Written by Jonathan Wojcik
NIGHTMARE MENAGERIE 2021
Guest Art by Plakis Morakis!
TV Head
Posted by Yohoia
"I was watching tv in my house, except it was one of those old-style cathode ray sets. Everything seemed normal until I changed the channel, and suddenly all that appeared on the screen were fangs. Then the set started to grow an inky black body with four arms and four legs with the tv acting as the head. It also started to let out awful metallic screeching sounds from the fanged mouth on its screen. I wanted to run, but I couldn't move for some reason. It walked slowly over to me, and when it was about a foot away it stopped, and in a crisp, clear voice that sounded just like Elijah Wood, it said:
"That concludes our broadcast day. Goodnight."
And then I woke up."
"I was watching tv in my house, except it was one of those old-style cathode ray sets. Everything seemed normal until I changed the channel, and suddenly all that appeared on the screen were fangs. Then the set started to grow an inky black body with four arms and four legs with the tv acting as the head. It also started to let out awful metallic screeching sounds from the fanged mouth on its screen. I wanted to run, but I couldn't move for some reason. It walked slowly over to me, and when it was about a foot away it stopped, and in a crisp, clear voice that sounded just like Elijah Wood, it said:
"That concludes our broadcast day. Goodnight."
And then I woke up."
I always like having these tight, classical nightmares where an ominous thing appears, it says or does something weird, and basically the credits roll. I commend this one for saying something that makes thematic sense, and would be a pretty killer line before a TV-themed monsters kills or eats someone, but just as ominous as the ending line of a harmless dream, too. The nightmare's schedule for the day was over, that's all! Always a fan of monsters with TV faces, too, and especially when the screen displays just one major facial feature.
Hero Otter
Posted by Nathan Karr
Every once in a while, Disqus clears all the comments on an article with no possible recovery method, and they still can't explain why, so this screenshot is now the only record of this epic scenario. Why Batman-Themed birthday parties? Does the clown demon just relate that hard to the Joker? He's a Jokerbro? Well, it's interesting that a sometimes otter, sometimes snake is a "good" demon, and wearing the duplo block goggles is pretty adorable. The whole debacle with the poisonous berries is a pretty hare-brained scheme on the bad demon's part, I gotta say.
Grin Spider
Posted by Duckyworth
"I came here to share a nightmare I had ages ago. I remember this nightmare that I had when I was very young - I think I was around about the age of 7 or 8 when it happened, but I do really vividly remember it.
I was in bed, and all was quiet, then I looked at the corner of my bedroom out of the corner of my eye and I saw this little spider in the corner. We get spiders in our house often and spiders in and of themselves usually don't scare me, but what happened next was HORRIFYING.
When I turned around in bed to go back to sleep, all of a sudden, I heard this surprised squeak coming from the spider, and I looked back in surprise - the spider had this REALLY jarring look on the face that it suddenly had, and then it started edging towards me. It wasn't crawling along the floor like normal spiders - it was floating! And then it started edging towards me in sudden erratic movements, as it's look got angrier and angrier, and then the smile on it's face got wider and wider. It slowly edged towards me with this really weird rhythmic 'Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah!', and then it was an arms reach away, it stopped, just staring at me for 5 seconds.... before then leaping onto my face with a final 'HAH!', and I could only see the horrible expression it had. And what was worse was that I didn't jolt awake straight away... my dream just HELD on that horrible wide grin it had with it's eyes staring wide at me like the eyes were bulging out of the sockets...."
"I came here to share a nightmare I had ages ago. I remember this nightmare that I had when I was very young - I think I was around about the age of 7 or 8 when it happened, but I do really vividly remember it.
I was in bed, and all was quiet, then I looked at the corner of my bedroom out of the corner of my eye and I saw this little spider in the corner. We get spiders in our house often and spiders in and of themselves usually don't scare me, but what happened next was HORRIFYING.
When I turned around in bed to go back to sleep, all of a sudden, I heard this surprised squeak coming from the spider, and I looked back in surprise - the spider had this REALLY jarring look on the face that it suddenly had, and then it started edging towards me. It wasn't crawling along the floor like normal spiders - it was floating! And then it started edging towards me in sudden erratic movements, as it's look got angrier and angrier, and then the smile on it's face got wider and wider. It slowly edged towards me with this really weird rhythmic 'Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah!', and then it was an arms reach away, it stopped, just staring at me for 5 seconds.... before then leaping onto my face with a final 'HAH!', and I could only see the horrible expression it had. And what was worse was that I didn't jolt awake straight away... my dream just HELD on that horrible wide grin it had with it's eyes staring wide at me like the eyes were bulging out of the sockets...."
