Genesis For awhile now, this picture has been floating around on the internet. You’ve probably seen it by now. The photo is a simple black and white, grainy still of a young girl in the woods. The girl has a dark shadow over her face and...
Atheists get something of a bad rap. When a religious person hears the word, it often fills them with a sense of dread or anger. Personally, I believe this is because the possibility that the god they have dedicated their lives to being fake fills...
When Irving Gibson first met me, he was on top of the world. His story was an interesting one, too. One of many I’ve found memorable, sure, but everyone is unique. Backgrounds, behaviors, choices and excuses—maybe I get overly invested in people, but I can’t...
Looking from within the woods, I could see my ex-wife’s Camaro parked outside of what used to be our house. I could also see the truck belonging to my former neighbor, Trey. The signatures on our dissolution paperwork were not even dry yet, but at this...
Just a little over a week ago, I was awoken at seven in the morning by a startling phone call from my mother. She informed me that her sister had just passed away in the hospital. For three years my aunt was battling leukemia to...
I’m a veteran detective working in a mid-size city, retirement age but not ready to rest yet. Among all of the standard assignments I’ve covered, I’ve seen my share of strange cases, only a few of which have made me struggle when it came to...
In the summer of 2025, a large house just outside of a small town in northern New Hampshire went on the market. I’d been watching and waiting for years, because it was where I grew up. I was even born there, after my mother suddenly...
“It’s just a mirror”, that phrase echoed in Elisa Smith’s mind every time her gaze fell on the blackened glass hanging in the long hallway of her grandparents’ house. The mirror was nearly her height, its opaque surface barely reflecting the outlines of the room,...
“Six. Seventeen. Nineteen. Forty-five. Twelve. And…Twenty-three,” he finished, the last of the lotto numbers rolling off his tongue, which was suspiciously dry considering the speckles of spit that now clung to the sneeze guard separating him and the attendant. He cleared his throat before wetting his...
In Milan, under the relentless sun of a summer that seemed intent on sealing the city in an endless embrace of heat, a website appeared almost by chance in the dark labyrinth of the deep web, a digital recess that very few dared to enter....
The following anonymous tip was deposited into the mailbox of the Lincoln Police Station in Lincoln, Nebraska. * * * * * * The ice cream place on the corner of N 48th Street and Vine is a front for human trafficking. It used to be called Soft Serves (and...
To the writers of Retlaw and Drummond’s Almanac, I’d like to thank you for the vestige. Your county map, in its textured patchwork of onion yellow and copper goner green, was among the last to list my fair town by name. Of course, I understand why that...
I suffer from a condition called Charles Bonnet Syndrome, or Visual Release Hallucinations if you want to get more technical. It’s a condition that’s far more common than you might realise — it’s estimated that as many as half of people with gradual loss of vision...
This autumn, a couple of work friends are going deer hunting. It’s been the talk of the office for two months straight. It became the conversational watering hole, and everyone who doesn’t take part is left to dry out in the sun. Hell, even Vicky,...
I was born a burden. My parents said it jokingly, but I could tell it’d always been on their mind. Even as an infant, I had bronchiolitis, hypersensitive skin, and several infections. My mother used to say that I was made as if God was...
I used to do small scale construction work with a private firm out in rural Minnesota. Mostly private jobs. Someone needs a new deck or wants to build a guest house on the edge of their property. This isn’t really the “I want a custom...
I never thought we’d be in danger. That was never a real, conscious thought. After all our adventures to ghost houses, séances, or abandoned asylums, none of us had never actually run into something dangerous. But a couple of years ago, that changed. It was...
