The Haunted Locker Room Report
Flash Fiction by
Jude Deluca (Architect) & L.T. Williams (Haunter)
This piece is the product of our Tiny Hauntings pop-up sub call. First, we asked you to become Architects, creating stunning, spooky, spine-chilling settings. Next, we gathered Haunters and unleashed them into our favorite Architect-designed landscapes. The results are to die for.
Ivy Falls State University was – and still is, somehow – like every other college in the 1990s. You couldn’t turn a corner without finding a new garage band, coffee shops were the place to be, and everything was covered in flannel as far as the eye could see. Except when I say everything, I mean everything. Maybe that should have set off the first alarm bells.
Though the college had an Olympic-class pool and an award-winning swim team boasting a variety of body-size diversity, most avoided the old locker room if they could help it.
Because of the curse.
As one of the lesser-skilled swimmers and an aspiring ghost hunter, I spent a lot of time in that locker room.
One day someone added up the random numbers etched into each locker. They made 666 exactly. That’s when the rumors started. Students and staff reported strange things lurking within the locker room. Bizarre things. Inhuman things. Dead things.
Most didn’t believe the stories until the day a diver stepped into a locker and vanished. They found his body in the pool a week later.
Tests confirmed that all the “blood” left in the body – which was most definitely a dead human – and sloshing about in the pool was from Squeezit juice bottles. They never quite got the red tint out of the water.
Whose voice do you hear from the mirror on the wall?
For me, it was my voice, but happy. This varied from person to person.
Does the specter of death really live in one of the lockers?
I couldn’t confirm or deny this, but locker B12 had a suspicious number of skulls crammed inside.
And which shower spews boiling hot human blood?
All of them. Truly awful on the pipes.
More to be revealed.
-Your Local Curse Investigator
Jude Deluca is a writer and professional historian of 90s horror media specializing in YA and teen horror. Deluca has begun channeling their love for 90s horror titles like Goosebumps, Fear Street, and Nightmare Hall into their own writing. Twitter: @judedeluca1990.
L.T. Williams is a horror and fantasy writer from the ancient hills of Appalachia. He now lives in the not-quite-so ancient mountains of the Ozarks, but the folk tales, urban legends, and cryptid stories of his hometown never left him, and often bleed into his writing. He has a soft spot for weird, folk, and supernatural horror, as well as dark fantasy. When not writing or reading, L.T. spends his time climbing rocks, hiking with his dog, playing board games, and pursuing a PhD in space and planetary sciences.
