On this day in 1948, songwriter Stan Jones released Ghost Riders in the Sky, which tells a version of the Wild Hunt legend.

As the riders loped on by him

He heard one call his name

‘If you wanna save your soul

From hell a-riding on our range

Then, cowboy, change your ways today

Or with us you will ride

Trying to catch the devil’s herd

Across these endless skies

A mighty hunter and a pack of dogs, horses, or other beasts racing across the horizon, making a terrible noise as they rush above you! What could it mean? Well, that depends on who you are.

Let’s say you might be an average citizen in a time of political upheaval and great anxiety about the future (seems rather timely). For you, the appearance of the Wild Hunt may not be so helpful. In some traditions, the Wild Hunt is a bad omen— not just for those who see it, but for the entire society they represent. That’s right, those huntsmen chasing howling wolves across the sky means you’re going to have a war! Except! If the guy leading the hunt happens to be King Arthur or some other long-dead hero. Then you may be relieved, as the day is about to be saved, supernatural-superhero-style.

Check out my Weird Wednesday blog post on the Wild Hunt for the whole story and some writing prompts, such as:

King Arthur returns. This is some Angels of Mons type stuff, where visions in the heavens presage victory for one side or the other. But what if your character finds they recognize Wild Hunt Arthur as somebody they know? A grandparent, neighbor, or lover? Maybe someone could get abducted into the Wild Hunt only to realize they themselves are the supernatural hero.

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It’s almost spooky-blue-flames day in Dracula! So here’s some info about ghost lights.

In the novel Dracula, poor Jonathan Harker endures a perilous nighttime carriage ride, during which the creepy coachman repeatedly stops to make piles of stones in places where blue flames are blazing. Apparently, Jonathan has managed to arrive in the area on the eve of St. George’s Day (given as May 4 in the book), a night when evil freely walks the land. It’s also the one night a year when buried treasure can be located by blue flames. Anyone brave enough to go out on that night can mark the treasures’ locations and dig them up later, which probably explains why Dracula’s got piles of gold coins lying around his castle.

But guess what—unlike some of the other paranormal topics discussed on this blog, ghost lights are actually real. So what the heck are they? Let’s look at some theories!

Read the whole story on my blog and get writing prompts, such as:

Just a little filthy lucre buys a lot of things. So Dracula probably didn’t give a flying mirror (haha) about the supernatural provenance of the gold he dug up, but the rest of us might want to take more care. Because what are the odds that treasure marked by blue flame on the most evil night of the year is not cursed? A story could get into different aspects of this idea: where does the gold come from, anyway? (In Dracula, it’s wealth hidden during times of war.) Who buried it? Are they planning to come back and get it? Why would a treasure cause a blue flame once a year? And if you did manage to get your hands on the treasure, is there a way to un-curse it? Perhaps if you give most of it to good causes, or have it blessed by a priest—unless of course it’s so unalterably cursed that the priest dies and the good causes have a horrible spell of bad luck…

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“It is said that on that night, every year, all the train men that are on the road at a certain hour…hear and see and feel the spectre train rush by them. It sounds hollow and awful. Its lights are yellow, pale and funeral. Its train hands and passengers are sepulchral figures. … It even carries with it a whirl of wind as fast as trains do, but it is a cold, clammy, grave-like atmosphere, all its own. As it passes another train the shriek of its whistle and clang of its bell strike terror to the hearts of those that hear them.”

Check out my Weird Wednesday blog post for the whole story and some on-track writing prompts, such as:

Memento Mori. Hauntings that replay tragedies are called residual hauntings. They’re like an old movie, where none of the actors are actually present in your living room, but you can watch them over and over. Grieving characters might be drawn to the scene of a train crash on its anniversary for a last glimpse of a loved one who died on the train. Or they might hear rumors of vanishing-hitchhiker passengers and hope they might recognize one. A character could even contact a necromancer (a person with the magical skill to summon the dead) to try to keep the hitchhiker from vanishing.

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Crisis Apparitions

February 9th, 1884.

