Story Ideas

Scary story ideas and plots with a twist at the end. These could make good stories, but as yet I haven’t been creative enough to take these plot ideas and turn them into proper scary stories. Perhaps in the future, I’ll come back to these tales and expand them so they can be published on the website.

The Green Rat

Three men stayed overnight in a haunted mansion on a dare. If they managed to stay all night, they would win money. In one of the rooms, there was a creepy painting of a green rat with a ball and chain on one of its legs. The men thought they were really tough and chose to stay in separate bedrooms. During the night, two of the men were horrifically killed and their skulls were found in the room with a large disturbing picture of the green rat. The third man was about to leave town, but was advised by an old lady who used to work as a maid in the mansion, about the picture’s origin, malevolent nature, and weakness. Advised and equipped, he kills the giant green rat that has emerged from the picture, burns the mansion down, and departs.

Mr Monstro

It’s the story of a boy who is stranded outside alone at night. He hears the mysterious voice of a man coming from the darkness. The man warns him to stay in the light, because there’s a horror lurking in the darkness named Mr. Monstro, a skeletal and murderous man. The story frightens the boy, who can’t easily continue without leaving the patch of light he’s standing in, so the man tries to comfort the boy and offers to escort him through the darkness. The boy is about to accept when he spots the man’s outstretched skeletal hand. Before the boy can even object, the man starts protesting too much, claiming that he’s not Mr. Monstro, just the unfortunate victim of a fire…

The Skulls in the Well

I read a creepy story about a man who would take in travelers for the night and while they slept, he would kill them and steal their belongings. Then he would dump the bodies of his victims in the well. One night, a traveller managed to overcome the murderous thief and tied him up. As the traveller wondered what to do with him, he found the well. He told the man he was going to leav ehim in the well while he went to fetch the police. The thief screamed and begged not to be put in there, but the traveller lowered him down into the darkness with the bones of his victims. The traveller said he’d be back in an hour or so and walked away as the thief screamed in terror. When the traveller came back with the police, they found the body of the thief had been torn limb from limb. He was surrounded by the skulls of his victims and their teeth were dripping with blood.

The Rollercoaster

A family goes to the seashore for their summer vacation. The brother and sister fight a lot. The family goes to the beach and the boy wanders off. He lies down in the sand and a black car drives up. The driver is an old man dressed in black like an undertaker. He gets out and opens the back door where a woman is sitting. He motions to the boy to get in and tells him “You’re next”. The boy gets scared and runs away, but when he gets back to where his family was, he realizes they have left the beach. He goes back to the beach house where they are staying and tells them about his experience. They convince him that it was just his overactive imagination. Later that night they go to a nearby amusement park. The brother and sister are excited to ride the old fashioned wooden rollercoaster, but the parents are concerned about their safety. When the two kids reach the front of the line, the attendant turns out to be the old man the boy saw on the beach earlier. He holds the door to the rollercoaster open for them and says “You’re next” just like he did before. Sitting in the car behind them is the woman he saw in the back seat. The boy grabs his sister’s hand and drags her away. As they run, they hear the sound of the rollercoaster collapsing behind them.

The Junkyard

A couple are driving through the country, and they pass a massive junkyard. They get a flat tire and pull over to ask for help. The hillbilly owner of the junkyard sends a few of his helpers out to fix the tire, while the couple take a stroll through the junkyard.

The couple notice that everything in the junkyard is separated into huge bins. A bin for tires, a bin for crowbars, a bin for steering wheels, etc. As they continue to walk through the junkyard, they gain an appreciation for its size. The junkyard (and all the bins) seem to stretch for miles. They also notice that not all of the bins contain car parts. Some contain shirts, some contain shoes, some contain glasses, etc.

After a while, they look back and see that instead of fixing their car, the yokels are tearing it apart…separating its pieces into their respective bins. They start to run back to their car, but the yokels attack them. During the attack, the yokels strip the couple of their clothes, and put their clothes into the bins.

The couple manages to escape, running further into the maze of bins in the junkyard with the yokels following close on their heels. The woman climbs up onto one of the bins and falls in, noticing that she’s now surrounded by wet ping pong balls. Then, to her horror, she sees that they’re not ping pong balls… they’re human eyes. She screams and climbs out, and that’s when she sees what’s in all the other nearby bins… fingers, toes, intestines, teeth, etc.

