What did Jed find at the bottom of the lake?

A sword; a shield; and a wooden rake,

A ring; a dress; and one mistake,

A wallet; a card; and an old remake,

A ruler; a pen; and a paper plane,

Laughter and Death in a calm embrace,

Sadness and Life holding stakes,

Dead people awakening as a whole new race,

Fire, earth and storm; a kindling taste,

To plunder and scorch the people's waste,

Burning to ashes all of their mistakes,

And that's what Jed found at the bottom of the lake.

The Shadow in the Hallway

Late one evening, as Jennifer was locking up The Holliday House, she heard the unmistakable sound of footsteps echoing from the second floor. Thinking it was Zackery or Kenneth, she called out—but no one answered. The air grew heavy, and a chill crept down her spine.

Slowly, she ascended the staircase, her flashlight cutting through the darkness. As she reached the top, she froze. A tall, shadowy figure stood at the end of the hallway, motionless yet menacing. Before she could react, the figure melted into the wall, vanishing as if it had never been there.

But Jennifer knew better. The Holliday House wasn’t empty. And whoever—or whatever—was there was watching.

Haunting Susurrations: Tales from the Shadows is a chilling collection of short stories that lingers in the mind long after the final page. From eerie whispers in forgotten corridors to shadows that move just beyond the edge of sight, each tale is a journey into the unknown—a place where the line between the living and the dead blurs.

These stories weave together the psychological and the supernatural, exploring themes of grief, isolation, and the ghosts we carry within us. Whether it’s a lost soul trapped in time, a house that refuses to be forgotten, or a voice calling from the darkness, Haunting Susurrations will pull you into a world where the past never truly stays buried.

Perfect for fans of gothic horror, eerie folklore, and spine-tingling suspense, this collection is an invitation to listen closely… because some whispers are meant to be heard.

It's been two hours. She drones on. I cannot help but listen. A lifetime of vague implications my family was cursed, confirmed by one bizarre encounter.

I cannot find the feeling of fear inside me anywhere. She drones on. I think she - it, needs someone to talk to. My bedside table holds my folder from my voluntary inpatient psychiatric visit, diagnosis of disorder in plain view. She/it drones on about it.

I am familiar with long sleep paralysis. I am unfamiliar with an episode lasting two hours with zero fear. My body is relaxed. I cannot view this as a malicious curse. There has been no movement from the foot of my bed beyond a mouth forming words. My physical safety feels real.

Two hours, it's been. I've never been in a conversation where I was not the predominant speaker. This entity presumably precedes me, that is the reason I cannot bring myself to be the dominant speaker. I was after her, I can wait my turn. I am only a concept of a person at any given moment. A feeling identified. What a concept, my silence. A concept nobody sans she and it have seen actualized.

She drones on. It needs someone to talk to. The Victorian nightgown looks akin to my Mother's infamous nightgowns and I realize it must be who she says it is. The speech is disorganized, like mine - hard to parse through, almost impossible to process in real time.

I don't think it gets it. I don't care whether it is real or not. A maternal figure, one I was never blessed with meeting, has chosen me to spew her schizophrenic thoughts on. I can feel them soaking into me, yet I can't... I can't identify what ideals or stories are currently saturating me. The bed feels wet. Two hours for one decade of progress to be scrapped, I haven't wet the bed since I was fifteen. I never even felt the release.

It drones on about it. The Victorian nightgown seems strangely fitted in a boxy, unflattering way. I did not feel my rise to level with it, yet it happened. Sitting upwards in my sister's bed, where did my sister go? I can move after hours. I could have moved the entire time. It just feels like any of my days, blurred, unimportant, and above all, wholly unbelievable.

I can see the staining on its gown. Blood, yet not alarming. I look down, and I can see the staining on my nightwear. My urinary tract track record preserved, my maternal grandmother and I's menstrual track broken. It drones on about it.

Oh. The curse. The mark of Cain. Bound by blood. We are not grandmother and granddaughter, hallucinator and hallucinatee. We are brothers, bound in blood. It drones on and completes the binding of itself to me. I did not realize what process was occurring.

