Post by Salzackbar mini™ on Jan 18, 2019 10:01:04 GMT -5
I’ve been uploading old spooky stories I’ve written to Reddit’s “NoSleep” recently and put them on Knowhere as well, and I thought—hey, it works for the Haunted Chatterbox too! The last is not scary, it’s a comedy based on a writing prompt.
And finally a non-horror piece based on this prompt:
“Like a Picture-Postcard”
The Loucks House? No, nothing. I mean, I spent years and years working there, and if there’s a ghost, I certainly never saw it. Sometimes Linda Bennett—Linda was one of the docents—would say she smelled something baking in the kitchen—like apple pie or that kind of smell—but that was pretty much it, except… Well, it’s not a ghost, but there was a spooky experience I had there. Sorta. Yeah, I know after that introduction I have to tell the story, but I’ll try to make it short.
I was managing the place at the time for the owner, and most of my job was just office-work—pretty much making sure that the museum was kept up and, more importantly, actually took in enough money. I changed the tour route a little bit, but it’s such a small house that I doubt anybody would have even noticed. This thing happened in the middle of the summer—a really, really hot day, not even a sea breeze off the water. Not many people want to come to a colonial house-museum on that kind of day—no air-conditioning—but there was this family that was going on the tour. Real picture-postcard kind of family: mom, dad, two kids (a boy and a girl, maybe twins). You’d expect to see ’em in the example photo in a picture frame—in front of a house, playing with their dogs, all-American.
I passed by the tour group on my way to the office; Claire Walsh was the docent. I said hello and “welcome to the Loucks House, everyone,” and then went back to the office, not thinking much about it until Claire burst in about an hour later and said the kids had gone missing. I didn’t think I had heard her right: like I said, the house is so small that it’s pretty much impossible to get lost in it. She told me that the kids were with the tour group for most of the time but had been getting a little bored, especially in the heat, and run back to one of the rooms they’d seen before, Mr. Loucks’ study.
We had Murray—yeah, Murray Klein, he needed something to do in retirement—dressed up in colonial attire in the study. Claire and I went to him immediately, and he swore up and down that nobody had come back in the room. We had a docent at each door—nothing. So the kids still had to be in the house. It couldn’t be all that much to worry about.
I tell ya, we tore that place apart from top to bottom—looked in every closet, under every bed, everywhere we could find. There was nowhere in the house they could have gone. I even checked the attic, where they couldn’t have gone without setting off the security alarms, but they weren’t there; and I was even overly melodramatic and checked fruitlessly for secret panels or anything like that.
The weird thing was that the mother and father never even moved, or cried, or said anything. They stood perfectly still in the hallway, breathing gently. Except at one point, when the father asked us if we’d found anything yet; when I told him that we hadn’t, he and his wife went quiet again. It was the lack of emotion that got me; the rest of the group had left by this point, and we were left with these two, completely unmoved by their kids going missing.
After another hour we gave up. Rationally, I thought, it was possible that the kids could have been hiding somewhere (but where?), and they had escaped out the door when we went to look for them somewhere else. We decided to call the police but knew that we would have one hell of a time trying to explain this—but, right as Claire had picked up the phone, we heard a whimper, like the sound made by a small dog. Yeah, the sound a dog makes, and then a kid laughing—coming from the attic. I rushed to the stairway and disarmed the alarm, then ran up—and there they were, playing with a puppy, laughing and giggling and smiling.
The mother, grinning, spoke as though the children had been missing only a few moments, not the better part of two hours: “Oh, there you are. Did you get lost?”
Honestly? “Did you get lost?” How on earth could they have gotten lost? The whole thing was like parenting out of the loony bin, and the children were just as unruffled as the parents: “Yes, mommy, but we found this doggy,” said the little girl. The puppy, at the word “doggy,” picked up its ears and ran off—down the stairs and (as Murray, who was downstairs, told me afterwards) out the door. We never saw it again.
“Many thanks for your help,” the father told me, and the whole family set off—picture-postcard again.
But I had checked that attic upside down and backwards, and God only knows where those children were or what was going on. I don’t know what happened there; all I know for sure is that, for a few months after, we kept hearing the whimpering of a dog and the laughter of children coming from the attic.
