Good evening, it’s Spooky Boo from Spooky Boo’s Scary Story Time. Tonight I have four spooky scary stories for you to enjoy. I’m having fun reading your submissions. While I can’t get to all of them at once, I’ll add them to the queue. Be sure to listen to see when your story plays! And if you haven’t sent it in yet, submit your story at www.scarystorytime.com
Now let’s begin…
STORY ONE
Mia from California
Okay, I can’t stop shaking while I’m typing this. My name’s Mia, I’m 19, and I swear to god everything I’m about to say actually happened last year at the county fair.
Me and my roommate Jess went because we were both dying from summer midterms and needed a break. The moment I smelled the funnel cake I had to have one so we bought one each with a large soda. . We rode the Tilt-A-Whirl twice, screaming and laughing until our stomachs hurt. Everything felt normal, you know? Safe.
Then we walked past the Fun House.
It was kinda tucked back behind the Ferris wheel, all faded red and yellow paint peeling off. There was this giant clown face painted over the door that looked like it was smiling way too hard. Jess was like, “Nope, too sketchy,” and wanted to skip it, but I was feeling stupid and brave. I told her I’d just go quick and meet her at the corn dog stand in ten minutes. That was a huge mistake.
I was standing there buying my ticket when this clown stepped out from the shadows right next to the entrance. Full makeup, it had a baggy polka-dot suit, giant red nose. But something was off with his face. The white paint looked all cracked and old, like it had been sitting there for years. His eyes were completely black tgere was no shine, no life, just dead looking. He tilted his head and smiled so wide I could see every single yellow tooth.
“Hey pretty girl,” he said in this high, sticky voice. “Come inside. I have something special just for you.” He held up this piece of candy wrapped in old yellow wax paper that looked all sticky and gross. “Just for sweet ones like you. Go deeper in… you’ll laugh forever.”
I laughed nervously so I didn’t sound rude, but I’m not sure if I passed the test. My feet started moving anyway. I walked in. The Fun House had mirrors everywhere There were spinning floors and black lights. His laugh kept bouncing around like it was coming from inside my own head. I kept seeing him in every reflection, getting closer each time, waving me deeper. “Come on, Mia,” he whispered, even though I never told him my name. “Stay with me. The police can’t find me anymore.”
I spun around in circles looking for a way out. I felt trapped. How in the hell did he know my name?
My chest got tight. I turned around to run and slammed right into a mirror that wasn’t a mirror—it was him. Solid for half a second. His cold fingers grabbed my wrists. I screamed, twisted out of his grasp. Then I bolted for the exit sign, tripping over my own feet the whole way. I busted out the back door sobbing so hard I couldn’t even breathe.
Jess was already standing there waiting, face totally white. “Mia, what the hell?”
I told the security guard everything. At first he rolled his eyes, but when he saw how bad I was crying and the red marks from his cold fingers on my wrists, he radioed two other guards. These big dudes with flashlights. They went in laughing, one of them joking, “We’ll drag that clown out by his big shoes.”
They never came back out.
Ten minutes passed. Then twenty. The fair manager shut the whole ride down. Cops showed up and searched every inch. There were no clowns. There were no guard. There were no cops in there. Just empty hallways and dusty mirrors. They ended up closing the fair early that night. People were whispering all over the place.
On the way home Jess told me this rumor she’d heard from one of the old carny guys. Back in 1957 there was a clown named Rusty who worked the Fun House. He’d lure girls inside, lock the doors, do awful stuff to them. One night a bunch of parents finally caught him. The police shot him right there in the mirror maze. They say he still walks around in there some nights, still calling out to “pretty girls,” still smiling that same smile.
I keep having dreams about those black eyes and that red nose. I keep hearing him say my name.
My advice? Just stay away from the Fun House. He’s still waiting for you.
STORY TWO
Tyler from Texas
I’m still freaking out bad and my hands won’t stop shaking while I type this. My name’s Tyler, I’m 18, and what happened last night at the county fair still doesn’t feel real at all.
Me and my buddies Jake, Jenna, and Angela went because we wanted one last stupid fun night before senior year was over. The Ferris wheel looked sick: huge, all lit up with blinking colors, spinning slow against the dark sky. We piled into one of the swinging cars, laughing our asses off as it lifted us up.
