- NienNunb
- Feb 15, 2012
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Hi hello, if there's already a recent-ish thread for this subject please let me know and I'll close this.
Many years ago in like 2012 or 2013 there was a Halloween-themed thread here for short horror stories and creepypastas. That thread introduced me to a number of amazing writers and stories that I had never heard of before.
One of those stories, the namesake for the thread, is Arthur C. Clarke's The Nine Billion Names Of God. In it the monks of a remote monastery, with the aid of a group of computer programmers, attempt to mathematically determine the true name of god.
Another story, one that I couldn't track down online again for a number of years until semi-recently, is Thomas Disch's Descending. A speculative short story about the realities of going further and further down a set of never ending escalators.
One last one that has stuck with me since then is, in my opinion, the Ur Example of objectively great creepypastas: Ted The Caver. Told through pages and pages of a charmingly dated Angel Fire page, it is a masterclass of building vague unease and dread.
Please feel free to post any short story that is tangibly creepy or appropriate for the season, even if it isn't strictly in the "horror" genre.
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Oct 19, 2020 06:57
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Apr 20, 2024 04:14
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- Juliet Whisky
- Jan 14, 2017
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Suppose everyone already knows _9MOTHER9HORSE9EYES9 on Reddit.
If not here's the OG user comments. There is a start and an end so to read it in order scroll to the end then go up because Reddit is a good website.
https://www.reddit.com/user/_9MOTHER9HORSE9EYES9/comments/
The posts are probably curated better elsewhere but I think it is cool to see as it was presented.
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Oct 19, 2020 08:48
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- NienNunb
- Feb 15, 2012
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Another great entry into the creepy, atmospheric speculative short genre is Bradbury's There Will Come Soft Rains, a guided tour through a retro futurist suburban community.
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Oct 19, 2020 16:23
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- Pondex
- Jul 8, 2014
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Another great entry into the creepy, atmospheric speculative short genre is Bradbury's There Will Come Soft Rains, a guided tour through a retro futurist suburban community.
This russian animated version of that story pops up on my youtube every now and then.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5LNHYz89sNc
I can't find it online, but "The Wind" is one of my favorite creepy short stories of R.B.'s. Just a guy talking on the phone with his friend who's maybe going nuts/maybe getting stalked by the wind for some reason.
Most of his anthology October Country is pretty good actually.
This one is maybe a bit Steven King-derivative but I found it plenty creepy:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xE-RV1sRL4A
The ending is just a chefs kiss of an awful gutpunch. The poor bastard doesn't have it in him to hope for rescue or anything like that. Just that it's not the worst one of these ghouls that's coming to get him.
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Oct 19, 2020 18:35
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- coronatae
- Oct 14, 2012
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There's also this collection of goon ghost stories of varying lengths, with the Humper Monkey/50FA novellas conveniently filed in separate sections.
Jezebel runs an annual scary (allegedly true) stories contest but linking to the comments section is an enormous pain so I'm just going to copy/paste the best story that ever came out of it:
quote:
Look at Me from theatreguy
This happened in my junior year of high school.
One evening, my mother and stepfather had gone out to some event, maybe it was an extended dinner or a concert, it's hard to remember. I had stayed at home to work on a paper that was due the next day (I was one of those kids who procrastinated until the last minute) and spent the whole night working at the desk in my room. To give you a picture of the room, my desk faces a wall and sits next to a small window that's on the same wall, and from where I sit, my back faces my doorway. While I was working, I was wearing these great headphones that I had gotten for my birthday — the kind that are noise canceling.
My parents left the house around 6:00 PM, and the whole time they were gone, I sat at my desk, blasting music through my headphones and writing my essay. Occasionally, I would take breaks and watch the rain and lightning outside my window (we lived in Houston at the time and there was a big storm that night). I never left my desk.
My parents returned around 11:00 PM. At some point late late in the evening, I had removed my headphones, so when my parents came home (coincidentally just a few minutes after I had taken off my headphones), I clearly heard the garage door open and my parents open the door to the house. Seconds after I hear them enter, I hear my mother shout my name. "Adrian!" she screams, "what on earth happened in here!?" Confused, I get out of my chair and start walking through the house to them. There's only a small hallway that separates my room from the living room. Due to my rush to figure out why my mother was yelling, I paid little attention to the hall and the house. After a few moments, I get to my parents. My mom looks livid. She's pointing at the carpet floor yelling, "Was this you!? Did you have friends over!?" I look down. The carpet is ruined. It's covered in muddy footprints.
