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Discover weekly, the best short stories

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

Suspense Short Stories to read

Submitted by writers on Reedsy Prompts to our weekly writing contest. From bizarre characters to creeping threats, this collection of suspense short stories gives you an exciting array of bone-chilling tales.

Suspense Short Stories – Page 2

The Things the Mirror Refuses to Show

Weekly Contest #378

CW: Violence, blood, murder The first thing the mirror showed Donny Baird was his daughter in a wedding dress. The second was a man burning alive. He bought it on a Saturday because he was tired of seeing himself in the dark windows of an empty house. The estate sale occupied a brick Victorian on the far side of town, the kind with an iron fence and a porch that sagged in the middle. He had come for a dresser. Instead, he found a tall walnut mirror leaning against a wall in the basement. Its frame was carved with flowers whose petals looked...

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The Returning Guest

Weekly Contest #378

The problem with Halloween parties is that nobody really knows who is supposed to be there. That was especially true at the old Miller house on Oak Ridge Road, just outside of Salem. Every October 31st, the house became the neighborhood’s unofficial Halloween headquarters. The house itself just looked the part. Spooky, haunted. Pumpkins sat on the porch, fake spiderwebs stretched between the trees, skeletons hung from the gutters, and enough plastic gravestones littered the front yard to make the local cemetery look understocked. Inside,...

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It Can't Be

Weekly Contest #378

May contain graphic details and difficult for some to read. The rain had turned the cemetery dirt into black grease by the time we finished digging. It was midnight when James and I lowered the heavy pine box containing our older brother, Christopher. He had died screaming in his locked bedroom, his flesh turned a bruised, swollen purple from a sudden, violent illness the doctors couldn't name. To respect his final, frantic scrawled note—Bury me deep, bury me immediately, don’t let them see—we didn't call a funeral home. We dug the hole our...

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Date Zero

Seper Arabi

Weekly Contest #378

The worst place to be stuck in during a plague outbreak is a densely crowded, confined space, like a movie theater. And the worst time in which a plague could break out is during your first date with someone you'd had a huge crush on since college. It was a cold cloudy night. Is it gonna rain? I wondered while we were waiting for the movie to start, just as the lights started to dim. I hope we get to catch a bit of that drizzle. It would make a nice romantic walk. The movie just started. Romantic walk? pff! Who am I kidding? It's a miracle s...

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I Really Did Love Her

Sophia Anderson

Weekly Contest #378

Story contains themes of death, manipulation, crime. I have to be missing something… The dead man slumped against the shower wall had not slipped and hit his head. I felt it in my bones—the whole thing was amiss. I scanned the room with a keen eye, notepad at the ready. A shiver trickled down my spine, and I drew in a breath despite the humid air. Pushing my glasses hard against the bridge of my nose, I forced myself to focus. Some say my years seeing the worst sides of humanity made me jaded and insensitive. In reality, sights like these h...

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Memoirs of an Angry Sentinel Who Took Pride in His Grisly Work

Weekly Contest #378

Prompt: Include the line “I thought you were dead” or “We buried you” in your story. Memoirs of an Angry Sentinel Who Took Pride in His Grisly Work The weather today was much like any other day this time of the season. The sun dimly peaked just above the horizon behind a few feathery clouds. The air was crisp but soon would warm with the rising sun.I stood at my watch like any other soldier, but I was also in charge of a few armed soldiers. It was only a couple of days before the town would be swarmed with thousands of revelers celebrating...

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Missing Persons

Kristina Warlen

Weekly Contest #378

Whitney dropped to her knees as another bolt of lightning struck the mountain. The thunder came, and the narrow ridge ahead disappeared in white light. She pressed her palms against the rock, afraid to move. There was nothing on either side of her but a drop straight down, and the wind kept pushing at her back. She watched herself crawl toward the edge, watched one hand reach over and feel for something to hold on to. She wondered what would happen if she jumped. The thought was hers, but the version of herself on the ridge was only concerne...

