New Story Day: "Phantom View" at Reactor!

My final publication of the year dropped today: a new novelette called “Phantom View”! I love that Reactor held this one off for Halloween.

“Phantom View” is about a son caretaking for his father, and discovering a blurry person in all their family photos. He has no memory of this person. He can’t even tell if it is a person. Then he discovers the same blurry figure is in all his dad’s old paintings--and the figure may be in the house with them right now.

Re-reading this story shook me up a little. I’d long wanted to write about disabled people caring for other disabled people. I got in touch with a piece of myself. Even better, I got to play with notions of accessibility devices, both for corporeal and incorporeal beings. “Phantom View” is for people who loved “Open House on Haunted Hill” and “That Story Isn’t The Story.” It’s about the macabre stirring something in our hearts.

You can read “Phantom View” at Reactor through this handy link.

Or you can buy “Phantom View” on Kindle at this handy link.

No matter how you read it, let me know what you think! And happy spooky season!

 

The Halloween List: Veronica and... Veronica?

Let's talk about two great movies.

They both came out in 2017.

They both came out in August of 2017.

They're Spanish-language.

They're both Horror movies.

They're both called "Veronica."

Yeah, somehow a Horror movie got a doppleganger. They caused a SEO nightmare for any of us not in their home countries. One came out in Spain and the other in Mexico, and both were extremely difficult to import to the U.S. until Netflix added them. The thing is that these two movies are utterly excellent and nothing alike.

And Netflix added them both in the same month, just to further the doppleganger curse.

The Halloween List: The Haunting (1963) and Kwaidan (1964)

Previously: My Friend Dahmer and Suicide Club

The Haunting (1963)

This has to be up there with the best of black-and-white supernatural films, neck-and-neck with the classic Frankenstein. It’s based one of the all-time great novellas, Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House, about researchers who study whether a notoriously haunted house has anything true to its legends. Jackson inspired Matheson, King, and an army of other Horror writers to write similar stories, yet hers holds up thanks to fierce psychology. The movie focuses on Eleanor, a psychically susceptible woman carrying misplaced guilt over the death of her mother, who was always demanded too much of her time and stifled her growth – and who died the one time Eleanor ignored her.

It’s a slow burn that is well worth the time you put in. Everyone has a strong personality that the house is going to bend. The mansion itself is gorgeous, and only feels more old-fashioned and unwelcome in 2018. It doesn’t need cobwebs and dungeons. It has excessive signs of wealth that nobody wants anymore, and they’re all freshly cleaned. And when we get our special effects, they are remarkable for their time. There’s an effect where a door pulses inward as though it’s a giant heart beating with the life of a ghostly building, that frankly is one of the coolest practical effects I’ve ever seen.

The Halloween List: A Quiet Place, Emelie, and Hereditary

I'm kicking off The Halloween List this year with one of my favorite hidden gems, and two of the biggest Horror movies of 2018. 2018 has been so long that it's easy to forget A Quiet Place even came out back in April, right?

All three of these films attack the family in very different ways. A Quiet Place is about family surviving in a country that's destroyed; Emelie is about a family that thinks it's safe until they hire the wrong babysitter; and Hereditary is about a family haunting itself. Each is powerful, but which kind of conflict is the most effective on you?

A Quiet Place (2018)

I have been waiting a damned long time for A Quiet Place. Horror has a troubling history of relegating disabled characters to the roles of villains. I wrote about that phenomenon for Fireside Magazine last year. You can take solace in the well-meaning portrayals of Wait Until Dark and Silver Bullet, but those are moves with abled actors cripping it up, and screenplays that pander. They could never get beneath the surface.

Millicent Simmonds is a deaf actor, and she’s the emotional core of this movie. She plays Regan, the oldest child in one of the few families to survive an invasion of monsters. The monsters hunt on sound; they can hear a toy space ship from miles away, and be there in seconds. Regan has saved the family, because since they all know ASL, they know how to communicate and live without speaking. They walk into town to scavenge on paths of sand to quiet their footsteps. They have adapted.

The Halloween List: Stephen King's 1922 and Creep 2

Stephen King’s 1922 (2017)

After the shocking hit of Gerald’s Game, I had to watch Netflix’s other big King adaptation. I am a huge King fan. A decade ago I began limiting myself to reading one King book per year so I wouldn’t run out. Yet I honestly don’t remember this novella from Full Dark, No Stars. Even by the end of the movie, nothing shook loose.