The only negative feeling I harbor is a sense of confusion. Brother, mother, grandmother, sister, one should never coerce a mentally unwell individual away from therapy. It shakes me to my core; it heard my heart's value questioned.

One of my only Precious Moments with my grandmother. One piece of precious advice, from a life denied, a life scorned. My grandfather.

One hour long were his therapy sessions. His time wasn't ready to grant him existence. Neither was my mother/father's. Two hours, one each for lives not granted a true experience. They attach to me, and I feel my heart start to carry them, the muscles beating harder and bounding stronger by each beat.

"All therapy converts."

Brothers, man I am not - man I appear. Find solace in me, live through me - I'll only ever pay you in the mind you should have had to begin with.

"I would really rather if you didn't--"

The weirdo lady interrupts me and starts talking again.

I stopped paying attention to what she was saying an hour ago.

I wonder if it's my fault for being too much of a pussy to force her to leave or if she's just an unusually stubborn cosplayer.

I sit on the end of the gurney bed, it's part of my costume as a lobotomy survivor zombie type thing.

"Ma'am," I begin again, "This is a sci-fi convention. Not a medieval festival."

The woman gives me a harsh glare and continues to blither.

I desperately hope that someone will come into my room so that I can finally get rid of this creep.

“Awaken, dear sir.”

Not again! I turn over in my bed, eyes still closed, and hope the disturbing voice disappears. But I know it won’t. I can’t seem to shake the strange thoughts and voices that pop into my head at 4 or 5 in the morning when I have to pee but I don’t want to get up.

“Whilst you sleep in this paltry room, my good man, ’tis…”

Oh, this one is a doozy. I got a woman with a British accent bugging me. Last night, it was a pro wrestler with a gravelly voice and an eviction notice.

I turn to the other side and my pillow falls off the bed. I reach to the floor and probe with my hand, but can’t seem to find it. Drat! I grudgingly open my eyelids. And I freeze.

A woman is standing next to my bed. She is in an elegant blue nightgown. Brownish-blonde tresses are falling over her outstretched arm, which is holding my pillow. But I won’t look at her face. I am afraid of what I will see in this nightmare.

I shut my eyes and rub my lids with my fists. When I slowly open them, the woman is still there. But the pillow is closer, inches from my face.

I summon the courage to turn my gaze upward. I see a narrow, pale-white chin. Lucious pink lips in the hint of a smile. Finally, alluring eyes with long dark lashes. She nods toward the pillow.

I know this image is not real, but I smile and move my hands toward the pillow. But she whisks it away. She leans down closer to my face.

“Tis right that I withhold your pillow, Mister Longworth, because on this morn you cannot sleep in,” the woman says in a flat, serious tone. “You must rush in to work, because at this very moment, a fly-rink colleague at Dorn Manufacturing is plotting with company Vice President Franks to terminate your employment and your division. Don’t lay there like a wooden spoon!”

I close my eyes, but I still hear her telling me to get up. “If you do not reach the president and put a stop to this codswallop, you will be condemned to this pigsty perhaps until death. Where is the fireplace in this bedroom? And your bed—is that a common wood frame? Where is the brass, good sir? You live like a Middle Age primitive, not a self-respecting Englishman in the enlightened nineteenth century.”

I try to think of other things. I try to sleep. I toss around and the sheets come loose. It seems like an hour has passed. Maybe two. She is still there and still talking.

Enough! I throw off the bedcover and sheet, bounce out of bed on the other side, and run to the bathroom. I hear her voice until I shut the door. At least I finish my business in peace. I cautiously open the door. The voice is gone—and so is she.

But the messy bed I left is now a picture of order, every cover and sheet smoothed and in place and the pillow fluffed—with two wrapped mints on the pillowcase.

I shake my head and sit on the edge of the bed. Before I know it, I am laying atop the covers. My eyes closed.

“Excuse me.”

The next thing I know those two words are tumbling from my mouth. I am standing at the foot of a grandiose brass bed in a sprawling room with a fireplace, a chandelier, ornate furniture, and flowing drapes.

