If "Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark" Was Written For Milllennials

Posted by Unknown on Friday, October 02, 2015

The scariest story of all begins with a reply-all.

THE PHANTOM FACEBOOK STATUS

It was a rainy Saturday. Sharon had an appointment set up at the Genius Bar to fix her iPhone 6s. She took the bus to the mall and made it to her appointment with time to spare. While she was waiting, Sharon decided to browse the Internet on one of the available MacBook Airs in the store. She logged into her Facebook account, responded to a friend request, commented on a few photos, and before she knew it, her name was being called for her appointment.

Sharon's phone was replaced, and she was very happy with the service. She bought herself a pretzel in the mall before leaving. Upon returning home, she started restoring her new phone from a previous backup. While she was doing this, she noticed she had several Facebook notifications.

"I'll check these real quick, and then I'll finish restoring this phone and do some laundry," thought Sharon. She clicked the Facebook tab in Chrome.

A new status had been posted on her own timeline, but she hadn't written it herself.

"Currently marathoning The Big Bang Theory!!"

47 of her friends had liked this status. Many of them commented ironically with stickers.

Sharon was so mortified that she deleted her Facebook account forever.

Andrea Hickey / BuzzFeed

THE VERY OLD INSTAGRAMS

Webster had a huge crush on a girl in his Psychology elective. The only thing he knew about her was that she was a sophomore, and that she worked at the coffee shop on campus.

One day in class, he was sitting behind her. He saw her log onto Facebook, and snuck a peek at her profile. He found out what her last name was. That night, he searched her on Instagram and started looking through her photos.

He scrolled further and further down her feed, looking at all the photos.

She had a few videos in her Instagram feed, so Webster decided to watch them. He clicked on one that was posted about 6 months ago. The sound wasn't on, so he tapped the video to hear the sound. He still couldn't hear the sound, so he tapped a few more times.

Just then, something tremendously horrible happened.

He had accidentally double-tapped the video, liking it.

Webster was MORTIFIED. He quickly un-liked the photo, but it was too late. He knew his crush had already gotten a notification. She was probably already looking through his own Instagram feed, confused and disgusted.

Should he quickly make his Instagram private so she can't see who liked the video? Should he explain the whole thing to her tomorrow? Maybe make up some ridiculous excuse about his Instagram being hacked?

"I know what I have to do," he thought, resigned to his fate.

Webster dropped the class the very next day.

Andrea Hickey / BuzzFeed

SIRI THE UNDEAD

Jane got her first iPhone for her 16th birthday, and it was the best gift she had ever received. She couldn't have been happier. She spent every second of her free time on her new phone.

The day after she got the iPhone, she started asking Siri questions. She asked Siri every single question she could think of. "How old are you, Siri?" and "What is the Earth's atmostphere made of, Siri?" and "Who is the oldest living person alive, Siri?" She was learning so much.

But after a few months, Siri's tone started to change slightly when she would provide Jane with answers. It sounded almost...annoyed. No, that couldn't be. Right? Jane kept asking more and more questions.

A year to the day after Jane's 16th birthday, she asked Siri another question. It was just like any other, but Siri's response was "I'm sorry, I don't understand."

Jane asked again, but got the same answer. She tried again and again, but Siri responded the same way.

Jane was so angry that she threw her phone against a wall, and the screen shattered. When she realized what she'd done, she decided she couldn't let her parents know. She would bury the phone in the backyard and tell her parents a kid at school had stolen her phone.

All went according to plan, and her parents bought her a new phone the next day. But that night, as she was drifting off to sleep, she heard a woman's voice drift into her room with the breeze from her open window.

"I'm sorry..."

"I don't understand..."

"I'm sorry...I don't understand..."

At the same time, bright blue light started flooding through her window; the same detrimental, electronic blue light that she had been warned against in countless online studies and infographics.

Jane got less than the recommended 8-10 hours of sleep recommended to teenagers that night.

Andrea Hickey / BuzzFeed

THE PHANTOM REPLY-ALLS

Harold worked in an office. He enjoyed his job. It was quiet most of the time, and he had a lot of time to himself to think and dedicate to his work.

One day, one of his coworkers sent around an ordinary email letting everyone know that the paper clips in the supply room had been refilled. Harold read the email and then went back to work.

Thirty minutes later, he checked his email again. 8 people had responded to the email. Ten minutes later, 19 more people had responded to the email. An hour later, almost the entire office had responded.

Harold tried to mute the email, but somehow, it kept re-appearing in his inbox.

Harold could never get away from the email; it followed him everywhere he went. As the months went by, he'd see one or two more reply-alls on the thread from people he didn't even know worked at the company. Every time he thought the thread had stopped, he'd see a new response.

Years after he retired, and several email addressses later, Harold was still on the thread, receiving responses. Nothing he tried could stop it.

Harold died at the age of 97. After his death, his lawyer was going through his old emails to find information about settling his estate. He happened upon the old work thread.

The last response on the thread was dated two days after Harold's death. It was a meme.