In the higher part of the door was a glass window, and I all at once, in the darkness, saw a face looking through that window. The face was very well known to me, though for the instant I did not associate it with the original, as she was 300 miles away. I instantly opened the door, found nobody there, and then searched the ivy with which the porch and house are covered. Finding nothing, and knowing it was impossible anyone could have got away. … I at once knew the face was that of a married sister-in-law of my wife’s. I told all our family of the circumstance directly I got home, and judge of our dismay when we had a letter to say she died at the very hour I saw her. Monday was the evening I saw the face, and on Wednesday, when we were at dinner, the letter came.

W. Goodyear.

From Apparitions of the Living Vol 1 (free to read online).

The story goes like this: when someone is in a moment of crisis, whether it be death, near-death, or just a time of great anxiety, they can project an image of themselves to a loved one. The image can speak or be silent. It can look ghostly— someone floating above the floor, shining with radiance, or resting in a coffin— or it can seem exactly like a real person visiting. Many times crisis apparitions are comforting: a beloved family member coming to say a last goodbye.

Check out my Weird Wednesday blog post for the whole story and some spectral writing prompts, such as:

Loose lips and ships. A common story involves the mother of a shipboard soldier receiving a crisis apparition of her son at the moment of his death. The military doesn’t like to announce the loss of ships right away, but knowing that her son has died gives the mother advance notice of a sinking. What would she do with that information? Inform the other families? Press the military for details? Go to the press? Try to save other ships from befalling the same fate?

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This month in 1906 the E.F. Benson story The Bus-Conductor was published in Pall Mall Magazine. It’s one of the earliest appearances of the urban legend Room For One More?

The story goes like this: a traveler is staying the night at a friend’s house. Shortly after midnight, a sound from outside brings them to the window. On the driveway below, the traveler sees a hearse pull up. There is no coffin inside, but instead a group of living people. The hearse driver, a man with a sinister appearance, looks up at the traveler in the window and says, “There’s room for one more.”

Shaken, the traveler returns to bed, and in the morning, dismisses the creepy encounter as a dream. But later that day the traveler goes to board a bus, and finds the driver looks exactly like the hearse-driver from the night before. And he repeats his invitation— “There’s room for one more.” 

Terrified, the traveler backs away from the bus, letting it leave without them. A moment later, a truck slams into the bus, killing everyone on board.

Read all about it on my blog, and get writing prompts, such as:

Destination unknown. The story always ends with a crash. But there are other potentially horrifying fates. Perhaps the bus is hijacked, or takes a wrong turn down a foggy road and never arrives at its next stop. Maybe the elevator reaches the first floor unscathed, but with all its passengers vanished. Could it have opened at floor 13, which everyone thinks does not exist?

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On this day in 1934, 20-year-old artist Everett Ruess was last seen heading into what is now Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in Utah. No trace of him has ever been found.

Check out my Weird Wednesday blog post for the whole story and some writing prompts!

Missing persons are a particularly distressing problem for the human mind. We don’t like ambiguity. We don’t like to think of a bewildered family. We don’t like to conceive of circumstances that could allow a person to just vanish. No wonder we’re fascinated with adding to Wikipedia’s Solved Missing Persons Cases.

Unfortunately, the question of Everett Ruess will likely never be answered. For one, it’s been 90 years since Ruess disappeared, and for two, he did it in a particularly difficult place to search: isolated rocky desert, beautiful and barren.

No one raised the alarm for a few months, because Ruess was often out of touch for long periods. But when his parents started receiving their son’s uncollected mail in February of 1935, a frantic search began. Soon after, Ruess’s campsite was found near Davis Gulch, with two donkeys in a corral he’d built. But no further concrete sign of him was ever discovered. Somewhere out there, amid starry skies and stark canyons, something went very wrong for Everett Ruess. And we have no idea what it was.

Keep reading

One of the writing prompts:

Back to reality. Disappearances are traumatic events, and as such, they aid in the telling of literary stories which examine the effects of trauma on a group of people. The novel Jaws (not so much the movie) did the same thing. So how would a family deal with such a loss, with no answers ever forthcoming? Or a team of searchers, college campus, or a group of internet sleuths? In a literary take, the focus is not so much on what happened to the missing person, but to the people left behind.