Someone in the bed stirs and slowly peels back an ornate bedcover. I see the frightened but alluring eyes. Quivering pink lips. And that narrow chin. This is the same woman who visited me.

She asks, “What are you doing in my bedroom?”

I open my mouth, but only frightened silence comes out. I shut my eyes, cup my face with both hands, and shudder. I open my eyes and I am back on my own bed.

I close my eyes and open them again. I am standing next to a bed in the corner of a gymnasium.

“Ahem,” I say because I don’t know what to say.

Someone in the bed stirs and tosses aside an old green cover. It is the wrestler who tried to evict me just the other night.

“How’d you get in here?” the wrestler says in a gravelly voice. “And do you have that deed?”

Panic sets in and I close my eyes.

A phone rings.

I open my eyes and I am laying atop my own bed.

The phone rings again.

I leap out of bed, run to the phone, lift the device off the charger, activate the app, and shout, “Hello?”

“Longworth, is that you?”

“Yessir, Mr. Franks. What can I do for you?”

“Nothing. Due to downsizing, I regret to inform you that your division has been eliminated along with your job. Effective immediately. Thank you for your service.”

The call ends. I shuffle back to the bedroom. I brush the mints off the pillow and lay on the bed. I wipe away a tear.

#

there is no face in the window.

asylum.

a·sy·lum

/əˈsīləm/

noun

1. the protection granted by a nation to someone who has left their native country as a political refugee.

shelter or protection from danger.

2. an institution offering shelter and support to people who are mentally ill.

how confidently i announced

that ghosts were nothing more

than figments

of an imaginative (or perhaps deluded)

mind.

$2,000. help wanted.

i thought,

what the hell? why not?

the cameraman never dies.

it never crossed my mind

that the cameraman

could suffer a fate worse than death.

there is no face in the window.

they even provided me a camera;

some fancy gadget

they ordered off of amazon

that claimed to be able to record

the paranormal.

it was heavy. i figured if a ghost came at me,

i'd go down swinging 300 dollars

worth of equipment at their dead face.

we saw nothing.

honestly, as much of a skeptic as i was,

i've always hoped something

(or someone)

would prove me wrong.

as we walked through the hallways,

grainy, dim-lit footage marking our path,

i found myself hoping:

show me something, anything.

we marched along for hours,

with a kid four years younger than me

narrating the scene.

"12:34 p.m., eastern standard time...

no signs of any activity yet. my name is

kevin schumer, i'm here with my crew

and tonight we are joined by..."

he pauses.

"the cameraman," I finish,

which prompts a few uneasy giggles.

yep, that's me,

the eternal watcher.

i see and i record

for posterity.

there is no face in the window.

we were there until four a.m.

our eyelids had grown heavy.

our livestream had exactly one viewer.

perhaps that was why

i felt like i was being watched.

nothing had happened. no doors

had slammed, no windows broken.

we were alone.

yet i could not shake the feeling...

there is no face in the window.

i drove myself home.

headlights lit up the parking lot.

yellow lines. black asphalt.

then darkness again

as i made my way up

three flights of stairs

to my apartment.

my lights refused to turn on.

a power outage? or had my power

been cut?

i did not know. i was too tired to care.

tomorrow, my check would hit

my account

and then i could solve the problem

of late rent.

i laid down,

in nothing but boxer shorts,

awaiting the release of sleep,

and found that

i could not hold my eyes shut.

a feeling was sinking into my spine

like a numbing injection

and i found myself tingling with

some unseen awareness.

i was being watched.

there is no face in the window.

it has been

three weeks

since i had looked outside

that night

to reassure myself

that i was alone.

there is no face in the window.

yet the feeling did not leave.

it only grew.

more and more, i believed

i was hunted. haunted.

there is no face in the window.

each night i check the door,

the closet, the bed, the window—

wait, the window—

tonight,

(one last desperate cry,

the moment before the mind

shatters)

THERE IS NO FACE IN THE WINDOW.

it has followed me home.

now i will follow it home.

to my sanctuary.

to my asylum.

i am the face in the window.

you will feel me watching,

just as i felt it.

when you look outside tonight,

do not trust your eyes. trust

your instincts.

there is a face in the window.