It is certainly a King story. A loveless farm marriage threatens to break up when the wife wants to sell a large chunk of the land that’s legally hers. The husband (Thomas Jane) bides his time, then kills her and dumps the body in a nearby well, covering his tracks and manipulating their son into being an accomplice. The law wants to know where she was, and while the father keeps them away, rats have started climbing out of the well and following him.

The Halloween List: The Transfiguration and A Dark Song

The Transfiguration (2017)

I was utterly unprepared for this movie. It was an amazing get for Netflix, which scooped the film up from Cannes and recently released it on its streaming service. It’s the sort of highly poignant thing we can’t get enough of in Horror.

Milo is many things. A high school student. A son whose mother died when he was young, and whose father is long gone. He’s a serial killer who has no idea what to do with his compulsions.

Most of all, Milo is a fan of vampires. He thinks he is one, and uses their sanguine lore to rationalize his impulses and how strange he feels. He doesn’t fit in anywhere; his older brother offers no empathy, and he can’t communicate with the gangs that dominate his block. Instead he hides in his room, watching Nosferatu and Lost Boys. His notebooks are full of diagrams and lists of lore, figuring out how different vampires worked, as he tries to figure out why he is the way he is.

The Halloween List: We Are Still Here

After I finished The Guest, I got on the elliptical and loaded up Netflix. By pure coincidence, We Are Still Here was next in my queue, and opened… on a couple coming home after the death of their son.

We Are Still Here is still a very different movie – the couple begin experiencing strange phenomena around their house, like pictures their son hated falling over and cracking, or voices in the basement. It turns out this is a new house they’ve just moved to, hoping to get away from some of the grief, but they suspect something has followed them here. But the locals explain that horrible things once happened in this house, and they’ve always found it eerie. We begin to question what is watching them.

What unfolds is one of the finest recent haunting movies outside James Wan’s The Conjuring series and The Wailing. While this is also a period piece, set in the 1970s, We Are Still Here uses the visual style of film rather than digital, and has best-in-class costume design and make-up. Characters often felt familiar to me because I knew adults like them in the early 1980s when I was a child.

There’s a great charm, too, to casting so many actors with fading looks, receding hairlines, and other touches of age that the crew don’t cover up. They feel aging in a way that Hollywood tends to hide. It nails its period better than any other Horror movie I’ve seen since House of the Devil.

The house they’ve bought also lacks glamour. The ground and upper floors are both worn, not in need of repair, but with the scuffs and chips of time. It brought me back to times spent in old Maine houses. Only the basement seems odd, with its hole in the wall that might as well lead directly to Hell.

Especially if you have Netflix and are craving a haunting for Halloween, this is a great pick. Indie Horror seems to be grasping period pieces better than ever before.

The Halloween List: Attack of The The

It's my first week of Halloween movies and I'm already joyous. By pure coincidence, I watched all the movies beginning with "The" in a row. Today we're going back in time, to a dark forest in Japan, before stopping off in a doomed Korean fishing village. It's going to be a good time. Well, mostly.

The Final Girls (rentable on Amazon, iTunes, and Youtube for 2.99)

Imagine if Hot Tub Time Machine and Cabin in the Woods collided. The result is a punchy, funny Horror Comedy that has more heart than either of those two movies. It’s an unexpected delight that I’m still mulling over.

Great Things I Read in June, 2016 Edition

June is over! It has been conquered, and there is no more of it. I'm back from the first of three conventions this summer, and had a wonderful time on panels at 4th Street. While I was on the road, I read some fantastic shorts and non-fiction that I'll share with you today. As always every piece is free to read, no pay wall or anything. If you like what you're reading, though, please consider sharing it, or tipping the zine or author's Patreons.


Flash Fiction and Short Stories

"Other Metamorphoses" by Fábio Fernandes at Lightspeed Magazine
-The third paragraph positively killed me - one of the funniest reveals in any flash I've ever read. This flash is a great twist on Kafka's classic novella, and as badly as I want to discuss Fernandez's worldbuilding, it'd spoil the reveal. The story is too short to give away. Just click and come back when you hit "dreamtime."

"The Blood That Pulses in the Veins of One" by J.Y. Yang at Uncanny Magazine
-A vicious piece of second-person narrative, explaining how you are being physically cut out of the narrator's body, and then dissected. The most uncomfortable story Uncanny has yet published, dark and ponderous, where the real game is figuring out the context for why all this is happening, and what you and the narrator are.

