Folkhorror Stories

This is a short, speculative folk horror piece. It is weird, original and under 2000 words. (A nice quick read.) While my current novel project is a Sci-Fantasy series, horror will always hold a special place in my heart and A Good Yield is the first in several short horror fiction pieces I have authored this year. I hope you enjoy.

Keana Greene was abducted as an infant and raised by a religious cult without ever knowing her true identity. When a mysterious encounter causes her to question everything she's ever known, the dark secrets of her faith begin to reveal themselves. Suddenly plunged into a dangerous world of magick, myth, and horror, Keana enlists the help of two strangers as she seeks to uncover the truth behind her ancient powers before falling victim to a sadistic killer intent on eradicating her entire bloodline.

A cidade de Kerasy Guasu tem três regras não ditas: Nunca faça perguntas sobre o que aconteceu em 1986. Ignore os segredos que afundam no lago. Em hipótese alguma, seja a garota nova da cidade.

Rafael Sabino, filho de um barão do café, é arrancado da vida confortável no Rio de Janeiro e levado para o isolamento da Fazenda Pássaro Branco. O lugar é úmido, silencioso e esconde um segredo ancestral: um brejo que sussurra nomes à noite. Ao descobrir que sua família foi escolhida para guardar uma prisão sobrenatural, e que o preço dessa guarda é o próprio sangue dos Sabinos, Rafael se vê preso entre dois mundos: o amor proibido por Dandara, uma jovem escravizada, e o destino sombrio que o espera nas profundezas do pântano.

The boarding house on Bellweather Lane should have been condemned years ago. Its windows have gone blind with age. Its hallways breathe after midnight. And at the end of the second-floor corridor stands a stained glass door that glows even during power outages, spilling bruised colors across the walls like something alive beneath the paint. Six strangers move in anyway. Cheap rent has a way of silencing instinct. Maren Dorsey arrives last, carrying two overpacked suitcases and a lifetime of exhaustion into a house that feels aware of her before she ever crosses the threshold. The other tenants are young, funny, grieving, restless. People are trying to outrun loneliness, debt, mistakes, and themselves. Then they learn the rules. If you hear a laugh that isn't yours, close your eyes. Count to ten. Don't breathe. Don't open them. Pray. Nobody takes them seriously. At first. Soon, the mirrors stop keeping pace with reality. Water begins climbing upward through drains. Laughter leaks from the vents at impossible hours. A miniature replica of the boarding house appears in Maren's room, changing whenever nobody is looking directly at it. And somewhere inside the walls, something is learning. Watching. Waiting. When the first tenant dies, the house changes. The doors lead to the wrong places. Reflections begin answering back. Names appear where no one wrote them. Every rule hides another lie. As terror spreads through the halls, Maren uncovers a truth buried beneath decades of disappearances and forgotten rituals: The house was never haunted. The house was taught. And whatever waits behind the stained glass door has been expecting her for far longer than she's been alive. This is not a ghost story. This is a story about a house that learned how to hunger. ©️ Relle H

The same night Will Graham enters the Black Lodge, Dale Cooper dreams of an unsettling presence in the woods, and learns exactly what haunts Graham's dreams. (Originally posted to AO3. Companion work to "One More Cup of Coffee." This is my work.

In the quiet Yorkshire village of Hawley, nothing ever truly changes - or so it seems. On the last day of summer, eleven-year-old Isobel "Izzy" Hartley and her friends welcome a new girl into their circle. But when a strange wind sweeps across the moors and leads them to a boy left for dead among shattered mirrors, Hawley begins to unravel. The boy, Cedric, remembers nothing of how he arrived there - only the feeling that something followed him through the glass. As Cedric struggles to understand the world he's woken into, Izzy is forced to confront memories she has spent years avoiding, while the village itself reveals cracks in its history: distorted reflections, missing time, and an ancient presence tied to the moors and maybe Cedric himself. What began as curiosity turns into consequence. Friendships are tested. Secrets surface. And as the mirror-world presses closer, the children realise that Hawley is not haunted by ghosts - but by something that watches, waits, and remembers. Because the moors do not call everyone. And once they choose you, they never truly let you go.

Title: Chuna Maacha Author: IshqkiInk A son comes home from the city. A mother welcomes him with warmth, rain, and his favourite dish - chuna maacha. But hunger turns obsessive. Food becomes ritual. And something ancient begins to feed. Set in the quiet lanes of Odisha, Chuna Maacha is a slow-burn folk horror rooted in caste violence, desire, and vengeance that refuses to die. As a household unravels, a forgotten girl returns - not as a memory, but as a curse. Some ghosts knock. Some wait to be eaten. ⚠️ Content Warning: Psychological horror, caste-based violence, abuse, supernatural elements, disturbing imagery.

The North Star, abandoned for years after a mysterious tragedy that claimed its previous crew, was rediscovered drifting at the London port, its secrets shrouded in darkness. With its new owner determined to restore the ship to glory, the vessel embarks on another voyage. However, the passengers and crew soon confront inexplicable phenomena, gruesome murders. Each character brings their own traumas aboard, with recurring dreams, vivid hallucinations, and memories of lost loved ones haunting them at every turn. The supernatural elements grow increasingly sinister, creating an oppressive atmosphere of paranoia and dread. As the mysteries of the ship unravel, the revelations only deepen the puzzle, pushing the characters to the brink of madness. The novel concludes with an open ending, leaving haunting questions and lingering uncertainties.

