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CONTEST ENDED – Thank you for submitting your stories!

#221: Ghostly

With Halloween fast approaching, I find myself thinking about the different kinds of spooky stories we like to tell each other. Year after year, there’s one particular topic I gravitate towards when in search of a thrill: ghosts. Whether they’re friendly or vengeful, these haunting spectors represent more than just our fears and anxieties around our own mortality. They’re also symbols of the collision between the past and present, and the ways what has been can tangibly affect what will be. It’s no wonder, with the universality of these themes, that ghosts feature in folklore from all around the world.

This week, as the veil between worlds continues to thin, let’s dive into that liminal space between life and death, and see what it has to offer us.

This week's prompts

Write a story from a ghost’s point of view.

Halloween – 133 stories

Write a story about someone who is haunted. Whether by a ghost or something else is up to you.

Halloween – 137 stories

Write a story about someone trying to raise the dead.

Halloween – 49 stories

Write a story where ghosts and the living coexist.

Halloween – 69 stories

Set your story in a world where contacting the dead is as easy as making a phone call.

Halloween – 35 stories

Stories

“The Ghost” by Ashley Illicete

Submitted to Contest #221

It was the incessant knocking that forced my crusty eyes open. It forced me to swing my legs over my bed in such a quick motion that the dozen beer bottles on the floor collapsed making a crashing sound. The groan escaped my lips to add to the clatter. The throbbing in my temples complimented the beat of the knocks. “I’m coming damn you!” I shouted as I picked up the clothes strewn across the floor from the previous night.The wall comforted me as the room began to spin from the night’s festivities and the rapid movements. I quickly pla...

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“The Stay-at-Home Ghost” by Jessica Crockett

Submitted to Contest #221

Cheryl is always bossing me around. She thinks that just because she died first makes her in charge around here, but she forgot one little fact. I am the matriarch in this house. Oh yes, I forgot to mention, I’m a ghost, a specter, a phantasm, an apparition, honestly, whatever floats your boat. You want to know how I got here? Well, I’m going to make this nice and brief because no one wants to linger on a sob story, especially me. I am just getting over it. So, here’s the long and short of it. I got stage 4 breast cancer when my youngest ...

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“Our Halloween” by Lily Sanchez

Submitted to Contest #221

The world is different than she remembers. She used to listen to music from a radio she kept on the table in the living room right next to the fine china and the books. But the women play their music from a plastic pink mushroom controlled by a little box they left on the kitchen table. It’s different from how she remembers. The house, she means, is very different from how she had kept it in her life. There isn’t a cabinet full of china but there is still a book shelf. It had different books than what she and Elspeth used to keep ...

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“Ghosts Don't Need” by C. S. Ocampo

Submitted to Contest #221

Ghosts don’t need to eat. It’s a blessing, really. Think about how much of your energy is spent on food. Working to afford it. Driving around to find it. Prepping it. Eating it. A large chunk of each and every single day spent solely on sustenance. “If I could go without eating, I would.” I remember telling that to a co-worker once. It was one of those things you admit to someone that you immediately wish you hadn’t. That unmistakable look of judgment on her face as she averted her eyes from me is forever burned into my memory. Forev...

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“Elber T .Wise” by Ana Pullen

Submitted to Contest #221

Elber was dead. He knew that. He had known that for a long time. He also knew that going to the mortal realm was hard. Not hard to enter. But hard to be pulled in by people he knew, their familiar emotions, and watch them die, one by one. But he went. And still does. Why? No one knows why. Just that he does. Every day, without fail a ghost will go from the realm of the dead to that of the living. And every day, it is the same ghost. Elber T. Wise.Elber was watching the cars go by with great pleasure. He enjoyed this. Not the watching, of cou...

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“Advice From A Darwin Award Winner” by Richard Downie

Submitted to Contest #221

Of all the possible ways, why did it have to be this one? I could have gone out in a blaze of blood-splattered glory, careening off a cliff in a stolen car, going over the top of a World War 1 trench, blown to smithereens while defusing a bomb, a heroic casualty who sacrificed himself so that others might live. If not a heroes’ death, I could at least have met my end while having some fun. A heart attack in a Thai brothel, an explosion on a powerboat, a stage diving accident at a Phil Collins gig. But no, I had to die in the most pro...

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“day 1.” by Lara Deppe

Submitted to Contest #221

You open your eyes bathed in starlight. The moon is the tip of your thumbnail hovering in the net of stars above you. Something feels different. Many things feel different. You don’t feel tied to the ground in the same way you used to. You know you are lying down but it feels more like you are hovering above the earth rather than pressed against it with the weight of your body. You lift your arm to look at it because you were beginning to wonder if it was there. You curl one finger at a time in succession. You look more like fog than skin...

