1. I woke up to hear knocking on glass. At first, I thought it was the window until I heard it come from the mirror again.
2. The last thing I saw was my alarm clock flashing 12:07 before she pushed her long rotting nails through my chest, her other hand muffling my screams. I sat bolt upright, relieved it was only a dream, but as I saw my alarm clock read 12:06, I heard my closet door creak open.
3.Growing up with cats and dogs, I got used to the sounds of scratching at my door while I slept. Now that I live alone, it is much more unsettling.
4. In all of the time that I've lived alone in this house, I swear to God I've closed more doors than I've opened.
5. A girl heard her mom yell her name from downstairs, so she got up and started to head down. As she got to the stairs, her mom pulled her into her room and said "I heard that, too."
6. She asked why I was breathing so heavily. I wasn't.
7. My wife woke me up last night to tell me there was an intruder in our house. She was murdered by an intruder 2 years ago.
8. I awoke to the sound of the baby monitor crackling with a voice comforting my firstborn child. As I adjusted to a new position, my arm brushed against my wife, sleeping next to me.
9. I always thought my cat had a staring problem - she always seemed fixated on my face. Until one day, when I realized that she was always looking just behind me.
10. There's nothing like the laughter of a baby. Unless it's 1 a.m. and you're home alone.
11. I was having a pleasant dream when what sounded like hammering woke me. After that, I could barely hear the muffled sound of dirt covering the coffin over my own screams.
12. "I can't sleep," she whispered, crawling into bed with me. I woke up cold, clutching the dress she was buried in.
13. I begin tucking him into bed and he tells me, "Daddy, check for monsters under my bed." I look underneath for his amusement and see him, another him, under the bed, staring back at me quivering and whispering, "Daddy, there's somebody on my bed."
14. You get home, tired after a long day's work and ready for a relaxing night alone. You reach for the light switch, but another hand is already there.
15. I can't move, breathe, speak or hear and it's so dark all the time. If I knew it would be this lonely, I would have been cremated instead.
16. She went upstairs to check on her sleeping toddler. The window was open and the bed was empty.
17. Don't be scared of the monsters, just look for them. Look to your left, to your right, under your bed, behind your dresser, in your closet but never look up, she hates being seen.
18. My daughter won't stop crying and screaming in the middle of the night. I visit her grave and ask her to stop, but it doesn't help.
19. After working a hard day, I came home to see my girlfriend cradling our child. I didn't know which was more frightening, seeing my dead girlfriend and stillborn child, or knowing that someone broke into my apartment to place them there.
20. There was a picture in my phone of me sleeping. I live alone.
21. The doctors told the amputee he might experience a phantom limb from time to time. Nobody prepared him for the moments though, when he felt cold fingers brush across his phantom hand.
22. Don’t be scared of the monsters, just look for them. Look to your left, to your right, under your bed, behind your dresser, in your closet but never look up, she hates being seen.
23. They celebrated the first successful cryogenic freezing. He had no way of letting them know he was still conscious.
24. She wondered why she was casting two shadows. Afterall, there was only a single lightbulb.
25. It sat on my shelf, with thoughtless porcelain eyes and the prettiest pink doll dress I could find. Why did she have to be born still?
26. The grinning face stared at me from the darkness beyond my bedroom window. I live on the 14th floor.
27. There was a picture in my phone of me sleeping. I live alone.
28. I just saw my reflection blink.
29. Working the night shift alone tonight. There is a face in the cellar staring at the security camera.
30. They delivered the mannequins in bubble wrap. From the main room I begin to hear popping.
31. You wake up. She doesn’t.
32. She asked why I was breathing so heavily. I wasn’t.
33. You get home, tired after a long day’s work and ready for a relaxing night alone. You reach for the light switch, but another hand is already there.
34. My daughter won’t stop crying and screaming in the middle of the night. I visit her grave and ask her to stop, but it doesn’t help.
35. You start to drift off into a comfortable sleep when you hear your name being whispered. You live alone.
36. I kiss my wife and daughter goodnight before I go to sleep. When I wake up, I’m in a padded room and the nurses tell me it was just a dream.