The Monkey Bars

A group of kids is playing on some monkey bars in a playground. Just for fun, they imagine a terrible monster is living in the sandbox below them. One kid falls to the ground and suddenly a monster comes out of the sand and viciously mauls him. The kids are stuck on the monkey bars and try to wait it out, but one by one they get eaten by the monster. One kid falls onto the sand and gets slashed across the face by the monster. The last two kids manage to escape and run away. When they think they are safe, one of them says, “Good thing we didn’t imagine it had legs…” All of a sudden, the creature comes crawling up out of the sand and chases after them…

Toe Tags

I read a book when I was a kid. It was about this boy who’s parents ran a funeral home and they lived above it. The boy meets a girl his age and they become friends. One night when his parents are out, the girl comes over and they go down to the mortuary to explore. They find a dead body laid out on a slab. Looking at the toe tags, they realize it is the corpse of a prisoner. The corpse gets up and starts chasing them and they keep trying to get away, but it just keeps coming. They eventually kill the corpse by pushing it into the crematorium and burning it. Then the parents get home and tell him that they just picked up a new body that they are going to work on and when they look at the toe tags, it turns out to be the same corpse that had chased them.

The Newspaper

A man wakes up and goes outside to pick up the newspaper. He brings it in, unrolls it and a small creature jumps out. The creature hides around the furniture in the room and is too fast for the man to make out what it is. He chases it around and finally manages to trap it in the bathroom. His wife comes and when they enter the bathroom, the creature is sitting at the bottom of the bathtub. The man reaches in to grab it but the creature ferociously bites his arm, tearing a huge gash of flesh. The couple try to kill it, but it has incredible strength and it’s very fast. It attacks them again, and the man and woman run outside to get help from their neighbors… only to see that every other house on the street has a neatly rolled-up newspaper sitting on the doorstep.

Piggy Piggy

There’s a man who works at a slaughter house that kills pigs and chops them up into meat. The story ends with him going to pick up more pigs, but then it is revealed that he is driving a schoolbus full of kids to the slaughter house…

Just Like Me

A boy is hanging out in the mountains. Suddenly he sees something in the distance. It’s a hunched, slow-moving figure coming in his direction. He looks at it with binoculars and realizes it’s actually some sort of creature but it looks exactly like him, except it is all bloody and its limbs are at odd angles. The creature chases him, getting slowly closer and closer. Eventually, the boy has no choice but to jump off the cliff. He survives the fall, but ends up looking like the creature that was chasing him.

Apple Seeds

Three people arrive at a man’s house one night, looking for shelter. They seem nervous and upset, and one of them seems ill. One of them, a woman, explains that they were camping or hiking and they came upon an apple tree. They ate the fruit but the apples had seeds that were very small and soft and white and close to the skin of the apple instead of in the core, so they didn’t realize they were swallowing the seeds. The woman says that she’s afraid they’re turning into trees because of eating this fruit. The man finds this ridiculous, but he still lets them stay for the night;

In the middle of the night there’s a commotion and one of the group disappears. The woman claims he’s a tree now but the man doesn’t believe her, even though there’s a tree on his property that he can’t recall being there before. The woman asks him to kiss her to comfort her, and he does.

Later, she disappears as well, and the man finds another new tree in the garden and grows more and more uneasy. When he kissed her, he remembers feeling her slip something into his mouth… she slipped one of the seeds into his mouth and now he’s doomed to turn into a tree as well…

The Neighbors

A man lives alone in his apartment. A married couple moves in next door and he can hear them through the wall. The husband and wife often have terrible fights. One day, the man overhears the husband in his deep, booming voice, threatening to kill his wife. The man is so disturbed by what he is hearing that he visits a priest to ask for advice, but he is told it is better not to interfere. One morning, after a particularly nasty fight, he sees the husband getting rid of a dead cat. He decides that if they have another fight, he will confront them about it. However, he finds out the next morning that the husband has died. He wonders if the wife finally worked up her courage to kill him. At the funeral service, he goes over to the wife and conveys his condolences to her. She lifts up her veil and, in a deep booming voice says, “Thank you.”

