Bob Boyd's Mini Stories

Something about the quaint, old painting of a beautiful woman caught his eye. This is an undiscovered masterpiece, he thought to himself. He took it home and hung it in his bedroom. Her painted rendering was the last thing he saw each night. He fantasized about how nice it would have been if he could have had a woman like her in his life.

His obsession deepened. He imagined he was holding her in his arms each night and thought of her as his wife. As the days and nights passed, his imagined connection with her grew till he believed he’d be with her in the afterlife.

He got his wish at age 50 when, a healthy man, he died unexpectedly of a massive heart attack and found himself in hell with the beautiful woman who was a soulless murderer who killed three ex-husbands, a dozen homeless men and her two children for big insurance payouts before she got caught and was put to death.

Horrified, he struggled to get away from her, but his soul was sealed to her because of his earthly obsession with her. He began to feel the eternal torment, heard screams of souls trapped in hell, felt flames burning him up, and saw terrifying, red-eyed demons tormenting him. Though not religious, an atheist at heart, he prayed to Christ to save him. He vowed to become a believer and atone for all his sins and the many mistakes he had made in his life.

Like an afterlife miracle, he heard a thunderous boom in hell, saw brilliant white light flash all around him, heard the murderous woman scream and vanish. And as if he were an infant, a child of God, he felt arms around him lifting out of hell into heaven. When in heaven and a renewed, saved spirit he spent his time praying for all the damned souls in hell.

Then he woke up on the examination table with a doctor pounding his chest with paddles. And he realized he’d been clinically dead and the painting of the woman he saw as a murderer in hell was more like a dream. Nonetheless he got rid of the painting and eventually found a real and wonderful woman that he became married to.

And after much study and conversations with many people who had had near death experiences, he concluded the hell he saw when clinically dead was just a projection. It was from the many from warnings he’d received as a child about going to hell when he died that had been stored in his subconscious mind and came out.

But he became a believer in God and attended a local church – just in case ….

Bob Boyd

Brandon read in a book that if you call the Devil in a forest at night, he will answer. A skeptic and cocky, he took that warning as a challenge. He told his friend Aaron about the Devil warning and asked him if he wanted to debunk it with him.

But Aaron was a little superstitious and worried that to be in an isolated forest at night calling upon the Devil might yield terrifying results a person wouldn’t think possible. Despite Brandon calling Aaron a pussy, he didn’t relent on his decision not to get involved with Brandon’s crazy scheme. And he was genuinely fearful of calling on Satan in a forest at night. He did agree to drive Brandon to the forest and wait for him though.

Brandon agreed to the compromise. On the night he and Arron arrived at the forest, dark clouds floated in the sky, sometimes obscuring the half moon hovering over the forest. Brandon exited the car and fearlessly hiked into the forest. He saw a boulder, climbed up it, stood tall and yelled loud enough for Aaron to hear, “Hey, Satan! Where ya at! Come out and play! Come out and play, Bitch! What? Yeah, just as I figured, ya ain’t real at all!”

The sky darkened, the moon disappeared behind huge, rolling, dark clouds. An ominous feeling pervaded the forest and the creatures of the night fell silent. Seconds later, Brandon screamed three times. Screams that sounded like a person would scream trapped in hell.

Aaron jumped out of his car then stopped from running into the forest despite wanting to save Brandon. He feared Satan or whatever made Brandon scream might still be there. Instead, he yelled, “Brandon! Brandon! Are you okay? Brandon, are you okay?”

But he was met with silence. Because Aaron had a feeling Brandon was dead and whatever killed him could still be in the forest, he phoned the police.

When the police arrived, Aaron felt okay with going into the forest with them. And the half moon was shining again unobscured by any dark clouds. As they ventured deeper into the forest, the police smelled an awful scent, the smell of burned flesh. They found Brandon’s dead, scorched body on top of the boulder with a horrified look on his corpse’s face.

At first, the police felt that Aaron had murdered Brandon and burned his body to death and made up the crazy Devil story. But days later, when during the autopsy, a cloud of black smoke rose out of Brandon’s body and morphed into a glittering, red pentagram then flashed seven times and vanished, there was no doubt supernatural causes were responsible for Brandon’s death. And that maybe what happened to Brandon really was the Devil’s answer to Brandon’s taunts and calls to him.

Bob Boyd

Amanda’s dream was to marry a good man and be a good wife and mother. She met the right man in college. They fell in love, and two years later they married. They had two children, attended church and had a good life together. But, the perfect picture of the ideal married life ended when her husband died in an automobile accident.

On that day, she felt her life had ended too and wished she could die and be with her husband. Only her children kept her going on. But her fate grew worse when shortly after the death of her husband, a volcano blasted through the town she and her children lived in and tore her home apart and took her and her children’s lives. Some people saw it as more bad luck. Religious people felt it was God reuniting her and her children with her husband in heaven.

Bob Boyd

Paula was born a bad seed. From her infancy to age 16, she was like Trouble’s spawn. Her bad behavior came to a head when she reached age 16. She skipped school, never behaved at home and began throwing hysterical tantrums.

Her parents took her to a psychologist for an evaluation. The psychologist claimed she was mentally sound, but just going through the growing pains of teenage years and that she was certain she could help her with counseling sessions. At first the counseling seemed to work. Paula became better behaved and seemed on the way to becoming a model child. But after her psychologist died in an auto accident, Paula’s bad behavior returned with a new twist.