Everything was chill at first. We were all the way at the very top when the wheel just jerked to a stop. The car rocked hard and then… just stayed there. We figured it was normal, like they were letting people off or something. Then we looked down.
Two carnies in dirty orange vests were going at it right below us, screaming and shoving each other near the control booth. One had a wrench, the other was swinging a metal bar. They were yelling shit we couldn’t really make out, but it looked bad. We started shouting “Hey! Get us down!” over and over. Jake was leaning halfway out yelling the loudest. Angie was crying. I kept checking my phone, but it was dead. Our watches were dead, too. Nothing worked.
We screamed for what felt like forever. People walking around on the ground just kept going like they couldn’t even hear us or they couldn’t even see the fight going on. The brawl kept going. Punches, cursing, one guy slamming the other into the fence. Our car was swinging harder every time we yelled. It felt like an hour. It was more than an hour. My legs were numb from sitting there, my throat was raw. We kept checking our watches, counting the minutes. It had to be at least seventy minutes up there, easily.
Finally, the wheel started moving again, super slow, and brought us down. This old carny with a beard unlocked our door and let us off like nothing had happened. We were all pale and shaking. Angie was still sobbing.
I grabbed the guy’s arm and said, “What the hell? Those two were fighting down there and left us stuck up there for over an hour!”
He looked at me like I was crazy. “What fight? The ride wasn’t even supposed to be running tonight. We had it shut down for maintenance. Nobody’s been operating it.”
We all started arguing with him. Jake pulled out his phone, now it worked, and showed the time. 8:47 p.m. We got on at 8:42. Only five minutes had passed. I checked my watch again. Angie’s, Jenna’s, everyone checked their own watches. All of them said five minutes. But we’d been checking them the whole time we were up there screaming. I swear on my life it was over an hour. We were freezing, starving, our voices were gone from screaming. How does that even happen?
The old carny got this weird look on his face and lowered his voice. “Listen… years ago, back in ’98, two carnies got into it real bad while the wheel was running. A little kid in one of the cars panicked, climbed out, and fell. Died right there. They say sometimes the wheelremembers. Stops when it shouldn’t. Shows you the fight. But time…time don’t move the same.”
We didn’t believe him at first. But when we asked around, a couple of the old-timers just nodded like it was common knowledge. There was no video, no witnesses from our experience tonight. Just our story and four watches that all lied. Some say the fair and the police had closed up the case and said nothing so the tourists wouldn’t catch on.
I keep replaying it in my head. The screaming. The car swinging. Those two carnies beating each other up while we begged to get down.
I’m never riding another Ferris wheel again. If you hear the wheel stop and see the fighting below… don’t yell. Just close your eyes and pray it lets you off in five minutes. Because sometimes it doesn’t.
STORY THREE
Anonymous from California
I was sixteen the night it happened, the summer before junior year. My parents were out of town for my dad’s work thing, and I’d begged them to let me stay home alone instead of crashing at my grandma’s. I was at the fair earlier that day and some creepy dude was following me around so I was glad to just get home and rest.
The house felt huge and quiet, but I liked it that way. I stayed up late texting my best friend, who in this story I will call Tina. She left around eleven after we watched a movie. Around two in the morning I finally turned off the lights and rolled over in bed.
That’s when I felt it.
Not a sound. Just this heavy, watching feeling, like someone had stepped into my room and was standing by the door. I figured Tina had come back for something she forgotten. She does that. I whispered, “Tina?” and sat up a little. The streetlight through my blinds lit up faintly across the carpet. There was definitely a shape there, taller than Tina, shoulders too wide. It was a man. He wasn’t moving. He was just staring at me.
My heart slammed so hard I could feel it in my teeth. I tried to scream. My mouth opened, my throat worked, but nothing came out. The air felt thick. My voice was trapped inside it, muffled and small, the way sound gets underwater. I clawed at my throat like that would help. The figure took one slow step forward, then another. There were no footsteps. Just the shape gliding closer.