The Car Accident

A girl and her family watching a news report about a large car accident on a highway. One of the reporters left a microphone on and the viewers could hear the passengers in the pile-up moaning and screaming in agony. In the end, it turns out this is just the girl’s dying hallucination and she and her family actually died in the crash.

A Night Underground

There was a story I read about two boys. One dared the other to spend the night buried underground in a casket in a cemetery. They set up a breathing system, which was basically just a long tube that ran up from the casket and stuck out of the ground. The kid was “buried” and everything was going fine until a well-meaning old lady came through the cemetery and, feeling bad for the unmarked grave with no flowers, stuck a flowerpot in the breathing hole, leaving the kid to suffocate to death underground. In the morning, his friend came back to the grave and saw that the hole has been blocked up. He realized that his friend must be dead, so he just left him there.

X-Ray Eyes

A kid steals some experimental x-ray vision contact lenses. They fuse permanently to his eyes and he starts seeing everyone as monstrous skeletal beings. It eventually drives him insane.

Like Mother, Like Daughter

A girl is raised by her cold, mean mother. The girl is embarrassed by her mother because she always dresses in thick, ugly clothes and never lets the girl go out and have fun. When the daughter becomes a teenager, she meets a guy that she really likes but her mother tries to keep her from leaving the house to see him. One day, the girl gets a headache and it gets worse and worse. The girl touches the back of her head and realizes that she can see her hand. An eye has grown in the back of her head. Her mother, who has been quietly watching all this happen, removes her clothing to reveal hundreds of eyes all over her body. She says that she wasn’t sure if the condition was hereditary or not and that she is sorry it is happening to her. The girl ends up dressing exactly like her mother and staying in the house with her, while everyone in the neighborhood whispers about the two weirdos who live next door.

Meat

A boy’s parents die and he is in the care of his aunt. She hates him and she hates spending money, so she walls him up in the basement and feeds him vegetables. She feeds him through a gap in the bricks. Over time, he regresses to the point where he is feral… more animal than boy… and he keeps pleading for “MEAT!” In the end, he escapes and eats the aunt, then runs off to terrorize the countryside.

The Teleporter

A guy invents a teleportation device. He successfully teleports a pot of flowers. His son uses it without his permission, but the leftover seeds from the plant fuse with his skin. Plants start sprouting all over the boy’s body.

The School on the Edge of Hell

A married couple were driving home from some sort of conference by car. They had to stop in the middle of a forest because something was wrong with the car. Then they went to search for help along the road. They met a boy who kept his head covered with a hood all the time so they couldn’t see his face. He led them into the forest and to an old, abandoned building. It turned out to have once been a school for boys – and all the boys died, because one of them had made a pact with the devil. This one boy’s body is still in the basement of that building, and the couple have to push it into hell to escape.

Soft Things to Eat

I read this short story when I was a kid and it freaked me out. It was about a young boy who goes to visit his grandparents, and everyone in town tells him to stay away from the lake, because there is a monster in it. They tell him that the thing in the lake likes “soft things to eat.” The kid doesn’t believe them so he packs up some chicken and goes to the lake. He gets into a row boat and another boy joins him on the dock and asks if he can get into the boat as well. They row out to the center of the lake and then, the other boy in the boat says something about liking soft things to eat, and he opens his mouth to reveal rows of raxor-sharp teeth.

It’s In The Mirrors

Someone is trying to solve some brutal killings and at the end they figure out that the killer was able to pass from mirror to mirror and that’s how he was committing the murders.

The Chair That Eats People

I read a story when I was 9 or 10 about a group of teens who discover this raggedy armchair in a junkyard of some sort. Somehow they realize that the chair is haunted, and eats people by sucking them down between the cushion and the back of the chair. I think it ends with one of the kids getting eaten by the chair…

The Letter

I read a short story years ago in an anthology of mystery stories. It was about a man who received a letter written in a foreign language. The man couldn’t speak the language and thus couldn’t understand the letter. However, every time he asked someone to translate it for him, that person would refuse to tell him what it said and they would cut off all contact with him. In the end, it turned out that the letter was actually instructing the person who reads it to kill him.

The Telescope

A boy was in his bedroom and looks out through his telescope. He sees some kind of weird cloaked figure in the tower of a church and it freaks him out. The story goes on to follow the boy’s life as he grows up etc etc. Eventually, he becomes a monk and one night he climbs up to the top of the church tower and he sees a boy watching him through a telescope.