The Loucks House? No, nothing. I mean, I spent years and years working there, and if there’s a ghost, I certainly never saw it. Sometimes Linda Bennett—Linda was one of the docents—would say she smelled something baking in the kitchen—like apple pie or that kind of smell—but that was pretty much it, except… Well, it’s not a ghost, but there was a spooky experience I had there. Sorta. Yeah, I know after that introduction I have to tell the story, but I’ll try to make it short.
I was managing the place at the time for the owner, and most of my job was just office-work—pretty much making sure that the museum was kept up and, more importantly, actually took in enough money. I changed the tour route a little bit, but it’s such a small house that I doubt anybody would have even noticed. This thing happened in the middle of the summer—a really, really hot day, not even a sea breeze off the water. Not many people want to come to a colonial house-museum on that kind of day—no air-conditioning—but there was this family that was going on the tour. Real picture-postcard kind of family: mom, dad, two kids (a boy and a girl, maybe twins). You’d expect to see ’em in the example photo in a picture frame—in front of a house, playing with their dogs, all-American.
I passed by the tour group on my way to the office; Claire Walsh was the docent. I said hello and “welcome to the Loucks House, everyone,” and then went back to the office, not thinking much about it until Claire burst in about an hour later and said the kids had gone missing. I didn’t think I had heard her right: like I said, the house is so small that it’s pretty much impossible to get lost in it. She told me that the kids were with the tour group for most of the time but had been getting a little bored, especially in the heat, and run back to one of the rooms they’d seen before, Mr. Loucks’ study.
We had Murray—yeah, Murray Klein, he needed something to do in retirement—dressed up in colonial attire in the study. Claire and I went to him immediately, and he swore up and down that nobody had come back in the room. We had a docent at each door—nothing. So the kids still had to be in the house. It couldn’t be all that much to worry about.
I tell ya, we tore that place apart from top to bottom—looked in every closet, under every bed, everywhere we could find. There was nowhere in the house they could have gone. I even checked the attic, where they couldn’t have gone without setting off the security alarms, but they weren’t there; and I was even overly melodramatic and checked fruitlessly for secret panels or anything like that.
The weird thing was that the mother and father never even moved, or cried, or said anything. They stood perfectly still in the hallway, breathing gently. Except at one point, when the father asked us if we’d found anything yet; when I told him that we hadn’t, he and his wife went quiet again. It was the lack of emotion that got me; the rest of the group had left by this point, and we were left with these two, completely unmoved by their kids going missing.
After another hour we gave up. Rationally, I thought, it was possible that the kids could have been hiding somewhere (but where?), and they had escaped out the door when we went to look for them somewhere else. We decided to call the police but knew that we would have one hell of a time trying to explain this—but, right as Claire had picked up the phone, we heard a whimper, like the sound made by a small dog. Yeah, the sound a dog makes, and then a kid laughing—coming from the attic. I rushed to the stairway and disarmed the alarm, then ran up—and there they were, playing with a puppy, laughing and giggling and smiling.
The mother, grinning, spoke as though the children had been missing only a few moments, not the better part of two hours: “Oh, there you are. Did you get lost?”
Honestly? “Did you get lost?” How on earth could they have gotten lost? The whole thing was like parenting out of the loony bin, and the children were just as unruffled as the parents: “Yes, mommy, but we found this doggy,” said the little girl. The puppy, at the word “doggy,” picked up its ears and ran off—down the stairs and (as Murray, who was downstairs, told me afterwards) out the door. We never saw it again.
“Many thanks for your help,” the father told me, and the whole family set off—picture-postcard again.
But I had checked that attic upside down and backwards, and God only knows where those children were or what was going on. I don’t know what happened there; all I know for sure is that, for a few months after, we kept hearing the whimpering of a dog and the laughter of children coming from the attic.
“The Clock-Man”
This is a story that I got secondhand— typical “friend of a friend” stuff, you know? From one of those icebreakers where you tell your own real-life ghost-story. This was back when I was a high-school kid, trying to make some cash as a camp counselor. The little kids loved scary stories, and they were actually the ones who kept asking for us to tell more—but, of course, we didn’t want to make it too scary for them. Obviously this was years before I started working at the Loucks House (though I think that was the summer I first visited), and I didn’t really have a great scary story, but one of the other counselors, a girl named Maddie, had one of the best I’ve ever heard.
She said that when she was the same age as the camp-kids (around 8 or 9), she went to a sleepover at a friend’s house—just her and the friend. There was no upstairs, all the rooms on one floor. The way she described the layout, there was a long hallway with the friend’s room on one side, then the bathroom on the other side in the middle (visible from the bedroom), then the parents’ bedroom on the same side as the friend’s. If you were in the bathroom looking out you could see down another hallway with a window st the end. I hope that all makes sense.
