This week: What's Scarier Then This? Edited by: W.D.Wilcox  
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“Despite my ghoulish reputation, I really have the heart of a small boy. I keep it in a jar on my desk.”
-Robert Bloch
“Listen to them, the children of the night. What music they make!”
-Dracula (Bram Stoker)
“Hell is empty and all the devils are here.”
-The Tempest (William Shakespeare)
“There are horrors beyond life’s edge that we do not suspect, and once in a while man’s evil prying calls them just within our range.”
-The Thing on the Doorstep (H.P. Lovecraft)
“The last man on Earth sat alone in a room. There was a knock on the door…”
-Knock (Fredric Brown)
“Blood is really warm,
it’s like drinking hot chocolate
but with more screaming.”
-Zombie Haiku (Ryan Mecum)
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WHAT'S SCARIER THAN THIS?
In the Internet age, stories of “real life” horror abound. Anyone brave enough to plumb the depths of Reddit can find endless testimonials of creepy and outright terrifying events that have seemingly befallen everyone to ever use the Web. But as we all know, truth can be stranger than fiction—or in cases like these, more horrifying and shocking than anything that could be dreamed up by even the cruelest horror scribe. If you are faint of heart, please consider that your warning.
 Montana schoolteacher Rita Maze called her husband first. She had been hit on the head and kidnapped from a highway rest stop. She was currently in the trunk of a moving car, and she had no idea where she was going or who had taken her. For several excruciating hours, Rita remained in contact with her husband and a Helena police officer as her phone’s signal became more and more unreliable. Police were able to determine the direction the car was headed in, eventually tracing it to Spokane, Washington—after contact had been lost. Local authorities found the car shortly after midnight in a parking lot. Rita’s body was in the trunk. The coroner established that she had been killed after arriving in Spokane.
For 13-year-old Alana, a family trip in the summer of 2014 was to be a getaway from all of the recent problems in her family. Her parents were going through a divorce, and a looming court-ordered visitation with her father was a source of stress. But it would end with the most horrifying moment of her life: with her mother, who had just drowned her two-year-old baby sister, slashing Alana’s wrists and throat while screaming at her to die faster. With her teenage daughter bleeding out, Jessica Smith simply left their hotel room, telling Alana to lock the door behind her, which she did. She was discovered by hotel staff and amazingly survived.
Responding to a call, Chicago police had no trouble locating the dead woman; she was on her back porch, and she had been stabbed 45 times. However, the investigators’ night was just beginning. The inside of the woman’s house was utter carnage. Five additional family members, ranging in age from ten to 58, had suffered the same fate. Each victim had been stabbed to the point of absurd overkill. Some were bludgeoned as well, with as many as 16 blunt-force injuries. One was also shot.
In the wee hours of the morning in Manchester, Connecticut, a woman and her teenage daughter were murdered in their sleep. The ax-wielding maniac split the woman’s face clean in half. A butcher knife was also used on both victims. It was the summer of 1865, and local residents had never so much as heard of such a crime. Albert Starkweather, son of the older victim and brother of the younger, gave an account of that night: He awoke to find the house on fire. With the help of a neighbor, he carried out the bodies of his mother and sister, brutalized almost beyond recognition. In the following days, police were moved to arrest Albert after he began to give contradictory statements. He was promptly put on trial, convicted, and executed in 1866, never having given a reason for his crime.
In the summer of 1960, four teenage friends in Finland decided to go camping at a nearby lake. Only one would survive. He came away with a concussion and most of his face broken in addition to other wounds and could only recall a black apparition with glowing red eyes. Some locals still say that it was the Grim Reaper, Death himself, who came for them that night—simply for lack of any other explanation .The victims were all savagely stabbed and bludgeoned, yet there were no weapons to be found at the site. In the intervening years, there have been many suspects and potential leads, all going nowhere. One man even confessed on his deathbed, only for investigators to prove it false. The survivor of the attack was even arrested 44 years after the fact, but a thorough modern investigation, including the use of DNA testing, produced nothing. To this day, the mystery of what happened that night at the lake inspires a dark wonder among locals, and the story is said to have heavily influenced the seminal slasher film Friday the 13th.
On a hot summer night in Miami, well-liked and athletic Florida State University student Austin Harrouff was patronizing a local diner. Surveillance video would later show that he became agitated for some reason and left. After that, authorities say he walked over 5 kilometers (3 mi) to the home of a couple he didn’t know, for no apparent reason. When three police deputies responded to the home hours later, they found the 19-year-old on all fours, making animalistic grunting noises, attempting to literally chew the face off his male victim. He had already brutally stabbed the couple to death and had seriously injured a neighbor who had tried to intervene. It took all three deputies to subdue him. While the involvement of drugs was obviously suspected, Austin’s mental state had slipped drastically in recent weeks, according to friends and his parents, who nevertheless couldn’t have conceived that Austin could become violent, let alone commit so heinous a crime. A recent YouTube post by the killer provided grim foreshadowing for what was coming, however: “I’ve got a psycho side and a normal side,” he said. “I’ve lost my mind. Help me find it.”
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DEAD LETTERS
Here are some comments to the question: Do you have scary dreams?
 Yes. The very concept for Toddlerhood came to me in a dream.
Always.... some of them are vivid enough to remember i put them down in an outline even if i have to get up in the middle of the night and do it.
Themed resort, the test pilot, the castle of dreams are all based on subconscious dreams. And so vivid that you felt like you were there and didn't want to wake up... a cozy comfy place to sleep and find refuge from the outside perils of life.
Pretty bizarre in many ways. other times if they get too gory you have to wake up... but that makes for a good horror genre.
No cuz a lot of them are a blur and who wants to read all that?
I don't remember my dreams. Its certainly something I haven't wrote on here. But then again, dreams influence us in ways we don't know.Then again, this could all be a matrix simulation. 🤷♂️
My dreams are weird and I never remember enough to write most down.
I don't dream dreams I dream movies, complete with action, music, sound, smells, and often taking place in alternative worlds and dimensions with people I don't know in real life. And as some of you know I met my wife in a dream eight years before i met her.
Not usually, but I had a dream that foreshadowed 911 during September of 2000. (I wonder if it happened September 11, 2000, but I'll never know.) I had a friend who pushed me to write it down because I kept talking about my dream over and over and I couldn't let it go. I finally started writing it in February 2001.
When September 11 happened (a Tuesday), that Friday all the similarities hit me. I called my friend freaking out and started listing them to her as well. She also started freaking out. The only difference is that in my dream, the US was taken over. Thankfully, that part didn't come true! But that was the part that had me the most terrified!
Unfortunately, when I was leaving Alaska (I'd later joined the Army and AK was the duty station where I'd deployed to Iraq), I had a friend helping me pack and the disc my story was on was accidentally thrown away. *Frown* I had 115 Word document pages written...all forever gone now.
I really felt like that was an inspired piece of work. My friends I would read it to were all on pins and needles to know what was going to happen next. Now I don't think I'd ever be able to get into that headspace again, so while I could write something decent, it will never be what it was. *Frown* If I'd had WdC when I was writing it...
Dreams are ideas and thoughts; a writer who dreams have more ideas to turn into stories...
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Horror/Scary: August 31, 2022 Issue [#11530]
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