My poetry blog is now at https://bobboydpoems.com A click on that link will take you there.
This blog is now for mini short stories under 1,000 words.
Fiction and nonfiction stores under a thousand words, usually offbeat, written daily.
My poetry blog is now at https://bobboydpoems.com A click on that link will take you there.
This blog is now for mini short stories under 1,000 words.
My friend Mark and I always wanted to try hunting spirits with a spirit box in Green Hill Cemetery. Mark bought a high quality spirit box that had scans from 76 mH to 86.9 mHz.
Properly equipped, excited, we snuck into the cemetery late one night. Mark turned the Spirit Box on. It crackled and the spirits started poppin’.
But their voices came in spurts and were not quite clear: hello … no … yes … I’m here … dead … not dead … yellow flower …. green grass ….
Then things got horrifying. The dead began talking out of Mark’s head, and Mark dropped the spirit box and, screaming, fled to his car.
I grabbed the spirit box and tried to catch up with him, but it was too late. Mark had vanished somewhere into the night and I couldn’t find him.
The next day I learned Mark had killed himself by driving into a semi-trailer truck. Because of the association of Mark’s death with the spirit box it took me a month before I could use it again at Green Hill Cemetery.
When I turned it on that night, I heard Mark’s voice: “It’s evil! It will kill you! Get rid of it!” Shocked, I shut the spirit box off, threw it away, and never went spirit hunting again.
Bob Boyd
It was a wonderful honeymoon, the beginning of a great life with his new, beautiful bride. They honeymooned in a mountain resort, rustic and idyllic. They made love, dined in the quaint restaurant, and went for a hike to the top of the mountain.
The air was country fresh, birds chirped, a slight breeze ruffled his wife’s long auburn hair. He hugged her and told her he loved her. She said I love you too.
They hiked to a nearby cliff with a spectacular view of the ocean. Tall pointed rocks jutted up from below. HIs wife said, “Look! You won’t believe this!” He dashed to her side, said, “What are you looking at?”
“Way down there about 50 yards below,” his wife said.
He peered precariously over the cliff, screamed, and saw the jutting rocks rising up fast at him after his wife pushed him off the cliff to his impending, certain death. She cackled like an evil witch watching his body smashed to death on the rocks.
She told the police it was an accident. Since she seemed so sweet and incapable of malice, they bought her lie, and she was never charged with the murder of her new husband.
A year later she married a man in another state and talked him into honeymooning in the mountains.
Bob Boyd
He went to the Emergency Room with what he thought would be a routine problem waiting for a few hours, seen for a few minutes and back home. But to his astonishment, he was tested with instruments and machines and told he was staying there; they’d get him a hospital room when one was available.
They gave him more and more tests and blood drawn constantly. He felt like a rat in a lab. Then came the diagnosis, a blood cancer.
How the hell is this happening?, he thought. I’m Mister perfect health. I’m Mister don’t eat red meat, and with no cancer in my family and have worked out for decades. Yet there he was diagnosed with a blood cancer that was trying to kill him. It seemed impossible that something that only happened to others had happened to him. It seemed impossible that the cancer he was sure he’d never get had invaded and weakened him and was intent on killing him.
It took months of infusions and medications. For a while it looked like he was going to be doomed when the infusions and medications were not killing the cancer. And his cancer doctor was having difficulty in finding the right combination of treatments to put it in remission.
Then his doctor sent him to another cancer doctor for her suggestions. He returned with the outline for a new treatment, and ever so gradually, the cancer began losing its death grip on him. More months of different infusions, a new medication, and eventually he was cancer free, sort of like being reborn with a second chance at living.
And he’s been that way for three years and kind of grateful he had the cancer. He derived enormous personal and spiritual growth from it and an appreciation for the medical field and the loss of his fear of going to doctors. And his hard-won battle against the cancer became like a happy ending. And should the cancer return, he’s perfectly okay with that. So far so good, no symptoms, no cancer.
