Month: January 2026

I was tired of all the BS about supposed evil dolls. The nonsense about them being cursed or possessed.

When my aunt a foolish believer in all paranormal things bought a raggedy doll named The Evil Victoria, I guffawed at her paying $1,000 for that obvious fake.

When that healthy woman died of unknown causes, a day later, I didn’t entertain suspicious conclusions.

When my uncle took over store and died the same way, I more than began to entertain those suspicious conclusions. And not wanting to see or touch the doll to throw it out, I torched the store right after my uncle died and left it to me. It burned to the ground reduced to smoldering ashes,
But that damn doll remained sitting and smiling in a chair Untouched by the burning flames of the fire.

Bob Boyd

Some days just don’t go right. I woke up today and my alarm clock had broken in the night. I checked my wristwatch and saw I was an hour late for work. I jumped out of bed, showered at warp speed, shaved so fast I nearly cut myself, dressed as quickly as I could, and called my boss, Hilda, an annoying person to work for.

”You better get your ass in here now!” she said and hung up the phone.

A little pissed from similar abuses by Hilda in the past but more concerned by the face loss of being late, I flew out of my house and dove into my ancient Volkswagen Beetle, a holdover from my free spirit days. I cranked the Beetle on. It shook, sputtered, and coughed. Dark smoke bombed out of the exhaust. Then it made a sound like a death rattle, shook a little, and died. I wondered if that was its last gasp because of how old it was and the repairs it needed.

I called Hilda again to explain to her that my car had died and I was going to call a cab to still get to work.

“Can’t you do anything right?” She yelled. Tired of her abuse, I blew up.

“Screw you, Hilda!” I yelled so loud that my next-door neighbor peered out her window and looked at me like she was looking at a raging lunatic.

“Screw you too, and you’re fired!” Hilda said and hung up.

With that glorious weight off your shoulders feeling, I strolled into my house and at peace for the first time since I started working for Hilda. I retrieved some Moose Tracks ice cream from my refrigerator and sat down in my plush easy chair. I turned on my TV and watched a sci-fi movie about an eccentric young guy from Erie, Pennsylvania, who willingly got abducted by aliens and volunteered to live on their distant planet to escape the insanity of the human race only to be served on the alien planet as a rare, tasty delicacy.

When the movie ended with the human screaming as the aliens ravenously feasted on him, I heard the mailman arrive in his mail truck and drop off some mail. I marched out to the mailbox to see if I got anything besides bills and those unending advertisements that I received almost daily. I saw a letter in a pink envelope. It was from my girlfriend, Rhonda. I wondered why she sent me a letter instead of phoning or emailing me. Who sends letters nowadays? And why a pink envelope?

She wrote she was leaving me. To make that bad news even more disturbing, she said she had fallen in love with Hilda’s brother, a jerk with shifty eyes and a grating attitude. I felt like punching the hell out of the mailbox, but I let that thought go. No sense in beating up a mailbox over the loss of Rhonda. I didn’t need her around anyway. The relationship had nosedived, and I was tired of listening to her complain about me not making enough money, which told me what she saw in Hilda’s brother who had recently won a million dollars in a lottery. She’ll go through that quickly I mused, and it will serve Hilda’s brother right. Good riddance to Rhonda and good riddance to Hilda the Annoying.

Relieved that ill fated day was over, I went to bed hoping to enjoy a restful sleep and maybe some sweet dreams of hot women to take the sting off my debacle of a day. Just as I began to fall asleep, the ground beneath my house started to crumble. I charged out of my house seconds before it plunged into a sinkhole. I thought to myself, maybe tomorrow will be a better day.

Bob Boyd

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

Al and his wife Eleanor inhabited a tiny house off grid in mystical Tao’s, New Mexico. For a while their lives were idyllic, living free and easy on the Taos desert land before a ragged band of zombies began invading the desert, their origin story unknown, as mysterious as UAPs.