During a round of disciplinary actions by her parents, objects began to levitate and fly around the house. Chairs rose in the air. Places fell off shelves and shattered on the kitchen floor, silverware flew out of silverware drawers. Paula loved her new poltergeist power and believed an invisible doppelganger gave it to her.

On the day her parents forbid her to see a new boyfriend, who had a bad reputation and had gotten into trouble with the police, she took her most extreme tantrum, howling like a she demon from hell. Things began to fly all over the house, mostly in the kitchen where her parents were preparing dinner. Before her terrified parents could escape the onslaught by running out of the kitchen, two steak knives flew out of the silverware draw. With uncanny accuracy, they pierced Paula’s parents palpitating hearts. Her parents fell to the floor and died seconds later. Their blood streamed out of their bodies and formed two bloody pentagrams

When the police appeared on the shocking devilish crime scene, Paula had vanished. Despite numerous attempts to find her for the last ten years, and many leads, Paula has never been found. Maybe she joined her poltergeist friend in some hellish dimension.

Bob Boyd

Jonathan thought when she left the earth plane, he was finally free of her, his hateful ex-wife who burned down his house and died of a massive heart attack before being sent to prison. But after she died, her spiteful spirit arose and terrorized him, manifesting as an apparition of a red-eyed, evil spirit with long razor-like claws, snakes for hair like a medusa and fanged teeth. She whispered curses in his head, tormented him in terrifying nightmares and appeared to him many times daily.

Nearly losing his wits, about to have a mental breakdown, he heard of a wizard who dressed in black, always had a raven perched on his shoulder, and had powers over dark forces. He visited the wizard to see if the wizard could end his ex-wife’s ghastly torments. While Jonathan was sitting at a table and talking with the wizard, a cheerful old man with the raven on his shoulder, his ex-wife appeared floating in the air and threatening to kill them.

The wizard, unaffected, stood up, chanted a spell in a strange language, and his raven morphed into a dragon spirit and sprang at Jonathan’s ex-wife. Though she tried to claw the dragon spirit to death with rapid deadly slashes, her slashes only cleaved the air.
The dragon spirit swirled around her dodging her attacks and breathing blasts of fire on her. She screamed and shrieked, her arms flailing, her spirit body burned and flamed until all that was left of her were astral ashes that evaporated into the ether.

The dragon spirit’s work done, the battle won, the dragon spirit morphed back into the raven perched on the old wizard’s shoulder, and Jonathan never saw his hateful, dead wife again.

Bob Boyd

Sometimes a person with a face that looks evil is the same inside. Of course, the old saying you can’t judge a book by the cover, usually applies. But, not always. She was like that, and I can’t even write her name here because I feel like some of her evil would escape out of her name.

I don’t get scared about many things, but her face scared me. I saw more evil in her face than in any face I’d ever seen before. It was as if she was one of a devil’s minions cast upon the earth to darken days and spread evil upon the land.

And I wasn’t far from wrong when it was revealed she was a widow six times over from six husbands she’d poisoned to death and buried in her backyard.

At first, it was thought she was just impossible to live with and each of those six husbands just left her and moved out of town. But as the runaway husbands kept increasing and family members kept calling the police about their missing male loved ones who’d been married to her, the police had to investigate.

But, despite their investigations that began with husband number three, it took them till husband number six to search her property with cadaver dogs and find out her backyard was her burial ground of all those husbands.

And though she was finally arrested and sent to prison, the five officers who arrested her all died mysteriously of massive heart attacks seven months later. Maybe it was an awful, extraordinary coincidence, but I think her evil and vengeful thoughts about them manifested into the bodies of each of those officers and ended their lives so tragically. And I know much more about her, things I dare not say, because that evil woman is my sister.

Bob Boyd

After my wife was buried in Lakewood Cemetery, she showed up at our front door the next day, dirt and grass falling off her. I said to her, “What? Do you think you’re Jesus now?”

“No,” she said, “I just got bored lying in that box in the ground all day.”

I said, “I can see your point, but you’re supposed to be dead.”

“Um, ya, but being dead got boring too.”

At that point, my mind began doing flip flops; my vision got blurry; my nerves got frayed; my extremities began to tremble, and I remembered I hadn’t taken my meds. I staggered to the medicine cabinet in the bathroom, and, shaking, gulped down all my happy pills.

My physical and mental faculties restored, I returned to where my wife was standing, and she was gone. And I vowed never to forget to take my meds again.

Bob Boyd

My girlfriend Mandy went on a ghost tour. 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

Phil began seeing dead people in dreams, people he had known who newly passed away, people he knew were recently deceased but had never known. Each night, he saw a parade of the dead passing through his eerie dreams. He tried thinking of pleasant things before falling asleep with the hope of derailing the dreams of the dead but unsuccessfully. He estimated in the course of a month he saw 30 or more dead people in dreams.

It was worrying to him that in those dreams the dead seemed inanimate and an ashen color, as if in death people remained dead in spirit corpses.

In one of the dreams, he saw an ex-girlfriend who looked the same as the others, and who always wanted to get back with him. He tried to communicate with her but there was no response, like trying to talk to a corpse.

From these dreams, he deduced that when you die you are dead in body and in spirit and there are no heavens or hells, and that all the talk about moving on to other existences in the afterlife was disturbingly untrue. The dead were dead in the here and hereafter.

And when Phil died shortly after those dreams, he lost consciousness of himself and awareness of where he was. A month later, like waking up from sleep, he regained his consciousness in a pristine paradise and saw that his soul took time to resurrect from the death of the body that housed it. He saw all those dead people in his dreams all come to life again in that spiritual paradise as well.

Bob Boyd