37. You’re laying in bed and with your feet dangling out of the covers. You feel a hand grab your feet.
38. The funeral attendees never came out of the catacombs. Something locked the crypt door from the inside.
39. I was having a pleasant dream when what sounded like hammering woke me. After that, I could barely hear the muffled sound of dirt covering the coffin over my own screams.
40. The last man on Earth sat alone in a room. There was a knock at the door.
41. After working a hard day I came home to see my girlfriend cradling our child. I didn’t know which was more frightening, seeing my dead girlfriend and stillborn child, or knowing that someone broke into my apartment to place them there.
42. You hear your mom calling you into the kitchen. As you are heading down the stairs you hear a whisper from the closet saying “Don’t go down there honey, I heard it too.”
43. I never go to sleep. But I keep waking up.
44. Nurse’s Note: Born 7 pounds 10 ounces, 18 inches long, 32 fully formed teeth. Silent, always smiling.
45. The longer I wore it the more it grew on me. She had such pretty skin.
46. “I can’t sleep” she whispered, crawling into bed with me. I woke up cold, clutching the dress she was buried in.
47. You hear the scream across the hallway, but your eyes won’t open and you can’t move.
48. Being the first to respond to a fatal car accident is always the most traumatic thing I see as a police officer. But today, when the crushed body of the little dead child boy strapped in his car seat opened his eyes and giggled at me when I tried to peel him out of the wreckage, I immediately knew that today would be my last day on the force.
49. I looked out my window. The stars had gone away.
50. I always thought my cat had a staring problem, she always seemed fixated on my face. Until one day, when I realized that she was always looking just behind me.
51. The pairs of emaciated eyes outnumber the single round in my gun. With pleading tears falling on her doll’s hair, I point the barrel at my last surviving daughter.
52. My sister says that mommy killed her. Mommy says that I don’t have a sister.
53. The floor boards creaked from behind me. Slowly I turned, the skin had literally been stripped from her face exposing bones, muscle tissue and veins.
54. The floor bucked and heaved. When it stopped, my mother stood in front of me.
55. The creep was still standing by the bus stop the next day. Even after running him over twice yesterday, that guy was still there.
56. Blood dripped from the edge of the knife, he was practically gutted. Yet, there he stood, alive, and with a vengeful look in his eyes.
57. My dog's eyes began to fill with blood. I cradled him in my arms, sorrow anchored by the firm knowledge that I was next.
58. I thought that I would be safe if I could just wake up from this nightmare. But then, I did wake up.
59. When I awakened, I found myself in pitch blackness, in a confining space lined with a satin-like material. I had hardly room to move, and the air was getting hard to breathe.
60. I was not completely alone in the forest as I heard the brushing sound of someone stalking me, treading through the grass. I fell down and as the man's tall shadow loomed over me, I realized it was too late to scream.
61. It wasn’t with my own eyes but with the eyes of a sixth sense that I saw my brains splattered on the warehouse wall behind me after the double-barreled shotgun Bruno had stuck in my face coughed enough lead to drop several geese. I wondered if Vondine was warming up the meatloaf and noodles left over from lunch.
62. For a city kid to hear someone walking behind you on a late evening is pretty much a daily occurrence. Though when that person breaks into a run you usually want to start running yourself.
63. He held his breath until the sound of footsteps faded. When he opened his eyes, the warm breath on his neck told him that he was not alone.
64. The way he had died wasn’t the way he would have wanted to. And this certainly wasn’t the way--he thought to himself as he looked in a mirror--he would have wanted to come back from the grave.
65. Many believed that he died that day. He did but he had two compelling reasons to come back - to seek revenge and to take the girl he loved with him.
66. She couldn’t have said why she was afraid he would return from the grave, any more than her mother could have explained, in the forum of the beauty shop, why her daughter went to sleep at night with a sawed-off shotgun.
67. He didn’t believe in zombies until, in a room dimly-lit by what a skylight let in of evening, he saw one approaching, its clothes torn, the skin rotting off its face. Recoiling instinctively, he watched as the zombie did the same thing, and it was then that he noticed the bench, the long mirror’s fasteners, in the littered space that had once been a department store’s breakroom.
