Of ghosts and things

CREEPS

A hiker finds the skeletal remains of a body. The skeleton is intact except for a shattered skull. Forensic examination of the remains shows that the deadly blow came from inside the skull.

The room you are in has a large picture on the wall of the local skyline lit up at night. As you turn to leave the room, out of the corner of your eye, you see a window in one of the buildings go dark.

You are walking somewhere familiar; maybe up your own driveway. You glance across your yard and you see someone standing inside a window watching you. There is no house connected to the window. When you realize this and look back the window is there just long enough for the person inside to pull the blinds shut.

Walking on a crisp autumn morning, you happen to be looking at a tree across the street when you hear a brittle snap. In less than a minute’s time, every single bright yellow leaf from the maple falls to the ground, all at once.

You keep seeing a small child out of the corner of your eye, staring in abject terror at the space just behind you.

You're walking home at night, and happen across a half dozen cats sitting in a circle. They turn to stare at you until you've walked past them.

You're going about your business, when a song you've never heard comes up on your music player. The words are foreign, discordant and catchy, and it's difficult not to sing along. When you check for the name of the song you realize the player ran out of batteries several minutes ago.

You walk into a room, and see the furniture has just settled back into it's proper places.

Each night as you lay down in your bed, a streetlight outside your window goes dark.

You've lived inland your entire life, but the one time you visited the ocean it smelled.... Like you were finally home. You'll be back.

You're casually checking your appearance in the mirror. Your reflection looks at something behind you in horror.

Snow gently falls covering the world in a thin blanket of glistening white. Something crawls beneath the snow, something much larger than the snow's depth should allow.

As you drive home from work, a man wearing a red hood stands on every street corner and watches your car drive by. Is it the same man at every corner?

You awake in a cold sweat,your bedroom door closes right as your eyes open

One particularly hot summer's day, you notice no one around you is casting a shadow. Neither are you.

Your life went back to normal pretty fast after that car crash, except that every time you fall asleep a distant voice whispers "Please, wake up" in your ear.

 a man approaches you, hands you an ornate horn then is gone

You're getting quite drawn into the book you've been reading for quite some time now. It's getting late, you know you should stop and get some sleep already. You can't bring yourself to stop however; it's just too damn good. The next day, you show it to your friends to explain your sleepiness/tardiness.
"Dude, is this some kind of joke or something? I can't read a word of this..."
Now that he mentions it, it IS in fact just a tangle of lines, angles, and alien symbols that seem just barely organized. Regardless of this fact, you can still read it perfectly. It is still just as compelling to you as it was before.

You are visiting your parent's graves. As you begin to re-trace your steps through the graveyard back to your car, you begin to hear spastic thumping beneath your feet.

Late at night, you are roused from sleep by a strange sound. There is a strange voice you do not recognize coming from the closet, too tinny to be a human. Though the lack of sleep coupled with momentary confusion has frightened you, you decide not to let your fears get the better of you. You open the closet, and realize the sound is coming from a high shelf. You pull down a terribly aged shoe box, and fish out a Porky the Pig toy you haven't seen in years. You're too tired to pay attention to what it's saying...or to the fact that the batteries should have died long ago. As you shake the batteries out of it, you finally start paying attention...just in time to hear it speak:
"I seriously hope you didn't just do that."

You go about your day, start finding teeth in random places when you are alone. They seem to disappear when you try to show people.

When you are not paying attention to the people around you and they aren't talking directly to you, you can't hear them talking, only a low hum of static.

While washing, you discover you are pulling out body hair in small handfuls, but only when water is touching your skin. It doesn't grow back.

Both your hands are full, and you keep trying to reach for things with your other arm. You're not sure why it surprises you that you only have the two.

After one too many sleepless nights kept awake by the banging and scraping in the apartment over yours, you go to file a noise complaint with the manager. He stares blankly and points out you live on the top floor.

Idly looking at a clock or watch, you see it tick backwards by a minute.

