An incomplete list of spooky stuff that happens where I live sometimes

1- On the full moon of every month, everyone in my neighborhood receives an envelope full of various stickers in the mail. The stickers always have a theme- In July, it was sea creatures.

2- The public pool’s drainage is linked up with storm drains, so you get critters in there sometimes. They never survive long because of the chlorine, but it means that sometimes you find the corpse of a frog or minnow. One time we found something that looked like a two foot long white shark with no eyes and long, clawed limbs. Nobody could figure out what it was and google wasn’t helping, so we just chucked it in the trash and forgot about it.

3- In my town’s county fair, they have a circus act. It’s old-fashioned and corny, but everybody comes because sometimes they give people who cheer gifts- it’s always weird stuff, like silver coins, lizard skeletons, and commemorative mugs for amusement parks that don’t exist. Apparently the clowns have no idea where it comes from either, their bosses just give them the stuff and tell them to give them out every once in a while.

4- One time the night ended and the sun just never came up. It stayed dark for the whole day and night, and only became light on 1 O Clock the next day.

5- In a field next to the school, dandelions grow in different colors. Apparently the school used to be a candy company and they dumped their waste products in the field, so the pigments in the plants there are pretty funky. You get blues, reds, greens, and sometimes even purples or pinks. One day they all turned black for some reason and were normal the next day.

6- This one time the local spirit Halloween got in this huge scandal because one of their skeletons turned out to be real. Eventually though they realized that the skeleton in question was just a flawed manufacture and wasn’t actually real at all. Some people say the skeleton turned into plastic BECAUSE everyone was yelling at it but I don’t like those implications.

7- All kinds of weird graffiti. Seriously. Every weird or unsettling phrase under the sun, hundreds of weird freaky monsters, depictions of hamsters murdering people and garbage disposals causing the apocalypse and all kinds of screwed up stuff, and things I literally can’t say here or I’ll get banned. It’s nuts.

8- On Halloween it’s a trend to have a costume that’s just a black cloak with a mask. Some people don’t wear masks, but you wanna look out for those people. Generally, it’s a good idea to stay away from anyone whose mask isn’t store bought. Yes, even crappy paper plate masks.

9- Right now, just as I’m writing this, some guy threw a tv out his window.

10- Sometimes, late on august nights, a crapton of critters get washed out into the roads. Flopping fish, crawling salamanders, snails and crayfish and all manner of bugs, and leeches. Big ones. I don’t know what kind they are but they’re green and at least as long as my middle finger. One time I caught one and intended to put it in the leech jar with the rest of mine but it immediately started trying to eat my finger so I dropped it and it fell down a storm drain.

11- The town in live in is pretty urbanized, and really only has “nature” in dedicated parks and nature trails. However, I live in old Maryland, which is notorious for containing a crapton of legends and creepy critters. Essentially, they just kinda crammed several hundred beasties and spirits into tiny squares of forests and fields and hoped for the best. So obviously I don’t mess with that, but if you stick around these forests too late after dark, you start to see stuff. I’ve never seen anything myself (except one thing I swore was a ghost but now think was probably just a beaten up lawn gnome) but I definitely FEEL them. It’s hard to describe exactly what it’s like, but it’s not good. Generally it’s a good idea to evacuate if you start feeling it.

12- You don’t go out after dark here unless you’re in the city or have light, and ideally you want both of those conditions to be met and even then it’s still not really a good idea. One time I was sitting on my balcony listening to some dumb internet meme song, and the next night while I was sitting out again I heard something that sounded like a coyote trying to sing the meme song itself, and also someone took out it’s vocal cords and put in a wind-up music box. I don’t sit out at the balcony at night anymore.

13- I live in an apartment complex, and it’s BIG. The whole place is packed with rooms and the walls are thin, so most of the time rooms aren’t occupied. Sometimes you’ll hear something far above you skittering on far too many legs, or see a pair of yellow eyes peering out of a dark window. A common practice around here for idiots who want to screw with stuff they shouldn’t is to walk around the upper floors- which have the least occupied rooms because they’re the hardest to reach- and knock on random doors and wait to see what happens. I don’t do that, but I’ve heard stories.

14- In the local park, deep in the woods, pinned to the tree there’s a wheel. Not a car wheel, or a wagon wheel, but a carnival wheel, the kind of thing you spin at an insurance business’s advertisement stand to win a pencil or fishing lure. It’s got every color of the rainbow, and the pegs are marked by symbols. A skull, a heart, a star, a screaming emoji face. Locals call it the wheel of misfortune. No, it doesn’t change your future. Or predict it. It does SOMETHING though. I never spun it, but they say once whatever happens happens, whatever you got will make perfect sense. They’ve tried to take it down, but it just reappears on a different tree.

15- In one of the last undeveloped fields we’ve got, there’s a crapton of signs. Any signs. Road signs, yard signs, kitschy decorative signs, all on poles of metal and wood, some of them the size and thickness of trees. Nobody knows how they got there. It’s called the “Grand Signwoods”. Everyone who walks in says they’ve found a sign that really unnerves them. One time I wanted to walk in just to find a cool sign for my house and the first one I saw once I got just a little bit in said “We don’t take kindly to thieves around these parts”. With a picture of some grimacing cowboy to the side. I never went back.

16- Deep in the woods we have an old fashioned clawfoot bathtub, just kinda… there. The drain is hooked up into the ground, but nobody’s been able to find out where it goes. They call it the Old Tub. Sometimes people throw stuff down the drain, but it almost invariably comes back up, and FAST. You don’t stare down the drain.