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Discover weekly, the best short stories

Looking for a steady supply of horror short stories? Every week thousands of writers submit stories to our writing contest.

Horror Short Stories to read

Submitted by writers on Reedsy Prompts to our weekly writing contest. From hauntings and murderers to terrifying creatures from the deep, our collection of horror stories will have you breaking out in cold sweats. Take a look… if you dare.

Horror Short Stories – Page 6

A Wager by Firelight

Weekly Contest #376

The grass was cool, the air was hot, the wind rustled the leaves above. I stretched my silvery legs, toes splaying as my face split into a yawn. A row of alabaster needle-point teeth line my mouth. Yes I have ears. No, I don't groom myself. I’m not barbarous like you pair walkers think– but that’s not to say my kind doesn’t know savagery. Before me sits a girl. She looks to be twelve at most, but she holds herself with the ere of an elder child. A first born. I watched her, waiting until the sun had taken its rest, and stars pricked the dark...

16 likes 6 comments 6
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It Wears Coats

Weekly Contest #376

A man condemns his own creation as monstrous, yet neglects to confront the depravity of his own nature. He cloaks his savagery in virtue, his sins in righteousness, and mistakes his capacity for remorse as proof of innocence. How curious that a being so acquainted with evil should tremble at the sight of its own reflection. It wasn’t as if the thing was born that way. In fact, its origins were no different from any other child's: expelled from its mother's womb, swaddled tightly in an ivory sheet, and gently cooed at by passersby on the subw...

16 likes 1 comment 1
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Roar of Thunder

Weekly Contest #376

A shrill screech ripped through the night, silencing the murmuring of cicadas and the hoots of owls. It reverberated in the humid air, sending a tingle up Ravi’s spine. He bolted out of bed, tossed aside the sweat drenched covers and stumbled toward the window, peering out. Glowing crablike crustaceans scuttled over the beach, their pincers snapping and ripping chunks of flesh from a larger animal sprawled across the ground. Its scales glittered in the shafts of moonlight filtering through the palm trees, gouts of fluorescent blue blood spu...

16 likes 4 comments 4
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A Poet

Weekly Contest #376

Arthur always wanted to be a poet. In the mornings when the pinkish hue of sunrise crossed his muddy pond, melting the black forest into a scattering of shadows cast by darkened treetops, he would rub his back along his favorite tree trunk and compose a short poem. The reflection of reddish rays On the water's summery haze Shed shadows from the forest floor Painted as bright and bitter berries A morning feast He wasn't a very good poet, though no one told him so. No one could listen to his poetry. He tried to find an audience that loved th...

14 likes 3 comments 3
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It Goes Where It Wants

Weekly Contest #376

Content Warning: Murder, ritual sacrifice, death of a teen, grief, and supernatural body horror. Dana opened the wrong cabinet again. She’d done it every morning for three weeks. Her hand just habitually went to the cabinet beside the fridge, the one with the cereal bowls, and she stood there staring at the stack of white bowls until she remembered. The mug was where it belonged now. Second shelf of the cup cabinet to the left of the sink. Oversized and bright yellow with a cartoon cow on the side and UDDERLY EXHAUSTED in bubble letters. Ca...

14 likes 5 comments 5
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That Hated Word

Weekly Contest #376

The pod was cylindrical, with rounded ends and a glass front so that its occupant could see the outside world. A tangle of wires and cables ran out from the back, looping over and under in a crazy mess that fed into a dozen screens set on stands surrounding the pod. Every screen was abuzz with calculations. On the largest screen, however, a simpler string of numbers was displayed; a five, and then two zeroes. Will stared at the pod and the apparatus surrounding it, absentmindedly drumming the fingers of his right hand on the bottom of the la...

12 likes 1 comment 1
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Cinderface

Weekly Contest #376

Blaine Cooke and Tanner Ember pass a bottle of Mad Dog 20/20 between them. “Maybe we should have gone for Maximus Super,” Tanner says, gagging at the wine’s rancid aftertaste. “You mean Maximus Stupor. You know you can’t handle malt liquor,” Blaine replies, catching himself as he nearly sways off the shoulder and onto Hook Road. The pair of teenagers have spent the night drinking, smoking cigarettes, and complaining about living in Accident, Maryland, which they feel is aptly named because people find it by accident, and whenever something h...