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On this day in 1977, Jay Anson published The Amityville Horror, and a launched a whole new generation of haunted house stories.

But before the movies, before the book, before the revelation that it was all a hoax, the house at 112 Ocean Ave, Amityville, Long Island, New York, was the scene of a real horror: the murder of six people.

Ronald DeFeo, Jr., 23, killed his parents, two brothers, and two sisters with a rifle on Nov 13, 1974. If you’re familiar with the Amityville Horror story, you know of claims DeFeo was hearing voices that told him to kill his family. This part is surprisingly real— at least, according to his defense. The jury was unmoved, however, and DeFeo was convicted of mass murder. He died in prison in 2021. It is also true that motive remains elusive: DeFeo might have been after life insurance, and there was tension between him and his father. But nothing was ever said about evil spirits before the murders. 

Of course, living in a house where six people were murdered by someone they loved has got to be a little freaky. But one family claimed there was a lot more horror going on. George and Kathy Lutz and their three children lived 28 days in the house at 112 Ocean Ave, starting in Dec, 1975. Interviews and a 1977 book by Jay Anson told the story of a terrified family who barely escaped with their lives. However, later fact-checkers found, well, no facts at all.

So we’re left with an odd contradiction: a false tale that got a lot of publicity for being “true,” but which remains, at its heart, a really good ghost story (which is why it led to many more books and movies). And here on Weird Wednesday, writing good ghost stories is our aim, so let’s see how horrifying the tale really gets!

Check out my Weird Wednesday blog post for the whole story and some horrific writing prompts, such as:

A Foolish Man Builds His House Upon the Sand. You’ve got a few choices for character fates in a haunted house: unscathed escape, injured or traumatized escape, death, or perhaps most horrifying, becoming part of the house forever. We often think of characters who die passing into a safe paradise, but in the horror genre, that avenue of escape is often blocked. So what does happen to those people? Perhaps the inside of the haunted house is just a form of Hell, where a character is stuck with a bunch of demons. Or maybe they’re alone, which is also not a great eternal fate. Maybe they really do become part of the house, part of its walls and floors, and can only move on when the house finally rots or burns down.

Or maybe haunted houses/places also exist in another world, invisible to the mortal eye, where a character can go traveling. Maybe if you die in the Amityville house, you get a visitor’s pass for the Lincoln bedroom or Borley Rectory. Are there demons pursuing these travelers? Do the newly departed make friends with other ghosts? Can they ever pass back into the world of the living?

DannyeChase.com ~ AO3 ~ Linktree ~ Weird Wednesday writing prompts blog ~ Resources for Writers 

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134 years ago today the Ouija Board had its commercial introduction as a harmless parlor game.

A Ouija board is a rectangle of wood or cardboard printed with the alphabet, the numbers 0-9 and the words yes, no, and goodbye. Players put their fingers on a triangular planchette and ask questions of the spirits, who answer by moving the planchette around the board. Of course, we know how this goes: it’s malicious entities who respond and then they kill everybody. That’s the trope. But it wasn’t always like that.

The Ouija began as a benign religious practice of Civil War-era Spiritualists, who were seeking to contact beloved family members who had died or met the more horrifying fate of vanishing into the theater of war. The board’s darker reputation began with the 1973 movie The Exorcist, which showed demonic consequences for playing.

Check out my blog post for more on the mysterious talking board, plus writing prompts, such as:

Call in the spirits. The Ouija board was built for necromancy: divination (seeking supernatural knowledge) from the dead. Of course, the practice of begging data from the dearly departed began long before the board came about. But the Ouija makes it easy. So let’s dial up the deceased.

(Pro-tip: You can DIY a Ouija board by drawing numbers and letters on a flat surface and using an upside down glass as a planchette.)

Possibilities for benign contact include loving family members who pass on reassurances about the afterlife, ghosts with info on random stuff like lottery numbers, ghosts of murder victims who wish to name their killers, or creative types who want to help you write novels (looking at you, Patience Worth).

