His early ones with Anthony are definitely my favorite. The Messenger series is amazing, and I can’t see the game without hearing “I’m Ninja Bobbyyyy!”
I tried putting the story in the body of the post a few times but it hangs forever when submitting, I think there may be a character processing limit. Trying it this way to see if I can post it in the comments instead.
“How often do you feel alone in a crowded room?” That was the question she had asked me the first night we met, in the loud, smoky, cramped room in my fraternity house. It was an end of semester party, which had rotating hosts through the years, and these things tended to be those special occasions where people would drag their friends along that wouldn’t normally attend. She happened to be one of those friends.
I introduced myself and we made idle small talk while waiting in line for another drink, plastic cups in hand, and I asked her name. She said that she wouldn’t give it to me, not then, maybe at the end of the night, if things went well. She was shorter than me, with long dark hair, green eyes and a small tattoo on the back of her neck in the shape of a bird. She was fascinating to listen to, having a wealth of knowledge across multiple subjects. I asked her what her major was, and she said she hadn’t decided yet. She had gone two years with general studies but nothing had piqued her interest enough to set her mind.
The party continued around us as we sat on the folding chairs in the corner, maybe half the guests still there. We discussed a variety of topics before settling into the supernatural, as one tends to do with friends as the hour gets late. It was a passion of hers, it turned out. She said a lot of things in the paranormal were a matter of getting a new perspective. I asked her what she meant, and she made a broad gesture sweeping across the room. She held up a finger, signaling me to wait, drank the last of her cup, then sat it down on the floor beneath the chair. She wiped her mouth with her sleeve and cleared her throat.
“How often do you feel alone in a crowded room?”
I sat there for a second, unsure how to answer. It definitely wasn’t the question I was expecting, as it seemed to be getting either philosophical or psychological. Maybe it was some sort of Litmus test she was using on me. I opened my mouth to speak, but she held up a finger again. She asked “Now, how often do you feel crowded in an empty room?”
I paused again, and, reading the puzzled look I had, she smiled. I asked if there was a correct answer or if it was meant to be hypothetical, and she laughed for the first time that night. We locked eyes and she said her name was Laura. She stood up and I stood with her. She said that if I wanted to find out my answer I could meet her at the Louie Diner in Hescher Falls Saturday at noon. I agreed, and walked with her as she made her way to the front door. We stepped out into the night and stood on the porch. I asked her if she needed a ride or a cab and she declined. She said it was a short walk to the bus stop at the corner, and the last bus was scheduled to run in ten minutes so she would need to start heading there. She pulled away and stepped off the porch onto the sidewalk, looking back once to give a short wave. I waved back and watched until she disappeared around the corner, a big grin plastered on my face.
Saturday afternoon found me in a window booth at the Louie Diner, sipping an endless cup of coffee and scrolling through my phone. I was halfway through a news article, just killing time, when I heard a familiar voice. There she was, in jeans and a teal shirt, happily approaching the booth. She shrugged the bag off that she was carrying, sliding it against the wall on the bench, and sat across from me. We exchanged pleasantries while the waitress brought her drink, then we ordered lunch. While we waited she reached into her bag and withdrew a folder, placing it on the table. This would explain what she was talking about at the party, she said, and slid it over to me.
I opened it and sifted through the contents. There were pictures of rooms with short descriptions attached to them. A living room, with the words “couch, left-hand cushion” below. An alleyway, “near the window, crouching”. A car, “passenger seat”. Several more scattered across the table, and I looked at Laura.
Each one of these, she explained, contained a picture of a spirit. She had spent countless hours finding them in libraries and newspapers, building a sizable collection. I looked at them again, unable to see anything unnatural. When I told her she said that she expected that. Not many people could see them, she explained. The only way was to see a real spirit first, since seeing one tuned your senses to their frequency. She called it “true sight”. Then she told me the story of how she obtained it.
She had been a part of an urban exploration group the summer before her first semester at the university. They were enthusiasts, and lived by the creed of “take nothing but pictures, leave nothing but footsteps”. One of their group had received permission from the land owner of an old factory, outside of Lakeview. There had been a fire there in the 50s, destroying half of the interior but leaving the structure intact. Two people were reported dead at the scene, another three were found in the recovery efforts. The company that owned it never recovered after paying out the insurance, and the building and land defaulted to the bank. A man named Derek Sumpter had purchased it in the mid 60s, and sat on the property for years trying to gather enough funds to demolish the factory and sell it off as scrap. It never happened, and when he died it was purchased by Morgan Brinker, who still owned it. She had plans to demolish it and build a water park on the land. Unlike Derek, Morgan had secured the money from investors. Laura’s group found out about the impending demolition and one of them contacted Morgan, asking for her permission to document the site before it was gone. After several rounds of discussion, and the inclusion of lawyers and waivers, she finally agreed.
It was dawn when they arrived. Since the agreement was for a single day they wanted the maximum amount of time possible; it was a large area, and there were only four of them to cover it. They had spent a week drawing up plans based on the blueprints of the building and assigning zones to explore. Laura had been assigned the second floor, where the manager’s office was.