She and her friend stayed up, watched a movie, had a pillow fight, etc., but because they were still young they went to sleep early and fell asleep quickly.
Maddie woke up in the middle of the night—she looked at the clock and saw it was around 2. She could hear rain hitting the window, and she got up, looked around, and saw the bathroom door was open but the light on. She walked over to the bathroom, saw that no one was there, and turned the light off. When she turned around, she looked down the hallway and saw the figure of a person through the window.
The person didn’t do anything, he or she just stood there. Maddie was really scared until she realized that it was probably a tree or plant or something that looked like a person. The mind can play tricks on you, especially in the dark.
She went back to sleep and didn’t wake up until it was light, and she and her friend were going into the kitchen for breakfast when she noticed there was nothing outside the window in the hallway.
She asked her friend’s mom about it, but her friend’s mom said they never had any outside that window, it was just open lawn.
Maddie ran to the window and looked outside—nothing there, no statue, no plant, no tree. And no footprints in the mud outside. Her friend’s mom asked her what was wrong, and she said what had happened. The mom said she’d probably been having a bad dream, but her friend said, “Oh, it’s probably the Clock-Man.”
Her mom told her to be quiet and don’t scare your friend, and reassured Maddie that it was just a bad dream.
Maddie and her friend eventually grew apart, not for any particular reason, but years later Maddie’s mom saw the friend’s mom at the supermarket. They were reminiscing, and the friend’s mom said that her daughter had once had an imaginary friend called the Clock-Man, who apparently lived in all the clocks in the house and came out at night. But that was all so long ago.
This is a story that I got secondhand— typical “friend of a friend” stuff, you know? From one of those icebreakers where you tell your own real-life ghost-story. This was back when I was a high-school kid, trying to make some cash as a camp counselor. The little kids loved scary stories, and they were actually the ones who kept asking for us to tell more—but, of course, we didn’t want to make it too scary for them. Obviously this was years before I started working at the Loucks House (though I think that was the summer I first visited), and I didn’t really have a great scary story, but one of the other counselors, a girl named Maddie, had one of the best I’ve ever heard.
She said that when she was the same age as the camp-kids (around 8 or 9), she went to a sleepover at a friend’s house—just her and the friend. There was no upstairs, all the rooms on one floor. The way she described the layout, there was a long hallway with the friend’s room on one side, then the bathroom on the other side in the middle (visible from the bedroom), then the parents’ bedroom on the same side as the friend’s. If you were in the bathroom looking out you could see down another hallway with a window st the end. I hope that all makes sense.
She and her friend stayed up, watched a movie, had a pillow fight, etc., but because they were still young they went to sleep early and fell asleep quickly.
Maddie woke up in the middle of the night—she looked at the clock and saw it was around 2. She could hear rain hitting the window, and she got up, looked around, and saw the bathroom door was open but the light on. She walked over to the bathroom, saw that no one was there, and turned the light off. When she turned around, she looked down the hallway and saw the figure of a person through the window.
The person didn’t do anything, he or she just stood there. Maddie was really scared until she realized that it was probably a tree or plant or something that looked like a person. The mind can play tricks on you, especially in the dark.
She went back to sleep and didn’t wake up until it was light, and she and her friend were going into the kitchen for breakfast when she noticed there was nothing outside the window in the hallway.
She asked her friend’s mom about it, but her friend’s mom said they never had any outside that window, it was just open lawn.
Maddie ran to the window and looked outside—nothing there, no statue, no plant, no tree. And no footprints in the mud outside. Her friend’s mom asked her what was wrong, and she said what had happened. The mom said she’d probably been having a bad dream, but her friend said, “Oh, it’s probably the Clock-Man.”
Her mom told her to be quiet and don’t scare your friend, and reassured Maddie that it was just a bad dream.
Maddie and her friend eventually grew apart, not for any particular reason, but years later Maddie’s mom saw the friend’s mom at the supermarket. They were reminiscing, and the friend’s mom said that her daughter had once had an imaginary friend called the Clock-Man, who apparently lived in all the clocks in the house and came out at night. But that was all so long ago.
“Stuffy in Here”
When Jane first began working at the Halmore Inn for a summer job, she was young, intelligent, educated, and (though she would have denied it vehemently) terribly naïve. In a way, working in a hotel can disabuse you of the naïveté: after all, you see the way other human beings interact, in a closed environment, for a set period of time.
