After dark story time

It was a chilly night on the second weekend in October. The autumn air in Blackwood Hollow didn't just chill your skin. It clung to it like damp wool. Every October the Miller farm hosted a haunted hayride to celebrate Halloween, many people's favorite holiday. It was local legend material: tractor-led, sprawling across forty acres of overgrown timber, populated by high school kids in cheap foam masks who jumped out from behind corn shocks to make teenagers spill their cider. That night the hayride started the way it always did. Creaky trailer, smell of diesel and straw, kids screaming on cue at the plastic skeletons wired to the fence posts. Marla had worked the Blackwood Hollow haunted hayride for three seasons and could recite the script in her sleep. Scarecrow jump-scare at the first bend. Chainsaw guy (no chain, just noise) at the pond. Fake grave markers with the corny puns. This year, they had added a new stretch of trail through the back acreage, past the old orchard n...

St. Mercy’s Regional was been built in 1911, back when hospitals were places people went to die quietly. Over the years it expanded, modernized, added glass wings and cheerful murals. But the original building remained at its core - brick, narrow windows, and hallways that smelled faintly of antiseptic and something older, like damp paper and rust. Everyone knew about the fourth floor. Officially, it was closed after a fire in the 1980s. Electrical failure, they said. Unofficially, nurses said all the patients weren't evacuated in time. Records vanished. Names were missing. Death certificates were… incomplete. The elevators skipped the fourth floor entirely. But there were rumors that sometimes, at night, they stopped there anyway. Mara started working nights because she needed the money and because she liked quiet. She had heard about strange happenings at St. Mercy’s Regional, but she told herself she didn’t believe in ghosts.  If anything, hospitals were emotional places - grief...

The carnival arrived without posters, without radio ads, without warning. One night the empty fairgrounds at the edge of town simply changed . Rusted gates stood wide open. Strings of lights flickered weakly, glowing a sickly yellow against the fog. No one remembered seeing the trucks come in. I noticed it first on my walk home. Music drifted through the trees - tinny and warped, like it was being played underwater. A carousel tune. Slow. Wrong. Every instinct told me to turn around, but curiosity pulled harder than fear. The Ferris wheel creaked as it turned, though no one sat inside. Each empty car swayed gently, like it was breathing. The air smelled of damp hay, oil, and something faintly sweet… like rotting cotton candy. “Hello?” I called. The sound was swallowed immediately. The midway stretched farther than it should have. Lights buzzed weakly, casting long, crooked shadows that twitched when I wasn’t looking. Every game booth looked abandoned, yet every prize was dusty with fin...

by Lynn WL A group of kids were bored on a Sunday afternoon, so they decided to go to the local hospital to play doctor with a real patient. Little did they know it would lead to an evening of horror. ***** The following took place a number of years ago when I was 8 years old. It was in early or mid October, and it was a 3 day weekend, so my family decided to go visit our relatives who lived in a small town. We (my parents, my 12 year old brother Dave, my 10 year old sister Tania, and myself) left home Friday afternoon and drove a few hours through the countryside to get to our destination. It was a nice drive. The weather was cool and the leaves already started to turn colors. It was starting to get dark when we got to the town where they lived. It was a small town, and there weren't very many people out and about. There was only one hospital in the town. My uncle is a doctor and he worked at the hospital, and his house was just a couple of blocks away. So when the weather was nic...

by Lynn WL I was born in an Asian country and lived there until I was seven when my family and I moved to the US. I still remember how I used to be spooked whenever I went into a hospital as a kid because most of the hospitals back there were old and had dark corridors. There were also a couple of objects associated with hospitals that always made me uneasy when I saw them. They were gurneys or stretchers, and wheelchairs . I associated them with pain and suffering besides the spooky environments of the hospitals themselves. The following took place when I was nine (so I was already living in the US). Our family and my aunt's lived like a couple of miles apart, and we were pretty close to each other. We would often visit each other and hang out together. One day my aunt was tied up at work, and my uncle was out of town, so she asked my mom if she could pick up my cousin Robert (who is a year older than I am) from school and bring him to our house until she got off work which would ...

by Lynn WL Author's note: When you're on social media you have to be careful with the personal information you share cos you never know who might read it and what they might do to you. I posted this story on Reddit a while ago using an alt account. This is based on true events. I waited so long to post it here because I didn't want to reveal my identity at the time. I just don't ever want to experience this kind of nightmare again. Some of the names were changed. I'm not linking back to the original story. So in case some of you happen to have read it, there is no copyright infringement. I wrote the original story myself using a different name. Disclaimer: Unfortunately, a few people were offended by this story. So let me be very clear: this story is in no way intended as an attack against people with mental disorders. Any reference to them is purely coincidental. Please don't take anything personally. If you're very sensitive to this matter, you may wan...

WARNING: This story is NSFW (not safe for work), and is for adult readers ( 18 years or older ) only. If you are under 18 or are sensitive to eroticism and gore, please choose a different story to read. There are many others, including family friendly ones. by Lynn WL Early last summer I was going on a cruise to Alaska leaving from Seattle with my girlfriend Sandra. She's actually my childhood best friend (I'm bi and she's lesbian). We were planning to stay in Seattle for a day, and already booked a hotel. It was a quaint little waterfront hotel, and we were lucky to get an ocean view so that we could watch ships pass by. Sandra was flying in from a different city, and she happened to have relatives in Seattle whom she wanted to spend a little time with. So we agreed to meet at the hotel some time in the evening before dinner. I arrived in early afternoon, so I had plenty of time to kill. The weather was just perfect. It was in the mid 70s, and the sun was shining b...

My girlfriend and I camped out by a lake north of Houston. We were still having lots of fun in the wee hours when we heard a woman sobbing. We went to check it out, and I really wish we hadn't. by Lynn WL Shelley and I had been best friends since elementary school. We had many things in common, and loved each other's company. In middle school I came to realize that I was bi, and I was physically attracted to my best friend, but I kept it to myself for obvious reasons. In the last year of high school she shocked everyone (especially the boys who had a crush on her and were greatly disappointed) by coming out as a lesbian. I then opened up to her and told her I had always been attracted to her. To my pleasant surprise, she told me the feeling was mutual. But we didn't get into a romantic relationship immediately since I had a boyfriend at the time. Shelley and I went to the same college the first year, during which I broke up with my boyfriend and subsequently starte...

It was Friday, Halloween night. Mom wanted to give us a special treat, so she told us the story of the faceless ghost. Family friendly. by Lynn WL The following happened when I was 9 years old. I was sharing a room with my big sister at the time, but on weekends during the warmer months I would camp out in the backyard with my 8 year old little brother Kevin. It was a lot of fun, and we both always looked forward to it. Faceless ghost That year Halloween fell on Friday which was an extra treat for us since we could stay up later. We had a blast trick-or-treating. I dressed as a witch, and Kevin a pirate. I loved going barefoot so I was a barefoot witch, but Kevin wore shoes. We got a boat load of candy, and when we got home we immediately went into the tent. My feet were quite dirty but I didn't bother to wash them since we were going to sleep outside the house. As we were sorting out the candy mom suddenly appeared in front of the tent. We were both startled as we weren...