"Wet" is in the first issue of Urban Fantasy Magazine

This week the first-ever issue of Urban Fantasy Magazine was published. Its first two stories are "A Chance of Cats and Dogs," by the award-winning Ken Scholes and "Wet," by myself. I'm honored to be in their first issue, and in this company. The magazine is currently available in EPUB and MOBI formats for Pay What You Want. One penny, ten bucks, it's up to you.

"Wet" is the story of a friendship between an immortal and a ghost, between someone who can't die and somehow who is traumatized by dying far too young.

It's a ghost that speaks exclusively in the voice of GWAR.

It's an immortal that volunteers as the fire department as a first responder, because what's the worst that can happen if the building collapses? You dig me out in a week.

The things these two can mean for each other... well, you'll see.

I'm so proud of this story, and not just because it's one of my more unbridled imagination pieces. Something I strive for is to mix to the absurdly humorous and the cathartic, which are the two things we owe ghosts. If you've ever enjoyed the imagination or humor of The Bathroom Monologues, then you're going to like getting "Wet."

A great thanks to everyone at UBF for giving me this chance. For other writers, they're open for submissions and pay SFWA pro-rates. They already have some amazing stuff in store, including work by Carrie Vaughn and Tim Powers.

If you read "Wet," I'd love to know your responses. Comment here, on UBF's site, or at my e-mail, bathroomDOTmonologuesATgmailDOTcom.

Haunted House, Holy House - #fridayflash

Sometimes you call a setting evil, or hallowed. There’s good houses and bad, at least according to home owners associations. But there’s this one house crumbling on the city limits, near the Target no one wants there, the last house on the right. The one made from white bricks that have yellowed with too many seasons, and that everybody says they’ve seen angels in the windows of, even if they don’t have a photo. People park outside but you seldom see the lights on.

People still aren’t sure what that house is. It does something to you, to be sure, though I think most of the stories are lies. Everybody wants to say they stayed there and were molested by angels or something.

The first documented tenant of the house lost his mind and said he was walking on air. This was in the eighties. Some of the time he was right, and there’s ample video of the man walking upwards of ten feet above the floor of his room at the sanitarium. His problem is that he always thinks he’s walking on air, even when he’s not. There’s a claim that the airport twenty miles from the sanitarium sees more accidents whenever he’s hysterical. There’s a scientific study going on to check this.

There are a couple of people who claim the house turned them into geckos, but their visits are unsubstantiated. The next documented tenant is a woman who rented the house for four consecutive weekends in the early nineties, and claims to have used a door in its basement to transport herself to Mars, from which she has returned with four garbage bags full of artifacts from Mars’s ancient civilizations. Whenever she is asked why astronauts have never found remains of such civilizations, she responds, “My relics aren’t from our Mars.”

The third documented visitor grew wings. They’re very pretty, turquoise and oily mauve, though they’re flightless and don’t fit in her smart car. Skeptics say she might have always had wings.

The fourth person to stay there was cured of her manic depression and catastrophic writers block. He’s self-published four books in the last thirteen months and has bought his way out of debt. He just paid off his parents’ house. This convinced many people that the Awful House was a miracle, even though the man’s books are mostly about glorifying violence. Copies were found on the phones of two school shooters. There’s a serious question of how much this has helped his sales.

In fact, it can’t be proven that the original documented man wasn’t a deluded telekinetic before his stay. Skeptics dispatched three people with fully recorded histories of normal behavior to reside in the house. They livestreamed their entire stay and reported the week so uneventful they wound up playing tech support.

The streams captured all of their heads detaching at various points and flying about the house. Two of the three were seen to go invisible at seemingly random intervals, while the third seemed to become super-visible, appearing in no less than three parts of the house simultaneously. There is at least video of him talking to a second self who’s on the roof, cleaning the chimney.

But if there’s an oddity to the skeptics’ tale, it’s that they don’t believe it. Given audio and video evidence, the threesome routinely debunk or cast doubt that the events were anything more than digital tricks. They claim no memory of random beheadings or invisibilities. Since their stay, they’ve also lost belief in many other things, such as that anyone actually disbelieve in manmade global warming, or the George W. Bush won the 2000 presidential election. In fact, they are skeptical to the point of certainty that Bush was never President of the United States.

A second threesome of skeptics spent a second week in the house, but went missing. There is no video or audio evidence as to where they disappeared, causing many internet commenters to joke about how tame a fate the house gave them. They were hoping for gargoyles to eat them or something. Gargoyles show in the backyard every so often. The trust pays me to clean them when they appear.