But the strangest part of all was that it was sent from Harold himself.

Andrea Hickey / BuzzFeed

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How The Hole In My Heart Almost Killed Me

Posted by Unknown on Friday, October 02, 2015

Haejin Park / BuzzFeed

It’s six in the morning on New Year’s Day and Ava cries from the crib, which means my wife says something to me like, “Your turn,” and I say something whiny like, “Bottle, fine,” and stumble into the kitchen and spill milk on the counter and don’t wipe it up. I leave it for later, after coffee, after the caffeine makes my mind fire right. I tuck the bottle in the waistband of my drawers so I can hoist Ava up with both arms, and she says, “Let’s play,” a new phrase for her, and I carry her back into our bed and lay her in the middle and get back in myself, Lelo and I flanking her, the three of us lying like a happy family, and for 20 seconds that’s what we are.

Then the numbness starts.

I notice it first in my right arm, then realize it’s creeping into my leg, too. That’s weird, I think, two limbs falling asleep at the same time. Soon there’s no feeling on that entire side of my body, from shoulder to toes. I shift positions, rolling onto my back so blood can flow freely.

Five seconds, then ten, then twenty. Still numb.

Fear spills out of me like the milk rolling down my daughter’s chin. I’ll miss everything. Kindergarten. A musical instrument. A boyfriend, a girlfriend. I’ll miss the privilege of knowing Ava as an adult.

I shake my dead hand back and forth, back and forth, and say to my wife, “Something’s wrong,” and she says, “What?” and I say, “It’s happening again.”

Her eyes open: “Wait, what?”

“911,” I say.

Lelo is to the phone fast and I roll over onto my stomach, a gesture that Ava interprets as an invitation to play and she’s straddling my back and yelling, “Hop on pop! Hop on pop!” which makes this moment of emergency seem ludicrous but also sort of perfect, the way a child can’t comprehend how grave and mortal things are.

She keeps thumping her butt on my back and chanting, “Hop on pop!” and I crane my head around to see her as she bounces on me, and I say to Ava, “I don’t want to die.”

It’s silly to say that to an 18-month-old, but I can’t stop myself, and maybe, there’s no better person to tell because she’s the reason I need to live.

Three years earlier, Lelo and I went south from our home in San Francisco, headed for the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books. I was scheduled to sit on a panel with some other indie press novelists, but instead I heard a popping noise in my head and lost the ability to talk. I ended up at a Hollywood emergency room on a Sunday morning instead of at the festival. After a CT scan, chest X-ray, and an MRI we were told the terrible news. I had a stroke. I was 35 years old.

And actually, I hadn’t just had one stroke. The MRI showed a lesion on my brain, a scar from a stroke in my past. When I mentioned my drug history to the neurologist, she said I probably had the first stroke when I was loaded and might not have known. I imagined myself sitting at a dive bar, coked up and twisted on whiskey, and stroking right there, surrounded by other sorrow machines, me speaking in tongues, brain curdling, and no one even noticing.

Once Lelo and I traveled back north from Hollywood, over the next few months my neurologist would run a gamut of tests and eventually shrug her shoulders. She’d note a ubiquitous heart defect called a Patent Foramen Ovale, or, PFO, say it’s nothing to worry about, it’s found in 20% of the population. She’d say, “The stroke seems to be an anomaly. Take a baby aspirin every day and hope for the best.” Her misdiagnosis would almost cost me my life.

In the ambulance, my symptoms get worse, affecting my vision, my speech, and the guy asks me questions in the back and I’m having trouble talking, producing these horrible moaning noises, macerated syllables that don’t mean anything, and he averts his eyes, tells me not to worry about it, and then we are at the admittance desk at the hospital and I’m being asked the same batch of questions, along with some forms that I’m supposed to fill out, clipboard thrust at me as I lie on the rolling gurney. I’m supposed to start by writing my name and address and the like but my brain is broken, the pen won’t work — I try to spell J-O-S-H, knowing full fucking well that the second letter of my name is O, so why did I write down a W, why can’t I remember how to make an H? and the merciful nurse says she’ll write these things down for me. Trying to speak is still distorted, garbled; the words “San Francisco” take forever to fall out of my mouth, and the nurse looks at me with pity.

By the time I change out of my clothes and get some preliminary tests done, my physical symptoms have all subsided. No numbness. My speech is normal.

The on-call neurologist is a young guy. Too young. I want gray hairs. I want his eyes to say I’ve seen it all. He’s too young and I’m too scared, and he orders a batch of tests, imaging to make sure my brain isn’t still bleeding, which it’s not but the pictures do confirm that I’ve had another stroke.

“That’s three,” I say.

He gives me the same pitying face as the nurse.

I am wheeled up from emergency a few hours later, loaded into the stroke ward. It’s me and a bunch of 80-year-olds, and each new hospital worker, every orderly and nurse and doctor, all say the same thing upon seeing me for the first time: “You’re so young.”

