Short Hauntings

Short Hauntings

by Matt Callahan

1.

The morning of the garage sale, the family took in more than four grand. They took that to a motel from which they shopped for new houses.

2.

They sold their old house to the Coopers, a newlywed couple whom just bought their first home on the cheap. The first night of their stay, a third presence made itself known.

3.

It took all of their electrical appliances into what can only be described as a spectral void before they suddenly reappeared in the house's bathtubs the following evening. The next morning the table settings were suspended in mid-air, where the children could not reach their breakfast. They went to school hungry and terrified.

4.

The house's original owners appeared in a newspaper article, chronicling their deaths in an auto accident caused by a falling tree just off their property. The tree has since been removed, flagged as a hazard, and the property has remained vacant.

5.

Fiona O'Shea was always rumored to be a witch, this often happens to small town recluses. But it was nearly confirmed the night the town's young people inexplicably rose from their beds to put their parents to the knife. Amnesia set in at a very convenient time for Ms. O'Shea, the town's only surviving adult.

6.

The young man was very concerned with the size of the spider that he caught out of the corner of his eye. If he hadn't seen it, it would've doubtless been on his forearm the following millisecond. Swatting at it, it scoots away and he loses it. He concerns himself with the arachnid's whereabouts for the next hour or so before finding it and killing it, but the German Shepherd-sized queen lay in wait just under the apartment balcony where he smoked. And this spider business is stressful work.

7.

She used to hate the full moon. It always seemed to bear some sort of lunacy. She wasn't fond of the way the moonlight lit her pale skin, but she's much happier now with the way it falls on her hair. The rabbit squealed slightly on impact but was quickly muted my her maw. The kill measured in innumerable joules. And the howling was victorious.

8.

The theatre's managers had never seen the place so full! Go figure, some accidents happen, you start a rumor about a ghost, and the morbidly curious pile in in droves! What was once a performance space was now a macabre museum of crimes without proof. Old props had been made to look more worn, and were claimed to be evidence found in the cases. The managers were last heard laughing very loudly on the Loge before their bodies were discovered in the orchestra pit.

9.

Satan followed a boy home from school one day, but the boy did not recognize him. The Dark One took this to his advantage by offering the boy any wish in the world. The boy asked Satan that the bullies at school would stop harassing him. So Satan stopped the bullies, but the boy was never heard from again.

10.

Death row is no place for a priest. Well it is, but in the function of offering Last Rites, not waiting to be hung by the neck until dead. The desperate monk wrote out a prayer on his last scrap of toilet paper and rolled it up under his mattress. When the guards came to take him to their charge, he resisted a little and then soon quit. This did not stop the guards from clubbing him in the head, and after, he saw only blood.