Hatch A Conspiracy Theory With Your Friends

at least I don’t think there’s any horror movies on these (and I mean like directly inspired by these and less like movies kinda with that concept). I love historical horror and there needs to be more.

Childhood can be scary.

You know now (not then) that power comes through and from favors.

If you had known that then you would probably not have done so many.

(This is where it starts.)

One.

There is a strange creature crossing the road behind the lecture hall. You stop on your bike and frown at it. It looks a little like a turtle, but it’s limbs are longer than any turtle you’ve ever seen. It’s stretched out on the hot asphalt, long, pale limbs clawing forward towards the small stream that runs on the other side.

 You hop off your bike and gently pick the creature up, hands under the belly of the shell like you learned from the internet.

Imagine your surprise when the shell slides off the creature instead, dropping a tiny woman onto the asphalt.

“Water,” she croaks, tiny eyes screwed shut.  Her eyelids are the size of yours which means they’re huge on her. “Please.”

(You will not know until later what exactly please means to the fae.)

You feel yourself move through your shock. You pick her up and take her to the water’s edge. She slips under the surface, pale skin flashing like the scales of a fish, and she’s gone.

You’d wonder if your roommate slipped you something this morning if she wasn’t back a moment later, pushing a small rock into your hands.

“A boon,” she says. Her eyes are large and black, suited for her underwater world. “For a favor.” She smiles, showing teeth jagged and sharp like a piranha.

When you blink, she’s gone.

You stare at the rock in your left hand. It’s smooth and worn from years in water, an interesting swirl of granite and quartz. “I wish I knew,” you tell it.

The rock ices over so fast that you don’t have time to drop it. The frost swirls across your skin, burning you where it touches, and you watch in horror as your skin turns a mottled black and blue.

 You fall to your knees from the pain and choke on a scream as the stone sinks into you, touching your bones and sending more ice through your marrow. It climbs up your arm and touches your eye, changing you vision so now that you’re see double, a strange, blue world juxtaposed next to the one you know and love.

The thing rose upon its lowermost appendages, two long trunks that ended in flat, protruding flippers that branched into stubby, grasping mockeries of a sucker. It’s triple-hinged uppermost limbs were similar, but the ends branched into five smaller tentacles, each with three hinges of their own.

I froze, as the thing’s gaze fell upon me and it opened its hideous fish-jaw, filled with thick, many-shaped teeth like white shards of stone, and spoke in a shrill, discordant babble. I felt its horrid dry grip on my flesh, as those hinged appendages closed on me like the legs of a crab.

I felt the heat of its body, tasted its noxious, oily flesh through my touch, and prepared for the end, and all went black as a swoon overtook me.

I awoke, some time later, the cold and comforting water, banished back to the comfort of the sea and the dark. I should be grateful I am alive. I should cast aside the experience like a half-remembered dream.

I shall never again go swimming in search of lights above. The last thing I recall before the darkness took me was my right eye popping free of the thing’s grasp enough to see into the distance for one brief moment.

The UFO Watchtower in Alamosa CO with supposedly two interdimensional portals in the front garden. People will leave items there to connect them to that other world

There are images of Kokopelli everywhere. Kokopelli is a native american trickster spirit and the spirit of music. You can’t escape him

Whatever the fuck Casa Bonita has going on. It’s a so-called Mexican restaurant but really it’s an eldritch trapdoor. Saying it has Mexican food is an insult to both Mexicans and food. I can't even describe it. It's like another dimension in a restaurant. It's bigger on the inside.

Most people know at least some Spanish - there’s a ton of Spanish names but they’re all pronounced wrong in the Americanized way because we’re stupid. If you don’t know Spanish you miss out on a lot

Nobody knows what group it belongs to in the larger United States. It’s in the West, but nobody can decide whether it’s Northwest or Southwest. I’d personally say Southwest because it has a lot of the native American and Hispanic influence as the rest of that area but it’s very up in the air

The western half and eastern half are SO different. Western half is mountains and elk, Eastern half is plains and cattle. The culture is so different between the two directions that it even confounds natives of the state

You always know what direction it is since the mountains are in the west. Lost? Look to the mountains

The Vampire of Lafayette CO. After Fodor Glava, an immigrant from Transylvania, died he was suspected of being a vampire. Some said the tree that grew from his grave was from the wooden stake lodged in his heart. A red bush grew beside him, a grim reminder of the blood he drank, of all his victims

The Tommyknockers in the mines, who beat out the support beams to cause cave-ins. The only way to know they’re at work is the chilling knocking sound. Miners would leave their food as offerings in the mines to appease them

You can’t predict the weather. Not even the meteorologists can. Don’t even try. It’s 80 one day and 42 the next. 

