Haunted

I thought I'd signed up for an immersive dating show.

Turns out it was a 99.9% death rate, globally livestreamed horror game.

And me? Half-blind without my contacts, desperate to go viral, I somehow talk my way through a death game like it's a romance.

I mistook blood for ketchup, human eyeballs for sashimi, a murderous child ghost for a kid who just needed some love.

Worst part? I fell for th...

At Holy Oak High, being the Top Flyer isn't just a crown.
It’s a ticket to the upper class.
Girls would pay any price to stand at the top of that pyramid.
But I didn't understand that the spotlight hid a man-eating abyss until I had to put on that blood-stained uniform.
Listen. Do you hear that scratching sound coming from inside the locker?

irectly in front of me.
Only the night before, she’d been curled up in my arms, her warm fingertips brushing my collarbone, our bodies tangled in tender, loving intimacy.
Yet the toe tag fastened around her ankle was etched with cold, unflinching words: Su Wan, Female, 22. Cause of death: fatal fall from height. Time in morgue custody: 365 days.
She had been dead for an entire year.
Just what in t...

A frat party Ouija board game awakened a deadly fae. Every fortune it grants comes with a fatal price. It offered me three. I refused them all.
But my boyfriend, crushed under student loans, craved the fae's riches. He took the money. He signed the deal. He opened the door.
I thought I would stay safe as long as I refused the fae's demands. Then my body started to weaken. My limbs thinned. My stom...

My husband locked me in a suitcase to punish me for frightening his childhood sweetheart. He said I could come out when I apologized. By the time his assistant warned him about the smell, our baby and I were already dead. But Adrian still expected me to crawl out and beg for forgiveness—and I was trapped beside him, watching.

After giving birth to my son Finn, crippling postpartum depression and searing nerve pain left by my difficult labor reduced me to nothing more than a walking corpse.
My husband Preston had once sworn to stay by my side “in sickness and in health”, yet every bit of his patience had long since burned away.
At the Thanksgiving feast, my hands shook and spasmed. I knocked over the scalding gravy, dr...

I'm a folklorist. Folk traditions are my field.
At first, I thought it was just an ordinary rhyme, a scrap of oral history set to a tune.
"A rag doll in the mire, swinging high up to the sky..."
We all thought it was just a prank.
Until the first person drowned in the bog. Then the second fell from a tower crane. Then the third somehow drowned in a bathtub.
I stared at the black symbol surfacing o...

"Knock on this door over the noise one more time, and you're dead!"
Calling the cops was useless, and I was too broke to move.
Driven practically insane, I recklessly tore open the black box from the dark web—the seller promised that if I just followed the instructions, it would "eliminate the noise at the source."
Less than half an hour later, the deafening rager upstairs completely stopped.
Thr...