But of course, you can also phone up the fiendish: convicted killers, undiscovered killers, relatives you thought were kind who were actually killers, ghosts who like mean pranks, ghosts who just plain hate the living, and the biggest danger: dead dudes who would like to live a second life. Possession by spirits is a favorite Ouija trope, and you often get there by breaking a rule while playing the “game,” which can be anything you like: don’t play alone, don’t try to contact the very recently dead, don’t play without a piece of iron in your pocket, etc.  

DannyeChase.com ~ AO3 ~ Linktree ~ Weird Wednesday writing prompts blog ~ Resources for Writers 

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On this day in 1912, eight people were murdered with an axe in their home in Villisca, Iowa. Josiah Moore (shown above), and his wife Sarah, along with their four children and two neighbor children, were killed in their beds by a person who has never been identified. And I mean never—the internet doesn’t even have a favorite suspect.

I used to live in Iowa, and I have actually been to the “Villisca Axe Murder House,” now a museum and historical site, and a frequent host to ghost tours. Visitors are free to leave their mark on the rafters in the barn, writing messages which range from the usual names and dates to oddly creepy warnings like “Don’t stand on your head in the kids’ room.” On my visit I was struck by how little has changed, though Iowa has traveled more than a century into the future: at the end of our tour, we were discussing suspects and expressing sympathy for the victims, exactly as people have been doing outside that house for over 100 years.

Check out the blog post for the whole story and some creepy writing prompts, such as:

Nobody woke up

So this part is almost true. There’s evidence that only one person in the house woke up before being murdered: one of the neighbor girls downstairs. Everyone else was killed in their sleep, probably starting with the parents. But that’s quite a feat considering eight sleeping people were in just 3 rooms. Neighbors reported hearing some inconclusive sounds, but nothing that would cause alarm. The crime wasn’t discovered until a neighbor noticed the house was silent at breakfast time. 

Now, murder with an axe is not nearly as loud as murder with a gun. (Ronald DeFeo of Amityville infamy claimed to have drugged his family before shooting them, which is why they didn’t wake. No evidence of sedatives was found, however.) As far as writing a story goes, it is extremely creepy to think of someone killing eight people essentially soundlessly. Your story could have multiple killers, a really experienced killer (most likely the real answer to the mystery), or victims who have been drugged, poisoned, or gassed. Perhaps neighbors could be threatened to keep quiet until morning (or nasty neighbors could even be paid off). Paranormal explanations for quiet killing include a spell or magical/cursed item that removes sound, a ghostly killer, a supernatural disease that kills quickly, or a killer so demonically horrifying that victims freeze in silent terror when they see him.

DannyeChase.com ~ AO3 ~ Linktree ~ Weird Wednesday writing prompts blog ~ Resources for Writers 

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​​Who is the third who walks always beside you?

When I count, there are only you and I together

But when I look ahead up the white road

There is always another one walking beside you

–TS. Eliot, The Waste Land, written about Ernest Shackleton’s 1916 third man experience.

On this day in 1916 Ernest Shackleton reached a whaling station in Stromness in the South Atlantic, completing an epic 26 day journey to reach help after losing his ship. While crossing the mountains, starving and without climbing gear, Shackleton famously saw a fourth person in his group of three desperate sailors.

And he’s not the only one. The “third man,” named for the poem above, is the phenomenon where people in life-threatening or highly stressful situations sense another person (of whatever gender) with them. The solo hiker has a companion, or the group of four becomes five, of which most or all report seeing the extra person.

Read all about the Third Man Phenomenon and get writing prompts on my blog, such as:

All the lonely people. The third man has been reported most often in mountaineering, shipwrecks, and polar exploration, but any highly stressful situation would work for a story, including disasters, crime, or simply getting lost. The sky’s the limit here: you could have an alien on a disabled ship experience the third man as the ship’s AI, or a sorcerer believing their animal familiar is with them. You could also combine the third man with crisis apparitions, where people in life-threatening situations appear to their loved ones many miles away. Perhaps the third man is two-way communication.

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