SPOOKTOBER STORY #23:

The Murder Man crouches in the closet, waiting for the sexy teens to come upstairs and do the thing known as sex, so he can murder them with his knives and hands. He can hear them downstairs laughing in a sexy way. His knees hurt from crouching but he knows it will make a better murder if he hides in the closet, instead of just standing in plain sight like an idiot where the sexy teens could see him, which would probably make them run away instead of doing sex together on the bed.

He thinks what he will probably do is: he will use his machete to cut up the boy all at once as a nice surprise and then while he is doing that he will let the girl think she is getting away for a little while but then jump down onto the yard and pin her down with his knee and take off her skin while she is still alive. Then he will probably crucify the bodies for her parents to find when they come home. This is a good murder and the Murder Man smiles when he thinks about it and then he laughs a little too, but quietly so the sexy teens don't hear him. He has done a lot of murder over the years, but he still finds a way to keep it interesting for himself.

The Murder Man thinks about what he will make for dinner and he thinks maybe a nice vegetarian lasagna that will last through the week. He has a lot of fond memories of eating vegetarian lasagnas at his grandma's house, and remembering these memories makes him happy. He pats his grandmother on the cheek lovingly, which he can do because he is wearing her face like a spooky mask. When he made the mask he was sure to stitch her soft old mouth into a smile, because that is how he likes to remember his grandma: always smiling.

Yes, he thinks, I have lived a good long life and have done a lot of nice murders too. I am the Murder Man, that is me, and I have done the best I can with what little I was given. There is a lot of comfort in that.

SPOOKTOBER STORY #22:

The natural process of aging and decay.

SPOOKTOBER STORY #21:

You love your mother, even after dementia and the pain of the cancer made her forget and then hate you; but you don't think the tumorous thing crawling towards you across the floor of her bedroom is your mother anymore.

SPOOKTOBER STORY #20:

The human-flesh devouring robot from the future (disguised as a regular human) is chewing on a ricotta ravioli and thinking "This is the nicest date I've ever been on," right as the first alert comes in, flashing mildly in the lower right of his cone of vision.

CORE TEMPERATURE RISING. DEVOUR HUMAN FLESH TO AVOID OVERHEATING.

The robot disguised as a regular human frowns. This is very bad timing.

"Is something wrong?" Megan asks him. Her eyes are intelligent and robin's egg blue. During their conversation about beekeeping, before the food came, the human-flesh devouring robot noticed that when she gets excited she brushes her strawberry blonde hair repeatedly behind her right ear. A piece of chicken is suspended on her fork as she reads his face. She looks worried. The robot realizes it is because he's frowning. He stops frowning and smiles instead.

"Oh, no! I got a piece of spinach in my teeth. I'm having a really nice night. I mean, time. Also a nice night, though."

"Me too," she says, and pops the piece of chicken in her mouth.

CORE TEMPERATURE RISING. DEVOUR HUMAN FLESH TO AVOID OVERHEATING.

"Excuse me, I'm going to go deal with this, uh..."

"Spinach situation?"

"Spinach situation. Pardon me."

The robot stands and walks through a small hallway into the men's room. There's no attendant, which is good. There are no other humans to eat, though, which is bad. The temperature alert is flashing more urgently now. He is getting pretty worried, if he doesn't eat a human in the next five minutes he will probably burst into flames and that will not only ruin his date with Megan but it will also kill him dead.

CORE TEMPERATURE RISING. DEVOUR HUMAN FLESH TO AVOID OVERHEATING.

He decides to perch on the counter, out of sight of the door, and dive on the first person to walk through it. He could run outside and gobble up the maître d' in full view of the house, but that would ruin his chances with Megan, and the robot is having a really nice time talking to her. She could be the one, he thinks, and smiles despite the increasingly anxious warnings in his visual display.

Minutes pass. No one enters the bathroom. The alert changes, flashing hugely, nearly blinding him:

CORE MELTODOWN IMMINENT! DEVOUR HUMAN FLESH IMMEDIATELY!

He sighs and climbs down off the counter. Why did he ever think he could live a normal life, maybe meet someone nice, compartmentalize his need to devour human flesh and live simply with a woman like Megan? Once she sees him murder and eat the maître d', that is going to be that. No more hope for a normal life.

