The Novella Life of Illuscia Nester Himawari

Staff and customers alike at the Sunnyvale, California, Toys’R’Us store have experienced what they believe is a haunting. It is not just one or two staff members, but many. Some of the more common, strange events that occur involve staff hearing their names whispered to them, cold breezes and objects moving of their own accord. Taps would turn on by themselves in the women’s bathroom, and many of the stores female employees had experienced something unseen playing with their hair. It is never anything violent and it does not seem to target anyone in particular (besides mainly women). Staff who have come to terms with the idea that their store is haunted regard it as a friendly, if a little mischievous, presence. But when the phenomena was first beginning to be experienced back in the 70’s, it did take the staff unawares. As you would expect, the staff were a little freaked out by the strange poltergeist like happenings, so some outside help was sought. As word got ar...

Released in 1973, The Exorcist was acclaimed as a masterpiece, the scariest movie of all time and one of the most controversial films ever made. It was adapted from the novel ‘The Exorcist’ written by William Peter Blatty in 1971. The inspiration for Blatty’s novel came from a class he was attending in 1950. A priest was a guest speaker, and he told of an exorcism he had performed the year before. Blatty was working as a public relations director at the Loyola University, when he made an appearance on the Groucho Marx quiz show ‘You Bet Your Life’. Blatty won the $10,000, which was enough for him to quit his job and focus on a career as an author. Several publications, including The Exorcist, were the direct result. The Exorcist was a New York Times best seller, remaining on the list for well over a year, and soon Blatty, along with film director William Friedkin, would translate the work into a screen play. (note, there are a few spoilers ahead) The film (and book) co...

Credits to jellovert

I put my frozen hands over my mouth and blew steaming breath into them as I walked through the misty cemetery, a dense fog pouring into the half-open door of the church. Stumbling blindly down the graveyard path, I instinctively reached my hand out to guide me, but shivered when it fell upon a gravestone. I drew my hand away and kept marching, Am I even going the right way? I looked up at the night sky and watched dense clouds envelop the moon, taking the eerie glow from the mist, but also cutting off my sole supply of light. I shivered again. Strong winds whipped my face and wound their way into my open coat, steering me off course. Cold and disorientated, I spun on the spot to find any glimmer of light to show me the way to the gates, and as I focused I heard it. Ringing. The unmistakeable ringing of a bell. Frantic, panicked ringing. I followed the sound desperately, tripping over graves, trampling flowers and knocking over crosses, and where it was loudest I crouched dow...

When I was a small child, I was terrified of the dark. I still am, but back when I was around six years old I couldn’t go a full night without crying out for one of my parents to search beneath my bed or in my closet for whatever monster I thought was waiting to eat me. Even with a night light, I would still see dark shapes moving around the corners of the room, or strange faces looking in on me from my bedroom window. My parents would do their best to console me, telling me that it was just a bad dream or a trick of the light, but in my young mind I was positive that the second I fell asleep, the bad things would get me. Most of the time I would just hide under the blankets until I became tired enough to stop worrying, but every now and then I would become so panicked that I would run screaming into my parents room, waking up my brother and sister in the process. After an ordeal like that, there would be no way anyone would be getting a full nights rest. Eventually, after one particul...

I had memorized every detail of this beautiful woman in front of me. The dirt under her fingernails, the vein that throbbed on the side of her neck as she screamed at me, the subtle bumps that ran down the center of her back when she curled into a ball in the corner to sob after each of our visits - every little feature made me love her even more. The sound of her voice, and the way her tone would change depending on if she was begging me or threatening me, was music to my ears. I began to crave the smell of the sweat that would coat her skin during our rendezvous in the humid basement. I knew she could never leave me, and that kept me going during the day and helped me sleep at night. My feelings for her weren’t like this at first. She was intimidating. She didn’t talk to our coworkers unless she needed to, and she only needed to when they were in trouble or she had a demand to make. She was the type of manager that everyone dreaded, a bitch that asked too much and allowed very little...

