Original Horror

Question

There are many horror stories out there. Most can be slotted into very few categories, all holding similar plots and ideas. Boring, right?
So here's the challenge I pose to you:
Write an original horror story. Twists, fear, a happy or sad ending, whatever you believe would be original. No word limit. Happy writing. :)

Comments

You really have put a chink in my armor.  I have always fancied myself quite the horror writer or horrid writer if you must.  This challenge has really had me thinking.  There has been so much horror written over the years that it is darn near impossible to come up with some "completely" new.  I'm still thinking and I do accept your challenge.  If you get any takers I hope you are not faint of heart and accept "covers" of original ideas or stories.  I would like to know what you really expect to get out of this challenge.  What do you write?

---

I know it won't be a completely new idea, but I'm sick of always reading vampires, werewolves, serial killer get's the main hero/heroine and you think he/she's about to be killed and oh! She/He finds something to set themselves free and the police arrive just then! I'm looking for something that is unique and different.
And to answer your question, I've been told I mostly write morbid stories, but I could try to write anything if I was asked.

---

Is there any suggestions anyone could make so I could improve my challenges? I would love to hear some. :)

Answer 1

So I write my horror story, decide it's time to sleep and shut down the computer. And the minute I close my eyes this pops into my head. Go figure.


Have you ever heard of the abberwackles? No? Consider your self lucky. Also, consider closing this window right now because you might not want to read the rest.

An abberwackle is a minute creature, about a milimeter or less in diameter, dark brown and hairy. Or furry. Whichever you prefer. It doesn't really matter, their hair (or fur) is too small to make a difference, right?

The life goal of the abberwackle is to eat, drink and sleep. No surprises there. It sleeps in hidden places, the nooks and cracks around our homes. It drinks moisture from the air. A clever little creature, really. And it eats - human flesh. Yes, remember the part where I told you not to read? You really should have listened?

So if this thing eats humans, how come I've never seen it, you'll be asking yourself. Well, the thing is, they only come out at night. When all the lights are out and we settle in for a nice comfy rest, that's when they wake up.

They slither down the walls and crawl from behind wardrobes, making their way accross our sheets and blankets, until they reach their meal. Some of them like to just nibble on your skin, some use their claw-like front legs to cut open a small hole through which they travel to a more tasty treat. And they're not picky, they will even take a nip at your eyes if they see an opportunity. But the really courageous ones go for the mouth. If they can get there withough being swallowed, they're in for a true delicacy. A choice between the gums of your teeth, the underside of your tongue, the delicate lining of your throat...

The amount they feed on is never enough to cause us to wonder why we're missing part of an earlobe, but sometimes they leave an itch or a mark behind. Sometimes they give you that tingling feeling where you just can't settle before going to sleep. Sometimes they get to a blood vessel, a tiny one, capillary, and they pierce it, leaving a bruise which we can never really remember the origin of.

And in the morning, with the first light of dawn, they retreat back to their sleeping quarters, waiting for a new night to return.

Comments

Oohhh creepers.

---

Bedbugs? Real horror. Hate anything that crawls on or even near me. This includes babies and drunks at weddings.

---

I am so glad I work graveyard shift!  Good one Spots!

---

Oh, wow, gave me the heebie jeebies big time!

Answer 2

Ok,  critique away but I guarantee you I am not done with this challenge!

The hesitant heart


Bleeding out on a porch step wasn’t my idea.  A co-worker of mine had a “dream” and he just had to tell me about it.  “Doug, I had a dream, it was kind of fuzzy but you were shot and there was a big hole in your arm.  I thought I had to tell you.  I had a dream about Marie getting burned in the fry vat and it came true.  She was diving after a hash brown and her hand went straight into the vat.  I didn’t tell her about it and now I feel like I could have warned her to be careful.”

Why can’t people keep their dreams to themselves!

My mom cried when she found me; my wife rushed home from work and held my lifeless body in her arms like a baby.  Blood coagulated into her shirt and spread out in a tie dye fashion.  Nothing funny about that Mister!  Here I am, a dead bleeding corpse with fluids leaking out of every orifice in my body.

What’s so funny about that?  Oh tee-hee all you want.  You say I deserved to die?  No one deserves to die even if they are 118 years old.  There is no “natural” death.  There is nothing after death except for more death.  Believe me?  

This is all a rerun of past events.  A synopsis of the horror that originated from a single gun held at the very exact angle by a single person who shot a single bullet into my chest where it ricocheted thru my ribs and came out creating a “big” hole in my arm.

Prophetic huh?