It was near the end of the summer, and she was thinking about her time the Halmore when she, having dealt with a complaint on the 9th Floor, pushed the “down” button on the elevator. The indicator slowly showed each floor number—and finally hers. There was no one in the lift. Jane entered and pressed the button for the lobby; the doors shut quickly, and the elevator descended. Jane was alone, with her thoughts, staring at gorgeous, intricate woodwork. But, even when one is quite alone, it can be so stuffy in an elevator.
The descent stopped at the 4th Floor, and the doors opened once again. Nine persons, the men in tuxedos and the women in long dresses, stood there. The woman in the front, in a blue dress, wore a white mask that covered her face.
None said a word; none moved a muscle; they only stood, staring. The elevator doors began to close.
From the back of the crowd, one man said, “Why is the elevator so full of people?”
The doors slammed shut, and the elevator descended once more to arrive at the lobby. Jane rushed out and ran up to the 4th Floor, but there was no one and nothing there, except for a white mask.
The Halmore is a very old inn.
When Jane first began working at the Halmore Inn for a summer job, she was young, intelligent, educated, and (though she would have denied it vehemently) terribly naïve. In a way, working in a hotel can disabuse you of the naïveté: after all, you see the way other human beings interact, in a closed environment, for a set period of time.
It was near the end of the summer, and she was thinking about her time the Halmore when she, having dealt with a complaint on the 9th Floor, pushed the “down” button on the elevator. The indicator slowly showed each floor number—and finally hers. There was no one in the lift. Jane entered and pressed the button for the lobby; the doors shut quickly, and the elevator descended. Jane was alone, with her thoughts, staring at gorgeous, intricate woodwork. But, even when one is quite alone, it can be so stuffy in an elevator.
The descent stopped at the 4th Floor, and the doors opened once again. Nine persons, the men in tuxedos and the women in long dresses, stood there. The woman in the front, in a blue dress, wore a white mask that covered her face.
None said a word; none moved a muscle; they only stood, staring. The elevator doors began to close.
From the back of the crowd, one man said, “Why is the elevator so full of people?”
The doors slammed shut, and the elevator descended once more to arrive at the lobby. Jane rushed out and ran up to the 4th Floor, but there was no one and nothing there, except for a white mask.
The Halmore is a very old inn.
And finally a non-horror piece based on this prompt:
You and a friend set out on a perilous quest to recover an ancient and cursed artifact. In reality, there is no curse, no danger, and the quest goes smoothly. Your friend, however, keeps expecting the worst.
What I didn’t understand from the beginning was his jumpiness. I mean, yeah, I’m from around here and he’s not, but you’re going to get scared just because you’re in the jungle? Too many adventure stories, I tell ya.
We got into the main chamber fairly quickly and grabbed the artifact—strike that, I grabbed it, while my cowardly companion was too busy glancing over his shoulder. Qué tarado!
The only mildly exciting incident that occurred on the way out was a few rocks dislodging, if you call that interesting: it’s an old cave, after all, and my, er, comrade grabbed on to me, terrified. And he kept asking if there were a curse on the artifact. My God. I smiled and kept my cool, though. I needed the money and was always happy to assist and assure rich, foolish American treasure-hunters.
He paid me and thanked me for guiding him in and out afterwards, and I thought that was the last I’d hear of him. I didn’t even know about the book he published about our adventure, the whole thing complete self-glorifying bullshit! It was only when someone actually made a goddam movie of “Dr.” Henry Jones’s fantasy story that I heard his name again.
We got into the main chamber fairly quickly and grabbed the artifact—strike that, I grabbed it, while my cowardly companion was too busy glancing over his shoulder. Qué tarado!
The only mildly exciting incident that occurred on the way out was a few rocks dislodging, if you call that interesting: it’s an old cave, after all, and my, er, comrade grabbed on to me, terrified. And he kept asking if there were a curse on the artifact. My God. I smiled and kept my cool, though. I needed the money and was always happy to assist and assure rich, foolish American treasure-hunters.
He paid me and thanked me for guiding him in and out afterwards, and I thought that was the last I’d hear of him. I didn’t even know about the book he published about our adventure, the whole thing complete self-glorifying bullshit! It was only when someone actually made a goddam movie of “Dr.” Henry Jones’s fantasy story that I heard his name again.