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Friendly Fire

Travis Waith-Mair

Weekly Contest #378

“I thought you were dead,” Kaleb said, coughing into his elbow. His cabin had no lights, no gas, nothing but the moonlight to show him who his visitor was. But Kaleb didn’t need to see the man to recognize his squad leader and brother-in-arms from the Mutate War. There was a time he would have given his life for Jak, and maybe today was that day. “I think you hoped it more than you thought it,” Jak said as he stepped into the darkness of the cabin, dragging his right foot as he did. A trail of blood followed Jak’s defective leg. Kaleb couldn...

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No Fuss

Peter Delametter

Weekly Contest #378

Crying filled the apartment. It was never like this for mom. The baby would always settle with a soothing touch and some rhythmic pats on the bottom. When the baby cried there was always a need to be fulfilled, and, once eliminated, no more need to fuss. But not tonight. Linda’s mother has never trusted her to take care of the baby independently before, but with her sister in the hospital after a car accident, her mom simply had no other choice. She didn’t want to bring the baby to the hospital with all those sick people. She was a helicopte...

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The Monster Beneath

Jennifer Osborne

Weekly Contest #378

The Monster Beneath October 24rth, 2026 Cincinnati, OH As though he were several rooms over, I could make out his voice. Muffled, underwater tones. His touch alerted me that he was close, as I could feel his fingers grazing the side of my arm, saying horrible things, but also shushing me, like one would soothe a baby in need of sleep. “Poor, poor girl, you go to sleep like the sick little baby that you are,” he whispers. He stops caressing my arm, and goes into a closet or the laundry room. He drapes a sheet over my body, as I lay there, p...

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Together Until The End

DAISY VAHEY BOURNE

Weekly Contest #378

They look so pathetic. So scared. Hard to believe I loved them once. Feared them last. Now they are afraid of me. Very afraid. It feels so good to be the one causing them to shake. "We buried you." Even their voices cannot stand still, tremulous, thin. They might as well be the ghost. "I dug that grave. So why shouldn't I be able to dig myself out?" And that's the part that still hurts, somewhere in my exposed marrow, my rotting insides, my absent soul. Somewhere, somehow, I still feel betrayed by that. But unfortunately for them, I feel...

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The Sun rises and the Sun sets

Weekly Contest #378

Chapter one: Sunrises The sun is low in the sky, and all I can think of is my late mother. She had dark auburn hair with piercing blue eyes. Her smile could convince anyone to do anything for her. Her voice of clothing was always simple. People often made fun of her for not wearing anything nice, but she paid no attention to them. I remember when I was young overhearing a conversation about a wedding. Of course, you’re supposed to wear nice clothes to a wedding, and my mother would have none of that. My father made her go buy a nicer dress f...

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She Who Conqueres True Love

Alivia Maar

Weekly Contest #378

Blood covered my pale skin. Standing in the light of the silver moon, I let the blood slide over my naked form. I was changed. I was new. I quaked in my skin as the change overcame me. Keres, the word on the lips of the elders as they chanted my name. A spring of new beginnings, a cave of unfathomable ends. And blood. I licked my lips, gratitude filling my heart even as I departed. The elders stared back, sagging skin clothed in blood and age, their faces a mold of pain and pleasure. Then there were my birth kin. Most had left the nest, but ...

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Sixty-Five Days

Jim LaFleur

Weekly Contest #378

The sun went down at 1:41 in the afternoon, and I walked out to the gravel strip to watch it happen. Almost nobody else came. Two kids idled their snowmachines by the fuel drums, then ripped off toward town, yelling about somebody named Dale. An old woman stopped with her grocery bag, looked once, kept walking. That's the thing about the last sunset up here. It sits down on the ice, low and orange, and it doesn't set so much as leak out along the ridges. Most people have errands. I'd cleared my whole day for it. Starting tomorrow there are s...

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The Last Thing That Wears Your Skin

Weekly Contest #378

I learned to speak by listening to a man beg for his life. He called me a bear at first. Then a wolf. When I opened my mouth and gave back his own voice, he stopped naming things and began praying. I have worn his face for 17 years, though I remember only fragments of the afternoon I found him beside the creek. My territory lies in the mountains of eastern Tennessee, beyond the last maintained road and a logging camp abandoned after the company went bankrupt. I know every spring and den, every trail where people walk believing they are alone...

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