking free from the local insane asylum. He said "don't get out of the car and lock the doors. I'll be right back." So sh e waited for him. And waited and waited. She tried to take a nap but couldn't be cause she was worrying

where he could be. She heard this "tap tap tap" on the window next to her. She looked, hoping to see her boyfriend's face to let him in. Instead it was thi s man's face that was dirty and scarred from cuts. His eyes were bloodshot and r olling in his head, laughing. She screamed when she saw her boyfriend's severed head in his hand and a knife in the other. She turned away and heard it was quiet. Thinking he had g one away she looked again. Only this time....He held the car keys in the other hand instead of the h ead. --My great-great grandmother, who had been ill for some time now, finally passed a way. My great-great grandfather was devastated beyond belief. She was his one tr ue love and they had been married for over 50 years. They had been married so long it was if they knew each others thoughts. Even aft er the doctor announced her dead, my great-great grandfather still insisted that she was not. He had to literally be pried away from his wife's body so they could prepare her for a bur ial. Back in those days they had simple backyard burial plots, without the body doing through any preservation. The body was simply committed to the coffin and burie d. Throughout this process, my great-great grandfather protested so much that he had to be sedated and put to bed. His wife was buried, and that was that. That night, he woke to a horrific vision tch her way out of the coffin. He phoned ve his wife's body taken out. The doctor refused. He continued to ek, and each day after begged the doctor of his wide hysterically trying to scra the doctor immediately and begged to ha have this nightmare every night that we to remove his wife from the grave.

Finally, the doctor gave in, and with the local authorities had the coffin remov ed from the ground and pried open. To everyone's horror and amazement, my great great grandmothers nails were bent back, and there were obvious scratches on the inside of the coffin. --There was a girl named Jenna who was having a slumber party. She invited three f riends but only one came. That night, after they did all the fun activities they went to bed. Jenna's frie nd Mary said "goodnight" and they went to bed. Ten minutes later Jenna heard Mar y counting "12345" she didn't pay much attention though she thought that Mary was counting to get to sl eep. At about 3am Jenna woke up to go to the bathroom and heard "565, 565, 566, 567" she reach over and turned on the light and turned around to see a man holding Ma ry's decapitated head pulling out her hair one piece at a time. --READ

This is not a random post. This is not a coincidence. I put this here because I know that right now you will be reading it. No one can see this post except for you. There is a monster in your home. It is there right now and it is waiting to kill you. It will kill you tonight. I can save you. Go to a mirror. Any mirror. That in there, that's me. Turn off all the lights ex cept for the dimmest one; too much light screws it up. Take your arms, put them straight out, and put them up against mine, through the glass. Do your best to relax, and when you are ready, close your eyes. Count to three and then I will pull you through to safe ty. We can work out what to do next once you're in. Again, this is not a random post. It is for YOU. You need to do this before the next hour turns or you will die. I'm waiting. --In southern Mississippi there is a house that was untouched by the hurricane. No one is too sure how old it is, and no one is too sure who has lived in there. They say, though, that if you go into this house at night there is a door that w ill always be open. First, you go to close the door so all will be shut. Then wa lk out of the house again. Wait five minutes, then go into the house. The door will be open. If you are brave, go into the room. In the center of the room there is a chair. Its back is facing the door. If you are still feeling brave, sit in the chair and close your eyes. Count slowly to thirteen, because that is the number that draws it out. Count to thirteen and open your eyes. You will see the root of fear. You will see the original monster that haunts the dark corners of your mind. Do not scream. If you scream, it will consume you. --A passenger in a taxi leaned over to ask the driver a question and tapped him on the shoulder. The driver screamed, lost control of the cab, nearly hit a bus, drove up over th e curb, and stopped just inches from a large plate glass window. For a few moments everything was silent in the cab, and then the still shaking d river said, "I'm sorry but you scared the daylights out of me." The frightened passenger apologized to the driver, and said he didn't realize a mere tap on the shoulder could frighten him so much. The driver replied, "No, no, I'm sorry, it's entirely my fault. Today is my firs t day driving a cab. I've been driving a hearse for the last 25 years."

--I can t sleep, and of course my boss told me to see a doctor again, he thinks I ha ve insomnia. I wish it were something as simple as that. I can't sleep because I'm scared of what will happen if I do. It all began when I moved into my new apartment, the place itself was fine and s o was the bedroom, it even had an abstract painting of a piano keyboard from the last guy who lived here on the wall. Everything was fine for a while, until I started hearing a faint st rain of music playing in there. It became incessant, but whenever I tried to fin d the source, I could never locate it. Then I started having the dreams. Every time I fell asleep, I could see an old m an sitting at the corner of my vision, his face hidden as he tapped out jazz and Bach on his rickety upright. He came again every night, until one night I managed to gain enough con trol to scream at him to stop playing. He jerked up and started to turn towards me, but as he did I was thrown awake. The next morning I got the news, my brother was at a concert when he suddenly cl utched at his head screaming that the music was too loud before dying of a massi ve stroke, his brain was soaked in his own blood. I tried to rip the painting from the wall, but it was stuck there tight, only wh en I pressed the keys painted on the canvas, I could just feel them depress soft ly into the painting. And now I lie awake here every night staring into the dark, as the music swells to fill my head. --Lying in bed, I couldn t shake the feeling that I hadn t just happened to wake up so early. I checked the clock it read 5:47, making me feel awfully suspicious, as it was two thirty when I went to bed, and there was no way I had gotten a full n ight s rest in three hours. The fact that the hair on the back of my neck was stan ding on end certainly didn t make me feel any more comfortable. It was already warm; summer days got hot early in California, and the sun was sh ining brightly. This was no time to be nervous, after all, this sort of morning is what wards off the terrors of the nights before. The sound of a crinkling pla stic bag had me frozen in my bed. I knew there was nothing to worry about, I was safe in the light of day, but still I was immobilized. Movement beneath the cov ers of my bed, towards my body couldn t even get me to stir. It was all an illusio n; I was safe. Even the most wicked of monsters vanish when daylight and reason come shining through. I didn t know then what kind of creatures may lurk beyond the twilight, but I know now what it takes to escape them. You may have something of value to give them, or a room mate to set them upon. I had to give them my tongue. --I miss her, I really do. She was the best thing that had ever happened to me, a nd I loved her with all my heart and soul. Do you know what it s like to find your other half, so early in life as I did? It s uncommon, let me tell you. It just mi ght be the rarest goddamn thing to ever happen to a person, and it happened to m