Wish Upon a Star

There was a boy who lived with his grandmother in a lighthouse on an island. Years ago, his parents had gone out on a boat with some friends and there was a storm and they all died at sea. The boy hears that if he makes a wish on a certain day of the year, it will come true, so he wishes that his parents were back. That night during a party at their house, a bunch of evil zombie-like people start attacking. It is his parents and the other people who died on the boat. When he wished for them to come back he wasn’t specific enough and they came back just as they were.

Doctor Doctor

An old doctor has a younger wife who is cheating on him with a younger guy. The doctor finds their love notes, where they lovingly refer to each other as their “missing half” and talk about how they long to be together as one. The doctor has an assistant and together they find the place where the wife and her lover meet. They silently break in and find the couple asleep on the bed. The doctor uses an anesthetic to knock them out. There follows a detailed description of the doctor amputating the left leg and left arm of his wife and the right leg and right arm of her lover and grafting the two of them together, keeping them unconscious until the procedure is complete. Then, he leaves them to wake up and find a note telling them that their dreams have come true.

The Underwater Cave

I read a story where some kids who go swimming at a lake. They make up a game in which they have to swim down into an underwater cave and find something that the previous person hid inside. One of them does it, but when he comes back up, he is dead. He was strangled to death and drowned. The other kids are later murdered in their homes and other bodies of water and it turns out that there is some sort of creature in the town’s water, which eventually kills all of the kids.

The Anatomy Lesson

A medical student is doing a project where she has to assemble a human skeleton in the library. It’s a bunch of bones in a dusty old box, in an unused room in the back of the building. While she is assembling it, she notices that this specimen has too many of some bones and not enough of others and the finger bones are especially weird. She tries to turn it in for another skeleton but they tell her that it’s the last one available. She assembles the skeleton as best she can and goes to the teacher to be graded. When the teacher lays eyes on the freakish skeleton, she turns to the student and says that no one has fully assembled this skeleton in years… In fact, not since the teacher herself assembled it decades ago. The teacher asks the student if she feels strange, adding that it will take several days for the changes to start happening. As the teacher reaches out, the girl sees her fingers bend backwards…

The Teacher

I read this story online, but can’t remember where, but it wasn’t from a book. It was very short… There was a teacher with a group of students. The students were described as being attentive, their backs never slouching and their gaze never leaving the front of the classroom. The teacher was proud of the children, and was getting ready to introduce a new student to the class. The teacher brings the student in, and introduces him to the others. He then finds the student a seat, sits her down and nails her hands to the desk and her shoulders to the back of the chair. It is then revealed that the teacher is actually a serial killer, the school is an abandoned warehouse, and the children are all dead.

The School Trip

In the future, a bunch of kids are on a school trip. They are in a spaceship, making their way to a futuristic boy scout camp on another planet. Something goes wrong and the ship crashes on an unidentified planet. The only survivor is a young boy. He witnesses the brutal deaths of his teacher and all of his friends in the crash. He is left alone on a large featureless planet. He walks and walks until he finds something. It is a strange pedestal and perched on the top is a strange ugly alien head/skull thing. The alien is overjoyed to see the boy. It says it has been on the planet alone for ages. It was banished from its home planet for unspecified crimes and sentenced to spend eternity alone on this deserted planet. The alien reveals that it can do anything… anyhting at all… except escape from the planet. When the boy gets afraid and tries to leave, the alien inflicts mental anguish upon him. When the alien realizes that he can’t convince the boy to be stay with him, he plucks images of the protagonists home and family from his mind, and tricks the boy into believing he is home and happy again.

The Hitchhiker

A woman is driving home and she sees a hitchhiker. She is about to pull over and pick him up, but upon closer inspection, she realizes the hitchhiker looks like a psycho. Instead, she speeds up and drives on towards home. The road she’s driving on is has a lot of hills and every hill she goes over, she sees the hitchhiker standing there in the road. Of course, the car runs out of gas, and she has to coast up and down the last few remaining hills, and at the end of the last hill is her house. She plans to coast right into her driveway, into her garage and shut the door. But, as she coasts over each hill, the car goes slower and slower, and the psycho keeps getting closer and closer…

Vampires in Space

There was a comic book I read once about a bunch of people on a space ship. They are heading to a colony on another planet when people start turning up dead with 2 holes in their necks. They finally realize that there is a vampire on board and the only way to kill it is by driving a wooden stake through its heart. However, because they are on a space ship, there is no wood on board, except for this one old man’s cane. In the end, something goes wrong and you see the cane slowly floating away from the ship out into space.

