Rocks from Nowhere

September 6, 2025

by Naomie

One bright and hot summer afternoon, I decided to take a walk with my younger cousins while a family member was busy building something nearby. We chatted and laughed along the path, teasing each other about local spooky tales, including one about a nearby old bridge said to be haunted.

As we neared the bridge, we climbed onto a small ledge by the river, enjoying the warm breeze and peaceful view. I thought the ghost stories were nothing but fun—until something strange happened.

Suddenly, we heard a splash in the water below. Looking down, we saw small stones dropping into the river—but no one was there. We thought perhaps mischievous kids were throwing rocks, so we ignored it.

Moments later, splashes echoed again—bigger this time. Rocks were landing in the water, but we still saw no one. It felt like the stones were being thrown by someone invisible standing just out of sight, on the riverbank.

Fear crept in. We couldn’t explain what we saw—or didn’t see. Without a word, we turned and ran as fast as we could, hearts pounding, until we reached safety. What began as a sunny, easy walk ended in a rush home with no answers—only the unsettling thought that something unseen might have been there with us.

Even now, when I stroll by rivers or old bridges, I remember that day. It reminds me that even in daylight, in places that feel safe, the unseen can still surprise—and frighten—you.

Leave a Comment Cancel reply

You must be logged in to post a comment.

The Harvest Portrait

The autumn of my sixth year, my grandmother, Nana Rose, held her annual harvest gathering. Our farmhouse, nestled in the amber fields of Nebraska, was the heart of these celebrations. The air smelled of cinnamon and damp earth, and the porch was strung with gnarled gourds and dried corn. My great-grandfather, Pa Anderson, had been […]

The Glass Operator’s Log

Marta Voss had spent the last decade of her life chasing signals. As a radio astronomer at the High Desert Radio Observatory, she lived by data, not by faith. She had debunked more ‘anomalies’ than she could count—cold spots, electronic voices, images of saints in toast. The universe, she told her colleagues, was a beautiful, […]

The Cold Press

I remember that night in late February, the sort of damp chill that settles into old brick and doesn’t let go. I had just finished a double shift at the cannery, my fingers still smelling faintly of brine and metal. The house was one of those narrow, pre-war rowhouses on Hemlock Street, a place I’d […]

The Collector of Lost Hours

The trouble began, I think, with the blackout. Not the one that hit the whole neighborhood—that was just a storm, a tree branch, a transformer. I mean the one that happened inside our house, in the tiny gap between the kitchen and the dining room, on a Tuesday evening when I was carrying a stack […]

The Painted Window

The summer I turned sixteen, my little sister Mira and I started cataloging the impossible. It began with small things—a flowerpot that had moved three inches overnight, the persistent smell of pipe tobacco in a house where no one smoked. Then came the sightings. Mira, who was twelve and had always been more perceptive than […]

The Clover Warning

In the autumn of 1989, my fiancé Marcus and I decided on a final camping trip before our November wedding. We drove deep into the pine woods of northern Minnesota, far from any town, seeking the perfect spot by a cold, clear lake. But the weather had other plans. The wind howled off the lake […]

The Spinning Top in Room 3B

The first time I saw the boy, I was hauling a box of my great-uncle’s old clothes up to the fourth-floor storage room of the Everhart Hotel. The hotel had been in our family for generations, and after my great-uncle’s death, my aunt Cordelia had decided to turn it into a bed-and-breakfast. I was helping […]

The Stairwell at 3:27

The first time I saw it, I was coming down from the attic, a box of old Christmas ornaments in my arms. The stairwell light was a sickly yellow, barely illuminating the narrow passage. A figure stood at the bottom, silhouetted against the dim glow from the kitchen. It was tall, impossibly thin, and utterly […]

The Clockwork Hum

In the autumn of 2015, I found myself in the small, dust-choked town of Marrow, North Dakota, sent there by my company to oversee the digitalization of the local archives. The town was a skeleton of its former self, its main street lined with boarded-up storefronts, a single diner that served grey coffee, and a […]

The Cinder Path

I’m writing this from the burn unit at St. Anne’s Hospital, my hands swathed in bandages, my face still pink and peeling. They say I’m lucky to be alive. I don’t feel lucky. I feel like I’ve been given a glimpse of something that should have stayed hidden, and I’m terrified of what it might […]

The Ceiling Watcher

I remember the summer of 2005, not for the usual reasons a thirteen-year-old might recall a summer, but because it was the summer my grandfather decided to demolish the old Whitmore Sanatorium in upstate New York. He had inherited it decades ago, a crumbling monstrosity of peeling paint, rusted bars, and empty corridors that seemed […]

The Shift That Never Ended

The Cebu DataHub sat in a converted warehouse on the edge of the city, its two floors divided into open-plan cubicles and meeting rooms. The air conditioning hummed a constant, low-frequency drone that seemed to seep into your bones after eight hours. I started there as a technical support agent, answering calls about faulty modems […]