I was supposed to follow one of the team members with my camera. We were exploring a haunted asylum, not that I believed that at the time. I was new and all, so I wasn't super familiar with the others. I followed the person I thought I was told to all night. We met back up at the end, and they asked where I had been all night. I was going to point out who I had been following, but they weren't there.

Confused, I told them they could check my footage, but I had been following someone. They all started chatting with excitement about what I must have captured. I was bewildered. Not knowing what had just happened, I answered their excited questions with mumbled "yeah, it was cool, I guess." and "I thought it was a person, so there was no reason to be scared." They told me to leave quickly, and make sure the footage wasn't wiped. Thereafter, we headed home.

I live(d) by myself, yet when I got to my place the door I had locked when I left was open. I searched frantically to see if there had been a burglary, but nothing was missing. It seemed there were some additional items like another toothbrush, toothpaste tube, pair of shoes, and so on. Exhausted, but not wanting to do the necessary steps to go to bed, I plopped on my couch. I eyed the kitchen, as my stomach was a bit rumbly, and nearly jumped out of my skin when I saw someone in it pouring milk into a bowl of cereal, before turning around and putting the carton away.

"We didn't mean to scare you." a wispy voice exclaimed in a soft tone. Burying my face in my hands, I tried to process what I was experiencing. I looked back up to see a bowl on my island with a spoon in it. I got up to check for the mysterious person. The bowl had a single Lucky Charms balloon marshmallow in it. I don't like Lucky Charms. Weirder still, there was no milk in the fridge. Figuring I was overtired, I headed to bed.

When I woke up, I headed to the kitchen, eyes glassy. The bowl from before was still there, but it was full of balloon marshmallows. I made the coffee I had come to the kitchen for, and checked my phone while I waited. The team chat was blown up over my footage. They couldn't believe I had captured such a thing at all, let alone my first time. They also had figured out the 'person’ I had followed was a late team member, who had the same name as a current member. Those who had known him had reminisced about their favorite memories with him.

He hadn't believed in ghosts when he joined the group, he just needed money, but no one knew at the time. His first day on location he had wandered off without a camera, when they found him, his face was sunken, and he was sputtering “I believe you!” over and over again. He never told anyone what happened that day, but after that he insisted on eating a bowl of Lucky Charms before going to a haunted location.

My jaw dropped as I read the last message,

“Oh yeah, and the balloons were his favorite. They were always the last thing he ate.” The smell of my coffee brought me back to my senses.

I continue to be unsure what I believe, but I know there’s something after death. Whenever I'm uncertain his presence is more noticeable. Every now and then I hear different voices whisper

“Do you believe?”

Daisy knew that getting a job from Craigslist was a bad idea. She also knew that taking a job labeled, "Help us Prove Ghosts Exist,"was idiotic. But desperate times called for desperate measures. And Daisy, with only $10 in her checking account, was desperate. Maybe if she hadn't decided to drop out of business school to follow a dream of becoming a documentarian, things would be different. But she needed money, and applying to work as a videographer for a kooky Craigslist listing was the best she could do for now.

So she applied for the job, and got it. She found out that she would be left alone in an abandoned asylum for a night to capture video. The team member, Carl, who spoke to her in a video call, said that they wanted live footage of the hauntings. They wanted her to be there in order to make sure the footage wouldn't be tampered with by the ghosts.

Which is why she found herself alone in a pitch-black bedroom of the abandoned Anderson Asylum. Carl had told her this bedroom had the highest reading of paranormal activity. The only reading Daisy was getting was the creepy vibe of being left alone in the dark of an old building. Overall, though, this job was easy and she was going to be paid $500.

So she waited and endured three hours of nothing happening.

Then, at around 2 am, she heard a noise. It sounded like a squeak.

"Great, there are probably rats," Daisy thought to herself.

Then she heard a whine. Or maybe a sob. Nope, it had to be another squeak. Because Daisy knew no one else was here.

"Mum?"

Daisy froze. Nope, she didn't hear that. She knew she didn't.

"Mum?"