There is no floating soul hovering like a helicopter capturing all the carnage of grief happening below.  I didn’t come back as a willow tree with a brain observing it all.

I am now death.

Tag, your it!

Comments

Very creative. The "Tag, you're it!" Does that mean that the next person to die becomes death?

Answer 3

I awoke with a knot in my stomach.

You know that feeling you get when you swallow ten rocks because your older brother double-dog dared you? And you don't want to wimp out, because your older brother is so big and strong and if you turn down the dare, he'll never let you live it down? So, you swallow the rocks and then your stomach feels hard and knotted and you think it will never stop hurting, until the doctors do some quick surgery to get the rocks out and your parents ground you for a week but your brother gets off clean because it's not his fault that you took the dare?

No? Just me?

Well, that feeling of swallowing ten rocks it's like nothing I'd ever felt before or since, until I woke up with the knotted, stabbing cramps.

My mind raced. Why does it feel like this? It's been over a decade since the rock swallowing incident. I've been healed for years, the complications have long since stopped. So why has this feeling come back?

Was it something I ate?

No, can't be. I haven't eaten in five days. I've been stuck here in this hospital bed, with all the nutrients I need being pumped into me through a needle in the back of my hand.

Then I realized. I couldn't remember why I was in this bed. Was I sick? Did I get injured?

I reach my hand down, and pressed it against my agonizing abdomen. There was no give. It was not soft as flesh should be, but rather felt like I was touching stone.

The stabbing, knotted pain moved to my chest as it faded from my stomach. I tried to scream. It was so sudden, surprising, painful. But the words were frozen in my chest, and as my hands traveled upwards, I found it felt the same as my abs...like stone not flesh. The pain moved, fading from one place and moving to the next, each feeling like stone as the pain moved away.

I realized I was paralyzed, all that could move was my eyes, and the pain had now moved there. Two doctors moved into my line of sight. I heard them talking.

“It's almost complete. She'll make a lovely statue, no chisel required.”

And then I knew no more.

Comments

I really like that :) I truly have never read anything like that before.

---

You are evil and shall be turned to stone! :-)

---

Very creative. Should we be scared of you?

---

Yes Spots, you don't know her, but she carries a mean whip!

---

Yeah, I guess girls with Midnight in their name tend to be like that. ;P

---

it's always advisable to have a healthy amount of fear. Keeps you on your toes. So, feel free to be scared of me, and I'll do my best to be scary.  ;-)

---

See, now you've ruined it, now you don't scare me anymore. Or maybe that was your plan...

Answer 4

“True Story” by Ron

I golf. I’m sorry but I do.

I apologize because I really suck.

But I suck fast. And that’s important.

And I play in tournaments whenever I can. I like the goody bags and that it’s usually someone else paying and you can actually win even if you suck as long as someone in the group is stellar.

So I’m in this tournament once.

And it’s a shotgun start. That means each group starts at the same time but on a different hole.

So our second hole was actually the ninth hole on this particular course.

And I’m playing with nerds. No – really – computer nerds.

We had this service contract with a computer support company and I talked them into buying a foursome as I was actually affiliated with this particular charity tournament.

Since I had invited them and they were paying it seemed only natural that I join them.

Well we start miserably. We are, after all, nerds. But we get to the second hole.

It’s almost always true of charity tournaments that there are “prize holes”. This particular day there was closest-to-the-pin and longest-drive and two hole-in-one holes.

The hole-in-one holes are exactly what they say. Get a hole-in-one and win a prize. On this day the prize on the ninth (our second) hole was a neat one hundred thousand dollars.

It’s a two hundred ten par three with a bowl-shaped green. I hit first as I did the best on the previous hole. I’ve never even come close to a hole-in-one but you go for it.

I already said I suck. And I continued to suck right then and there.

Second guy actually does worse.

Third guy hits it a little left and it catches on the bowl and trickles into the hole.

Holy f-ing crap! Really?

But this is a horror story right?

And it is. Word spreads and excitement grows. It’s just amazing.

So where’s the horror?

The horror comes later – in the weeks that followed.

And it came in a specific form. That ghastly apparition actually has a name: Lloyd’s of London.

I’ve learned a lot since then about how all this works. And it works like this.

Say you’re holding a charity golf tournament and you’d like to have some serious prizes available. But you’ve hardly got $100,000 to put up.

Well it turns out there are companies that sell insurance policies for this sort of thing. The policies are called “riders” and for about $400 you can buy a rider against the possibility that a player actually hits a million-to-one shot.

But back for a moment to the tournament: This kid who hit the shot was famous. There is always food and drink afterwards and prize-giving and such. But all prizes paled on this day compared to the kid who hit the hole in one.

