Original Series

Baby Doll

Published

4 years ago

December 24, 2020

Nicole C. Luttrell

“Alright, Jenny. Are you ready for your Christmas present?” Mom asked.

“Yes, yes I’m ready!” Jenny cried, jumping up and down in place.

“You’ve got to stand still,” Mom laughed.

Jenny tried to stand still, but it was so hard. It was Christmas morning, after all. What child could stand still on that day?

“Okay, sit down and hold your arms out,” Mom laughed.

Jenny did, nearly shaking with excitement. Mom placed something in her arms, and said, “Alright, you can open them now.”

There in Jenny’s arms was a baby doll.

A little boy doll dressed in blue and white striped pajamas.

“Really?” Jenny asked. “I wanted a PlayStation.”

“Honey, we couldn’t afford that this year,” Mom said.

“This is your present, Sweetie,” Dad added. He was beaming. “His name is Cody. Don’t you like him?”

“No,” Jenny said. She felt like crying. “No, take him back.”

Her parents laughed, which was more than she could take. She shoved the doll into her mother’s arms and started crying.

The doll began to cry too. A sad, pathetic little wail. Jenny tried to stop her tears, but the doll kept right on. “Why won’t it stop?” Jenny cried.

“Honey,” Mom said. But Jenny didn’t want to hear it. She ran to her room, furious. Who wanted a dumb doll for Christmas?

Jenny couldn’t be coaxed from her room all day. She refused to come out even when her dad begged and her mom threatened to throw away every toy she had.

She wrapped her arms around herself. What a terrible Christmas.

Eventually, she pouted long enough that it wore her out, and she fell asleep.

She woke sometime later to the sound of the doll crying again. One of her parents must have moved it upstairs. But why was it still crying? She shoved her head under the pillow, but she could still hear it.

Jenny pulled her head out from under her pillow. That stupid doll, it was broken on top of everything else. She couldn’t stand it, it wasn’t fair. The doll was the worst Christmas gift she’d ever gotten.

She jumped up from the bed and ran out of her room. The crying was coming from the spare bedroom at the end of the hall. Her parents had put the doll in there, in the bassinet she’d slept in when she was a baby. She snatched it up and gave it a shake.

“Shut up!” But the doll just kept right on wailing.

This was more than she could stand. With the doll in her arms, she ran to the railing that looked over the living room. She threw the doll down, hoping the fall would be enough to break it.

The doll landed on the hardwood floor. It was finally quiet.

Her parents’ bedroom door opened. “Jenny, what are you doing out of bed?” Mom asked.

Dad looked down over the railing. “My God, Cody!” he screamed and ran down the stairs. “Call an ambulance! Jenny, what happened to your brother?”

Original Series

Nightmarish Nature: Screwed Up Screwworms

Published

4 weeks ago

October 27, 2024

Jennifer Weigel

Yeah yeah, the insects tend to get ALL the attention here on Nightmarish Nature. But honestly, this one takes the beefcake. It’s the New World Screwworm Fly, and it’s as terrifying as the name suggests. And they aren’t limited to the Americas, there is an Old World version as well, as they can be found pretty much anywhere tropical or seasonably suited.

Warm weather woes... Screwworm fly sipping a boat drink out of a coconut with a text bubble "Take me to the tropics." — Warm weather woes…

Revolting Little Buggers

The Screwworm Fly is a parasitic fly larvae that burrows into its host to feed, named because it seems to screw deeper and deeper into the flesh over time. This process is called myiasis and do NOT look it up online, you WILL regret it. They blur those images out for very valid reasons, trust me (and not because of pornographic content). And these maggots will continue to burrow en masse, rather than staying put as a botfly larvae would.

Do Not Do an Image Search on Screwworm Myiasis, Like Seriously – You Will NEVER Unsee That

The female Screwworm fly lays her eggs on an open wound or orifice of her chosen host… And not just one egg or a couple of eggs, no – hundreds, even thousands of them. Let’s let that sink in a bit, shall we? Or screw in as it were. Although any warm-blooded animal is a prime target, cattle are a fly favorite, costing millions of head of cattle to this sick and disgusting horror annually. And if beef isn’t on the menu, Fido or even yourself might be.

Too many maggots... Showing one is maddening enough. One screwfly larva with text bubble "I just keep on digging" and caption Multiply this by at least two orders of magnitude (regarding quantity not size). — Too many maggots… Showing one is maddening enough.

