Horror Writing Prompts

Seven pet owners in the same county bring in their animals with the same complaint: the animal stares at one corner of the house for hours without blinking. Different houses, different towns, different corners.

A tenant reports footsteps in the ceiling. The apartment above has been vacant for three months. The floor up there is covered in bare, wet footprints that circle the room in a continuous loop.

A night-shift pharmacist keeps receiving the same prescription by fax from a doctor's office that closed six years ago. The prescription is made out to a patient with her own name. The dosage instructions say "before it starts."

Soil samples at a construction site come back normal except in one corner of the lot. Every sample from that corner contains bone fragments, at every depth, as if the bones go down as far as the earth does.

A hospice patient in terminal decline keeps improving. Every morning he's sitting up, alert, asking the same question: "Has anyone else come in?" The night staff says no one visits.

A student turns in a creative writing assignment about a house fire that kills a family of four. Address, time, cause. A house fire killed a family at that address three years before the student was born. The student wrote it in present tense.

A customer returns a music box, saying it plays a song that makes his wife cry without knowing why. The shop owner winds it. She doesn't recognize the melody, but she knows the words.

You get home and your dog greets you at the door. You hear yourself call the dog's name from the kitchen.

A family moves into a new house. The daughter asks who sleeps in the room at the end of the hall. There is no room at the end of the hall.

It's 3 AM. An official phone alert wakes you up. It says "DO NOT LOOK AT THE MOON." You have hundreds of notifications. Hundreds of random numbers texting "It's a beautiful night tonight. Look outside."

You've lived in your house for six years. You just found a door in the hallway you've never seen before.

A woman wakes up and her husband doesn't recognize her. Not amnesia. He says a different woman went to bed with him last night, and he's never seen this one before.

Every mirror in the house shows the room as it was yesterday.

A child's imaginary friend starts leaving footprints.

You move into a new apartment. The previous tenant left a note on the fridge: "Don't count the rooms."

A man installs a security camera after a break-in. The footage shows someone entering the house every night at 3 AM. It's him. He has no memory of it.

A mother finds drawings under her daughter's bed. They're portraits of people the daughter has never met. The last drawing is of the mother, asleep, from an angle only someone standing in the corner of the bedroom could see.

You answer the phone. It's your own voice, mid-conversation, talking to someone you don't recognize. You listen for thirty seconds before the other you says your name.

A town's clocks all stop at the same time for one second every night. Nobody notices except one person, who stays awake to watch. During that second, it's daytime outside.

You wake up and check your phone. You have 200 missed calls from your own number.