The Stanley Hotel, which inspired The Shining

Route 666. Later renamed to Route 491 in 2003 because it was too notorious. Some say Hell Hounds and a strange Black Sudan follow them on the road, only to discover nothing there when they pull over

Ridge Home Asylum

A lot of the most famous murder cases happened in Colorado. JonBenet Ramsey and the Columbine Shooting come to mind. History is written in blood

Mike the Headless Chicken Day. Yes, that’s a real holiday. Basically there was this chicken that lived for 18 months without a head so we dedicated a day to him. 

The Hot Springs. Don’t trust them. The spirits like a soak just as much as you do. 

The Coffin Races to commemorate the death of a woman named Emma Crawford. Basically she died of sickness but a flood scattered her remains. We’re still finding pieces of Emma to this day. 

Garden of the Gods. It has that name for a reason

Greeley. It’s known for smelling like cattle because it’s home to a huge slaughterhouse. Once a year they burn the cowblood - nobody goes outside on that day. The smell is too much. 

In the San Luis valley, where that famous UFO tower is located, dead farm animals are often found skinned and gutted, blood drained, with no explanation. Nobody knows what keeps killing them, but it’s been doing it since the 1960s. My bet is on the Chupacabra. 

The Denver Airport. Look up Denver Airport conspiracies. It’s wild

Blucifer. It’s a giant blue horse statue outside the Denver Airport. It once fell over and crushed its creator to death. It’s eyes have glowed red ever since

There’s a huge air force base in the Mountains. You see planes flying all the time. The skies are streaked with their trails. Don’t ask what they’re doing. It’s best that you don’t know

the tree had grown a root up through the center of it & out through the sides

it was in awe lmao

then the hygienist and assistant all came over to look too and they were like “wooooow” and my ass was sitting there like

story time

okay so to preface this, my hometown where i’m originally from is a really fucking weird place. like from the outside it seems like a normal suburban town, but once you’re there for awhile you get the feeling that’s something’s not…quite all together. a lot of people are really fucking weird there — so much so that that was a running joke in school growing up, that people in the town were just like that. everyone knew not to go out to the farm lands surrounding the town especially at night, we called it “the cuts” and people used to disappear out there all the time or get shot at by the especially weird people that would live out there. the news was and still is truly a thing of horror. every time i come back i’m regaled with even more stories of crazy shit that has happened there.

to put it in perspective we generally never had “normal crime” like robbery or anything like that when i lived there, though that did happen sometimes. the news stories were always like, “a kid was kidnapped by local residents and tortured in a house around the corner,” “a random person was chased down and shot for sport in a really nice neighborhood,” “someone was gored to death by a bull while out car shopping,” etc. (these are all real, btw). everyone does drugs and the whole town is located really close to a government site where they test nuclear weapons and chemicals and shit. this is how i grew up, in this bizarre environment.

i need to preface it this way so that you get that it’s weird. it’s a fucking weird place. i used to listen to the welcome to night vale podcast and make comparisons from it to my hometown, that’s how weird it is.

i only say this so you know that this town is where i got my orthodontics from.

all the kids in my town went to this one particular orthodontist. i also used to go to a dentist in town that a lot of people went to as well. i had a permanent retainer put on my bottom teeth after braces and no one had ever said anything to me about the model of retainer itself or it being weird type of retainer at all. i saw a ton of other people (mostly other kids that were my age at the time) that had the same type of retainer as me too so i never thought about it.

so i kept my retainer in — it’s never caused me problems and it keeps my teeth straight, why not?

however i went to a dentist for the first time in a metropolitan area now, and when he saw it in my mouth his literal first reaction was to say “uh can i ask you a question….what the hell is that”

LITERALLY the words that he said

which in hindsight makes almost too much sense. of course my town of all towns would put these weird unnecessary contraptions in kids’ mouths, and of course it happened so much that everyone just thought it was normal. that sounds exactly, to a T, like my hometown.

my permanent bottom retainer is apparently this prototype that is so rare that he’s literally never seen it before in his life, not in dental school, nowhere. it’s not that it’s an outdated type, it’s just rare as fuck. they were still staring at pictures of it on my chart in wonder when i left the office.