I frantically explain to her that I have no idea how those got there, that I spent the whole night at my desk working on my paper. I watch as her face goes from anger, to confusion, to fear. We realize that someone else must have entered the house. Quickly we scan the footprints, trying to make sense of the situation. It only takes us a few moments to figure out where they start: our back door, which we usually left unlocked. Then we noticed something else. The footprints started at the backdoor, but there were no footprints exiting the back door.
We hear something pounding through our house. We hear the front door get torn open, then slammed shut with a sharp WHAM!
We all run into the garage and lock the door. My mom starts shouting at the police through the phone, "Please come quickly! Someone's broken into our house!" After what seems like hours, the police arrive. An officer stays with us in the garage as his partner goes through the house room by room. His partner tells us that it's safe to go back in, that there's no one in the house. Then she asks us a question. She asks us whose room is down the hall to the left. My parents look at me and I tell the officer that it's mine. She asks us to follow her down the hall.
As we go, it's easy to see that the footprints weave through my house from the back door. They go through the living room, through the small hallway, into my parents room (which is down the hall to the right) and then turn around towards my room. They stop in my doorway.
Then the officer points at my door, which I had left open the whole night. On it, in black sharpie, was written the following:
My Log
8:47: I see you
8:53: You forgot to lock the back door
8:59: You seem focused
9:24: Turn around
9:47: Look at me
10:15: Look at me
10:37: Look at me
10:49: Look at me
For nearly two hours, someone stood in my doorway watching me. To this day, I shutter to think about what would have happened if I had ever turned around and looked at them.
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Oct 20, 2020 03:36
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- NienNunb
- Feb 15, 2012
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It's old hat at this point (especially after the particularly good season of Channel Zero based on it) but this Creepypasta was incredibly upsetting the first time I read it:
quote:
I found a hidden door in my cellar, and I think I've made a big mistake
My wife and I have lived in our house for around 5 years, and in that time we’ve probably been down into the cellar a handful of times. Our house is an old Victorian terrace house, and so the cellar is cold and damp. When we first moved in we kept wine and stuff down there (because my wife liked the idea of telling people we had a ‘wine cellar’) but it got annoying going down there every time so we stopped using it. There’s only the two of us living here so we never really needed to use it for storage space.
A few weeks ago we decided we were going to renovate it, maybe turn it into a mini gym or something. So at the weekend we went down and began cleaning it up. The cellar has a stone floor, but the walls were covered in this horrible, yellowed floral wallpaper. It looked old as hell, and I assumed it was put up decades ago. So we began to strip the wallpaper. And that’s when we found the door.
Covered up with wallpaper, the door was set into the wall. It was plain wood, and the door handle had been removed so that it was flat. We were pretty stumped at how we hadn’t noticed this before, how it had blended in so well with the rest of the wall. But at this point, I was pretty excited that we’d found a secret door, so I largely overlooked its oddness.
All the houses in our street have cellars, so I assumed it must be an old doorway leading through to next door’s cellar. We decided that we’d go round to our neighbours’ tomorrow morning and tell him about the doorway, and suggesting we brick it up or something (I didn’t really feel comfortable about having this access point into our house).
My wife tried to look through the small circle hole in the door where the handle had been removed, but it was pitch black in there, so because we’re nosy, we used the torch on her phone to peek through the hole. My wife looked first. She suddenly went still.
“This doesn’t go into next door’s cellar,” she said slowly, moving back from the door. I frowned and took her phone, looking for myself. Instead of the cellar, there were stone steps, leading downwards. I couldn’t see very far with the light from the phone, so I brought down my big torch and managed to get the door open.
We looked down the stairs with the torch. They weren’t very long, and at the end of the stairway was another door. This one looked really old, wooden panels kept together with metal columns. It even had one of those metal ring handles.
It didn’t make sense how this could be here. Even though it was going down, the beginning of the stair way would still cut into next door’s cellar. We’d been in his cellar for drinks a few times, which had been done up into a games room with a bar and pool table, and I had never noticed a big jut out from the wall that would cover a stairway, or that it was smaller than our cellar if there was a whole wall blocking it off.