So the kid was revered and famous and respected and he hung out for the charity auction. And at that auction he purchased a putter for $100. The putter was worthless but the kid was buzzed and happy and feeling generous to the charity that hadn’t paid him a dime yet.

And he’s flat broke and busted so he comes to me at the end of the auction to borrow $100 to pay for his worthless putter. I front him the money.

Weeks pass and then the phone calls start. Fist it’s some local insurance company who asks a couple basic questions about the game and the day and the kid and the hole.

Then it’s a national insurance company asking all the same questions.

Then it’s calls ridiculously early in the morning asking the same questions again. It seems that this particular “rider” was sold and resold and resold again right up the chain to the biggest gambler on the planet – Lloyd’s of London.

And that gambler does not like to lose a bet.

They wanted to know if the kid played in high school. Had he walked the course the night before? Was he of age? Did he spend time on the range that morning? Did he have a coach? Did he walk or ride? Was he left or right-handed?

The questions kept coming. Over and over again a different person from the same company would call. Week after week it continued.

Nine months to the day after the miraculous shot – the kid got paid.

But this is a horror story right?

It would be easy to say the horror was the treatment our entire group received from Lloyd’s of London. It would be easy to say the horror was waiting to get paid for an advertised prize hole.

But that would be too easy.

The horror is simply that once the kid got paid he quit his job and I never heard from him again.

And I never got back my $100.

Comments

Sorry about the length. It actually is a true "horror" story and is unedited. I just kinda blurted it out.

---

That kind of made me giggle :) I like it.

---

Loved it! I like your style and I loved the ending. I wanna read more!

---

Definately another ronism.  Loved the pace of the true story and the horror that was involved.  You made it believable.  I do doubt you suck at golf though :)

Answer 5

THE BEGINNING

It was my first night on the 'big stage'.  My knees were shaking and my stomach was nausious.  It was my night to make it or break it.  All of the past disapointments rushed in as I walked out and sat at the piano.  My fingers were trembling and I didn't know if my voice was even working.  So I coughed.

The audience was silent as I sat down.  I spoke into the microphone "Testing."  I must have sounded awful because they laughed and heckled me.  I was still determined to perform my new songs.

I got my fingers working, but when I tried to sing, it sounded like PeeWee Herman.  This was terrible and they were laughing even harder.  I wondered if any of them knew the horrors I was going through.  Somehow my mind worked through the terror and I began singing a Tiny Tim tune.

They were roaring and I was a success.  I did 'Tiptoe Through the Tulips" and followed that with "Don't Sit Under the Apple Tree' - ala Andrews Sisters.  Relaxed now, I went into a rendition of 'Rhapsody in Blue'.  That's when they went crazy and started throwing tomatoes.

The stress of it all caused me to go into a paralysis.  You can't imagine the horrors of being bed-ridden for six months.  All you have to do is be awake or not.  They catheterize you, clean your sheets, and every few days you get a visitor who you can't talk to because there's a plastic tube shoved down your throat.

The dreams, I won't get into, because the story is already too scary for me.  I'll just say that it was my desire to get back on stage that helped me heal.  I'm back.

Comments

I can relate to this one as a musician myself, and it is horrifying when a crowd goes bad.

---

I got that from a supposedly true story about Arnold Shoenberg.  He took a two year break to develop his 12 tone system.  He conducted his first major piece, and when he turned around at the end, half the audience had left and the rest pelted him with tomatoes.  He went into paralysis and survived it.

The enigma is Why do people bring tomatoes to the symphony?

Answer 6

She had been in the box for days, though that meant nothing to her; it may as well have been years. Being cooped up in a space not much larger than an average suitcase with no light and just enough air to survive does that to you. You forget you ever had a life before and the tiny space becomes your whole existance.

The box was made of metal and it was cold to the touch. Its lid, if it even was a lid, she'd never seen it open, must have had holes in it because that's where the water came through. It was freezing water and at first she was trying to think of ways to plug the holes, an impossible task if your hands are trapped behind your back and you don't have room enough to wiggle them free. At some point she started getting thirsty. A minor nuisance at first, irrelevant when compared to the situation she was in. But it kept getting worse and worse, up to the point where she was grateful for the drizzle soaking her lips.

If the holes led directly to a room, then the room was unlit because everything around her was pitch black, even after all the time her eyes had had to adapt. It was quite possible she was blind, there was really no way to tell.

There were no voices around her, no sign of anyone's presence. But there were noises. Squeaks, creaks, scrapes, all the things that could make your skin crawl. All the things that she dreaded at first, then had seen hope in and was now just hanging on to, as the only signs that there really was a world out there.