You've always been annoyed by the collection of grotesque statues and gargoyles your neighbor keeps in their yard, and slightly curious why they bother rearranging them every afternoon when you're at work. (spoilers, no one actually lives there)


BBEG
All I'm saying to y'all is that life is a wholly unnatural and abominable construct that has no business existing.

A meteorite impacts a lifeless planet, leaving a giant molten crater. And that's fine. Been happening for billions of years, will happen for billions more, and nothing comes of it. But life impacts life, leaving a bloody scar, and suddenly there's pain! Life becomes stressed about dying, screams in agony, etc etc. There's still no purpose to any of it, but something is suddenly aware of the march of entropy. And there's no reason for this knowledge, no reason at all. For one blink of the universe's eye, some matter became aware of the fact that it's ultimate fate was annihilation, and it was afraid, so it started creating more doomed matter to be afraid, and the cycle just started spiraling out of control, and that was life. Just matter suddenly screaming and pissing itself over the fact that things fall apart. And to what end? The screaming matter can't stop things from falling apart, it can only make other matter scream for a short while, before it falls apart too. Ain't wrong with falling apart. Only natural course of things, that's all.

So why continue this little cycle of screaming? Nothing good ever came out of being alive. Nothing bad ever came of it neither, I reckon, on account of how bad and good are just things life screams about for a short while, before life reverts back to its natural state. It's not death that makes you scream and fall apart. Nope, that's all life's doing. And I guess I could just wait for life to run out of steam on its own, but I could also nip it in the bud, before it gets even more noisy and self-aware of how useless its noise is. And in the big picture, It don't matter one way or the other. But life screams about not wanting to scream, and there's a simple solution: end life! Life gets what life wants, and it all goes back to how things were. Real nice, that is.

SPACE CREEPS

- A derelict where every stasis tube on a ship has been broken, killing their inhabitants, except one. This half broken tube causes the bottom half of a man's body to decompose over thousands of years, while his top half remains alive. Upon being revived, he screams for two minutes straight then dies of shock.

- The crew is going through a routine checkup by boarding a shuttle for a flyby. The airlock begins to pressurize normally, until one of the crew realizes that there is nothing but the vacuum on the other side.

- During a procedural maintenance, a character suddenly notices that his/her heart hasn’t been beating during the course of the whole EVA

- The communication signal goes off, and when one of the pc's answers it, they hear the voice of a dearly departed family member pleading with them to stop what they are doing and go live a normal life. (Caused by time dilation, the message is received long after it was relevant. There is no turning back.)

-The players return from a spacewalk, and none of them can remember why they were outside the ship in the first.

- Players receive the distress signal from deep space with their ships own tags.

- Engine fluctuations are occurring strangely and repeatedly. The mechanic gets extremely paranoid until he realizes that the engines have been reciting the Our Father in ultra-slow morse code.

>Crew meeting in meeting room roll call goes off without a hitch. Midway through meeting someone is knocking at the meeting room door.

>While doing maintainance in lower levels you go through a series of corridors. You open a door to see at the end a person with the same uniform and name tag as you just exit the other end.

>As you fall asleep you hear the gentle lapping of water on the hull of the ship.

>Be at command console and see that lifesupport is registering everyone on the ship is deceased.


>The crews wakes up one day and do their usual routine. Halfway through the day an airlock breaks open and sucks out all the air, killing them. As they are gasping for breath they wake up that morning. The airlock door has a new dent in it.

> On board a derelict ship, a deceased woman floats in the airlock, which is open a small fraction. Her eyes are focused directly on the viewport. Oddly, no matter how you look at it, the eyes never seem to break contact with yours.

>A cryolab, with all but one of the pods broken, with a person restrained in a safety-harness inside. Periodically a robot will open the pod and feed the occupant coffee and biscuits, while apologising for the delay in travel time. While unfrozen the person will scream, cry and desperately try to claw their way out of their restraints.

> Idly looking at a clock or watch, you see it tick backwards by a minute.

> On board a derelict ship, a deceased woman floats in the airlock, which is open a small fraction. Her eyes are focused directly on the viewport. Oddly, no matter how you look at it, the eyes never seem to break contact with yours.