Is it an evil house? Since it started getting famous, there’ve been murders there. In 2011, ten kids were chopped up inside, stalked by the shadow of a coat rack. That time police beat the skeptics to the punch, and found the two tweens who’d faked all the videos. The house hadn’t done anything.

Seven of the kids came back to life, discovered in an attic closet, their graves inexplicably empty. Three graves, though, remain full. The house isn’t saying why.

Personally, I still can’t tell what sort of house that makes it. I’m only sure that, if there’s ever been a problem with that place, it’s the tenants.

Thankful for Ghosts

I’m thankful for having a genius brother. I could always pass a Math test, but Jasper had ambition, whether it was hot-wiring cars or counting bullets left in the revolvers of the assholes chasing us. When he died, it was with a purpose.

I’m thankful that Jasper died with unfinished business. It’s hard on me, and harder on him, but it was smart. He let lovers get away from him, and made promises knowing they’d go unfulfilled, and just about asked the Syndicate’s assassins to pin him down. We knew we wouldn’t get out of Georgia alive. The hopelessness was an investment.

Before we were two teenaged fuck-ups trying to take on the world. The next morning, we were one teenaged fuck-up and one pissed off ghost. We got a lot more work done. All that fancy throwing knife shit the Syndicate teaches didn’t do salt against Jasper. And when they turned and tried to escape, he’d possess their engine blocks and drive them into the ocean.

It once took us eighteen months to find the safe house where the man who strangled our father hid – an ugly labor, even if it’s how I met Hilde. And I’m thankful we don’t have to tail anyone anymore. Jasper sucked salt at tailing people, and I had to bail his ass more times than I’ve got fingers left. After he let himself die, after he died in my place in a sweltering warehouse and under a hail of knives, things got plain easier. He found Syndicate lawyers and magi faster than a GPS.

I almost began collecting a scrapbook of his greatest hits. The suspected heroin kingpin whose elevator malfunctioned. The three demonists posing as patent lawyers who went missing with their yacht.

I almost did it, but I worry that if I praise him too much, that’ll acknowledge his work, and then he’ll be done. If his business is settled, Jasper will cease to be. And maybe Jasper deserves the rest of ceasing to be. I can’t ask him because he doesn’t reckon things that way anymore. He’s still the pissed off ghost of a teenager, where I’m an expecting father of twins. I’m a little scared to tell him about them. I’m a little scared to tell him I’d like to slow down.

But I’m thankful. I’ll never pretend I’m not. Hilde wants to name one of the twins after him, and I owe him. I just don’t know how much further a man can owe.

13 Ways to Get Out of a Fantasy Army Without Deserting

A friend was recently stuck in her novel and asked me how someone could get out of the army without deserting. Being a great friend, I dropped everything and started IMing her with every dumb idea I could come up with. For anyone who's stuck in such a plot, here are thirteen totally viable and not at all suspicious ways to get out of a Fantasy army:

1. The war ends, demand for troops drops, and the Powers That Be release people to return to farming/etc. Presto! But I sense this doesn’t solve your problem. How about…

2. Nepotism or favors, such as knowing the colonel is diddling his mother, and blackmailing him for discharge.

3. You die! And now you’re a ghost, utterly free from duty to military service. Being a ghost is a good start for many kinds of plots.

4. You are reassigned to something like reconstruction, no longer in active military service while still technically drawing a salary. Also, congratulations on drawing a salary in the Fantasy military!

5. Injury that causes them to be given an honorable discharge but doesn’t turn you into a ghost. You’ve got spunk but you don't have arms anymore, and we're in a very stab-based economy.

6. Hardship discharge for something like trouble at home, such as half your family dying. You can come home to discover they’re ghosts, if your author is into that sort of thing.

7. Paperwork error. "You were supposed to serve another seven years, but they stamped in the wrong place." It happened in more feudal armies than you’d expect.

8. We don't know how to break this to you, but you're awful luck. As the main character, you are doubtless still alive, but being a novel with war, many others are not. Through whatever system of logic the author finds funny, we now suspect you are a walking Bermuda Triangle. Well walk your ass back home. We'd kill you, but then the executioner would be cursed too.

9. Identical twin takes your place! What a sport.

10. Fox demon takes your place because his mom says he needs to learn how to be human. You go off and have the plot of the novel. He shows up near the denouement, a changed man, now a very ranty pacifist who can't believe humans do such-and-such to each other when they only live blah blah yeah.

11. Your entire battalion is wiped out by a surprise meteor! You are the only survivor. Having no one to immediately answer to, and being shellshocked, you decide "fuck this," and go to the coast to open a sea food restaurant.