Suddenly, the door bangs open. It's Megan, tears streaming down her face. He reels in surprise. "Megan, what's wrong?"

CORE MELTDOWN IMMINENT! DEVOUR HUMAN FLESH IMMEDIATELY!

"There's something I have to tell you, and I'm so sorry, I wish to God that things were different," she gasps out. "See, the thing is: I'm actually a robot from the future, and I have to devour human flesh in order to keep from overheating. This wasn't supposed to- I was really having a nice time tonight, but I have to..."

She embraces him tenderly and unhinges her jaw to chomp down on his neck. Her teeth sink through soft flesh and muscle, and clink against his steel-reinforced robot skeleton.

Understanding washes over Megan's and she looks up at the robot disguised as a human, tears starting to trickle down his cheeks as well.

"I was having a really nice time tonight too," he says, as they burst into flame.

SPOOKTOBER STORY #19:

Look, there's seven billion other fucks on this planet, and no matter your sad little rubric, it's still hugely likely that neither you or anyone you know is ever going to be notable in any way.

SPOOKTOBER STORY #18:
white person: one booze
white person: more than one booze am i right
white people: hahahahaha
white person: you're so bad

SPOOKTOBER STORY #X:

5am: Jon Phillips sits in his bedroom, wide awake, having not slept in 31 hours. A Mr. Coffee machine grumbles from between his legs.

"Jon. Look. You've gotta keep making it in me."

Mr. Coffee sputters his last spurt as Jon finishes his undetermined bout of intense concentration.

"Jon. You've got to fill me up. You've got to turn me on."

Jon grinds for thirty seconds while Mr. Coffee writhes in anticipation.

"This is it, don't stop."

Jon opens Mr. Coffee, but there is a spider inside. The spider bites Jon, he shrieks, and becomes dead.

"Jon" grumbles Mr. Coffee.

"This was the best you never had."

SPOOKTOBER STORY #17:

A writer in Maine runs afoul of a generally innocuous thing that is imbued with malevolent supernatural powers and as it rends the fabric of his small town community he is hit by a car. This is a metaphor for substance abuse.

SPOOKTOBER STORY #16:

The thing heaved impossibly, my mind unable to comprehend its locomotion. It toppled towards me as if a collapsing building, climbing endlessly inwards or forward, joints buckling in sickly peristalsis, mouth-things forming silent invocations, rifts spitting and vanishing along vast semiorganic fissures. My last coherent thoughts before I finally went stark, raving mad: "this will make a dope spooktober story; can't wait for all those sweet likes and shares"

SPOOKTOBER STORY #15:

Chef Bobby Flay stares at the dish, his hands trembling. "Chef..." he starts, before losing his nerve and trailing off. He raises his eyes from the plate and looks across the table at Chef Bobby Flay, his perfect hair swept back from his forehead in a firey tsunami, pale blue eyes like daggers piercing Chef Bobby Flay's own with their intensity. He composes himself. "Chef, describe your dish." Chef Bobby Flay smiles, confident in his presentation. "What I've prepared for you today, Chef, is..."

But Chef Bobby Flay doesn't even need to listen to know the ingredients. Next to the julienned carrots and roasted brussel sprouts, staring at him through a red wine reduction, is the face of Chef Bobby Flay, a faint smile still on his lips.

SPOOKTOBER STORY #14:

She escapes the house
The drill wound gets infected
She dies anyway

SPOOKTOBER STORY #13:

The funk
The funk is
The funk is taking
The funk is taking over
Please help
Please help
The funk
The funk
Can you feel the funk
God help me
Please god help me
I can feel the funk
Deep down in my bones
Funk moving me and grooving me
Please kill me
Please kill me
The funk

SPOOKTOBER STORY #12:

At first I found it unsettling when the floorboards began to give me advice. "Dig... dig... dig..." they implored. I hadn't been sleeping a lot around that time and had felt (but not really registered... I've never been the most observant cowpoke on the dude ranch) the vibrations for a few weeks beforehand, it wasn't until the clarity my mother's funeral provided that I was finally able to suss out the floorboards'... let's say "exotic"... accent.

I clawed at the floor for a while with knives and screwdrivers and my fingernails and so forth, but the pit I drew after two weeks was barely even worth mentioning. Eventually I gave up. What can you do? I'm not an excavator. I live in an apartment building. I'm on the third floor, for chrissakes! I really dinged up my security deposit, doubtlessly, but I'll probably just end up slipping away in the middle of the night anyway.