They separated and carefully made their way through the building. It was a large place, the wind swaying the old metal and echoing groans through the building. She felt like she was in the belly of a large ship. After picking her way through the debris and taking pictures along the way, she was soon on the catwalk that lead to the office. It offered a remarkable view, which she was more than happy to take advantage of. Several pictures later she was lining up a shot of the large machinery below when something caught the corner of her eye. A shadow flitted between the metal pieces, just out of focus. She called out, but the closest person to her was about 30 yards away when they responded. She scanned the area and caught another glimpse, this time moving upwards towards the office.
Standing there on the catwalk, she suddenly felt drawn towards the office. It was a strong curiosity bordering on compulsion. Cautiously, she made her way across, camera raised. Then, there in the window of the door, she saw a man and stopped. He was blonde, wearing a dark suit and facing away from her. She tried to call out but her voice faltered. She cleared her throat and tried again. Her voice was shaky, but she called loudly so anyone else in her group within earshot would hear her. She yelled “what are you doing here?” at the man, and he didn’t answer. She started to back up and kept shouting, telling him he wasn’t supposed to be there and that they were going to alert the authorities. He did nothing. She heard running footsteps and a frantic voice getting closer to her. It was Garrett, coming to her aid. She raised the camera’s viewfinder to her eye and snapped a picture of the man, intending to have something to show the police if things went bad. After the shutter clicked she lowered it and stopped again. He wasn’t there anymore.
Garrett ran in front of her, holding what looked like a piece of rebar in one hand. He asked her what was happening and she pointed towards the door and told him that there was someone in there. By this time the others were making their way over. He told her to stay there and walked across the catwalk, holding the metal like a baseball bat. He leaned his back against the wall next to the door and nudged it open with his elbow. It swung all the way open, hitting the knob on the wall and bouncing back slightly. He waited a moment, then turned and poked his head inside. The others arrived and she told them about the man, watching as Garrett prepared to enter the room. Two people, Tom and Denise, followed Garrett for backup. The other two stayed with Laura, phones out, ready to dial the police.
Laura watched as they entered the office, which was no more than fifteen by twenty feet, with Garrett in the lead brandishing his makeshift weapon. They disappeared inside for a minute, calling out warnings that they were armed. Sounds of small furniture being moved were followed by the group exiting one by one. They had found nothing. There wasn’t anywhere to hide in there, and the windows weren’t big enough for a person to fit through, never mind that they had been broken and anyone trying to climb out would’ve been wounded badly. Garrett asked if she was sure of what she saw, and she firmly told them that there had been someone there and that she had taken a picture of them just in case. She scrolled through the screen on her camera and brought up the picture, zooming on the man in the window. She handed the camera to Garrett, who looked at it and furrowed his brow. After a moment he asked where in the picture it was. She stepped around and pointed over his arm at the man, saying “right there”. He squinted, brought the screen closer, then shook his head. He couldn’t see it. She took the camera from his hands and passed it to another person. After a moment they had the same response. Frustrated, she waited as they all passed it around and concluded that there was nothing there. It must have been a shadow that she saw and freaked her out, they said. She took it back and looked again, and there he was, clearly in the window. She could even zoom in further and see that he had gray hair peppered throughout the blonde, and short stubble ran along his jawline. Clearly an older man. They chided her for causing an alarm while a few laughed it off, saying they almost had a heart attack. Laura volunteered to sit the rest of the exploration out and wait back at the truck. Denise sympathized and walked her to the entrance, sweetly comforting her. She went back inside and Laura waited in the truck.
Sitting in the passenger seat she studied the picture over and over, looking at the man who was obviously there. She was angry and confused as to why they were acting the way they were, and felt like she was getting gas lighted. It wasn’t possible that they couldn’t see him, he was in perfect clarity with no ambiguous shadows or objects near him. She turned the camera off and on again, wanting to be sure it stayed. Opening the gallery to scroll to the end she saw another picture she took, of some rusted machinery with a series of gauges and dials on the side. She took it from another machine close by, making it the middle distance with a blurred background and foreground. It was beautiful in her eyes, and she wanted to keep it for her personal portfolio. Looking at it again, though, showed another man standing in front of the gauges staring down at a clipboard. Her stomach dropped. This wasn’t a member of her group, and there wasn’t anyone around when she took the picture. She went back to the beginning and scrolled through each one, all the way to the end. Those were the only two with people who didn’t belong.
Eventually the others exited the building, talking and sharing pictures they were particularly proud of. Denise got in the driver’s seat of the truck, carefully placing her gear in the middle. Laura said she was reviewing the shots she took and wanted her opinion on the framing of one. She handed the camera to her with the clipboard man pulled up. Denise looked and her eyes widened slightly. Laura got excited and was about to speak when Denise said that it was a gorgeous picture, and she really liked how it was framed. She tilted her head and mused that the gauges kind of looked like a face then handed it back to her.