Long before the news caught up with them, the band of zombies roamed Taos rabidly killing scores of human prey.

While Eleanor was tending her garden of prickly pear cacti behind her and Al’s tiny house, the sun ducked behind a dark cluster of clouds in the New Mexico skies, and a pitiful, little zombie girl shuffled toward her crying and growling.

Not suspecting a zombie, but thinking the child was in shock, her body in tatters, perhaps from an awful auto accident, Eleanor, a woman of great compassion, worried for what she saw as an innocent little girl in a crisis.

Eleanor invited her into her house to console her and dress her wounds and drive her to the Holy Cross Medical Center for medical attention.

Al wasn’t home at that time, hiking in the environs, enjoying his relaxing time in nature on that cloudy day.

As Eleanor was helping the little girl, she moaned and growled and bit Eleanor on her jugular vein. After a few gurgling screams, the wound fatal, blood running down her body, Eleanor died.

The little zombie girl feasted on her for a few moments, her young appetite easily sated, and shuffled away at an astonishing fast pace for a zombie.

A little later, Eleanor’s eyes popped open to the world again. She was pretty much brain dead and totally zombified.

When Al returned home and saw Eleanor’s zombified state, he was shocked and horrified; he’d seen enough zombie movies to know Eleanor’s irreversible, dark plight.

Not wanting to share her fate, he locked Eleanor out of their house and prayed for a miraculous restoration of the woman she had been before the zombie bite.

After a week of Eleanor scratching and pounding on their front door, Al missed her desperately despite the deal breaker of her walking dead disease.

Still loving her like the in sickness and in health marriage vow they solemnly shared in a little Methodist church in Idaho,
Al opened the door.

Despite knowing he was doomed, out of love he held her in his arms while she bit into his jugular and ended his free spirit life.

Somehow Eleanor’s romantic instincts and her wifely loyalty survived her undead deactivated mind.

When Al returned to life zombified, she hugged him and kissed what remained of his face. And they walked withered hand in withered hand to some distant living dead neverland, proving even for the zombified – love can find a way.

Bob Boyd

The locals claimed a werewolf prowled the forest next to their village. Patrick O’Leary, newcomer to the village, didn’t believe a word of it. It was nonsense talk, he knew. Werewolves were make believe monsters.

To prove his point, he accepted a dare to go into the forest on a full moon night.

He hiked all over the forest that night with only owls in sight but no werewolves. He laughed out loud in the deepest part of the forest before he made his way back home.

He stopped at the village tavern to the surprise of the locals who thought they’d never see him again after his foolhardy trek in the forest that night. He boasted about braving the forest where not a werewolf appeared.

He left the tavern three mugs of bear later a few minutes later, the locals in the tavern heard a howl and a scream. One of them said, “That’s Reverend John Marks again. I wish he’d just stick to preaching instead of his full moon werewolfing.”

And nobody was surprised the next day when the village constable found the remains of Patrick O’Leary in severed pieces.

Bob Boyd

The day was dark. The clouds blocked the sun. William was weary. He’d been through too much trouble at work and at home. His wife was always nagging him. His boss was always badgering him to work faster. His life had become abysmal.

He decided to end all the misery by killing himself. He took an elevator to the top of a ten story building in his city determined to jump off it.

When he got to the top, he was a pretty woman his age standing on the ledge about to jump off. In a gentle voice, he said, “Don’t … don’t do it. You’re too pretty to die.”

“Join me,” she said. “Let’s die together. I feel like we have a connection.”

Strange as that sounded said by a stranger, William felt she was right. He climbed up on the ledge beside her and told her he loved her.

“On three,” she said. One … two … three! John jumped to his death on three. The woman chickened out. When she saw John’s body, a smashed dot fall ten stories down and splatter on the street below, she vowed she’d never be suicidal again.

But before she could get off the ledge, a gust of wind on a windless day blew her off it and she screamed all the way down, as John’s vengeful spirit gleefully looked on.

Bob Boyd