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“Searching” by Étienne S

Submitted to Contest #221

Zahra had an insatiable desire to know. All she was was her curiosity. Maybe that’s why she jumped. She didn’t know what to expect. It wasn’t planned, but it also wasn’t spontaneous. It was a thought she had had a thousand times, more than that. Every day of her life she had wondered what death was like. She didn’t want to die, but the restrictions and routine of life bored her. She was a failed literature major with a soft spot for fiction novels. She loved art and people puzzled her in a way she’d never truly understand. Despite the...

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“Nina” by Keith Foster

Submitted to Contest #221

The cat was splayed out in a sunbeam that sliced through the curtains like a golden ray, a delicate tabby with fur as silky as autumn leaves. The drapes danced in silent delight as the cool fall breeze played with their edges. The cat's eyes sprang wide, exposing curiously sparkling emerald pools. The heat from the sun caressed its whiskers, and a satisfied purr rumbled in its throat. The feline stretched its paws wide, its claws unsheathing and sinking into the soft carpet, scratching at the surface in a rhythmic symphony of tiny scratches...

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“Into the Darkness” by Zoe Chadwick

Submitted to Contest #221

It was the eve of the decade’s largest full moon: That I shall never forget. I was only seventeen at the time. Positively wild to think– It feels like all of this began several blinks ago. I recall, with pristine clarity, that I finished up my closing duties with great haste that night; for I knew that I’d need ample rest to meet the chaos that sunrise would bring. I was the sole cashier at my father’s convenience store in the evenings. It was a raffish establishment, located o...

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“Remain” by Rose Esposito

Submitted to Contest #221

Loosely inspired by The Green Knight and the tale of St. Winifred, and for Domestic Violence Awareness Month (October). Content warning for references to emotional and physical abuse.-------------------------------Relief flooded over Jane when she saw the empty lot and knew that she had the lake to herself. The picnicking families had long since herded the kids back into the car and left, ready to wash off the grass stains and whatever was in those leaf piles; the early-evening joggers were at home with their glasses of wine and a cozy sense...

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“The Water Babies” by Petina Rowsell

Submitted to Contest #221

The Water BabiesShe has become my shadow; haunting me with her dark, mournful eyes, huge in her pale face. Her withered body, that glides rather than walks, and skeletal hands, twisted into hooked claws. She never says a word but she’s always there, those glassy orbs in their shadowy sockets, boring into me whether I dare to look at her or not.*Kate and I had always loved the water. We could swim before we could walk. Mum called us her “water babies” and the house was full of photos of us at different ages but almost always in the water. Our...

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“Jesus, Coke” by Lynda Williams

Submitted to Contest #221

cw: substance abuse/suicide I dreamed about him all the time, dreamed that we were in school together and that our teachers were endlessly separating us. Owen and I weren’t friends and he’d never been a crush. We had the tenuous small-town connection of having parents who were acquainted with each other, if only tragically. When I was six, I discovered an envelope of photographs shoved in the back of the silverware drawer in our China cabinet. Inside I found a collection of snapshots of a long-haired pirate with the same almond-shaped eyes...

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“The Stranger” by Keri Mohror

Submitted to Contest #221

A sudden gust rattled a loose pane in the narrow window. The old woman paused in her sweeping to listen to the wind rising around the cabin, whistling through chinks in the mud daubing and swirling down the stovepipe with a hollow, moaning sound.She had long since become accustomed to the constant roaring of the pine tops swaying overhead. But a wind like this one … well, it carried with it memories she didn’t like to revisit and a forewarning of yet another long winter in this desolate place. In the strong gusts she thought she heard the sh...

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“Ghost of Halloween Past” by Joseph Cillo Jr

Submitted to Contest #221

Marta prepared a lunch for her daughter Kristin and wrote on the brown paper bag the name, “Emily.” Closing her eyes tightly, she gripped the counter for a moment, then crumpled the bag and threw it in the trash.She had no daughter named Emily. She had never had a daughter named Emily and would never name a daughter Emily. She hated the name Emily ever since she had caught her old ex-friend Emily Tyson sucking face with her old ex-boyfriend, Clyde whatever-his-name-was. That was long ago. There were so many names. Why would she ever choose E...

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$250

Prize money

423

Contest entries

148

Stories

Ended on 23:59 - Oct 27, 2023 EST

Won by Bay Colt 🏆

Title: Clearance Aisle Libations

Submissions must be between 1,000 - 3,000 words and will be approved and published on Reedsy Prompts within 7 days of the contest closing.

Read the full terms & conditions or check out the FAQ if you have any questions!

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