Nope, nope, nope. She had fallen asleep at this point. That was the explanation. She was not hearing a word coming out of nothing.

"Mum?"

Why did she feel a rush of cold go over her body? Because her temperature had dropped as the night went on. That's why.

"Mum?"

Daisy was not feeling something nudge her. She was asleep, and she had to wake up. She had to wake up.

"MUM!"

Daisy jumped when she heard the yell. And hit her head on the low ceiling. The resulting pain she felt was too real, and too obvious a sign, that she had never been asleep.

Daisy was done. With this weird assignment. With whatever paranoia was hitting her. It didn't matter anymore that she was desperate for money, she just wanted to get out of there. She grabbed her purse and sprinted out of the room, crashing into things as she went because she couldn't see anything. She didn't slow down until she had driven back home.

Carl didn't end up paying her the full $500. She did get $250 for still providing film footage from the night, as she had left her camera behind. She also got the camera back. And something else.

Every night, since the night at the asylum, Daisy had the same dream.

It was of a small girl, with curly blonde hair, who stared at her from two black voids where eyes should have been. She said one thing. Over and over.

"Mum?"

"How will I explain this?"

"Why must you?"

He can't argue with her logic, not really. He is his own man, owing justifications to not a single soul.

"Yeah, okay, so you have a bit of a point, but we don't live in a vacuum."

She raises an eyebrow, but he ignores it and keeps on. "I have parents who will wonder who I'm dating."

"You haven't seen your mom in three months, your step-father doesn't care, and your dad lives in Iowa."

He rolls his eyes.

"I never told you those things."

She smiles, and his heart flutters. He shivers, but his heart turns cartwheels. She has shared his living space for quite a while now, and he still hasn't gotten used to the things she simply seems to know. It's infuriating, endearing, terrifying, and arousing.

Some of the things she knows are downright biblical in their sweet sinfulness.

She floats across the hardwood of the living room and runs a finger along his jawline. She leans in and whispers, "Let me show you other things I know."

He does, and forgets all about explaining his new girlfriend to the parents.

__

They met at work. He took a gig as a videographer for one of those idiotic reality shows that air on formerly respectable cable networks. This one specialized in sending in a handful of "regular people" to reportedly haunted places, where they had to spend a full 24 hours.

The crew isn't supposed to interact with the "talent," but the lady now in his house started flirting with him around three in the morning on the job. One thing lead to another, the shoot wrapped, and here they are.

He didn't find the "haunted" asylum particularly frightening. Honestly, he thought it was boring, except for the minor dramas that unfolded between the two efinitely not actors competing for who could behave like the biggest scared toolbag. He played along when he needed to, running down hallways and giving the producers plenty of shaky-cam footage to edit and play up. Every chance he got, he put his now-girlfriend on film, since she was easy on the eyes and didn't behave like an imbecile.

__

His phone rings and it's the director from that stupid ghost show. He steps out of the bedroom so he doesn't wake her.

"Hello?"

"No, I did."

"No, I changed memory cards several times. I turned them all in."

"Uh huh."

"Nope, nope, I did, didn't you see?"

"What do you mean?"

"That's not possible."

"Gimme a break, man. I was there. It's all on tape."

"You have the tapes. Well, cards, whatever. The recordings."

"Bullshit, I shot all night."

"The girl in the blue dress, yeah, on my recordings."

"What?"

"I don't understand."

"How did you not see? We had conversations. Yeah, I know I'm not supposed to talk, but what am I supposed to do when I'm asked direct questions, man? I'm not a robot, and hell, you hired her. She's hot."

"Explain that."

"Well who hired her?"

"Never mind, that doesn't matter. No, look again, I don't know what to tell you. It's all recorded, I did my job."

He turns around, and she's standing right next to him, smiling that smile that does things to him.

"Listen man, I gotta go. I'd love to work for you again, but I'm not feeling the accusations. I specifically recorded the girl in blue most of the night, and she's standing right here with me now."

He hangs up, she kisses him, and he forgets all about the director saying there was no actress in a blue dress at the asylum.

He has never heard the word succubus and he never will.