Bob Boyd
She was a veterinarian loved by those whose animals she healed. She seemed like a good person with no infamy in her. Somehow her path crossed with an arrogant doctor who thought he was a handsome lady’s man and a great doctor. But his conceit was his mirage. He wasn’t what he thought himself to be. He was far worse.
The veterinarian saw through him when they first met. Inexplicably, she began going out with him anyway. Maybe she liked bad boys. Maybe she thought she could change him. He also had a court case pending for stalking and harassing an ex-girlfriend.
The veterinarian was involved in a heated custody battle with an ex-husband for their two children. The doctor somehow talked her into a diabolic solution for winning custody of her kids. He talked her into hiring a hitman to kill her husband and his ex-girlfriend.
Unbelievably, the veterinarian agreed to hire a hitman. Why this woman oved by her clientele had agreed to hire a hitman to murder her husband is a mystery. Perhaps the doctor exercised something akin to a hypnotic power over her.
She found a hitman somehow, maybe online. She and the doctor met with him, exchanged some money for the murders. Then, as often is the case, the hitman was a cop posing as a hitman and the veterinarian and the doctor were arrested.
After she was released on bail, the veterinarian climbed up a tall building and jumped off it to her death. I believe if her path had never crossed with that evil doctor, she never would have done anything criminal. But, maybe I’m wrong. Maybe she was a psychopath at heart.
Bob Boyd
While staying at my apartment for a weekend, my new girlfriend, Brie, told me she astral traveled and had been to Jupiter and Mars. I had my doubts about her unbelievable claim. I just couldn’t accept she had left her body and went on, so to speak, astral plane field trips to other planets. I didn’t press her about her crazy claims. I played along with her story.
I said, “Isn’t it risky to leave your body like that? What if you got lost out there and couldn’t find your way back, or what if an evil entity tried to enter your body while you were out of it?
“No way”, Brie said. “I’ve been doing this for years. Never got lost or seen any evil entities. Matter of fact, tonight I’m going to travel to Neptune.”
“Really?” I said.
“Yes, really, and I’ll tell you all about it when we wake up tomorrow.”
I went to bed with her that night wondering what kind of story she’d concoct in the morning.
That morning she didn’t wake up. She wasn’t dead, her heart was beating. I wondered if she’d really left her body and got lost traveling so far. Her condition was too coincidental to be just medical; I was certain her body was unoccupied, and I didn’t know what to do. I was freaking out. I felt I had no other choice but to call 911.
At the hospital, the doctor said she was comatose, and had to stay there as the doctors tried to revive her. I felt that what he said about the coma was untrue but was relieved that at least she was safe in the hospital and maybe the doctors were right.
A year went by, she remained comatose, and the doctors declared she expired. At her wake, as if rising from the dead, she sat up in the coffin smiling, alive, and back from her extended trip to Neptune.
Bob Boyd
They met in college and knew they were right for each other. She was an Art Major. He was years away from being an MD. They dated for a year and married. She dropped out of college to work full time and support him through his years of study to become a doctor.
Thanks to her, he got through med school with very little debt when he became a doctor. A year later, he began acting differently. She knew something was wrong, and he wasn’t as attentive to her.
She had the disturbing feeling he was cheating on her but couldn’t prove it. He was taking too many allegedly work related trips, and he often stayed at work late.
One day when she unexpectedly came home after lunch, she saw his car and an unknown car in their yard. She opened her front door and heard what was unmistakably her husband having sex with a woman in their bedroom. She ran upstairs told the half naked woman to get the hell out of her house.
She said to her husband, “How could you do this to me?”
He said, “You’ve gotten fat and boring.”
She said, “We’re through, packed up her things and drove to her parents house to stay there until she could get a place of her own.”
Though done with him, her anger morphed into rage. She thought about how she had given up everything to put him through med school. She thought about what an ungrateful son of a bitch he was. Then she got a little crazy.
She began driving around their city to try to find him with her. She had taken her father’s hand gun out of its gun cabinet and had it on the passenger seat of her car. She hadn’t any intentions to shoot her husband. She just wanted to frighten him.