12 likes 2 comments 2
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Mercy Saves (Conclusion to the Beau Navarro Trilogy)

Weekly Contest #376

Gideon Rusk had written the message 11 times and deleted it 11 times. He sat behind his desk long after the last student had left, staring at the glow of his phone while the community college emptied around him. Beau, I need to talk to you about what happened. Delete. Beau, after what happened at my house, I need to establish some boundaries. Delete. Beau, my family has to come first. That one lasted almost a minute. Then he deleted it too. Gideon leaned back and rubbed both hands across his face. He was 44 years old. He had taught students ...

12 likes 6 comments 6
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The Big Haggis

Weekly Contest #376

Where is that boy? Gail belonged to the generation that believed work started when your boss told you it did. Not five minutes after that or whenever it was you felt like turning up. Terry was only sixteen, and she planned to break him of these silly modern notions regarding punctuality. If he ever arrived, that was. Gail hired him to help out on the weekends. Ever since that video went viral, whatever that meant, the shop had gone from a couple of visitors a week to a few hundred on Saturdays alone. Two little girls crashed through the fron...

9 likes 6 comments 6
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Such a Doll

Weekly Contest #376

“It’s so creepy!” Natalie whined doing her best to shield her ever-wide brown eyes from me. “We should throw it out,” Riley replied, “They’ll never notice.” It had been some weeks since the girls made their usual assault of me. They couldn’t be blamed, in all honesty. When I was their age I too was terrified of my grandparents strange knick-knacks, but even they had nothing on the Hendersons. The family room was sort of my stomping ground and high on each wall was a functioning cuckoo clock, though none of them got the time exactly right. If...

9 likes 1 comment 1
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Crucible

Weekly Contest #376

There is no greater test of faith than to be faced with the object of our beliefs and find we are wrong. That was the lesson which Anthony Martins learned the summer of his twentieth birthday. It was a lesson which changed everything for him. Anthony had many successes in his youth. He overcame the peer pressure to lead a life of drugs and crime with his classmates. He struggled through mental health and depression to graduate at the top of his high school class. He endured the loss of his parents in a terrible car accident and the tragic lo...

8 likes 0 comments 0
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Journey to Mattawa

Weekly Contest #376

3,153 km tackled, with only 1,000 km left to go. The last leg of the trek—from Thunder Bay to Mattawa—is proving to be the most challenging. That wide road quickly narrows to a thin line, and the colossal pines on either side start to close in on me and the goldendoodle in the back of my SUV. The closest highway rest stop is fifteen minutes away, and when I finally reach the parking lot, I can barely keep my eyes open. I guess those two iced lattes and Celsius didn’t do the trick. A concrete bench is in the center of an open field. After le...

8 likes 0 comments 0
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Every Coven is a Coffin

Weekly Contest #376

Every Coven is a Coffin Professor Rankly depressed the button on the boxy gray carousel controller. It made an audible ‘CLICK’ that clattered along the walls of the dark lecture theater. A new slide was projected onto the whiteboard, which read: Witches, Witchcraft, and the Myth of the Good Witch Most of the seats were filled with new recruits inducted into the Institute for Extraordinary Defense and Research (IEDR). The ranks were diverse, with recruits from all over the world and with varying skill sets. People from opposite ends of the...

7 likes 2 comments 2
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The Chronicler

Weekly Contest #376

You will think me mad - but everything I tell you now is true, or as true as any one man can understand a thing so strange to be. I have gone over this many times, have racked my thoughts for any idle reasoning I can divine. There is none. What I am about to tell you simply is, despite my best efforts. I have a library, which I adore. It has long been my place of haven, a refuge from the terminally ill world around me. In its embrace I have read many titles, their spines bearing no authors’ names, and have inhabited lives too close for easy ...

5 likes 2 comments 2
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The creature

Weekly Contest #376

Why the creature chooses to remove sick children from their homes will always remain a mystery. Hidden from the sight of comforting parents, it waits for fevers to spike, for voices to turn coarse, and when muscles are to weak. No one knows why the children are the only ones who can see it, and why they do not fear him is even more puzzling. For it has only one goal and one purpose. With a single grotesque green finger, thin and long, it appears between the blades of grass on lawns, from the calm waters of lakes, and in the far corners of di...

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RBE | Illustrated Short Stories | 2024-06

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