Laura didn’t talk about the photos or the man for the rest of the trip. She joined polite conversation and apologized to everyone about the false alarm. They took it in stride, good-nature ribbing and “no big deal”s. She went home, sent the pictures to the group’s cloud storage for the editor to retouch and color correct, and opened the folder with photos from their previous outings. She didn’t know what she was hoping for, but she knew what she was expecting. Four hours and two bottles of wine later she had gone through hundreds of pictures, maybe thousands. On the screen was the only one that was different from before. It was a picture of a closed down auto repair store that she had taken several months earlier, after seeing it from the road while driving to visit a friend out of state. She had pulled over and taken the picture at midday, the cloudless blue sky contrasting the dull empty frame. She had it full screen because on the top of the marquee sign that filled the left-hand side of the frame stood a silhouette, arms extended and leaning, captured just before taking a plunge that only she could see.
My lunch had been sitting to the side, getting cold while she told her story. I asked her what happened next, and she insisted we eat and talk before hers was cold as well. While we ate she said that she researched seeing people in pictures that weren’t visible to others. A few esoteric books mentioned something to that extent, but only one gave it a name: “true sight”. According to the book, people who had seen a ghost first hand would be able to see them in pictures or film, even if they couldn’t see them at the time it was being captured. Spirits rarely appeared to people, she explained, and the vast majority of reported sightings were just “echoes” of the deceased. These echoes show spirits re-enacting an event, like walking down a hallway every night at a specific time. Seeing an actual spirit is more life altering. They are reportedly unresponsive but intelligent, sometimes acting confused. She conjectured that they weren’t aware that they died, and they were moving through the world just as they would have while living. They were “true” spirits, thus seeing them granted “true sight”.
I sat back and took it all in. The skeptic in me was still strong, but the facade was cracking more and more the longer she spoke. She finished and I stared down at the pictures on the table. I had never been more unsure of a thing before that very moment. I asked her if she saw them everywhere, and she said yes. Not in person, but in pictures, or occasionally a movie. She discovered that she would get a cold feeling once in a while when looking at something, and learned to take pictures of those things after trying on a whim and seeing a silhouette that wasn’t there. Movies were surprising, as they weren’t prefaced with a feeling so she couldn’t be sure what she would see. There were only two so far, an old western called “The Range” and a comedy called “Mr. Lucky”. She smiled and said that she had stopped watching horror movies, of course.
She told me she was leaving for Europe in a week, and that she would be gone for an indeterminate amount of time. There were places that she wanted to visit, where she could use her gift. It was impossible to prove, since she was the only one she knew that had the true sight, so this trip would be just for her. I asked her what her plans were once she finished her itinerary, and she shrugged. She said that she would go wherever she felt like she needed to in order to get more spirits on film. Her lease would be up and she had a buyer for her car already; she wasn’t exactly planning for a return trip. I envied her freedom, to drop all responsibility and chase ghosts around the world.
We finished our lunch and packed our things, and we walked outside. I wished her luck, and expressed my jealousy of her sight-seeing. We shared a laugh and she started towards her car. I turned to mine, but quickly turned back to her. I called out “hey”, and she stopped at her door. “Why did you tell me all this?” I asked.
She exhaled and gave a small smile. “Because,” she said “when we were talking at the party I looked at you and felt a familiar cold. I thought you should know.”
“Why didn’t you tell me earlier?” I asked.
“Would you have believed me?” she answered. With that she got in her car, and she drove away.
I've only been a casual writer on and of for a few years, when I decided it would be fun to use as a creative outlet. I like to find a scenario or setting that would creep me out and build a narrative around it that hasn't (hopefully) been done a million times. This one was my take on a ghost story without the usual stuff like haunted houses, poltergeists, possession, etc., and was my first story getting started.
I like to do this with games I have several playthroughs completed in. One of my favorites is Bloodborne, with so many sequence breaks and glitches that can be done as soon as you start the game that you can basically tackle whatever area in whatever order you want.
This is the most recent and consistent setup for the COOKIE skip, which is done in the starting clinic area and gives you immediate access to the Forbidden Woods:
Once you get that you have access to a ton of late game resources and weapons, and if you combine it with the Shadow AI freeze glitch (which is incredibly easy to do) you can reach Rom in less than 20 minutes, stock up on supplies and upgrades, and break the game wide open.
I often think about stellar albums. The ones where they're really isn't a skip-able track. Off the top of my head, these come to mind: The Beach Boys Pet Sounds, Collective Soul Collective Soul (blue album), Bush 16 Stone, and Green Day Dookie. What are some of your perfect albums?
Best "Lets Play" Series
What are the best Let’s Play series that you have seen? Looking for something to watch while I’m exercising.
ghost - Short Horror
I tried putting the story in the body of the post a few times but it hangs forever when submitting, I think there may be a character processing limit. Trying it this way to see if I can post it in the comments instead.
Story Question
Hello all,...
What games do you break?
I was thinking about a few games where I have broken the tone or balance. Wondering what other people have done similar?...
perfect/near perfect albums
I often think about stellar albums. The ones where they're really isn't a skip-able track. Off the top of my head, these come to mind: The Beach Boys Pet Sounds, Collective Soul Collective Soul (blue album), Bush 16 Stone, and Green Day Dookie. What are some of your perfect albums?