WHERE FOLKLORE LEARNS HOW TO HAUNT AGAIN.

This wing of the archive is dedicated to storytelling in all its darker forms. Here you’ll find ghost stories, folk horror, gothic fiction, strange retellings, unsettling cinema, and narratives stitched together from old myths, real tragedies, and the quieter fears people rarely speak aloud. Some stories are invented. Others simply changed names over time.

THE FICTIONAL LIBRARY

RESET

Dryad Undine 5/14/26 Dryad Undine 5/14/26

ASH & INK: Chapter 2

As if someone had shoved a hand through my ribs and written the words on the inside of my bones.

She sold what was not hers.

She kept what should have burned.

She opened the door.

Then the front room went dark.

From somewhere upstairs, a woman began to weep.

And from the main store, Nora Pike’s desk phone rang.

ASH & INK: Chapter 1

I was always that weird kid who liked books more than friends. So, it's no wonder I ended up working the night shift at Ash & Ink Books—a musty Portland bookstore with its own reputation.

Two months into the job, I'd settled into the rhythm of nights. The footsteps in the walls. The strange sounds. The books that seem to move when I'm not looking.

But nothing prepared me for what I saw in the window one morning.

A gaunt face, stretched long as if screaming. My heart nearly leaps out of my chest.

When I look directly at the window, it's just a book with ravens on the cover. Just a book. Just my exhausted brain playing tricks on me.

Except it won't stop watching me.