When he reached the foot of my bed I saw he had no face. Where the face should be was only a swirling black mess, like smoke turning in on itself. He had no eyes. He didn’t even have a mouth. Just that endless, slow churn. He kept moving until he was right beside me. I couldn’t move. My arms were locked at my sides like someone had poured concrete over them.
He leaned down. The cold hit my left arm first—like someone pressing dry ice straight to the skin. It burned and froze at the same time, so sharp I thought he’d sliced me open. I tried to jerk away but my body wouldn’t listen. Then everything went black.
I woke up to sunlight and birds. My room looked completely normal. My phone was still charging on the nightstand. For about ten seconds I felt relief so big it made me laugh out loud. Just a nightmare. A stupid, vivid nightmare, I thought.
Then I looked at my arm.
A perfect oval of bright red skin, the size of a silver dollar, sat right below my shoulder. The edges were raised and shiny, like a fresh ice burn. It throbbed when I touched it. I stared at it until my stomach turned.
My mom got home that afternoon. I showed her the mark and told her everything. She listened, face tight, then drove us straight to urgent care. The doctor, a tired-looking guy in his fifties, examined the burn under a bright lamp.
“Classic ice burn,” he said. “How long did you keep the ice on it?”
I blinked. “I didn’t.”
He gave me the look adults give kids who they think are lying. “TikTok salt and ice challenge? I’ve seen three of these this month.”
My mom sighed like she was embarrassed for me. “She knows better than that.”
I kept saying I hadn’t done any challenge. I hadn’t even been on TikTok that night. They nodded the way you nod at someone who’s clearly covering for something stupid. My doctor gave me a cream and told me to keep it clean. My mom made me promise not to do it again.
The mark is still there, faded to a pale pink circle that never quite tans. Sometimes, late at night, I wake up and feel that same thick air pressing down on my chest. I don’t turn on the light anymore. I just lie there and wonder if he’s standing by the door again, waiting for me to look.
I never told my mom the worst part.
I still can’t scream.
STORY FOUR
Anonymous in San Francisco Bay Area
Okay, so I don’t really tell this story a lot anymore. I’m thirty-four now, got a kid running around. I got a house payment, and all that normal crap. But sometimes somebody asks why I get weird about hiking alone and it just kinda comes out. So here it is.
This was back when me and Trina were twenty-three, somewhere around 2015. We’d been tight since high school. That Saturday we were both bored as hell. Our boyfriends — mine was Derek, hers was Mike — they were off helping Mike’s dad fix some fence or whatever. Trina texts me: “woods behind the old mill, 2 o’clock, bring water.” I’m like, sure, the leaves are all golden and crunchy, why not.
We parked at the trailhead and started walking in. Just talking about regular stuff — should she dump Mike because he still stays up all night playing Xbox? Should I quit my shitty barista job. Normal dumb twenty-three-year-old talk. The sun was cutting through the trees, the air smelled like wet dirt and somebody burning leaves way off. It was nice.
But Trina saw it first.
She stopped to tie her shoe. I was looking down at my phone trying to see if I had any signal. When I looked up, she was just standing there frozen, one shoe still undone, staring straight ahead. She goes, real quiet, “You seeing this?”
I look where she’s looking. About thirty yards up the trail there’s this… thing coming toward us. At first I thought it was a person, tall and skinny, wearing like a gray hoodie. But it wasn’t walking right. Its legs were moving like it was taking steps, but its feet weren’t touching the ground. It was just floating along, six inches above the dry, fallen pine needles. The whole thing had this faint blue glow to it, and where the face should have been it was just kinda blurry and shimmery.
We both just stopped. My mouth went totally dry. My legs couldn’t even move.
It kept coming, slow and steady. Then it reached this big oak tree on the left side of the trail. Instead of going around it, the thing just kinda melted into the trunk. I’m not kidding. One second it was there, next second it was gone inside the tree. And right after that every tip of the branches on that tree lit up the same blue color. Not bright like lights, just this soft glow. It lasted a few seconds, then the glow faded and the thing stepped back out of the tree and kept going toward the next one. Did the exact same thing.
Trina whispered, “What the hell is that?” Her voice sounded so small.
I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t. It was getting closer, maybe twenty yards now. You could see the air around it rippling a little, like heat off the road in summer.