Lead into Gold

I remember one story about a slightly odd and mean girl, who spends a lot of time alone. She invites a boy over to her house and they are in the basement. She tells the boy about an old book she found about alchemy which contains a spell to change lead into gold. They decide to try it out and brew up a magic potion. They throw a lead bolt into the potion and after a puff of smoke, the bolt has changed into solid gold. It works! But then they accidentally drop it and it smashes on the concrete floor. They examine the pieces and discover the gold has changed back into lead. The girl forces the boy to clean it up and looks through the spell book. She wants to play a trick on the boy. She starts acting quite strange and the boy decides it might be a good time to leave. The girl starts mixing up a new potion and quickly drinks it. She shudders and twitches. Then, with a grin, she disappears into a cloud of smoke. The boy is scared and he staggers through the smoke, trying to find the stairs that lead out of the basement. He hears a loud buzzing coming from the dark. The girl has transformed herself into a large black flying beetle. It swoops down after the boy. In a panic, he lashes out, catching the beetle with his fist and dashing it to the ground. Screaming, he lunges and crushes it under his heel, squishing it into the concrete floor. The boy starts screaming and trying to crawl out of the basement, trying to get away from the crushed beetle, which has now transformed back into the twisted and mangled body parts of the young girl. I remember the description very vividly: “a bit of shattered jaw here, a bit of brain there.”

The Boy Who Couldn’t Eat

There was a poor old couple who lived in the woods. They were childless and had a hard time keeping up their small farm. A strange woman appeared one day and she had a quiet young boy with her. She offered to allow the boy to stay and help on the farm. The only rule was that the boy couldn’t eat any of the couple’s food, only a brownish sludge that the woman left for him. The old couple agreed and let the boy stay in the barn. As time passed, the old man and woman became quite attached to the boy. They felt sorry for him because He looked so skinny and malnourished. Eventually, they convinced him to eat something that the wife cooked. He died and when the mysterious woman returned, she admonished the couple for breaking the rule about feeding the boy. She revealed that he had been raised from the dead and the salt in their mortal food had reversed the spell.

Train Tracks

In this story, it’s late at night and two kids are walking home. It’s raining and they decide to take a shortcut by walking on train tracks. One of the kids stops and the other has to go up ahead for some reason. He ends up not coming back for a while and the kid who is left behind hears something walking towards him accompanied by a dragging sound. He moves of to the side and a scary figure walks past him. It turns out that the dragging sound is his friend’s dead body being dragged by the figure.

Dreams in Which I’m Dying

A man is dreaming that he is being chased by some mysterious men on horses. His dreams get progressively more terrifying each night. Each time he dreams, the men get closer and closer and he can see them more clearly. THey are carrying swords. Finally, one night they catch up to him in his dreams. The next day, when his corpse is found in his bed, it looks as though he was sliced to pieces by swords.

Locked In

A group of people are told they won a prize and to collect it, they have to come to the store closes after closing time. When they arrive, they find it was a trick and they are all locked in. A voice tells them they will only be able to leave when they can figure out who ocked them in and why. The people don’t know each other and are all very different, so they can’t seem to find a person they all know in common. Time passes and they have no food and no sleep and are all going out of their minds. Tempers flare and eventually they start sharing secrets about people they’ve hurt in the past who might want to do this to them. They eventually realize that they all contributed to the suicide of one man. One of the women in the group could even have stopped him from jumping in front of the train. They shout out the dead man’s name. The voice tells them they are right. The owner of the voice is the father of the man who committed suicide. In the end, he lets the people go.