I've been asking the floorboards for dating advice lately: I'm pretty lonely! But the advice they give always seems distracted, half-hearted. "There's other fish in the sea, you deserve someone special, just be yourself,"... that sort of thing. I think they were really set on the digging and are disappointed in me for giving up on it so early. Maybe I'll start hitting up garage sales, if I ever get a pickaxe or a shovel, maybe I could make some headway on their project, so they could help me with mine! I really am very lonely. I really, really am.

SPOOKTOBER STORY #11:

ghosts!

SPOOKTOBER STORY #10:

I reached for a Nabisco Halloween Oreo™ Chocolate Sandwich Cookie, craving the delicious chocolatey crunch and double-stuft seasonal orange cream filling- but to my horror, when I opened the bag... there were none left! Luckily more were just a short drive away; and this time I made sure to buy twice as many!

Tell us your most frightening spooky Nabisco™ brand stories in the comments below, and don't forget to stock up in time for Halloween!

[This post was accompanied by a temporary profile picture and cover image change to match the Halloween Oreo branding]

SPOOKTOBER STORY #9:

"Yaaassss, QUEEEEEN," her followers cry, writhing at the feet of the Selfie Mother, swaddled in her decaying regal vestments, bound by effluvium and rot, her bifurcated jaw grinding the skull of a softboy whose disconnected nervous system is still being really gross and pervy.

"Me IRL," they shriek, their unified voices piercing the heavens. "TFW ur cute and u know it fire emoji,"

The Selfie Mother lifts her royal brow from what's left of the softboy, the grime of a thousand dead seas slipping from her sabre-like cheekbones and splattering onto the grim cathedra she has perched upon for an eon.

She spreads her wings, vast and terrible, the dying sun a pale fog, enunciating every vein and tendon in shadow, and when she takes to the air, it is to the steadily fading chant of "Eyebrow game on fleek... eyebrow game on fleek... eyebrow game on fleek..."

SPOOKTOBER STORY #8:

"ronald.reagan.sextape.AVI" [21:03:12 08/03/2008]
!~WARNING: LARGE VIDEO SIZE~!

^^VERIFIED DOWNLOAD^^

SPOOKTOBER STORY #7:

"That's a real honey of a story," Polhous tells the dame, lighting another cigarette, flicking the spent match into the wastebin, "I might believe it, too, you'd taken another year in acting school."

She screams again, "Please help me!"

He rubs a smudge from his shoe with a rough thumb, and examines the damage while he talks: "Sorry, kid, you're a real knockout, but your tale ain't. You're laying it on too strong, too much sound and fury, for there to be anything behind it. A little advice: you can't turn a dime into a dollar by throwing an ing-bing."

The dame doesn't respond, too busy choking on her own blood. The killer stands from her corpse, grinning, splattered crimson from head to toe.

He turns to Polhous, who lazily lifts the iron from his desk and puts pills in the killer till he's dead.

"Huh," he muses, ashing onto the corpse. "I guess she was telling the truth."

His secretary Janet enters with a piece of paper for him to sign. She looks around at the carnage. "Who's the stiffs?"

"She's a potential client, but she got zotzed before she shelled out the clams. He's the one what did it."

Janet glares at Polhous as he signs the papers. "You're a real cutie-pie, you know that? One of these days you're going to need to keep a client vertical till they've signed the check, or we're going to be out on the street."

"Love you, Janet."

She doesn't look back as the door closes behind her. "A real cutie-pie."

SPOOKTOBER STORY #6:

SPOOKTOBER STORY #5:
I supine snoodled, swaddled in my mattressclothes, ready to tromble off to sandland with a fancy imagine in my main crane. But prior of slipping down Sleep Mountain, I eared the hootle of a janglebones, happy toothing in my window. "Shoo, janglebones," I sad asked, but janglebones sup sad asks for sunrise eggs and lickety I was pappling in tremblehouse, sheer, framming. Yet, the janglebones hootled no more, clockspins dialed, and in the sleep time even the hard graw of gooseflesh couldn't keep me from sandland...

...but far else than fancy imagines, Dreamish held naught but the gnashsmile and shiny vorpal of the janglebones, trailed me there, that there where I still am painjailed today, and ever and ever.