It’s the season for spooky things, the colour orange and pumpkin spice flavoured everything. Haunted houses are a staple of the terror genre, maybe even a cliche. As homes are meant to be safe places, their subversion into a place of fear strikes at the core of our stability. But ghostly goings on aren’t exclusive to houses.
Haunted Airport
Flight ASD3002 went missing as it flew over the far northern Pacific. No trace of the actual aircraft was found. Considered an unfortunate tragedy, the investigation was closed. Under the first new moon of winter, a year afterwards, Brevig Mission Airport in Alaska made a panicked phone call to North Pacific Air Traffic Control. Flight ASD3002 had just landed. Hundreds of miles from its original intended destination, the plane showed no signs of damage. As the aircraft taxied about the airfield, the ground crew tried to make contact to no avail. After making a complete circuit, ASD3002 took off, flying westward.
Originally the reports were dismissed as the ravings of the mad or desperate. Then, the next year, under the first new moon of winter, Flight ASD3002 reappeared again, this time at White Mountain. The next year it was Shaktoolik. Each time the pattern is the same. There’s no radar signature, the airport losses all radio communications and the planes never stops. The best guess is that it’s looking for something.
Haunted Phone Box
Every waxing gibbous moon a phone box appears on the corner of 4th Street and Manchester Road. The style of the box has not been used in the city for decades. Though it is solid to the touch, it has a slight stickiness, as if the wood was not entirely formed of physical matter. At midnight the phone rings for three minutes and at dawn the box is gone. In an old industrial district, there are fortunately few locals to disturb. Every now and then some fool gets the idea to answer the phone. They’re still screaming.
Haunted Gym
UltrFit is a new gym in a new building which appeals to the younger, richer members of the local area. It is the sort of gym were being seen is as important as the exercise and the very last placed one expects ghosts. It started with a few sound of weights clanking after the gym closed for the night and soon progressed to glimpses of full apparitions pumping iron in the middle of the day. Only one or two members at a time ever see a ghost but after repeated sightings, word reached the press. The notoriety drew new members in and the owner considered changing the name of the gym. That was until the “accident”. A man has been found dead, their skull crushed by a dumbbell. There are no witnesses and the CCTV mysteriously stopped working just before the accident. A genuine accident, a murder or something supernatural?
Haunted Mist
It was a dark and moonless summer solstice when a mist settled over the town of Butterpond. The town became quiet, like a blanket of silence had settled over it. It lasted for hours before a massive flood swept away the town. Far upstream a dam burst, sending forth a torrent of water. The receding water revealed all that was left were foundations and the mist. The mist defies all knowledge of weather behaviour, lingering no matter the conditions. It would be studied more if not for the shapes. The outline of the town and its people remain in the mist. If you watch closely, the people move as they repeat the day they died. Some echo of them is trapped as long as the mist remains.
- Image Credit – Luminous Pylons by Tom Blackwell – CC-BY-NC-2.0
- Image Credit – Portobello’s Old Phonebox by Andrew Girdwood – CC-BY-2.0