Simon

I remember a story about a boy called Simon who had never been normal. He possessed some kind of telekenetic powers. Another boy met Simon during the school holidays and befriended him. Simon bragged that he had the power to make things happen just by thinking about them. At first, the boy thought he was lying, but then Simon proved it. He made a can fall off a bin and made a bird fall out of the sky. The boy introduced Simon to his circle of friends and they found him good fun to be around because he could make all sorts of things happen, like getting them ice lollies for free and sending a bully home crying. However, it soon became clear that Simon was evil and would stop at nothing to get his way. He used his powers to make the boy beat up another kid, then he took the boy home to his parents and tormented them with his powers until they were terrified of their own son. The story took a much darker turn at this point. There were some seriously disturbing scenes in the family home. Then, after Simon was told off by a teacher at school, he caused the teacher to get into a fatal car crash. The boy went home to tell his parents what Simon had done and he made a vow to stay away from Simon. However, somehow he wound up at Simon’s house again. Simon’s mother had just given birth to a baby girl. Simon was plotting to kill her, but the baby turned out to possess the same powers. She looked at Simon from her cot and caused him to be lifted into the air and spun around the room violently, hitting the walls until he fell down dead. The story ended with Simon’s mother looking down at the baby girl in her cot and whispering “Oh no, not her as well…”

Story Idea 1 – The Skipping Rope

A young girl was playing with her skipping rope in the street. She dropped the rope on the ground and went inside to get a drink of water. While she was away, a criminal replaced the skipping rope with an extra-sharp metal wire. The girl finished her drink and returned to play with the skipping rope. Skip skip skip. Suddenly, she caught her leg in the rope and SLIKCH! No more legs! She found herself lying on the ground in a pool of blood. Her feet had been severed at the ankle. The criminal suddenly jumped out of the bushes with a big axe in his hand and cut the poor girl in two. Then, he poured gasoline all over her and lit a match, setting her on fire. Two minutes later… POOF! No more girl!

Story Idea 2 – Double Bad Luck

There was a family man who had two sons. When he got home from work, they would all play games in the back garden. One day, while they were playing a particularly rough game, the man grabbed one of his sons and got him in a headlock. He accidentally broke the boy’s neck. The police were called to the scene of the accident and asked the father how this tragedy could have occurred. The father tried to explain, using his second son to recreate the position. Right in front of the two policemen, the father accidentally broke the neck of his second son.

Story Idea 4 – It Was Me Who Answered

There was a young couple left their house to go on vacation for a week. When they arrived at their destination, the husband bought a new cell phone. To make sure it was working, he decided to call his home phone number, even though nobody was there. He let it ring. After 30 seconds, someone picked up the phone, but he heard no voice on the other end. A little shocked, he assumed he just dialed the wrong number. Upon returning home, the couple found house empty, but hanging on the wall was a note that read: “It was me who answered the phone!”

Story Idea 5 – Bus Full of Mental Patients

There was a bus driver who worked for the county hospital. One day, he was transporting 20 mental patients to the state insane asylum. On th way, he got thirsty and decided to stop for a few drinks at a bar.

When he got back to his bus, he was shocked to find it empty. The mental patients had somehow managed to get free and all of them had escaped. Worried that he would lose his job, the crafty bus driver came up with an idea.

He drove the bus down the road and pulled over at the first bus stop he found. He opened the doors and all of people waiting there got on the bus. The bus driver took them to the insane asylum and told the staff that these patients were especially violent and had to be restrained.

It took many months before the staff of the insane asylum realized their mistake. By that time, many of the people had actually gone insane. The real mental patients have still not been found.

Story Idea 6 – Cyber Love Chatroom

There was a teenage girl named Alice, who was desperate to find herself a boyfriend. One day, she was bored and decided to join a cyber-love chatroom. After fending off weird comments and suggestive messages from the usual giggling 13-year-old boys and middle-aged weirdos, she met a guy who she instantly liked.

He seemed to know all the right things to say. He was thoughtful, romantic and experienced. They found that they had a lot in common. Over the next few days, they chatted online every chance they got. Alice felt herself gradually falling in love. After about a week, their conversations became more racy and Alice decided that she had to meet this guy in person.

She sent him a message, proposing that they should take the next step and meet up at a local coffee shop. The guy e-mailed her, arranging a time and place. He said that he would be wearing a blue jacket. She told him she would be wearing a red dress.

The next day, Alice walked into a coffee shop, wearing a low-cut, figure-hugging red dress. Her heart was pounding at the prospect of finally meeting her Prince Charming. Suddenly, a man in a blue jacket tapped her on the shoulder. She whirled around and looked at him. He stared at her. They both gasped.

“Alice!” he yelled. “Daddy!” she cried.