But when she saw her husband and his slut girlfriend walking hand and hand on Oak Street outside the restaurant she and her husband used to dine at, she went even more crazy and changed her plans. Driving behind them, she blasted her car toward them and hit them both with it. When they were both injured on the ground, she drove her car back and forth over them until they both were dead.
She sped away after that and vanished without any clues to where she had gone. Despite five years of searching with many tips to her whereabouts, the police have never found her and have no idea where she fled to.
But somewhere in a seaside village, with her blond hair dyed black and her blue eyes covered with brown-eyed contacts, she paints portraits for a living and lives with a Swedish man who is a writer.
Bob Boyd
A feeder goldfish got hit in the head on the rim of an aquarium when dumped into the aquarium filled with over a hundred other feeder goldfish. That strike on his head awakened a telepathic psychic power inside the feeder goldfish and the awareness of his impending fate – fish food for bigger fish.
He spent weeks dodging nets that caught the other feeder goldfish that spelled their doom. He tried with all his psychic energy to send out mental SOSes to pet store customers with the hope they’d feel his telepathic pleas to rescue him. But their minds were too dense with worldly affairs and not refined enough for his telepathic messages to get through.
When a sensitive named Bob Boyd entered the fish section of the pet store, the psychic feeder goldfish’s second sight told him his savior had arrived. He sent the psychic SOS into Bob Boyd’s mind but the telepathy was too weak for him to hear the SOS in his head.
Bob had come to the pet store to buy a fancy goldfish. As he was looking at the many beautiful choices, he glanced at the feeder goldfish aquarium and felt drawn to a particular fish that seemed to be staring at him. He didn’t know why, but he unexpectedly felt a desire to save the feeder fish from its awful fate. But changed his mind when the sales person arrived to scoop out one of the fancy goldfish for him.
The psychic feeder goldfish redoubled his efforts with stronger and more sustained concentration. And just as Bob Boyd had picked out the fancy goldfish and was about to buy it, the feeder goldfish’s SOS appeared in his mind: help … help … please save me … help … help ….
He told the sales person he changed his mind and wanted the feeder goldfish instead. He bought it and saved its life and heard a little thank you in his head. And the feeder goldfish lived a happy life in a 50 gallon aquarium for the rest of his days and had many enjoyable telepathic conversations with his receptive fish keeper and friend, Bob Boyd.
Bob Boyd
My girlfriend Mandy went on a ghost tour with a friend. I didn’t go. I didn’t believe in ghosts. I saw stories about ghosts and haunted houses as made up nonsense.
Mandy didn’t return home the night of the ghost tour. I searched everywhere for her, called her parents, and talked to the tour leader who said she’d been fine after the tour.
Two days later, Mandy returned. She said her name was Angela, and everything about her had changed, as if she’d become an entirely new person. Her voice, her expressions and even her words were all different. Her change was scary and eerie. I hoped it was just a temporary condition that would end with a little time, and I’d have my Mandy back again. I hoped she hadn’t gone insane.
With some research, I learned a woman named Angela died in one of the houses the tour visited. She had hung herself to death after killing her husband and baby with a kitchen knife while they slept. Desperate, thinking Mandy had become possessed, I contacted a priest, Father Michael, who said he’d try to help but couldn’t visit us until a couple of days.
But before Father Michael could come to help, I woke up one night and saw Mandy standing over me with a kitchen knife holding it with two hands raised above her head, her eyes looking empty and evil. She backed off when I yelled at her, but I didn’t sleep for the rest of the night and told Mandy about Father Michael.
The next day while I was at work, Mandy had gone back to the house Angela died in. The caretaker of the house found her hanging on the end of a rope, dead, a ghoulish expression on her pale face.
I’ll never get over Mandy’s suicide. I have no doubt she was possessed by Angela’s evil spirit. I blame myself for not doing more to help her. I pray to God for her daily, hoping Angela’s evil spirit didn’t drag Mandy down to some hellish place in the afterlife.