12. You get drunk and go bowling with bearded gnomes. You pass out for a little while You wake up to find your shrew wife dead, your daughter an adult and grateful to see you again, and everyone is very high on someone called "Washington."

13. You fall through a magic closet and into a realm of witches, satyrs and very pious lions.

Have any plot troubles in your current work in progress? Maybe I'll come up with thirteen ways to fix that next week. Prod me in the comments!

It's Incorporeal Vengeance Week!

Reminder: October 28-October 30th is an open “vengeance” period for all licensed incorporeal entities. Any human beings or related physical entities who have run afoul of the dead or generally incorporeal are advised to make good on all pacts and make reparations for all indiscretions by midnight of October 27th at the very latest.

Due to the sequester, local governments will not be providing any assistance or clean-up related to such massacres.

For non-physical entities who cannot rise from the crypt or claw their way into reality for vengeance by October 30th, there is an additional grace period extending to November 28th. Applicants must have at least two signed evaluations from the government-recognized Spiritualists and Theologians List in order to qualify for the grace period. The government apologizes for the grace period closing on November 28th, but we need those department stores unhaunted for Black Friday.

To our citizens of fleshy substance, remember:

• Practice respectful rites!
• Make good on your pacts!
• Avoid unnecessary transgressions against the memories of the arcane!
• Get a costume together for the Halloween Parade of Relief on the 31st! We sure hope to see you there!

Poltergeist Leak, OR, To Each, Another

Tuesday D’amato smells it, but thinks it’s a bad dream. Then Trystram and Ysolde’s claws tack-tack-tack up the stairs as they flee the basement, and they mewl so loud they’ll wake Delilah. Cats are so needy. So Tuesday gets up and opens the basement door, and they flee for the safety of the bedroom, while he takes in the musty smell. Like sweat on copper pennies.

There are two water leaks down there. Physical water is at least two inches deep in the gloom, lapping around the base of the stairs and the boxes from two years ago that he still hasn’t unpacked. His fault, he’s resigned, and he doesn’t care about that water. The other water, a ghost leak, shimmers halfway up the stairs, and translucent trout swim in the air.

“Except they’re not trout,” he corrects himself. It’s late and he’s groggy. He pads back into the bedroom, careful not to wake Delilah. Trystram and Ysolde are already in his closet, twining around his iron harpoon. Ninety-nine percent iron, a ghost’s least favorite metal. Delilah had just about killed him when he ordered it, but it kept coming in handy.

Tuesday D’amato hastens back to the stairs and sits at the top. He stirs the second water, the spectral water leak, with the tip of his harpoon, and the things that look like trout spook and swim away, into the recesses of the basement. Of course they look like trout. The ghost pipes are leaking directly above his unpacked boxes, and so they’ve gotten into his mementos, and they know all his childhood memories. About him falling in the water while fishing.

The trout fleeing, he rests the harpoon on the third stair down. The tide is climbing and he’ll need to keep an eye out until the ghost water dissipates back into another plane of existence. Then he’ll need to call a plumber. The super better cover this.

He doesn’t realize he’s grown nervous, that his bare feet are shifting on the top stair as though begging him to run. He doesn’t realize anything until Delilah touches his shoulder, and then he jerks up at her. He’s never been so relieved her head isn’t a trout.

“What is it, Big D’am?” she asks, pushing on his shoulder until he slides over. Then she plops down beside him, her hip rubbing against his. She’s wielding a night gown and that precious tablet of hers.

“Another leak,” he says, gesturing at an errant spectral trout with his iron harpoon. “Got to make sure it doesn’t rise to this floor.”

“Mhm. Mhm,” she says, turning on her tablet. “Anything neat in the water this time?”

Tuesday D’amato so tired that he forgets how to answer, and he rests his head against the harpoon. Sweat on iron does not smell the same as sweat on copper, at least not when you’re afraid for your life. Or when you’re relieved for company.

Delilah takes his head from the harpoon and instead lays it on one half of her broad lap. He can’t argue; it’s more cushioned here. But she doesn’t baby him, rather staring down into the retinal screen, booting up an avatar to slay digital ghouls for better loot drops. As the beeps and squelches and high-def MP3 soundtracks whirr into being, he wonders if there are harpoons in her game. She always plays the same one, never buying different ones, only the sequels to this. He doesn’t understand the game. He doesn’t like the game. So why, he wonders as he hears the attack sound for the two-millionth and thirty-thousandth time while resting his temple against her knee, does he find that sound soothing?

