Stories

In 1975, a 49-year-old woman was admitted to a psychiatric hospital in Kentucky. She told doctors she was transforming into a wolf. She could feel her body changing. She saw fur growing on her hands and face. Her teeth were becoming fangs. Her face was elongating into a snout. She dropped to all fours. She howled. She scratched at the floor. She tried to bite staff members. When shown her reflection in a mirror, she saw a wolf staring back. ...

In 1903, Daniel Paul Schreber, a senior judge in the German court system, published a 450-page memoir titled “Memoirs of My Nervous Illness.” The book described in meticulous, articulate detail how God was transforming him into a woman. Not metaphorically. Literally. Through divine rays that penetrated his body and rewrote his nervous system. The transformation, Schreber explained, was necessary because humanity had been destroyed. He needed to become female so he could be impregnated by God and repopulate the Earth with a new race of humans. ...

There’s a horror story that has circulated online for years, known as “The Russian Sleep Experiment” or “The Soviet Sleep Experiment.” The story goes like this: In the 1940s, Soviet researchers sealed five political prisoners in a chamber and used an experimental gas to keep them awake for 15 days straight. By day five, the subjects became paranoid and stopped talking to each other. By day nine, they were screaming. By day 15, they had mutilated themselves and were begging the researchers not to let them sleep. ...

Imagine waking up one morning absolutely convinced that you are dead. Not metaphorically dead. Not feeling empty or numb or depressed. Actually, literally, medically dead. You can see yourself breathing. You can feel your heart beating. You can touch your skin and feel warmth. But your brain insists, with total certainty, that you are a corpse. You try to explain this to your family: “I’m dead. I don’t exist anymore.” ...

A woman looks at her husband of 30 years. She recognizes his face. She knows it’s him. The features, the voice, the mannerisms-everything looks exactly right. But she knows he’s not her husband. She’s absolutely certain. This person is an imposter. An identical copy. A replacement. Her real husband has been taken, and this lookalike has been put in his place. She knows how it sounds. She knows it’s irrational. But the certainty is overwhelming. ...

In March 2013, a woman in the village of Kalachi, Kazakhstan walked into her kitchen to make breakfast. She felt suddenly drowsy. Overwhelming exhaustion washed over her. She lay down on the couch “just for a moment.” She didn’t wake up for six days. When she finally regained consciousness, she had no memory of what happened during those six days. No dreams. No sense of time passing. Just… nothing. She wasn’t the first. She wouldn’t be the last. ...

On August 28, 1887, a man was found wandering the streets of Norristown, Pennsylvania, disoriented and unable to say who he was. He knew his name was “A.J. Brown.” He knew he was a stationer. But he had no memory of where he came from, why he was there, or how he’d arrived. Eventually, his identity was discovered: he was Ansel Bourne, a 61-year-old preacher from Rhode Island. Two months earlier, Ansel had left his home to run errands. He withdrew $551 from the bank, boarded a train, and vanished. ...

A woman hears the word “Derek” and immediately tastes earwax. Another person sees the number 5 as inherently, unavoidably red. Not because of any association or memory-it’s just red, the way the sky is blue. A musician feels violin notes as textures on his skin-high notes feel smooth and cool, low notes feel rough and warm. A painter sees every letter and number in specific colors. A is red, B is blue, C is yellow. She’s never seen them any other way. ...

On the night of February 1, 1959, nine experienced hikers cut their way out of their tent from the inside and fled barefoot into the Ural Mountains winter. The temperature was around -30°C (-22°F). They were dressed only in underwear or light clothing. They had functioning equipment, warm clothes, and a secure shelter. They abandoned all of it and ran. Search teams found their bodies weeks later, scattered across the mountainside. Some had died from hypothermia. Others had massive internal injuries-broken ribs, fractured skulls-with no external trauma. ...

You look down at your hands. They’re gigantic-swollen to three times their normal size, fingers like sausages, impossibly huge. You look at the room around you. It’s shrinking. The walls are closing in. The ceiling is descending. Everything is becoming tiny while you expand to fill the space. Or wait-are you shrinking? The room is growing massive. The doorway has become a cathedral entrance. Your hands are doll-sized. You are small, impossibly small, while the world balloons around you. ...