The house my family and I grew up in was a really disturbing place. Completely normal-looking both inside and out, and yet the feel of the interior was never quite right. Even though it isn’t true, the most correct way that I feel for describing the house is that  the dust refused to settle  - even the dust wanted to be far away. We all experienced the simple scares: doors opening or closing; lights turning off and on; unceasing footfalls throughout the house with nobody else around; finding items moved without anyone to offer explanation. And then there were the singular events that went beyond: watching the radio tuning itself up and down the FM band, then the light turning itself off, then the physical attack; the shower curtain pulling itself open in an otherwise vacant room; drawers and cabinets opening themselves to cause a moment’s terror. All of this and more I simply grew up with. They were generally causes of alarm and confusion, rarely raw  fear . Bu...

When I was a child, my babysitter told me a scary story about a man that lived in the walls. This man did not just live in the walls of my particular home, but somehow lived in all walls in all buildings simultaneously. He could see us through the walls, and even reach out from them, but what he could not do was take a step onto the floor, which required you to be in arm’s reach for him to do anything. What was this man’s modus operandi? Simply put, he would wait for children to fall asleep, and then he would drag them into the wall to be tortured mercilessly for the rest of their days. They never elaborated on his motivations, but really, you don’t have to. This was his motivation. This is what he did. Why he did it was immaterial—anybody being told this story just didn’t want to get dragged inside of any walls and tortured in any way. Even seven year old me thought it was BS. Just some made-up story the cool teenagers told to scare the kids. It was fine. I went to sleep that night th...

    “Last chance to back out, are you absolutely sure you want this?” the man asked.     At the question, Robert turned to the man and swallowed the fear that had been building since his surgery only a week ago. The horrors he had seen in that short time would stay with him forever, he knew this. This new procedure would merely prevent him from being subjected to it any longer, but he could not un-see anything he had experienced.     He had lived in a fantasy world his whole life. Dreams of beautiful sunsets, “blue” skies, and pretty women had plagued him and all he ever wanted was to see them for real. Being born blind, he had no way to really know what anything described to him would really look like but when he learned of a procedure that would grant him sight he didn’t even hesitate. It took his family hours to get him to stop screaming after they removed the bandages.     He looked at the horrific creature in front of him ...

So, I have lived in my home for my whole life until recently. I was literally born into the house. We live out in the country and when my mom went into labor it was the middle of winter and there had been an ice storm, and my dad was very reluctant to travel the icy county roads with his pregnant wife. So I was born upstairs, in the master bedroom. Until recently, I hadn’t thought much of this, but now it seems to be a lot more important given recent circumstances. A short history on my experience regarding strange activity in my house- most of it occurred during childhood. I contributed most of it to an overactive imagination and all that bullshit until recently. A lot of it consisted of just seeing out of place people. That’s the best way I can explain it. That’s how I felt when I saw them, like they were just out of place. Not quite right. These are vague memories, but I remember well the emotions that accompanied them. And the thing was, they weren’t bad emotions. Whoever they were...

On July 16, 1923, I moved into Exham Priory after the last workman had finished his labours. The restoration had been a stupendous task, for little had remained of the deserted pile but a shell-like ruin; yet because it had been the seat of my ancestors I let no expense deter me. The place had not been inhabited since the reign of James the First, when a tragedy of intensely hideous, though largely unexplained, nature had struck down the master, five of his children, and several servants; and driven forth under a cloud of suspicion and terror the third son, my lineal progenitor and the only survivor of the abhorred line. With this sole heir denounced as a murderer, the estate had reverted to the crown, nor had the accused man made any attempt to exculpate himself or regain his property. Shaken by some horror greater than that of conscience or the law, and expressing only a frantic wish to exclude the ancient edifice from his sight and memory, Walter de la Poer, eleventh B...

When I was a kid, I had a really active imagination. I would create scenarios in my head, think of characters on the spot, and make up a story to my younger sister as she drifted off to sleep… I just presumed I had a talent for it. My parents smiled as I began using my talents for the creative pieces of work I brought home from school. Paintings, stories, songs filed onto a compact disk… and my mother would hold me close and whisper into my ear; “You have an excellent gift Terry.” And that gift stuck with me all my life. In elementary school I didn’t really have many friends, so I’d make them up. On the spot. I had a new one everyday. Then I’d sketch them into one of my books. The kids would laugh at me but I didn’t care. I had my mind, and it was my friend. I sat alone, and talk to the characters I had imagined out of nothing. They had different personalities also. Teachers would smile whenever I walked passed them. “How’s your imagination going?” “Good,” I would reply, “Frank has pla...