“Got to keep watch,” he says, trying to blink sleep from his eyes, trying to blink sight back into them. The ghost water laps five steps down now; he thinks it’s receding, draining into another dimension. “Got to keep us safe.”

The two million, thirty-thousand and first attack noise is her first response. Then there’s a little victory tune, and she strokes his temple with the back of her hand. “I know, and you always do. Lucky you don’t have to stop the Ghoul Lords from breaking out of the digital dimension.”

“Yeah,” he murmurs into her lap. He’s glad he bought her the silk nightgown for Christmas. “That work seems hard, too. How do you keep it up?”

“Hm?” she asks, eyes already diving back into the game, new attack noises sprouting up as she slays the undead trapped into silicon chips. “It helps having someone who understands.”

Bathroom Monologue: Death Becomes They

People have died for as long as imagination has existed. Death is a franchise that services every religion and spirituality, but it's more of a commerce thing. When Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart died, he became a set of box seats at an undisclosed opera house. When Arthur "Big Boy" Crudup died, he became a song – I can't tell you which because of afterlife copyright issues, but it's a good one. Underrated, actually.

Many artists become works. Ella Fitzgerald became a tune that homeless children in Hudson, New York used to entertain each other, while Rodney Dangerfield became a Yo Mama joke. It's hard to become your own eulogy, and thus it's a prized afterlife.

But it's not the only option. William Penn became a doorstop, which seems blasphemous to some, unless you were privy to some of the conversations he let drafts into.

Albert Einstein became an equation, and not the one you'd expect. He became "2 + 2 = ?" on the first test that a young boy was taking. That boy is a physicist now. There's a bureau looking into whether that's permissible.

Lao Tzu became a road, but one that cannot be walked.

You don't have to be famous for your death to mean something. I'm fairly certain the telegraph, electric battery and iPad were built out of people you've never heard of. A funny kid who never did more than sketch clouds became the kite Benjamin Franklin flew to test his theory of lightning – or he turned into the folk tale about it. I'll have to look that up.

Often the living do the dead wrong. A river of starvation victims became an ocean of grain – though because there is no reincarnation, live people must harvest and deliver that grain in this life. They must or they dishonor what the dead become.

Many people die angry or hurt, which is why there are so many bullets in the world. Every modern war has been a thunderstorm of the deceased yelling about their unfair shake. Anyone would rather become vengeance, but you can't become an intangible. That's just not possible. Your physicality begets a physicality, and it's your lot to become a bullet fired at the wrong person. The living don't even know how unhappy murder makes the world.

You can make the dead sing in sowing a better world from their contributions, or you can make them regret they ever existed. It is all in how you use their memory.

Bathroom Monologue: Ghost Culture

I've never enjoyed waking up early. My body just did it to me, as it did a lot of things to me in my childhood, which is why I had to live in the Special Wing. No one else in the bunks was awake, so I sat up and pulled my blanket over my head, turning myself into a human tent. I don't remember when I started doing it, only that from my earliest memories, it felt better than lying in bed. It's like a denial of the day, or at least a stay of execution.

My bunk shifted with as someone else climbed on. I tensed up, afraid an orderly would chastise me for not sleeping, but this girl lifted the foot of my covers. She was no older than I was, with spindly arms and legs and splattered with freckles, and perched there, draping the end of blanket over her head as though mimicking me. Like everything other kids did back then, I thought she was making fun of me, even when she spoke.

"I like playing ghosts, too."

Happy Urban Legend 2: Chain Letters

One of the first superstitions of the digital era was the chain letter. An immigrant from the postal service, the superstition came in the form of a letter, and later an e-mail, threatening you to copy the message and send it to several friends. Why you'd do that to a friend has always been a course of mystery, stretching back to the first girl to ever compose a chain e-mail. To be fair, she was dead when she did it.

Anyone who follows the instructions of a chain e-mail is passed over and experiences none of Google's first paranormal agent. Anyone who disregards such an e-mail, though, will be haunted by the ghost of the girl who set the scheme up. She will haunt your inbox for the rest of your life, complimenting your good taste by acting as a secondary spam filter. You will very likely never see another penis enlargement ad that she thinks you don't need.

Skeptics should still be wary, for though disregarding her power has benefits, calling her work a superstition is hazardous. Doing so upsets her ghost and cause her to expose your search history to a loved one. That has never ended well, and ironically, its contents are always passed on by word of mouth.