The Twelve Nightmares of Christmas Holidays: Midnight

Published

2 years ago

December 21, 2022

Court Court

It’s midnight, officially Christmas Day, and Aly is sitting outside on the cold pavement outside her house. Thick snowflakes fall on her hair as she stares at the Christmas lights on the roof, a dance of reds and greens and blues and golds. Her robe is damp from the wet snow, her once fuzzy purple slippers are now crispy and hard to the touch after years of use. Her dad’s BB-gun, which he let her practice sometimes and did a terrible job hiding in the garage, lay right beside her.

She has been waiting all night for her friends to come home. Her babysitter, who fell asleep hours ago, has no idea that she’s outside right now. Her twin brother’s snores rippled throughout the house as she snuck out. His room, on the second floor, has a window that faces the street. It’s the window she’s staring at right now. Her parents are out, won’t be back until late. If Aly’s lucky, her friends will come before her parents come home. She’s been waiting for hours now, for her friends to crawl across the roof and lift up her brother’s window, pop open the screen, sneak inside and slither across his room, through the wooden floors in the hallway, down the stairs and into the stockings hung above the fireplace. The babysitter is so glued to her phone in another room in the house, and sometimes she sleeps when she has to stay late, so she wouldn’t notice Aly’s friends, who will sneak in quietly and think no one knows they’re there. But Aly knows.

For years, things died in her house on Christmas day. It was small at first, just a houseplant or two. But then two Christmases ago, her friends got greedy. The family woke up to a house full of dead plants, to all five fish floating at the top of the fish tank, the latter of which ruined Aly’s entire winter break because she felt so terribly sorry for them. Last year, the family got a cat over the summer. Christmas morning, Peanut was nowhere to be found. Aly still doesn’t know what happened to him; thinking about it too much scares her.

But her friends made a mistake last year. Before realizing the cat was missing, Aly and her brother were filled with nothing but joy on Christmas morning. She was even feeling especially generous and ran into her brother’s room to get a toy for him when she saw her friends escape. They slammed the window shut, the screen lay outside on the roof. She watched them slither, pink goo trailing behind them. When she told her mom about the broken screen and the friends she saw, her mom ignored the bit about her new friends and popped the screen back in, thinking Aly’s brother must’ve been messing around with it again. Aly tried to tell her brother about the friends, but he wasn’t interested. She tried to tell her dad the friends stole Peanut, but he insisted the feline must’ve ran away. Aly was always making up stories, and they were all tired of pretending to believe them.

But this year was different. Aly didn’t know what these friends were going to kill next and she refused to find out. She didn’t care how much snow was falling, how cold it was outside, how freezing her ears and toes had become. She’ll wait and wait as long as she could. She was ready.

***

Check out more of our holiday stories here at HauntedMTL and have a very happy and haunted holiday season!

Related Topics:christmas christmas horror horror

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Court Court

CourtCourt is a writer, horror enthusiast, and may or may not be your favorite human-eating houseplant.

1 Comment

Jennifer Weigel

December 22, 2022 at 12:28 pm

I’ve had those kinds of friends before; hopefully she hasn’t volunteered herself…

Reply

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.