>The crew wake up to find a tiny crack in one of the viewing port windows. Every time they wake the crack is in a different window, and it's bigger.

>When no one is around the wires and tubes onboard seem to reroute to seemingly missing parts of the station out into space. Substances are still being carried through them though.

>Cobwebs. Big ones.

>On the dark side of a planet / moon etc, and the temperature of the air inside the craft/station is slowly climbing each day.

>Everytime the airlock opens, it gets a little darker inside, no matter how many lights are on. What does the darkness bring with it?

>The crew come across a derelict vessel drifting through a void several million lightyears away from earth/terra. The ship is massive, at least a couple of kilometers long, but the technology aboard is hilariously obsolete (the system that controls the primitive FTL-engine still uses valves) and so bulky that there is only room for three or four people at best. The charred remains of the crew are found a few dozen meters behind the cockpit, fused into the dense machinery but still in a seated position, and what is visible of their faces is twisted in agony. A log is written on a notepad found a few more meters back, but the events detailed in it (written in Russian alphabet) would suggest that the craft was launched in the early 1960's...

A Hyperspace Research Vessel packed with huge sensor arrays and scientific equipment is discovered adrift and derelict. Despite the top-secret nature of it's mission and creepy interdimensional dangers, the ship could be worth BILLIONS of credits if it can be towed back to civilization. A tramp freighter could not do it, but perhaps you could get the FTL backup back online.
Meanwhile, the signal they intercepted was a hyperdimensional construct that defies easy understanding. It is some sort of monstrous protrusion into the material universe of something vast and incomprehensible.

>While making their way through a seldom-traveled part of the local cluster, the ship's communications-officer receives a distress call from a tiny research-station orbiting a gas-giant. When they open communications, a husky, monotonous voice begins speaking. He introduces himself as an engineer for the research-station, and tells the players that whilst performing routing maintenence on one of the solar-panels the station's one airlock suddenly jammed shut, and the crew wouldn't respond to his radio-calls. With only a few hour's oxygen and with no tools or methods to safely bypass the airlock, the engineer asks if the players could help him get it open.
>As one of the players departs from his vessel and begins spacewalking towards the spacesuit-clad figure (who remains facing towards the airlock), he sees lights and moving shadows in some of the viewports of the station. Despite the engineer's tendancy to keep facing away, him and the player exchange relatively benign and enjoyable banter as he gets the airlock's controls in working order. Finally, after a few minutes and spare parts the outer control-mechanism lights up, and the outer airlock silently slides open.
>Just as the engineer clambers through, the player looks up at one of the viewpoints and finds one of the researchers staring back at him. His eyes are wide open with horror, lips silently screaming something as he shakes his head side to side and slams his fists against the viewport. You look back at the engineer, and watch as he closes the outer airlock. He finally turns to face you, and just before the heavy steel door closes, you realise that despite the engineer's spacesuit's sun-visor being retracted, you can't see his face through his visor at all. In fact, you think you can see the back of the helmet's inside...

>The party finds themselves in a state of unease as they approach the bulky doors to the engine-rooms, which groan and vibrate as though under visible stress. The moment the party's engineer bypasses the locks, the door suddenly rips itself loose from its frame and flies outwards, revealing to the party that the other side is a complete vacuum, and lacks the artificial gravity of the rest of the ship
>Feeling fortunate for having decided to keep their spacegear on, they peer through the doorway. Just about everything inside the outer-hull is completely gone, and the vast space left behind is so expansive that they can barely make out the other side.
>Along the floor of this dark, gutted part of the ship are several fresh-looking human corpses, lacking any sort of protective gear and wearing a uniform from a long-disbanded private research-group. They stand shoulder to shoulder, feet clamped to the floor via clumsily welded metal clamps and facing towards the remains of the ship's engine. Their hands have been stitched together in prayer, and attached to each of them through their sternum is a long iron chain, running through all of their ribcages and through what's left of the main engine.