68. He was barely conscious when he felt himself hunched over uncomfortably, in terrible darkness. It was not until it dawned on him and ran out of air that he was in a large barrel- deep in the basement amongst the mad wineman's vast collection of booze and "new mixes."
69. It was already midnight when he decided to take a break from writing a story. He was about to turn off his computer when someone whispered in his ear, "Write about what you've done to me."
70. He liked to pretend that he wasn't afraid of the midnight hour. But what he didn't pretend to be afraid of was why his memory was blank every night's midnight hour.
71. No one would have believed him if he had explained why he was standing in an old cemetery in the middle of the night, a shovel in his hand, numb with the terror of what he knew he must find.
72. The air had turned cold and stale as the hours dragged by, he held the shovel tight, like his life depended on it. A forceful wind pushed him to the ground and when he looked up, his scream tore the quiet night.
73. Years later, he still woke yelling in the night, and felt a prickling of the scalp on such rare occasions as he could be coaxed into recounting what had happened to him. He wasn’t sure what had terrified him the most, the feeling of being pulled into a collapsing grave, or the sensation of what had him by the ankles.
74. The lack of light became a tasteless treacle that entered his lungs and oozed into his blood until he became the darkness.
75. She carried the last box into the house, feeling excited to finally have a place she could call her own. As she was arranging her things inside a closet, she found a voodoo doll on the top shelf, in her own image.
76. She knew that the evil man in black in front of her would make his prisoners and her go through torture and pain. Then her fears were answered as the man called her name and all her fellow students' eyes turned to her, burning into her psyche.
77. The obese beggars awoke in the filthy shadow of a dumpster in a downtown alley. A woman's red shawl lay at their feet and several fingers that had been severed most assuredly from a hand.
78. The worst thing wasn’t that, when the catering service delivered the finger food he had ordered for the reception, he found fingers in it. The worst thing was that he knew whose fingers they were.
79. I'm not afraid of the cemetery. It's the only place the ghosts don't follow me.
80. I enter the empty elevator and push the button for my floor. As the doors close I feel a hand cover my mouth.
81. It's hard fighting the urge to hurt myself. My only comfort is knowing that I can hurt the girl in the trunk instead.
82. When we bought the house I assumed the scratches on the inside of the basement door were from a dog, but the neighbors say the previous owner didn't have one. This morning the scratches had multiplied.
83. She felt the heat as the flames engulfed the only house she'd ever known. When the screams subsided she smiled, knowing she was finally alone.
84. I let my little girl sleep with me at night. I still like to snuggle with her despite the increasingly pungent smell of her rotting flesh.
85. My dog's muddy paws tell me he has been to to the cemetery again. The footsteps in the hall tell me he has not returned alone, but this time I have my ax.
86. The lights flicker. I put the pillow over my head, so I won't hear the screams this time.
87. The problem with sneaking out is that your parents have no idea where to look for you. By the time they find this cage you will not be alive.
88. I tell myself that the scratching sounds in the attic are probably squirrels. I choose to ignore the scratching sounds at my bedroom door, the ones from inside the closet, and the ones under the bed even though I can feel them tearing through the bottom of the mattress.
89. I hear my son scream, so I rush upstairs to comfort him back to sleep. He doesn't believe me when I say everything is okay, perhaps because he sees the creature that followed me to his room.
90. I hesitantly scrolled through a website full of pictures of me sleeping and realized that in each image the strange man gets closer to my bed. In the one uploaded last night he was lifting the blanket.
91. "The lake is so peaceful at night," he thought as he floated in the rowboat under the moonlight. "The lake is so peaceful at night," he thought until he dipped his fingers in the water and something pulled him in to drown.
92. He loved waking to sunlight on his face, but it was 3 am, the curtains were closed, and the light was coming from an orb hovering over his bed. "Dana?"
93. Finally to his car he drove away from there as fast as he could. When he felt safe enough to breathe a voice from the backseat said, "Leaving so soon?"
94. There is nothing like the pitter patter of little feet, hundreds of little feet, knowing they will climb onto the bed and smother you unless wake up right NOW. Wake up, dammit!
95. He ran to the next house, but that door was locked too. The boy collapsed in exhaustion as the clawed hand dragged him back to the others.