I looked up the bull-murder thing OP mentioned and Tracy seemed to be only town that came up with a matching case. Though the man didn’t actually die from his injuries everything else matches up one for one. So just to make sure that it was the right town I looked to see if there was any murder-torture of young people in Tracy, and unfortunately there was. It was a 17 year old boy who escaped and survived the torture. And just to solidify that it was in fact Tracy I looked up shootings in residential areas and there was one of a 20 year old man who was shot and killed in a nice neighborhood.

Okay, but I decided to look into Tracy more to find out more information about it and the town is super suspicious. There’s been a lot of murders and shooting in the town. Back in 2009 an 8 year old girl, Sandra Cantu, was kidnapped and murdered by a Sunday school teacher who said she had no idea why she killed Sandra. Another case happened in 2018 when four underage boys were shot and one was killed by four teenage boys. There’s a lot of news stories on shootings, homicides, and drug busts in that town. It’s a really cute town from the outside, if you just look up Tracy, California there’s a lot of really cute businesses and nice articles on sweet things that happen in the town, but if you actually look into it the town is really sketchy.

i grew up in tracy

also i have to add another person’s tags to this since it’s honesty hour because they’re hilarious and true

And OP’s response to seeing a deer do that to itself is horror because certain relatives of ancient ancestors of the OP would have seen that and gone “oh cool, free meal”. And those ancient relatives didn’t make it.

So, so much of what we find scary and horrifying is rooted in ancient lizard or mammalian brain disease avoidance and it continues to fascinate me every time

You all know how big a rabbit is.  Jack Rabbits and hares are much bigger. they’re the size of large cats or small dogs or just-walking-age children.

They also like to hang out in gangs of a hlf dozen to over 30.

and in the middle of backcountry dirt roads.

perhaps they’re dustbathing

or blood sacrifce

I don’t know because when you come up the road at night because your dog has a tiny bladder and needs to go out at midnight and you have no yard so you’re walking him on the dirt road around your neighborhod because you might aw well get some stargazing in, and you come just over the ridge to see a coven of twenty jackrabbits in the middle of the road

and

they

all

stand

up

not just onto all fours like a proper prey animal

No they get up on thier hind legs and don’t just sit but STAND like tiny rabbit-skinned toddlers, wobbing slightly as they stare directly at you eyes shining in your flashlight’s glow

…Blood Red.

And a chill goes through you on that warm july night because while they’re a puntable size and allegedly herbivores they’re standing and watching you just like people and you are vastly outnumbered.

everyone freezes

you’re considering your odds aganst roughly 200lbs of Suspiciously Humanoid Hare

and they’re considering their odds against you

the only sound in the never-ending high desert wind 

somewhere in your peripheral vision you can see the streetlights but they seem awfully far away

The nearest Jack Rabbit

Blinks

and takes a single shuffling step

forward

You area an overdevloped monkey and your prefrontal cortex is capable of some amazing feats but it runs very slowly compared to the reflexes of a rabbit and you’re frozen as you desperately scramble for the appropriate course of action, hands feeling thick and useless, mouth dry and feet imeasurably heavy there’s no way you’d outrun THESE, god there’s a rabies outbreak going around that shit’s not curable-

The Dog

L U N G E S

It’s only the briefest of movements but the animal you’d picked out for his gangly legs and floppy ears and goofy smile is suddenly a dark shape of muscle and teeth and had flung himself at the horrible goblin rabbits faster than mere physics should dictate, appearing in the circle of the flashlight for only the briefest of moments before the jolt from the leash makes you stumble and the light falters

The Jack Rabbits

Scatter

Vanishing into the faintly starlit sagebrush in as so many faint gray shapes that might be mistaken for the dustclouds they kick up

Later, you sit on the couch disquieted

and you wonder

If the sight of the Jack Rabbits standing and studying you was frightening enough to make you yearn for the safety of the yellowed streetlights

what must it be like from thier end?

what terrifying creature 

deliberately ties itself

to something so horrible

CONGRATULATE, THAT’S EXACTLY WHAT I WAS GOING FOR.

Scariest Urban Legends In Each State