SUPERNATURAL STORIES

My four-year-old son has a friend who lives in his closet. He's been talking to this friend for six months. My wife thinks it's an imaginary friend. I've heard the responses.

Three things changed in my neighborhood in the same week. The Garcias stopped waving. The dog across the street stopped barking. And something that looked like Mrs. Patterson started sitting on her porch at 3 AM.

My grandfather told me never to go into the pines behind the property after dark. He said something lived there that had lived there longer than our family had owned the land.

There was a house on my street that was always listed for sale. I grew up on that street. The house was for sale my entire childhood. Families moved in, families moved out, usually within months.

My girlfriend Emma died eight months ago in a car accident. Last Tuesday she sent me a Facebook message that just said "hey." I told myself it was a hacker. Then she described my apartment.

The 3 AM customer is always the same. Different person, different car, different reason they're out — but always at 3 AM, always buying the same thing, always paying the same way. Always looking at the same spot behind me.

Every house on Meridian Street had a ceramic pig on the porch. Every house but ours. The neighbors explained: you feed the pig or the pig gets hungry. We didn't take this seriously at first.

My apartment is on the top floor. There is nothing above me but the roof. I have been hearing footsteps above me every night for two weeks.

I know what sleep paralysis is. I've had it since I was seventeen. The entity that sits on my chest during episodes is not a hallucination. I know because it left a mark.

I found a door in my basement that wasn't in the house plans. Behind it was a crawlspace. In the crawlspace was a mattress, food wrappers, and a notebook.

Laughing Jack was a toy — a jack-in-the-box clown, black and white, given to a lonely boy in 1800s England. The boy grew up. Laughing Jack waited. When the boy came back wrong, so did Jack.

In June 1972, a woman was found wandering the halls of Cedar Sinai hospital in nothing but a hospital gown. She was covered in blood. In her mouth was a dead cat.