96. Okay, mama, I will go to sleep and not talk about the man in my closet anymore. He's going to your room now anyway, right, mister?
97. They said I'd experience "phantom limb syndrome" when it would sometimes feel like my arm was still there. They didn't say I'd wake up at night to it strangling me.
98. I burned the dolls even though my children cried. They did not understand my fear because they assumed I was who moved the dolls into their beds each night.
99. My grandmother told me that it was a gift to see the angel of death in front of people's houses, to know that he'd be collecting someone there soon. I thought it was a gift too, up until the day I began to see it in front of every house.
100. Yesterday my parents told me I was too old for an imaginary friend and that I had to let her go. They found her body this morning.
101. For years we heard the little voices and footsteps of the ghost children in our old farmhouse, and we got used to them. Then one day they went quiet, which should have been our own cue to leave.
102. When I finally grabbed her in the darkness, I swam back to the surface. It never occurred to me how fast the ice could freeze over.
103. The operation wasn't successful in the traditional sense since my sight didn't return, but it left me with the ability to distinguish heat signatures, at least. Three weeks have passed and I'm still not sure how to politely ask my best friend why he's room temperature.
104. Years ago, a lone chair appeared in the center of the basement, and no matter how many times I put it back in the corner it always found a way back to the center. It took a long time to realize it was positioned underneath the kitchen, almost like someone had taken a seat at the dinner table with the rest of us.
105. You know that weird, full-body twitch you get sometimes when you're falling asleep? If there was a camera pointed at you, and you saw what it captured at that moment, you'd never sleep again.
106. After struggling desperately to move any part of his paralytic body just to alert the doctors that he was conscious before they made the first incision, he was relieved to see that one of the nurses had noticed his pupils dilating from the bright light. She leaned in close and, in a whisper that tickled his ear, said "you think we don't know you're awake?"
107. "You stupid bastard!" I cried as he tied me to the rails, "don't you know this line has been abandoned for years!" "Of course I know", he said, walking away, "no one comes here at all."
108. I wake up and everything feels wrong; it's too quiet outside. I look out the window and see everyone standing still, looking at my house.
109. It's been watching me for hours now... Sometimes I catch glimpses of its reflexion on the computer screen, but I dare not turn around...
110. He came to my door near sunset, and put his cold hand in mine, whispering that he had seen "it" as he fell to the ground, dead. We still don't know how he got out of the morgue.
111. They say practicing smiling in front of a mirror makes you feel happier. I wish my reflection would join along.
112. Attending his funeral today was really scary. It might have been the constant muffled screams I heard or the worry of someone noticing the dirt on my hands.
113. Being buried alive was bad enough. Realizing I wasn't alone in my own grave was worse.
114. Back against the door, desperately trying to keep the voracious dead out, I looked in the mirror. My reflection raised his hand in goodbye and smiled sadly, never to be needed again.
115. My grandfather, who died of Alzheimers several years ago, refused to let the house lights be turned off at night. The light, he offered, was the only thing keeping the dark men away. What terrifies me about those two sentences is that they're true. The lights didn't go off in that house at night for three months.
116. It's behind you. It's always behind you... but nobody else can see it.
117. Neatly laid across my dining room table, I found a dull kitchen knife, a torn, crusty rag, and a Flip video camera which seemed to be recording. I own none of these items.
118. I always liked this picture of my great-grandmother. Why does she seem closer to the camera than before?
119. When next you are completely alone, imagine you are listening to a sound of some kind. When that sounds seems to stop, you'll know that you've been noticed.
120. The trains were delayed today. There's something in the tunnels.
121. Most laugh tracks were recorded in the early 70's, and most of those people are dead now. That means the dead are laughing at us.
122. The lady with the mangled bleeding face chased you in the staircase up to the buildings roof. You jump off, turn your head to the right, and see her falling next to you.
123. His reputation as the best surgeon in the world is well-deserved. In a lesser talent's hands, I would have died weeks ago and escaped his revenge.
124. You lay down in bed and turn your lights off. When you move your hand, you feel seaweed, followed by a whisper that says "I'm ooooolllld Greeeeeggg".
125. I ignore the sound of my room mate tapping on the door, asking me to let him in. I ignore it as I watch him sleep on the other side of the room
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