Friday funnies - Oct. 26

Fancy a gross out before satisfying your sweet tooth? Visit here to get an eyeful of some tasty treats. My favorite are the STD cupcakes, courtesy of London's repulsive cake shop.

And if you've yet to check out the Tumblr site, Title to Come, go there now. Here's a sample:

When I'm critiquing a manuscript, 
and the plot goes off the deep end




Have a great weekend!

True ghost stories

So I had a post on overwriting scheduled and then realized that, in fact, I'd rather write about ghosts. Because of Halloween and all. Since popular fiction includes those based on a true story (why do we love The Blind Side? And Sound of Music? And all those animal-in-peril-until-dramatic-rescue movies? Because they're true...mostly) I had to share one of my own creepy paranormal encounters.

When I was in second grade, my parents divorced so my brother and I moved to Lawrence, KS, with my mom. The only place she could afford to rent was this seedy little duplex that smelled bad and had ratty carpet. But it had three bedrooms and was in walking distance of an elementary school. My bedroom was in the back, next to the bathroom. We'd been there about a month when, late one night, I was awoken by something jumping on my bed. I thought it was our cat and sat up. Nothing was there. So I tried to fall asleep and it happened again. And again. I got up to tell my mother, who was taking a bath in the bathroom that shared a wall with my room. She told me I'd been dreaming. So I went back to bed and fell asleep. Mom told me later that she started to hear this banging against the wall. She yelled at me to be quiet. It kept up, literally shaking the whole wall. Mom assumed I was jumping on the bed and got out of the tub to tell me to knock it off. She opened the door to my room to see the bed jumping 1-2 feet off the floor while I snoozed, oblivious, in the middle of the mattress. My mom - an Ivy League grad who holds a PhD in biology -  was a brand-new baby Christian at the time and believed in the supernatural. She commanded whatever it was to be gone in Jesus name, and it stopped. We weren't bothered again. And the smell in the duplex went away. We found out later that the duplex had come up for rent after a huge drug/prostition ring bust on the previous renters. (Comforting news, no?) 
That's the least shocking of my two paranormals. The second tale involved an exorcism.  Both have shaped my view on evil/demons/ghosts. Do I think they're real? Yup.

So do you have any favorite true scary stories? Have they shaped your belief in the supernatural? Or, like the photo below, in the impossible?