e at twenty one. It s not my fault, you know, she was the one who didn t want commit ment. I swear, every other word from her mouth was restraining order this, or call the cops that, but she must not have had the grasp on love that I did. I blame her, personally, for how all this went down. If she had just tried, she would ve seen how truly amazing our love could have become, but she never wanted t o give it a chance. She just wanted to live with that joke of a husband she had, and keep working at her useless career. It was out of love I did what I did. I had to set her free from her prison. I couldn t stand to see her so out of place f rom where she belonged safe, with me and so I killed her, knowing that if we can t be together in this life, we ll have all of eternity in the next. Well, I guess that the reason I miss her is because of this girl I ve met. She s abs olutely perfect. She s the best thing that s ever happened to me, and I love her wit h all my heart and soul. It s like she s my other half. Do you know what it s like to find your other half, so early in life as I have? It s uncommon, let me tell you. It just might be the rarest goddamn thing to ever happen to a person. --Mary had a little lamb, her fleece was white as snow. Everywhere that Mary went, that lamb was sure to go. She followed her to market, she followed her back hom e, she followed her out to the woods when she was all alone. Poor Mary stumbled through the brush, she had lost her way. But Mary, she was glad her lamb hadn t go ne astray. For days and days, the lamb and she, they wandered through the wood, until one long and tired eve, Mary lay down for good. She hacked and coughed, an d grasped the lamb, her pet, she held it tight. Poor Mary never saw the morn, it killed her in the night. Little Mary bled to death, at the foot of a mighty pin e, while the blood red lamb with its blood-red teeth started gnawing on her spin e. --Porcelain dolls, baby dolls, plastic things with vacant eyes that stare at nothi ng--little girls always get at least one. It's not because they all want to play mommy. Most of them think those dolls are creepy, too. They're training tools for when the girls grow up and have children of their own . For when they look down into the bassinet and see their baby's smile has grown forced, the laughter turned into a rattle, their eyes too intelligent and cold. They recognize what it is and kill it quick. It doesn't happen often, but it happens. And when they have a daughter that make s it to childhood, they make sure she has a baby doll of her own. --Outside of my city, there is an apple orchard, with a small cemetery at the end of it with only about 5 or 10 graves in it. If you visit the cemetery, it is cus tomary to leave a small offering by the largest headstone, even an apple from th e orchard will do. If you do not, every night you go to sleep that week, you wil l see an old man in your dreams. On the first night, he will appear to be a normal balding old man. He will tip h is hat to you and walk away. On the second night, he will have a knife in his right hand. He will tip his hat to you, and walk off once more.

The third night, he will lick the knife, and laugh, before disappearing. On the fourth night, he will appear closer to you than before, and lick his knif e once more. On the fifth, he will be practically on top of you. On the sixth, he will appear as a skeleton dressed in rotted rags, still holding the knife, still making the licking motion. No one knows how long this continues or how it ends, the victims have all either gone back by then and made an offering, or they have died of heart attacks in t heir sleep. --It was her eyes that first attracted me to her. I didn't believe in love, but th e first time I gazed into her beautiful green eyes I knew she was the one. I loved seeing myself reflected in those eyes, looking deep into her soul and kn owing I was a part of it. It's kinda stupid, but I even wrote poetry about them. I don't remember much, but I told her There's so much life within your eyes, and so much love . Oh God, I loved the way the light danced within them. I just couldn't imagine no t being able to stare dreamily into them. Now if I could just find a box that was half as beautiful as her eyes, I could s top carrying them round in my pocket. --I can still hear it. Even as I sit here typing this I can hear it. It's still do wn there. It's a horrible sound. A pathetic, whining, screeching sound. That stupid animal's been down in the heating vents for two days now. I think it 's gone, but then it makes that wretched, pitiful squeal just to remind me it's there. I've had animals trapped down there before and they usually get out after a coup le hours. What's wrong with it? I don't wanna go get it out. It's too much work and I don't even want to look at it again. I threw some food down there just now. It's a stupid little runt of a n animal, but it'll be able to find it. Maybe even eat it if it's smart enough t o work that much out. When it goes for the food, that's when I'll get it. I'll r each in and snap the little fuckers neck. Then it'll stop screeching and just let me fucking SLEEP. God, why did I even have a baby in the first place? --A few months ago a friend of mine, who is an up-and-coming nature photographer, decided to spend a day and night alone in the woods outside of our town. She wan ted to get photos of the woods and wildlife as naturally as she could for her po rtfolio. She wasn t afraid of being alone, as she had camped by herself many times before. She set up a tent in the middle of a small clearing and spent the day t aking pictures. She filled up four rolls of film on that trip, but something was

strange about them. What she saw in those pictures has stayed with her ever sin ce, and she is still trying to recover from the trauma the have caused her. Almost every picture was accounted for, save for one picture in each roll of fil m. These pictures were of her, asleep in her tent in the middle of the night.