Connect with us

Published

on

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. 

Advertisement

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!

Advertisement
Continue Reading
Advertisement
1 Comment

1 Comment

  1. Jennifer Weigel

    December 22, 2022 at 12:28 pm

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

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Original Series

Finger Spiders Keep Trying!

Published

on

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

Advertisement
finger spiders

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!

finger spiders

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.

Advertisement
Continue Reading

Original Series

Nightmarish Nature: Creepy Spider Facts

Published

on

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
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.

AI art prompt: finger skin spider
AI art prompt: finger skin spider

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…

AI art prompt: finger spider
AI art prompt: finger spider

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.

AI art prompt: finger spider body
AI art prompt: finger spider body

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

Vampires Among Us

Perilous Parenting

Freaky Fungus

Advertisement

Worrisome Wasps

Cannibalism

Terrifying Tardigrades

Reindeer Give Pause

Komodo Dragons

Advertisement

Zombie Snails

Horrifying Humans

Giants Among Spiders

Flesh in Flowers

Assassin Fashion

Advertisement

Baby Bomb

Orca Antics

Continue Reading

Original Series

Finger Spiders What You Get

Published

on

Wow, you’re still with us… So, taking it from Part 1 and Part 2 of this saga, we’re still knuckle deep in 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…

finger spiders

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: fingers spider; fingers as spider; fingers as spider legs no hand; spider out of fingers.

Text reads: Creepy Crawlies Finger Spiders What You Get! This is all on you… You let the terrifying AI art generated finger spiders in the house and then let them crawl on you. When you turn into a spider, that’s all your own doing. Leave me out of it.

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 hand; fingers as spider legs; spider hand fingers; spider as fingers.

Text reads: Creepy Crawlies Finger Spiders Look I’m Sorry! I wish I could help. I really really do. Keep scrubbing at it even if your flesh falls off. It’s really your only hope now. You’ve been bitten and there’s not much to do for it now.

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.

Advertisement

Continue Reading

Trending