Creepy Shorts

By Lisa Griffiths

Where can you find a severed hand, a lunatic teddy bear, a bus destined for hell itself, and a mysterious glass cookie with the power to possess your soul? In your nightmares perhaps! But if you’re too scared to sleep, you can find these, and more spooky scenarios, in Creepy Shorts, a new collection of short stories for kids who love a good scare.

Inspired by classic spooky story collections, Creep Shorts is a great way to get your csare on before bed or on the bus ride to school. These short stories are full of kids and teens who battle all kinds of macabre mayhem and use their brains and bravery to come out on top.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lisa Griffiths
• Release date: Nov 5, 2019
• ISBN: 9780990897033

Lisa Griffiths

Lisa M. Griffiths is the author of Creepy Shorts, a collection of spooky bedtime stories, and The Traveling Coin/Margeaux’s Secret. A fascination with the paranormal, macabre, and mythology influences her writings. She lives in California with her family and faithful dog. She is currently working on Book 3 of The Traveling Coin series.

Book preview

Creepy Shorts

Lisa M. Griffiths

Illustrations by Brittany Ciauri

Copyright © 2014 Lisa M. Griffiths

All rights reserved.

Smashwords edition

License notes

This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to real people or places

is strictly coincidental. This eBook is licensed for your

personal enjoyment. It cannot be loaned or given to other people.

ISBN 13: 978-0-9908970-3-3

Library of Congress Control Number: 2014917797

Dedication

To Dan for lots of encouragement,

and to Claudine for being my own personal cheerleader

Author’s Note

There are many who have inspired me and helped me to get my ideas down on paper. Here are just a few that need thanking:

My family and friends, including the sweetest four-legged muse to grace the planet;

Toni Eastwood’s writing class—a huge thanks for all your help and input;

Brittany Ciauri, who seems to open my brain and see what I see when I write.

Table of Contents

The Closet

The Bus from Hades

It’s Alive

There Are No Glass Cookies

A Reflection

Rise and Shine

Now You Don’t See It, Now You Do

The Closet

It was in the summer of 1980, when I was twelve, that something weird happened in my closet.

We lived in an old Spanish-style house built in the 1920s. Although not everything worked perfectly, the house had lots of character. Or at least that’s what my dad always said. What I liked the best were the many skeleton keys that went with our doors. These keys all looked different and yet could be used on more than one door. Even the closet doors had skeleton keys.

My closet was not spacious but big enough to keep my clothes, shoeboxes, and collectibles. It also had a small window in it that faced the backyard. I used to pretend my closet was a clubhouse, sometimes locking myself inside. Once, I couldn’t get that darn skeleton key to work from the inside. I sat there for an hour trying to get out. I even thought of squeezing myself through the window to escape. My mom finally heard me calling and came to my rescue. She had me slide the key under the door so she could try. For some reason it worked just fine for her. I got an earful that day about locking that door.

During that summer, my friends and I thought we were old enough to start going to the movies without our parents. That was fine, they agreed, but only appropriate films for our age. Then a movie called His Bloody Hand came out in the theaters. Everyone was talking about how scary it was. We kids knew that this was a must-see movie for us. How were we going to convince our parents?

The movie was R-rated, so none of us got the go-ahead to see it. To say we were disappointed would be an understatement. My mom’s excuse for why I couldn’t go was You’ll have nightmares. That was obvious, but so what?

One afternoon three of my friends and I got dropped off at the mall. We promised to stick together and call when we were done shopping. Of course, we didn’t do any shopping. We asked some older girls to buy our movie tickets and get us into the show. Once inside the theater, we sat up toward the front. The place was packed.

For an hour and a half, that movie took the breath right from me. For a low-budget film, it did a number on all of us. It was rare that we couldn’t talk about a movie right after we’d seen it, but that was the case with His Bloody Hand. It was as if speaking about the movie would make it real, and no one wanted that. We all swore not to tell anyone what we’d done. Who wants to be grounded during the summer?

Later that night as I was getting ready for bed, I paused at a noise coming from my closet. It was a faint humming sound. When I opened the door, the sound stopped. I looked around and, not seeing anything, closed the door. I figured my imagination was getting the better of me.

During my sleep I did have nightmares. They were short, like mini movies, but very vivid. I couldn’t recall all of them the next day, but several involved running from someone or something. One stood out clearly: a bloody hand with a mind of its own was in my closet.

Upon opening my eyes in the morning, I was in a foul mood. I couldn’t decide whether I was mad at my mom for being right about nightmares or with myself for letting the movie get to me. I sat up in bed and stretched. My eyes automatically went to the closet on the other side of the room.

The door was open. My heart actually skipped a beat. A voice in my head kept asking why the door was slightly open when it had been closed last night.

There was enough light filtering into the room that I could see everything. I scanned the room from left to right, looking for anything out of place. Nothing seemed