This is definitely a 7 or 8 year old's dream. An awkwardly floating spider with a big weird smile and an odd "chant" makes me think of the kinds of dreams inspired by off-putting sketches on children's shows, if you have any idea what I'm talking about. Something creeps you out as a little kid, and maybe it wasn't even supposed to be creepy, but that night you'll have a dream very loosely mutated from the memory.
Window Stalker
Posted by FangTheGoldenCat
"Oh boy, I can't wait to share this. Here is a recent nightmare I've had about 2 days ago. It all started in my house with me and my parents. Somehow, we were already trying to escape from our home because we knew that there was something haunting us from the other side of our room's windows. We were in a huge rush to get away and I felt like dying. It was following us. We jumped into our car and drove away as fast as my Dad could. In the car, I looked back behind us and I saw it. The creature was horrifying. It was pale and completely white from head to toe. Its eyes were huge and bloody red (took up 85% of its own face.) The creature's mouth was surprisingly small. The deformed mouth had a Zig-Zag pattern to it and was melting horribly. The boney humanoid body of the monster was out of proportion. Its hands and feet were long and lanky, swiping towards our car. It was very close to us. We drove to my grandparent's house in some particular reason and stayed there for the rest of the night. At that time, I was super scared and I couldn't sleep. I looked out of a window despite the fear. And there it was, staring right back at me. I woke up."
"Oh boy, I can't wait to share this. Here is a recent nightmare I've had about 2 days ago. It all started in my house with me and my parents. Somehow, we were already trying to escape from our home because we knew that there was something haunting us from the other side of our room's windows. We were in a huge rush to get away and I felt like dying. It was following us. We jumped into our car and drove away as fast as my Dad could. In the car, I looked back behind us and I saw it. The creature was horrifying. It was pale and completely white from head to toe. Its eyes were huge and bloody red (took up 85% of its own face.) The creature's mouth was surprisingly small. The deformed mouth had a Zig-Zag pattern to it and was melting horribly. The boney humanoid body of the monster was out of proportion. Its hands and feet were long and lanky, swiping towards our car. It was very close to us. We drove to my grandparent's house in some particular reason and stayed there for the rest of the night. At that time, I was super scared and I couldn't sleep. I looked out of a window despite the fear. And there it was, staring right back at me. I woke up."
Very solid nightmare, straight out of creepypasta, right down to the pale lanky humanoid aesthetic! Its habit of appearing in windows and following a car immediately brings to mind the common experience of a "car follower," or whatever you prefer to call it; when a kid is looking out the window of a vehicle, they're very prone to imagining some kind of little being that follows along, leaping over passing objects like some sort of video game. We know this is a common experience because every time anyone talks about it on something like twitter or reddit there's a chance that it'll go viral with thousands of replies like "I THOUGHT I WAS THE ONLY ONE!"
...So, when people grow up and they have better thinks to worry about on road trips, where might their "car followers" go? I think maybe I have a theory about where a "window stalker" might come from.
Dog Freak
Posted by Shakara the Mad
"I was in my house, but it was rather dark. Apparently all the lights had totally blown. Every last one. And, I was coming home from some shopping trip or something- it was the evening and I was all tired out. Everyone else was out at meetings or friend's houses. I'm home alone for the night. So, I go in and everything's dark, except for the streetlights and moon shining through the windows. Immediately I hear scampering paws and excited barking- so I'm like "Hey, it's my dog!"
But I don't own a dog. The "dog" crept through the hall, just barely illuminated by the streetlights. A silhouette. The silhouette of the "dog-shape" faded away, turning into this hideous hybrid of man and dog. A man's arms and legs with twisted paws, a crooked long neck and the head of a man. He called me by name, in an atonal voice, deep and raspy- like the voice of The G-Man.
"Shakara. Shakara, come downstairs. Shakara, it's me. Shakara, why won't you come to me?"
I spent the remainder of that dream in my room, back pressed against the door- terrified that it would get in. I'd glimpsed the "dog-man" crawling up the stairs, far too graceful for its broken body to do so. I was grateful there were no lights, so I didn't have to see the dog-man's hideous face."