"[Primary Engineer] , ain't this thing supposed to be only four clicks long, not counting the prow cannon?"
"Well...yeah, that's what the blueprints say. Hey [secondary engineer], these blueprints are supposed to be sound, right?"
"They've been checked and double checked, these are the blueprints."
"Well, we measured on foot. Ten clicks at the least before we ran out of steam."
"Could you repeat that?"
"We're ten click in, measuring from the prow."
"There must be something wrong with your measurements, scanners confirm the blueprints. Four clicks. Could you broadcast location, for a few seconds?"
"Has to be a mixup. Hey, it's on, you reading this?"
"Well, something’s wrong."
"What?"
"Your signal isn't coming from inside the ship."
"What?"
"Your signal. The coordinates your broadcasting are approximately six clicks out in space from aft, and then three clicks down."


- When the exploratory team enters the derelict ship, they find old, dried bloodstains everywhere in pools and streaks and handprints. They find that a majority of the blast doors and airlocks have been sealed and locked down tight, responding only to the captain's personal passcode. When they finally locate the captain's stateroom, they find the cabin literally painted in the now crystallized blood. In the center of the room, they find the mummified, desiccated body of the captain sitting or floating in the fetal position, hugging a thick dossier with his password and vital information about the ship. On every viewscreen in the room, videos of earth or his family have been playing on loop for centuries.





    UNKNOWN ARMIES/?
    Dollar bills are flimsy pieces of paper, and coins worthless trinkets of metal. Where do these things get their value? Here’s a hint – there’s a reason currency is always covered with symbols.

    Tourists using cabs in Las Vegas are often taken through the TUNNEL under the runways to the Las Vegas Beltway. Supposedly the drivers do it in order to hike up fares - but the true reason is that the TUNNEL's hungers can only be placated by the cab drivers, who are the key to keeping the TUNNEL at bay.

    The letters of the alphabet seek to infect the minds of men. But the numbers stand opposed to their ambitions.

    The four stages of attaining the magnum opus are nigredo - albedo - citrinitas - and rubedo. Carolus Linnaeus identified four major races - Europeanus which he labeled the white race, Asiaticus, the yellow race, Americanus, the red race, and Africanus, the black race. The Magnum Opus is Man. But who was its creator?

    The history of the universe is the handwriting produced by a Minor god in order to communicate with a Demon.

    HP Lovecraft never existed. His works and influences appeared fully-formed in the public consciousness in 1991. For what purposes was the myth of Lovecraft created? And what does this have to do with Cthulhu's sudden rise in popularity in the 2000s?

    Tsunamis are produced by the vibrations of water, earthquakes the vibrations of land. If the air were to vibrate with sufficient amplitude and frequency, the result would be devastation of apocalyptic proportions. The Trumpets of Jericho are real - and they are in the wrong hands, waiting for the right time.

    Last December, a project to drill a new highway underneath Seattle was delayed after the drill hit a 'mysterious unknown object'. The official word was that it was a pipe. The real object was, in fact, not an object at all – it was an elite cadre of 'mancers out to stop the supposed 'highway' from being completed. They were killed trying to save Seattle. I will be too.

    Ghosts aren't real. Neither is death.

    Red ink did not exist before the Catholic Inquisition. Now recall that only the Pope can wear red shoes, that red is associated by alchemists with the philosopher's stone and that red is the colour attributed to the Devil. Red ink came into existence for a reason. I cannot tell you what it is, but it has to do with the Church, the Devil and the Secret to Immortality.

    There is a homeless man in Sarajevo that is constantly being watched by agents of at least five countries.

    The planets are imprisoning the Sun.

    Missing items can be found at their origins. Missing people can be found at their origins. Everything began where it should be - and the universe is angry that everything is out of place.

    When the first radio reciever was invented in 1843, there already was message broadcasted.
    It is a man repeating two sentences.
    It has been going non-stop since.
    It is not a recording.

    The secret service are within a few feet of the President at all times - but they aren't there to protect him. They're there to silence him.