It becomes a kind of chorus, and they don’t mean it in a cruel way, but that’s how I’m hearing it. You’re so young, you must really deserve this, that’s the only reason you’d be here.

My stepmom relieves Lelo of any Ava duties so she can spend time with me, bring me supplies, a pillow, a blanket, some books. Things to make this room feel less, well, like this room feels: a place where 80-year-olds have strokes and die.

We watch football and try not to talk. She is worried about becoming a widow. I am terrified that I’m going to have a bigger stroke any minute, and Ava will have no idea who I am.

Another nurse comes in to draw more blood. “You’re so young,” she says, sticking me.

As the docs go through all their tests, they finally find the culprit causing all these strokes, my congenital defect: My heart is missing an entire wall.

I have an eight-millimeter hole (a dime is about one-millimeter thick, so imagine a stack of eight dimes). There should be a wall separating the atria, the two upper chambers of the heart. This partition prevents blood from flowing the wrong way, so if in fact, you have a blood clot, it will hit this wall, but without this, there is a gaping hole for clots to travel up to the brain.

A neurovascular surgeon will build a wall in my heart, and I will be under anesthesia, a lovely opiate called Fentanyl. It will be the first time I do drugs in six years. In the junkie community, it’s called a freelapse. You relapse, but it’s OK. You get a free pass. You’re supposed to get high, just following the doctor’s orders. Your standard, garden variety freelapse.

There is only one surgeon who does these types of heart procedures, called ASD closures, at University of California, San Francisco, and he won’t be able to operate on me for two months. What that means is that I will have to pump an intense, outrageous, and hideous combination of meds to keep me safe until the surgery, each pill keeping my blood “slippery.” This is one of the doctors’ buzzwords. Slippery. They mean thin, something that can’t clot, can’t turn to ice, blood like vodka in the freezer.

Keeping my blood so slippery, of course, comes with its own risks. Such as bleeding to death. I am given a list of things I should not do on all these meds, and this list, this crazy list, makes me fear everything. Don’t drive a car, says the list. In fact, don’t ride in a car. Don’t shave. Don’t use knives. Don’t exercise. Don’t have sex. Don’t floss your teeth. Don’t cut your nails. Don’t be alone with the baby. Don’t pick up the baby. Don’t sit for longer than an hour. Don’t take a multivitamin. Don’t eat kale or spinach — too much vitamin K. Don’t go outside, if it can be avoided.

These meds have a lot of side effects and I stumble around my life, top heavy, my head feeling like an old parking meter full of quarters. The worst is the diarrhea. I lose 25 pounds in three weeks.

On the operating table, I orient and calm myself by looking around at various lights, computer monitors, nurses. The anesthesiologist runs a line into the artery in my wrist. His needle, like an umbilical cord, pumping my favorite food: oblivion.

This is it. I am probably about to die. I’ve seen Lelo and Ava for the final time. My sisters. My moms. I’ve written my last sentence. These are the last moments of my life, lying here and looking up at the eyes of grumbling strangers, their mouths concealed behind masks.

“This first shot will be like drinking a beer,” the anesthesiologist says, doing his merciful work. His needle brings the Fentanyl. This is like seeing a long-lost friend. Time loses its math, and everything gets heavy, oozy with smudged hues. I am high again.

I am home.

The surgery takes about 90 minutes, though to me it feels like seconds. I’m groggy and still high as they wheel my bed downstairs. They verify if the surgery is a success by “bubble test.” They shoot saline bubbles into my heart and hopefully, the bubbles hit their device, my new wall. If the bubbles can’t get through to zoom around my whole heart’s chambers, ambling this way and that like clouds, I’m fixed.

I lie there and see the saline bubbles fly into me on the ultrasound machine. There is my heart on the monitor, black and white, beating and repaired, and the bubbles hit the newly implanted wall. I know those are only bubbles made of saline, know that they are not in fact blood clots, yet that’s what I see, a whole infantry of clots trying to cross through my heart and speed up to my brain, trying to kill me and take Lelo and Ava away, but they are blocked.

I get to be a dad and a husband for a while longer. There are obviously no guarantees, but I’ll make it till tomorrow. I’ll get to make new memories with Ava and if I’m lucky, I’ll live long enough that we can walk through an entire garden of milestones, and I’ll look back on a good life, a long life, one without relapse or divorce or estrangement, one in which I bask in our luck: I survived three strokes in my thirties, survived an ill-formed heart, survived a procedure that saw surgeons entering and planting a device in my chest.

I finally make it to the L.A. Times Festival of Books, better late than never, a month after my heart surgery. I’m still very weak but that doesn’t matter. I sit onstage with a few other writers. There is a placard in front of me with my name. There is a bottle of water. There is a microphone. And there is a roomful of people, the audience a hundred strong. My heart is fixed and it beats. And the three other writers onstage have beating hearts, too, and everyone in the crowd has one, my beautiful daughter and wife among them. We are all together.

***

Joshua Mohr is the author of five novels, most recently All This Life.