Original horror stories from QuietDread: stalkers, highway horror, haunted small towns, cryptids and urban legends. New scary stories every day.
Every city has a scary urban legend about its public transit. New York has the ghost train. Chicago has the phantom L stop. In Pittsburgh, among the people who ride the late buses, it’s Route Zero. The story goes like this. If you miss the last bus home and you’re standing alone at the stop … Read more
Everybody has homeowner association horror stories. The fine for a basketball hoop. The letter about grass that’s half an inch too tall. The board president who measures mailboxes with a ruler. I used to laugh at those stories. Then we moved into a cul-de-sac in North Carolina, and our HOA started citing us for things … Read more
Ghost hunters split hauntings into two kinds. A residual haunting is like a recording. The same footsteps, the same voice, the same scene replaying at the same time, over and over, with no awareness of the living. An intelligent haunting is something that knows you’re there. For eight months, I lived under a residual haunting. … Read more
I’ve worked nights as a security guard at a few places, and the self storage horror story I’m about to tell is the only one that made me quit. Self storage is supposed to be the easiest gig there is. Rows of metal doors, a gate code, a golf cart. You drive around and make … Read more
This house sitting horror story is about a refrigerator. A very nice one, with a camera inside that takes a picture every time the door closes so you can check from the grocery store whether you need milk. The owners showed me how it worked as a joke. Ten days later I was looking at … Read more
Anybody who drives Interstate 80 across Wyoming in winter has scary highway stories. Jackknifed semis. Ground blizzards so white you can’t see your own hood. Mine is about a road closure, a man in a parka, and a gate that he said had been opened just for the two of us. In January of 2020 … Read more
Most creepy campfire stories are about something out in the dark. Ours is about something that came right up to the fire ring while we slept and left a gift. Four gifts, actually. Then a fifth one, for somebody who wasn’t even there yet. I work at a print shop in Eau Claire, Wisconsin. In … Read more
This creepy stalker story starts with a guitar pick in a sandwich bag. Someone left it in my mailbox with a label on it saying exactly when and where I’d dropped it. I hadn’t even noticed it was gone. My students like the best spooky stories at band camp. I’ve never told them this one. … Read more
This funeral home horror story is about a van that drove itself. Every night for four nights, the removal van at the funeral home where I worked in Savannah, Georgia, came back with fourteen more miles on it, and every morning the passenger seat was wet. Tour guides make a living off ghost stories of … Read more
I never cared about cemetery ghost stories until someone started leaving fresh dahlias on my father’s grave every week. They were his own dahlias, from the garden he planted, at a house our family had already sold. My town has its share of haunted graveyard stories. I never thought my family would end up in … Read more