Bob Boyd
She said she often left her body, something she called astral travel. She said she had been to many astral planes, and once went to distant stars and met purple aliens that looked like stick people. He restrained himself from telling her he felt she was delusional or outright lying.
She was always refreshed and elated whenever she took one of her alleged disembodied trips. Seeing her during those times, he almost believed her, but was too rational to accept her bizarre claims. He wondered if she suffered from some psychiatric condition beyond his ken to define.
The last time she might have astral traveled, when she told him she had met some angelic people on an interdimentional astral plane, her body began shaking, her head shook violently side to side, as she babbled incoherently and acted like he wasn’t in their bedroom even though he was in front of her.
Her eyes turned vacant, then glowingly red, like some demon had taken residence in her head. She screamed, ran, and leaped through their dining room window, glass shattering and falling with her. She dropped three floors headfirst splattering to death on the pavement below. Women on the street screamed at the sight of her broken, bloodied remains. Men gasped and turned away from that horrible sight.
He cried himself to sleep that night, saw her in a dream looking crazy … and he woke up with glowing red eyes.
Bob Boyd
Mitch met Diane at a bar. She was funny, intelligent and beautiful. They clicked right away. He sensed she was the one. Diane had two kids, a little boy and a little girl, by her ex-husband, but Mitch didn’t care. As their relationship deepened, she told him how she was having a custody battle with her ex over who got custody of their kids. She said her ex had more money and with a better lawyer got temporary custody of them.
Diane told Mitch how her ex-husband, who looked like a nice guy, was really a son of a bitch and often beat the shit out of her. He thought to himself how he’d kick her ex-husband’s ass if he ever laid a hand on her again.
One day, months later, Diane called Mitch crying. She said her ex had punched her and molested her kids, and how she wished he was dead. The seed planted, he kept thinking about killing her ex until Diane called him about her ex threatening to kill her; then he decided to act.
When her kids were with her for an overnight stay, he drove to her ex-husband’s home in the country, knocked on his door, and when he answered, fired six bullets into his head. Mitch dragged his dead body to his car folded it and shoved it into the trunk of his car. He cleaned up blood inside the ex’s house and drove to Walmart and bought a shovel.
After that, he drove a hundred miles away and buried the ex under a dark night sky in a remote woods a state away. He was sure, as far as anyone would know, the ex was just a missing person and that no one would find his corpse.
Mitch got away with the crime, but his relationship with Diane fizzled out. She had no use for him after he told her he killed her ex-husband. He’d served his purpose. Now day and night his killing her ex-husband plagues his conscience, and he believes the ex wasn’t the bad man Diane claimed he was. He believes she conned him into killing an innocent man.
Sometimes he feels he should confess his crime to the police, but changes his mind when he thinks about being in prison for life. And even though he became religious, he worries about going to hell.
Bob Boyd
Jennifer was visiting her grandmother’s grave on a sunny day in October with flowers in her hand to put at the grave site. Birds were singing in trees overhead. A slight breeze blew across the manicured grass the headstones sat on. Then all of a sudden the birds went quiet and Jennifer got an eerie feeling that someone or something was watching her.
She looked behind her and saw a black humanoid phantom rising out of a grave. Its glowing red eyes glared at her as it menacingly drew near her. She dropped the flowers and sprinted out of the cemetery without looking back until she was far from the cemetery and saw the black phantom had not followed her.
That night she saw the phantom in a nightmare, its red eyes glaring and glowing, and she could not move. Just as it floated toward her and grabbed her, she woke up screaming. Later that morning, she felt terribly weak as if her life were being drained out of her. She went to the ER, and after a series of tests, was diagnosed with terminal cancer.
She never saw the phantom in a nightmare after that, but wonders if it caused her cancer, or if, God forbid, it is the malignant cancer inside of her, or if the nightmare of the phantom and the terminal cancer were merely coincidental.
Bob Boyd