That’s when Trina sneezed.
Just a little allergy sneeze from all the pollen, I guess, I’m sure. But it sounded loud as hell in the quiet. The thing stopped dead. Its whole body turned toward us — not like a human turn, it moved inside itself and then was facing us. I swear I could feel it looking right at her, even though there were no eyes.
We both held our breath.
It started floating straight at Trina. Not fast, not slow. Just steady, like it had all day. She tried to back up but her foot caught on a root and she sat down hard on the trail. I grabbed her arm, pulled her up trying to get her to run, but my hands were shaking so bad.
The thing reached her and just poured into her chest, the same way it went into the trees. One second it was outside, next second it was gone inside of her. She lit up inside for half a second with that same blue glow. Then she screamed.
It wasn’t a normal scream. It sounded wrong, like something else was using her voice. She arched her back once, eyes were wide open, and then she just dropped sideways onto the leaves, out cold.
The thing slid back out of her, floated over to the next tree, lit up the branches for a second, and then it just disappeared. The woods went back to normal. Birds started making noises again like nothing happened.
I dropped down next to her. She was breathing but really shallow. I pulled my hoodie off and put it under her head. Then I grabbed my phone to call anyone but the battery was dead, even though I’d charged it that morning. So I just sat there with her. Kept talking stupid so I wouldn’t freak out. “Remember that time we snuck into the reservoir?” “You still owe me twenty bucks from that poker night.” My voice sounded fake and loud. The sun went down. It got cold.
It was almost fully dark when we finally heard the guys yelling our names. Derek and Mike had gotten worried when we stopped answering texts. They came running down the trail with their flashlights. Mike saw Trina and just started cussing under his breath. They didn’t ask a bunch of questions right then. They just picked her up — one under the shoulders, one under the knees — and carried her all the way back to the cars.
They took her straight to the hospital. Doctors did every test — blood test, CT scans, all of it. They didn’t find anything wrong. They called it a coma but couldn’t explain why. Her parents drove up. I stayed in the room a lot, just holding her hand.
On the third morning she woke up. Opened her eyes like she’d taken a regular nap. Asked for water, asked what day it was. She didn’t remember any of it. Not the hike, not the thing, nothing after we left the parking lot. Doctors said sometimes the brain just blanks stuff out when it’s bad. Then they sent her home.
Trina’s fine now. She’s married to somebody else, has two little girls. She works in the elementary school library. But sometimes she’ll text me late at night stuff like, “Tomorrow your kid’s gonna spill grape juice all over the white couch at like at 6:17. Put a towel down.” Or, “Don’t take 580 tomorrow, there’s gonna be a wreck by Altamont around 8:45.” And it always happens exactly as she says. She calls them her “previews.” Says they only show her the next day, never farther out, and usually right when she’s about to fall asleep. She doesn’t like talking about it much.
I asked her one time if she ever feels like something’s still in there from that day. She just shrugs and and says, “I feel like me. But sometimes I dream I’m walking through trees and they light up when I touch them. Then I wake up and I already know what my oldest is gonna say at breakfast.”
I still go hiking sometimes. But never by myself and never in those woods. We moved twenty miles away. I won’t even drive past that area anymore. Every October though, I think about how dead quiet it got right before she sneezed. Think about that thing turning toward her like it was waiting for her to make a sound.
And then I wonder if it’s still floating around out there, going tree to tree, waiting for somebody else to sneeze or step on a stick or whatever.
Thank you for listening. If you enjoyed these stories, please make a comment on the website where you listened. Also, I’d love to tell your true scary stories. Visit my website at www.scarystorytime.com and fill out the form to send in your spooky, scary story and it might get played on the air. You can also call 707-SPOOKYB. That’s 707-776-6592 and leave a message of up to 3 minutes. The story will be transcribed for a new show and also it might be played on the Splatterday Nightmares live stream on YouTube.
Please share the podcast with your friends and let them know about these spooky, scary stories.
I can’t wait to hear from you!
That’s all for tonight.
I’ll see you in your nightmares.
——
Credits:
Anonymous listeners
Intro:
The Order’s Theme – MYUU
Stories:
Abyss – MYUU
Midnight Society Pack #3