She still hadn't lost hope, though she didn't really have any idea where her rescue might come from. The idea of what she was hoping for was starting to fade as well, as a distant memory, more a notion than an actual image.

What was her goal again?

Comments

Ohh loss of identity and hope. I like :)

---

Tight. (No pun intended.)

---

I don't know why but I wonder about that water. Is it rain? Waves over a bow? No - not waves cause I'd think she'd realize with all the associated ocean sounds.

But it's also clear she's inside or else the sun would shine during the day and break the blackness. So it isn't rain.

So it's being sprayed then. Or poured.

So it isn't a grave.

It's a good story. It's got me actually thinking about it.

Is there an actual puzzle or do I just watch too much tv?

---

There is no puzzle. I can tell you where I imagined her to be if it's bugging you, but I wrote it from her perspective on purpose. She can't possibly have any idea where she is and why she is there and that's more than half the horror of it.

Thanks for the nice comments.

---

Don't tell me then. Great story. I just see puzzles where others see drama.

It is kinda written like a mystery instead of a horror in that there is a generous sequence of "clues". Oh I know. I know! Colonel Mustard killed Mrs. Peacock in the Parlor with a knife???

Answer 7

Lying still amongst the graves
A hidden treasure waits.

Martin had a “thing” for graveyards.  As an adult his mom took him on a tour of various local cemeteries to show him where his kin were buried.  Maybe his mom passed on the propensity to visit the dead.  Well Martin was a world class graveyard trespasser although the dead didn’t seem to mind until…

Martin had a favorite graveyard.  It was hidden amongst the locust trees and hadn’t been taken care of for centuries it seemed. Tombstones knocked about and trees had grown out of the graves sometimes carrying along bits of cloth from the burial clothes.  

Yes this interested Martin too.

Even as a child he had developed a great respect for the burial plots.  He photographed them and sketched them and generally revered the complexity of the site.  Families buried together in a square marked off by a short stone border.  Infant graves marked off by even smaller stone borders.

He never went at night except to this particular plot.  He would sit against the locust tree and hold a small candle with a flame flickering with the breeze.  Sometimes he would fall asleep and wake up in the morning to the rooster calling out the day.  One night he would never sleep in that particular graveyard again.  Resting in his usual spot against the locust tree and his candle flame almost extinguished he heard a muted cry come from the other side of the cemetery.  Being that the cemetery was only sixty or seventy yards long it didn’t take him long to follow the sound and find its origin.  A barn owl lay bleeding on the ground seemingly mortally wounded and making that muted cry.  It was resting on top of Thomas’s grave.  Thomas was a boy of five who had died of malaria in the 1700’s at least that is what the tombstone epitaph read.  Martin reached out to comfort the wounded creature and saw the earth begin to separate at Thomas’s grave.  A small bony finger with ragged skin emerged and caressed the wounded bird.  The barn owl died and Thomas returned to his resting place.

Martin became well known among his kin.

Comments

Lets just say this is a partially true story and I have been know to be Martin once in awhile.  I enjoy visiting cemeteries.  As a young boy my grandad was the principal at a children's home and there was an untended graveyard with civil war soldiers, infants, families and children who had died at the "home".  I visited it often.  Not only did my mom take me around to various cemeteries to see where my relatives were buried but my dad did too.

Answer 8

The Bullot                                                                                                              The night was darker then normal. The moon was full. I couldnt see anything till it was over. The blackout was for exactly 2 hours. But i felt a erge to scream. My heart was beating furiously. I gripped onto the stairs cause i was scared. I couldnt see him. His eyes were looking into mine. He slammed the door loudly and left the house till today. I was only 2 years old when that happened. I didnt realize what happened and why i was scared then. I was now scared of July 25. Thats when he came on the blackout. But this year he came back. There was another blackout that night. It felt like when i was 2. This was not normal. I couldnt resist to scream but i held it in. I gripped on the staircase so tight my hands ached. I bit my teeth so hard they broke. He slammed the door louder then  the last time. I could feel my heart beating nonstop. He crept up slowly but acted like it had to be perfect. He looked at me in the eyes. I could hear the bullot shot in my mothers chest. The man didnt look sorry. He just moved on to my dad. He shot him but slower then my mother. Then it was my turn. I gripped harder to the staircase. Closed my eyes and my last words were Jonathen Breakworth. That was his name. Then i was shot. I felt the bullot go into my chest. I never got to get married or have the experience of a baby. My grave read ' RIP July 25 Sara Grentey. Now i remember his name and i will forever.