It’s a long one. But trust me. Worth it. Every single word. This story will haunt me for days to come. Like most people, I had a sad childhood. Who doesn’t, these days? My father left before I was born and my mother was on drugs from the day she brought me home. She slipped right back into her party lifestyle and turned our apartment into an opium den. I walked around in a drug-fueled haze for the first 5 years of my life. The smoky air flooded down the hallway and under my door and seemed to linger for days. My mother wasn’t a bad person, just a victim of her addictions. When she did have spare money, she would put food in the house and even sometimes buy me clothes from Goodwill. The only pieces of furniture I had in my bedroom were a box spring and mattress set and a little blue and white toy chest. Not that I had a lot of toys to put in it, just the 3 I had gotten for birthdays: one was an art kit, one was a red wagon, and the last, my pride and joy, was a doll named Betsy. Betsy w...

    In my room, on my desk, sits a black, plastic casing which holds my glasses.     They have a power of minus 9 and they were very expensive to wear.     When I was younger, my mother used to warn me about sitting too close to the television. She used to tell me that my eyesight would get progressively worse and I’d either end up needing glasses or my eyes would simply be bad enough to make me legally blind.     Being an overly obnoxious nine-year-old, I never listened to her. So whenever my favorite cartoon or TV-show was on I would scurry to the living room and rest my head an inch away from the screen. I figured that the closer I got to the TV, the closer I could get to the show.     Whenever my mother found out about this she would yell at me about how expensive glasses would be and that we couldn’t afford even a single pair. She’d then proceed to slap the back of my head so hard that I would accidentally b...

There may be strange details in this story. Not all of them will seem to add up and appear to be significant, but it’s all true. That sort of statement is common with these types of stories, but this time it is meant in absolute earnest. My grandfather was a mortician and about a year after he retired he himself passed on. He and I shared the exact same name and it was slightly unsettling to hear my own name in the eulogy. To witness firsthand the lowering of a casket, revealing one’s own name on the headstone. It gave the whole event a sort of dreamlike quality. I suppose such things got me thinking of my own mortality more than a funeral normally should. After the burial we drove passed the old funeral home. The business had been handed over to a new guy who did an alright job I guess. Grandpa looked okay. Though that wasn’t on my mind. There was a large tree in the front yard of the old funeral home. Near the peak of the tree, amongst its naked branches, was a wicked grim reaper hal...

During my childhood my family was like a drop of water in a vast river, never remaining in one location for long. We settled in Rhode Island when I was eight, and there we remained until I went to college in Colorado Springs. Most of my memories are rooted in Rhode Island, but there are fragments in the attic of my brain which belong to the various homes we had lived in when I was much younger. Most of these memories are unclear and pointless– chasing after another boy in the back yard of a house in North Carolina, trying to build a raft to float on the creek behind the apartment we rented in Pennsylvania, and so on. But there is one set of memories which remains as clear as glass, as though they were just made yesterday. I often wonder whether these memories are simply lucid dreams produced by the long sickness I experienced that Spring, but in my heart, I know they are real. We were living in a house just outside the bustling metropolis of New Vineyard, Maine, population 643. It was ...

In the spring 1989 the Karvina Corporation released a curious game, whose dissemination among American students that fall was swift and furious, though its popularity was ultimately short-lived. The game was “Killswitch.” On the surface it was a variant on the mystery or horror survival game, a precursor to the Myst and Silent Hill franchises. The narrative showed the complexity for which Karvina was known, though the graphics were monochrome, vague grey and white shapes against a black background. Slow MIDI versions of Czech folksongs play throughout. Players could choose between two avatars: an invisible demon named Ghast or a visible human woman, Porto. Play as Ghast was considerably more difficult due to his total invisibility, and players were highly liable to restart the game as Porto after the first level, in which it was impossible to gauge jumps or aim. However, Ghast was clearly the more powerful character–he had fire-breath and a coal-steam attack, but as it was a...