Nora buys abandoned storage units at auction for a living - until an eerily cheap unit outside Reno comes with a fine-print rule: clear it completely within thirty days, or "tenancy transfers." A fifty-year-old ledger hidden inside shows exactly what that means, and exactly how many people before her didn't make it out in time.

Every night at 3:00 A.M., Kolkata holds its breath... because that is when three women walk the city-White kurtis. Red borders turned black, barefoot and silent. They do not speak. They do not stop. They hunt UNTIL...

On a world where Canada is a global superpower, Kadence Yates has recently moved to a new city with her father. They are starting a new life after a dark past with Kadence's mother on the reserve. But V20 isn't just any city. It's located on the side of a volcano! There are plenty of cities like this through out Canada. Where people sell precious metals and stones from the cooled down magma. Even selling oil has gotten easier. Thanks to the discovery of it's solid form; Oleum Petrae. People have transformed and refined it into refined oil. Though Kadence is going to be encountering things from myths, legends, and the past of the mining city. Could Kadence take the heat from these scary supernatural threats? Or is there something else she doesn't know about? Something so mysterious that it could only be found in the hot lava of the Vio-Burst volcano.

Hepzibah Kemp is drowned as a witch in 1665 in the village of Port Gwyneth, Cornwall. Her death should have been the end of her story, but she returns to life again, and again, and again to every successive generation of her family. She must find her bones, before the Witchfinder, to lift the curse of eternal life and save creation! Over three hundred years later, after many returns, she still has bones to find. She has to find her feet in the 21st century, convince Mizzy that she is Hep's great-great-great-great granddaughter and persuade her to help in the search. Hep's adventure, past and present, make a fun story for all ages. First book in a trilogy

Deep in the forests of northern Michigan, the Harper family hoped their isolated cabin would help them reconnect. Instead, something in the woods found them first. After a massive elk begins appearing outside their home every night, strange things start happening - scratches on the roof, hoofprints circling the cabin, screams echoing through the trees, and whispers coming from the dark. But this isn't an animal. It watches. It waits. And when it finally opens its mouth, the family realizes the creature isn't hunting for food. It's hunting them. A chilling supernatural horror story filled with psychological terror, twisted folklore, isolation, and a creature that wears fear like skin. You never see it coming in the woods. Until it's already watching you.

There is an ancient pond at Caerlin Howe Farm. On finding her drowned husband there, pensioner Abigail vows to destroy the menacing water and its mockingly heart-shaped plants. Damp suddenly appears about her home. She has strange nightmares and begins sleepwalking. Realizing she has stirred up far more than the mud, the grandmother begins to fear for her sanity and the very lives of her remaining loved-ones.

Jo inherits her family's Montana cattle ranch and finds an old branding iron locked away in a chest her grandfather never let out of his sight - a mark that binds a person to the land itself. When a young ranch hand is accidentally branded during a grass fire, Jo has until dusk to find a way to release him, using a secret only the iron's opposite face was ever built to hold.

In the mountain kingdoms, where church bells ring against the snow and old forests whisper with things older than God, monsters are only meant to exist in peasant tales. Caius never believed in them. A devout man of faith, raised beneath the shadow of the cross, Caius has spent his life believing every soul can be saved and every darkness can be cast out by prayer. But when blood is spilled beneath a dying kingdom and an ancient horror finds him, Caius is forced into a death that does not end. He wakes changed. Cold. Beautiful. Hungry. To complete his turning, he must drink human blood before the night is over - or rot from the inside and die forever. But the greater wound is not the hunger. It is the silence. For when Caius begs Heaven to save him, no answer comes. Now cursed as one of God's Abandoned, Caius is drawn into a hidden world of vampire bloodlines, wolf packs bound by sacred law, witches who bargain with costly magic, and royal families whose thrones are built on rituals darker than any monster's hunger. As kingdoms tremble beneath the weight of old gods and ancient curses, Caius must decide what remains of a holy man when faith has failed him. And if Heaven will not claim him... Perhaps blood will.

An English reconnaissance unit vanished deep in Serbia in 1915. Months later, two soldiers returned-marked by trauma, changed beyond recognition, and obsessed with a place no one could find on any map: Velinovac. A chapel that breathes. Children without eyes. A village not buried in soil, but in memory. Velinovac was never found-because it was never meant to be.

A genderqueer hillbilly and a haunted woman must break a generational curse that has entwined their lives in the abandoned coal-stripped mountains of the Pennsylvania Wilds. *** Desperate to flee a dark past, Finley drives off a cliff and prays to the ancient hemlocks below to catch her fall. But in the abandoned hollows of the Pennsylvania Wilds, everything comes at a price. Tasked by an undead Not-Deer, Finley must find the three talismans that mark the mountain's boundaries in order to break a century old curse, one that has not only haunted the women in her family for generations, but has also bound the supernatural beings to the mountain, including the dead. Fortunately, the handsome genderqueer hillbilly up the road, River Hawthorne, is just as eager [maybe too eager] to break the curse. Together, they navigate the woods where hungry trees walk and other demonic haunts roam, growing closer every moment. But breaking the curse also comes at a price and Finley must decide what freedom is worth when her past comes crawling back through the woods to haunt her. HEARTWOOD blends gothic folk horror with cabincore sapphic romance. Rated Mature for violence, gore, sex, language Content Warnings: body horror, alcohol/drug use, transphobic attack, animal death/hunting, DV/abusive relationships, generational trauma, mentions of suicide & infant death Rankings: 1 in #appalachia 1 in #folkhorror 1 in #transmasc 5 in #gothicromance 8 in #sapphic