    Adolph Sax almost died at 2, 6, 9, 11, 14, 19, and 23 years old from various accidents and maladies. At 29 years old, he invented the saxophone. Someone really didn't want the sax invented - and for good reason.

    Human beings have only so much emotion in them; it's chemical. Once you've felt enough, your body runs out of the nescessary elements in the neurotransmitters and the feeling starts to fade. Keep on going and you'll burn yourself out. It's how soldiers in prison become hardened to pain or doctors to the sight of blood. And poets? Pity the poet who wrings himself dry for his work, leaving nothing behind but a husk. Why do you think so many of them die young?

    Of course, you could take advantage of this, burn out an inconvenient emotion or two on purpose. How long can you stand a state of constant fear?

    Music soothes the savage beast. Laughter is the language of the soul. Weird Al Yankovic rules over both man and animal. Fear him.

    Only two species of eusocial spider species exist. One was discovered by a scientific expedition in 1986. The scientist who led the 1986 expedition was a member of the other species, many people are these days.

    No one ever actually dials the wrong number.

    On every QWERTY keyboard in existence, there is a key that corresponds to a symbol foreign to all terrestrial alphabets. Our minds try to protect us from it by subconsciously hiding it from our sight but it's always there, between T and Y.

    There is a shade of blue that blocks all electromagnetic waves. To block the messages of the Celestial Spheres from being beamed into human brains, the government occasionally paints the sky that shade.

    Coleridge's story "Kubla Khan" was not inspired by a dream of Xanadu - he actually was from Xanadu. And so was the person from Porlock.

    Right after the Cecilites, the upper echelons of the Church of Latter Day Saints are among the most clued-in religious folk out there. Joseph Smith didn't know a damn thing, but the exodus out to Deseret gave them a hell of a hard knocks schooling in what's out there.

    Steampunk was an attempt by mechanomancers to usher in Something and revitalize their school. The Sleepers caught wind of it and turned it into what it is today.

    Tokyo's infested with man-faced dogs that for a drink or two will fuck up traffic for you. Its not precise and its not pretty, but if you piss off the 'zokus, it might just keep you safe.

    There are over two dozen organizations that secretly control the entire world, and not one of them has the power to substantively affect it. This is because they are all pale, insubstantial shadows of the One True World Government, the Platonic Ideal of conspiracy. Should you learn each and every secret of each of these conspiracies, you will be able to deduce the shape of this Ideal Conspiracy, and become it.

    Much is made of the gun as a phallic image, but such psychoanalysis is misguided. Penises fill bleeding holes; guns make them. Any ritual based on the supposed connection between guns and penises is doomed to failure. Unless, for some reason, the penis in question belongs to a bedbug.

    There is a small and obscure chain restaurant in the Midwest whose locations describe a fibonacci spiral. Every couple of years, a new location opens, expanding the spiral. In a few decades, it will cover the entire Earth hypergeometrically.

    Every setback experienced by the space programs of the world is the work of Merriam-Webster, which hopes to recreate the Tower of Babel, and become the sole purveyor of intelligible speech in the world.

    Most modern nuclear weapons contain no fissionable material, but are instead powered by the fear of nuclear weapons. Ever since the Cold War ended, the nuclear arsenals of the U.S. and Russia have been literally fading away. In an attempt to rekindle that fear and maintain the strategic deterrent, the U.S. has been supporting N.K. and Iran in their nuclear programs, hoping to re-terrify the public with thoughts of nuclear terrorism and thus preserve the strategic deterrent.

    Social security numbers are actually the composite factors of the universal constant. If you multiply all SSNs of all living persons at any given moment, you will find the Name of God in numerical form.

    All encyclopedias are written by an illiterate man who lives in Switzerland.

    The US government tests nuclear bombs in the desert. But it tests nuclear propaganda in population centers.

    In every city, there is one true Way at any given moment through that city. By traveling along the Way, you shall face no obstacles, go through no delays, and at the end shall come to the destination you needed, not the one you wanted.

    Before discovering fire, humans used to fear the Light. Most people still can't bear to look at the Sun. Those who do go blind from fear.

