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:

Midwestern serial. My personal favorite Villisca suspect is a serial killer riding the rails, as posited in the book The Man From the Train by Bill James and Rachel McCarthy James. This is because there were a lot of similar axe murders at the time, all over the country, and even internationally. You could write a story about several killers with the same M.O., or one really prolific murderer who likes to travel. On the paranormal side, you could have someone killing in a pattern to cast a spell or harness a demon. You could even have a ghost train that carries your phantom killer on a never-ending mission.

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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:

The Evil Leaper. History is written by the victors, and survival stories by the survivors. If there’s a benevolent voice which tells freezing mountaineers to get up and keep walking toward safety, might there also be a malevolent voice telling people to lie down and give up? We’d never know, because those who die don’t report back. Your plot could have various degrees of an evil third man here: a comforting voice telling people to let go and pass on, an evil voice giving bad advice, or a malicious presence causing all kinds of mischief. Who might experiencers see as the third man here? The devil or an attacker? Or still an angel or loved one?

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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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Hey, y’all, it’s Weird Wednesday! Where on some Wednesdays, I blog about weird stuff and give writing prompts.

Today: Benjamin Bathurst: How to Become an Enduring Mystery in Just 10 Seconds

Welcome to Weird Wednesday! Today we’re going to follow a guy around a corner and see him vanish forever. Sound fun? Let’s get started.

In 1809, Europe was in the midst of the Napoleonic Wars. 25-year-old Benjamin Bathurst was a British diplomat sent to Austria to do diplomat things against the French that did not end well, and thus he needed to hurry home. It was thought the safest route from Vienna to London would pass through Prussia. Unfortunately for Bathurst, the route turned out to be terminally unsafe.

So why is the death of a random diplomat in dangerous territory still so famous? Because Bathurst didn’t simply die. He vanished. And according to legend (popularized by writer Charles Fort), he did it in a rather spectacular way.

Let’s join in on the night of Nov 25, 1809: Bathurst and his personal secretary, whose name is Krause, are traveling in Prussia under assumed names. Pretty wise in wartime. They stop at a post house in the town of Perleberg to get fresh horses for their carriage. They dine at the nearby White Swan Inn, and afterward Bathurst goes into a private room and writes a bunch of letters. 

The new horses are ready at 9 p.m. Bathurst comes out of the inn to get into the carriage, and then Krause comes out of the inn to get into the carriage, only Bathurst is not in the carriage. Bathurst is, in fact, nowhere.

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

History’s mystery. What if the problem is not that you don’t see a missing man, but that you see him too much? A residual haunting is like a recording that plays over and over on the site of an emotional event. So say you’re a traveler stopping for fresh horses at a small inn, and while hanging out in the courtyard, you see a man in an expensive coat that’s a decade out of style. He walks around your carriage and then vanishes. When you run shrieking to the inn, the staff says, Oh, yeah, that’s Bathurst. His ghost shows up once in a while to disappear and we still don’t know what the hell happened to him. How maddening would it be to watch the vanishing over and over, and still not have a clue about where he went?

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On this day in 1959 searchers discovered the abandoned tents of a group of friends near what would become known as Dyatlov Pass.

On Feb 1, 1959, nine young Soviet hikers died on Kholat Syakhl in the Ural Mountains. They were a group of experienced skiers led by 23-year-old student Igor Dyatlov. The group missed a planned check-in by telegram on Feb 12, and on Feb 26, searchers found the hikers’ camp in a very unexpected condition.

*The tent was partly covered in snow, and had been cut open from the inside

*The group’s shoes had been left in the tent

*Footprints led down to a nearby wood, where there were the remains of a fire and two bodies dressed only in underclothes.

*A nearby tree had broken branches, suggesting it had been climbed.

*Three other bodies were found nearby.

*The last four bodies were found in the spring, lying in a stream. Some of these were wearing clothes belonging to bodies that had been found undressed. 

*Some of the bodies had severe blunt-force trauma that likely killed them, and others apparently died from hypothermia

*There were no footprints from anyone outside the group

*One of the bodies had traces of radiation

*One witness at a funeral described the victims’ skin as being tanned

*Much later, witnesses reported that they saw mysterious lights in the sky on the night of the incident

In 2021, a study was published in the journal Communications Earth & Environment which showed that a slab avalanche was a probable explanation.

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

A link in the chain. There are at least two similar events to Dyatlov Pass. The Chivruay Pass incident took place in 1973 in the Lovozero Massif mountain range and involved the deaths of ten hikers from hypothermia. The Hamar-Daban pass incident refers to the death of six of seven members of a hiking team from hypothermia in the Hamar-Daban mountain range in 1993. Your story could involve some sort of curse or other paranormal bad luck. Maybe an old legend warns of hikers staying on mountains on a certain night, or perhaps a ghost wanders the area, and those who see it are doomed to be lost.

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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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On this day in 1921, the ghost ship Carroll A. Deering was found aground on the Diamond Shoals with its sails still set.

The ship had clearly been abandoned; the life boats and navigational aids were missing. The ship was damaged, but it is not known if that occurred before its abandonment or not. It seemed the crew had left in a hurry, as food preparations were underway. But no trace of the crew has ever been found.

Check out my Weird Wednesday blog post on the Deering for more on the story and some ghost ship writing prompts, such as:

Creepy cottagecore.The Deering was deemed a hazard to shipping and was dynamited in March, 1921. When wreckage washed ashore, locals used the boards to build houses on Hatteras Island. Perhaps using the wood from a ghost ship to build houses might lead to some sort of horror story plot?

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Wondering what the new year holds? Looking for some weird writing prompts? There are two articles on divination on my Weird Wednesday blog:

What Next? Methods of Divination

Divination is telling the future through supernatural means. You’ve probably heard of cartomancy (Tarot or playing cards), crystallomancy (crystal balls), and chiromancy (palm reading). Read about some rarer rituals, including keys (cleidomancy), pearls (margaritomancy), and the dead (necromancy).

A writing prompt: The past is present. What if necromancy could be used to solve crimes? People with talent for necromancy do it as a job, and produce ghosts who testify in court or advise investigators. Pretty simple: ask the dead guy who killed him. But what about stranger or older mysteries? Take the disappearance of Amelia Earhart. Maybe her ghost is also missing: tied to her resting place, which no one can find. So the search for her would include necromancers flying over the ocean, performing rituals in a hired jet. History professors could hire necromancers to interview people who lived hundreds or thousands of years ago. What if necromancers could raise dinosaurs?

Monday’s Child is Fair of Face: Divination Rhymes

Monday’s child is fair of face,

Tuesday’s child is full of grace.

Wednesday’s child is full of woe,

Thursday’s child has far to go.

Friday’s child is loving and giving,

Saturday’s child works hard for a living.

And the child born on the Sabbath day

Is bonny and blithe, good and gay.

(Curious about your day of birth? Plug your date into this calculator.) 

Read all about rhymes that tell the future via counting birds, sneezes, or dreaming about specific sounds.

A writing prompt: Soulmates AU. There are soulmate tropes that involve shared or matched dreaming, but you could use a rhyme to predict certain sounds that would link a character to a future mate. They might grow up hearing a certain bird or a tolling of bells every morning, or even a particular piece of phantom music, a tune only they and their soulmate would know.

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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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