Project Athena | Challenges

May Challenge(Paranormal) - OPEN

We're challenging you to write a short story with a maximum word count of 5000.

Your story has to primarily be Paranormal, but it can be any subgenre you like. You have until midnight on 31st May(EST) to submit your entry.

Once you've completed your story and published it here on Wattpad, please post the link to your completed entry in the comments at the bottom of this page so we know you've entered. If you don't post your link, or if you post the link later than the mentioned deadline, you won't be considered entered.

Co-writing is allowed, and it has to be a new story, not one that you've previously posted on Wattpad. English is the only story language we can accept as of now.

You can publish the story as a chapter of a short story collection if you have one of those.

Prompts

1. Every night at 11:59 PM, the world ends. Every day at 12:01 AM, it pieces itself back together again. It is midnight, and you watch from your window.

2. You bought a beautiful, vintage notebook at a local thrift store, intending to use it as a diary. However, as you quickly discover, every time you write something down, the text disappears as soon as you close the book. Whenever you go to write another entry, all pages are blank- but you continue to write there regularly. One night, as you open your diary to write yet another soon-to-vanish entry, you notice that there's some text written on one of the pages. This handwriting is unfamiliar to you, and it reads, "I have erased all your past entries. Why do you keep trying to write on me?"

3. Strange things begin to happen in your house. Lights turn on and off. Furniture moves on its own. You may have an angry spirit in your house. What do you do to deal with this odd problem?

4. A mysterious melody always strikes up at midnight every year on a certain day, but nobody knows who's playing it and why. Tonight, you peek out of your house and find a little girl walking down the road with a violin in her hand. You follow her into the town square, where she starts playing that same haunting tune at the stroke of midnight. All around you, the spirits of the deceased rise. But why are they here? And who is this mysterious, powerful girl?

5. After years of gentle persuasion, your best friend since childhood finally agrees to seek professional help for their serious mental problems. Much to your dismay, as she begins to recover, you slowly start to realize that you are her imaginary friend.

6. Write about a character who happens to be a traveller in a land full of dark horrors and ancient evils. One day, this character stumbles upon a town that is missing from all their maps. This town seems to be entirely out of place, happy and bright when everything else is dark and dreary. What secrets does this town contain?

7. While preparing your garden at the beginning of spring, you find the blueprints for your house buried in the earth. When you pull it out and examine it, you find that there is a room in the blueprint that doesn't exist in your house. Both disturbed and intrigued, you set off to find the missing room. What do you find in the room, and what startling secrets of the past does it harbour?

8. Your father is paranoid and locks every door and window each night out of fear of "the monsters." You think he is crazy until you begin to hear voices whisper to you outside the window...

9. Yesterday you found a new app on your phone. It doesn't open, you can't delete it, and you don't know what it is. Tonight you're woken up by an alert on your phone - it's the app notifying you of some very specific instructions...

10. You're working the night shift when you find a face in the cellar staring at the security camera. It is the face of your long-deceased friend who vanished one day after playing in the woods and never returned. They look dishevelled and seem to stare past the camera instead of into your eyes. What will you do?

Prompts by kth_disneyfanatic

Best of luck!