The Great American Worm Wall

In fact, this particular feature here on Nightmarish Nature is so terrifying that the United States has made agreements with all of Central America, even including countries that do not generally share its interests, in order to create a “Great American Worm Wall” to prevent them from spreading back into the United States. I’m not going to go into all of the creepy and juicy details of this bizarre science fiction freak fact, you’ll just have to watch it here on Half As Interesting’s YouTube channel.

Essentially, the Worm Wall is a complicated byproduct of scientists studying radioactivity on the flies’ maturity as well as the flies’ sexual lives and using this information against them to nearly eradicate the species and banish it from much of its former range. So, Peter Parker, if you thought everyone was messing with your love life before, be glad you weren’t bitten by a radioactive Screwworm.

If you’ve enjoyed this segment of Nightmarish Nature, feel free to check out some previous here:

Terrifying Tardigrades

Original Series

Finger Spiders Keep Trying!

Published

2 months ago

September 29, 2024

Jennifer Weigel

You’ve almost made it to the end of the finger spiders here at Haunted MTL! Because I made A LOT of unfulfilled requests for a spider out of fingers, I will continue this snarky little AI art series with NightCafe and Canva through the month of September… In case you missed out, here are the other parts of this series:

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Images: Overall design aesthetic of fashion / design advertising spread in muted tones with four AI art rendered images of spiders, built spiders, and spiders on hands, with any given number of legs on spiders and fingers on hands as you’d expect from AI interfacing at this time. Prompts used from top left to lower right include: hand that is a spider; spider legs as fingers; fingers becoming spider; spider all fingers.

Text reads: Creepy Crawlies Finger Spiders Keep Trying! Yeah, I’m sure you don’t remember being bitten. Because of the ways they warp time and space, and the natural chemical reactions involved, the AI art generated finger spiders’ bite isn’t typically felt. They are still attached to you, feeding… You have to get them off… Keep trying!

Images: Overall design aesthetic of fashion / design advertising spread in muted tones with four AI art rendered images of spiders, built spiders, and spiders on hands, with any given number of legs on spiders and fingers on hands as you’d expect from AI interfacing at this time. Prompts used from top left to lower right include: spider leg fingers; spider made out of hand fingers; hand spider picking banjo; fingers as spider playing banjo.

Text reads: Creepy Crawlies Finger Spiders That’s All Folks! Well, I guess that’s that then. It’s been nice knowing you. Enjoy your new form. Nothing left for it but to play the banjo…

All of the AI art images used in this series were generated on Thursday, June 13, 2024. If you want to see more freaky spiderness in art here on Haunted MTL, check out Bitten and Soul Catcher. More AI art graphic narratives from Jennifer Weigel have explored Little Red Riding Hood and Into the Deep Woods. Oh, and the Tiny Brain Computers exploration. To see more such devolutions into AI generated art, check out the Will the Real Jennifer Weigel Please Stand Up? blog.

Original Series

Nightmarish Nature: Creepy Spider Facts

Published

2 months ago

September 22, 2024

Jennifer Weigel

We just can’t get enough of spiders here on Nightmarish Nature… so here are some more creepy spider facts for you to consider, outside of the giants, eating and mating habits, and wasp predation as previously mentioned in this series. Plus the finger spiders have taken over the whole of the month of September, so strap in because they’re here too – no goofy drawings this month just more terror unleashed in the form of AI art, courtesy of NightCafe.

AI art prompt: finger skin over legs of spider body

Spiders Are Baby Mama Machines!

Spiders can lay hundreds and thousands of eggs in their egg sacs at a time. And when they hatch, all those tiny baby spiders can balloon, flying to new homes on airborne strands of silk as if raining from the sky… So if you suffer from trypophobia and are weirded out by large quantities of clustered small and tiny objects (especially when they are alive and moving) you may want to steer clear of these little bug bombs.

Spiders Are Athletic Archdukes!

Jumping spiders can leap as far as 40 times their body length. And wolf spiders can run up to 2 feet per second. In movement, spiders have four feet on the ground and four in the air at all times. And they have six knees on each leg for a total of 48 knees – that’s a lot of potential kneecapping, I’d try to take them down a different way if I were you…

Other Interesting Factoids

Spiders are on every continent except Antarctica and there are over 40,000 identified species of them. All spiders produce silk for all that they don’t all make webs, since some prefer to live on the move or ambush from hidey holes. There is a known species of herbivorous spider, the Bagheera Kiplingi, but most are carnivorous or omnivorous. And the longest lived spiders can survive for 40+ years.