My wife thought we should probably talk with him before going down and left, but I was too curious about the whole thing. So I took the torch and went down. I tried the handle, and it was a bit stiff, but I was completely took by surprise that it opened. I shone the torch inside. It was a concrete room, similar looking to our cellar but smaller, and this was the only entrance or exit that I could see.
I waved the torch around and nearly jumped out of my skin. There was a man stood at the back wall, facing the wall, his back to me. He was completely still, wearing a black suit and black rimmed hat. The man was so still that I began to think he might be a manikin, until he slowly lifted one foot.
I stood transfixed, my torch light trained on him. It was just bright enough to illuminate his body, but the rest of the room was in complete darkness. He held his foot still in the air, before slowly moving it a step backwards. His movements were unnatural and jerky, like someone who didn’t fully understand how to walk. He stayed like that for a moment, completely still, one foot placed back. Then he lifted his other foot in the same jerky movement. This time when he stepped back, his foot slammed on the floor.
The sound shook me out of my frozen state and I jumped back. As soon as I moved it was like I’d triggered something, and suddenly he moved so quick. He was running backwards towards me, his legs jerking around unnaturally. Writing this down it sounds kind of funny, but at the time it was utterly terrifying. I’ve never seen someone move that way before.
I instinctively threw the torch at him (maybe I thought I could knock him out or something, I honestly don’t know) and legged it back up the stairs, slamming the door shut behind me and running up the stairs leading out of the cellar, slamming that door shut too. I hesitated by the door, barricading it with my arm, trying to control my breathing and understand what I’d just witnessed.
I heard the sound of the door push open in the cellar, and then what sounded like a huge lump of flesh dragging along the floor. I thought I began to hear what sounded like a low hissing noise, at which point I ran out of the house yelling my wife’s name. She was stood on the front step of the neighbour’s, talking to him. I grabbed her and pulled her to the other side of the road, yelling for my neighbour to get away from the house.
Without waiting to explain to them what I saw I grabbed my phone and called the police. We all stood there in the dark, my neighbour in his robe and slippers, looking at the house. After a few moments, I saw the lights that we’d left on flicker through our kitchen window. And then they went out completely. All I remember was holding my wife’s hand so tightly, looking up into our dark windows, and waiting for the police to arrive.
They found no one in the house, but the cellar door was open and so was our back door. They checked our garden but found no one, and no footprints or signs of someone being there.
They brought a team over to check out the hidden room we found. My neighbour claimed no knowledge of the room, and that he too couldn’t understand how the stairs and room could possibly exist, could fit in between our two cellars. The police couldn’t explain it anymore than we could. I didn’t want to ever go back in there, so they showed us photos of the walls inside that room. The concrete was carved with symbols, and they found what looked like centuries old dried blood. They had the symbols sent to our local university’s history department, but no one knew what they meant.
They sealed off the room and we’ve never gone down into the cellar again. I think we made a huge mistake that day in opening that door, in going into that room. I think we set something free that day, something that someone had locked up for a reason, and I don’t think it’s good.
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Oct 20, 2020 03:52
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- Scott Lame
- Jan 8, 2014
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My favorite creepy story is The Night Wire, from Weird Tales magazine in 1926(!). It's corny I suppose but I like how the narrator's focus on just doing his job grounds the story in a way that most supernatural tales lack.
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Oct 20, 2020 07:46
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Apr 20, 2024 04:14
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- Grammarchist
- Jan 28, 2013
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My favorite creepy story is The Night Wire, from Weird Tales magazine in 1926(!). It's corny I suppose but I like how the narrator's focus on just doing his job grounds the story in a way that most supernatural tales lack.
I love this story. Horrorbabble on Youtube does a pretty decent narration of these older short stories. The speaker is a pretty practiced older man, so you don't have those drama-club teenager moments of extreme ACTING taking you out of the story, like some other channels. I often put it on to help me sleep.
The "Family of the Vourdalak" is one I particularly enjoyed from their Russian Horror series: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QKArbuk3tQk
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Oct 20, 2020 16:11
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Oct 19, 2020 06:57