"I was in my house, but it was rather dark. Apparently all the lights had totally blown. Every last one. And, I was coming home from some shopping trip or something- it was the evening and I was all tired out. Everyone else was out at meetings or friend's houses. I'm home alone for the night. So, I go in and everything's dark, except for the streetlights and moon shining through the windows. Immediately I hear scampering paws and excited barking- so I'm like "Hey, it's my dog!"
But I don't own a dog. The "dog" crept through the hall, just barely illuminated by the streetlights. A silhouette. The silhouette of the "dog-shape" faded away, turning into this hideous hybrid of man and dog. A man's arms and legs with twisted paws, a crooked long neck and the head of a man. He called me by name, in an atonal voice, deep and raspy- like the voice of The G-Man.
"Shakara. Shakara, come downstairs. Shakara, it's me. Shakara, why won't you come to me?"
I spent the remainder of that dream in my room, back pressed against the door- terrified that it would get in. I'd glimpsed the "dog-man" crawling up the stairs, far too graceful for its broken body to do so. I was grateful there were no lights, so I didn't have to see the dog-man's hideous face."
The horror "arc" to this one is absolutely perfect, and you can even see how this dream's "algorithm" played out; if I worry about something in my own dreams, it pretty much always happens and always happens exactly as badly as I was worried about. Even when you're not that aware of it, dreams tend to follow your subconscious expectations, so if Shakara had continued thinking "that's just my dog!" it's entirely possible the dream would have never taken such a dark turn. The sudden intrusion of real-life logic, the memory that there is no dog in this particular household, was likely all it took to turn an inoccuous scenario into a ghastly one.
Centipede Ghost
Posted by wednesdaythe11th
"students in a college dorm were trying to summon a ghost, just some campus urban legend, the ghost was called the Red Centipede and summoning was like game-y, like some kind of bloody mary, just a silly test of courage, but they successfully summoned the ghost and the ghost was me and i was all like, "i was human once but then i died and got long, and red, you can die and become long too" to these horrified students, my body wasnt insectoid, it was like i had been completely flattened with my bones still intact in my skin, like i was just stretched into the shape of a centipede and in a red light, like a spotlight on a devil in a vintage play or something like that (and then i spent the rest of the dream floating through really ritzy spaces and knocking stuff over)
towards the end i got the deep lore about how i died: that some older librarian guy was obsessed with me, he stalked me and harassed me when i was a student at the school, when he was afraid id report him, he knocked a bookshelf on top of me, which is what had killed me, he then kept me bound to the school with sinister magics and when he died he also became a ghost, apart of that magic was that I would constantly forget what had happened to me, but in that moment remembering what happened to me in the dream, the impact and despair-the complete lack of ownership over my body mind and soul, woke me up"
"students in a college dorm were trying to summon a ghost, just some campus urban legend, the ghost was called the Red Centipede and summoning was like game-y, like some kind of bloody mary, just a silly test of courage, but they successfully summoned the ghost and the ghost was me and i was all like, "i was human once but then i died and got long, and red, you can die and become long too" to these horrified students, my body wasnt insectoid, it was like i had been completely flattened with my bones still intact in my skin, like i was just stretched into the shape of a centipede and in a red light, like a spotlight on a devil in a vintage play or something like that (and then i spent the rest of the dream floating through really ritzy spaces and knocking stuff over)
towards the end i got the deep lore about how i died: that some older librarian guy was obsessed with me, he stalked me and harassed me when i was a student at the school, when he was afraid id report him, he knocked a bookshelf on top of me, which is what had killed me, he then kept me bound to the school with sinister magics and when he died he also became a ghost, apart of that magic was that I would constantly forget what had happened to me, but in that moment remembering what happened to me in the dream, the impact and despair-the complete lack of ownership over my body mind and soul, woke me up"
Wow, the backstory of this ghost is nasty! The idea of someone being squashed in such a way that their ghost is remembered as a "Red Centipede" is magnificently skin-crawling. It feels like a dream this very ghost would give people in an attempt to communicate, maybe even ask for help, though the way it offers for other people to become "long" is also textbook vengeful yokai behavior.
Since this one was so reminiscent of Shinbi's Apartment, which including a more literal centipede ghost, Plakis also drew the Red Centipede in Shinbi's chibi ghost styles for good measure!
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