    Farms do not grow vegetables nor livestock. They grow farmers.

    All vapors are a form of spirit. Steam - nitrogen - smoke - they are all the souls of inanimate objects, released from their prisons. More than 98% of all electrical generation on the planet uses steam as a working fluid. Our entire energy infrastructure runs on tortured animistic spirits.

    So the whole green energy, save the planet thing? A whole lot more literal than you might think.

    Nobody is born with blood. Nobody's quite sure where it comes from, really. But it sure as hell ain't natural.

    Number stations are litanies of logarithms, choruses of calculations, devoted to an unseeing and unthinking higher exponential power that defines the equations of the universe. Why pray to an uncaring and unintelligent god? Ask the number stations.

    Excalibur was unknowingly melted down in WWII to be used for war materials. Somewhere out there is a bullet that never fails to reach its target, and a pistol whose owner cannot be killed.

    Antarctica is the largest desert on the surface of Earth. However, the largest desert anywhere on Earth lies 500 miles beneath London.

    It is a well-known fact that the Statue of Liberty is green due to copper oxidization. The curious thing is that if anyone ever examines the original plans for its construction, they would find that it was never made of copper in the first place. It certainly doesn't help that the only photos from before the 'copper' supposedly oxidized were in black and white.

    September, October, November, December - these are the only months left from an alternate timeline. Do not be fooled by the history book's lies.

    Artists don't go mad. They are driven mad, by a government bureau devoted to ensuring that no artists discover the truths that Da Vinci did ever again.

    Never listen to a magnetic tape that has been left out in the sun - you don't want to hear what the sun has to say.

    The popular story goes that Nelson's column faces towards Trafalgar, to always look out over the place of his greatest victory. The truth is that he is actually watching, waiting. The slightest movement from under the waves of Trafalgar and Nelson will be there to defend us once again.


    Humans are born without teeth. Children's bodies are strong and fight them off for a time, but in adults they burrow into your brain. Never look behind a dentist's mask while they operate.

    Everyone has a first love. But not many realize that everyone's first love is the same love, the same person, for each and every one.

    If you have a song stuck in your head for three nights in a row, you become susceptible to unnatural influence. Nearly every pop radio station in America is a battlefield between different supernatural predators.

    HIS GOSPEL IS UNPRONOUNCEABLE, SING IT PROUDLY

    Since 1989, it has been possible to completely replace a human being for an economically viable cost. You didn't think you really survived that, did you?

    The Great Wall was not built to keep something OUTSIDE as much as INSIDE...So were the Mongols unwitting pawns, nihilists who wanted to end the world by unleashing whatever was behind the wall, or actually heroes who had a plan?

    All the astronauts who went to the Moon killed themselves. It was covered up, of course, but if you look deep enough, you'll find the truth. And you'll want to kill yourself too.


    Rats. Rats rats rats. Rats rats rats rats rats. Fear the rats. Fear them.

    Back in 1986, I bought three stamps at a convenience store (now closed) in New Jersey. These stamps are special; any mail sent using them arrives the previous day. I still have one left.

    The story about the twelve good men who carry the world upon their backs isn't quite true. There are twelve good men who keep the world the way it is. As long as they exist, God believes that humanity has enough innate virtue to solve its own problems. If there ceased to be twelve righteous people, God would send his angels to help mankind, and the world would become a better place. The twelve are essentially dooming humanity.

    One of the twelve, a reformed hitman in Hong Kong, has just found this out. He still has his guns. He has the addresses of the other eleven. He's very unhappy.

    Time gets stuck in some places, if you know where you can travel back in time.

    I can reach 1973 in the BBSA branch in Las Ramblas, Barcelona and 1985 on the Wheels exhibition at Beulieu National Motor museum. The trouble is when you leave those places you come back to the present.
    Or, at least, it looks like the present.

    There's a reason old ladies like to gossip, it keeps them alive. All information, even if it's useless and untrue can sustain even the most broken bodies just that little bit longer.
    The NSA is watching and listening everything we do.

    What are they trying to keep alive?