Lydia Schoch

I come across the strangest and most interesting images when I’m searching for stock photos for this blog. It always makes me a little sad when I realize that nothing I’ve written so far fits them in any way.

This is the third instalment in my series of posts about these kinds of pictures. As always, I included a brief description of  each photo directly below it for anyone who isn’t able to see them.  If you use of these images as a writing prompt, I’d love to know how you interpreted it! Send me a message about it on Twitter.

Picture description: two young girls are crouching underneath a stone doorway. They are gazing at something that is just outside of the scope of the photograph. 

I don’t actually see anything horror-related in this image at all. The girls in it look well cared for and only mildly startled. Maybe they were visiting a kind relative and playing hide-and-go-seek with their cousins? It would also make sense for them to try to sneak out of the house to buy more candy only to be caught by a slightly-annoyed parent just before they made their final dash for sugar.

Picture description:  there are three glowing glass bottles filled with some sort of liquid. One of the glasses is blue, one is teal, and the final one is purple. 

I have one word for you: spells. If spells really existed in our world, Don’t you think this is exactly what they’d look like? Bright, pretty colours like these would probably have happy effects. It’s the dark, cloudy bottles you’d need to be careful with.

Picture description: a man with a large barcode tattooed onto his face is staring out directly at the audience. One half of his face is obscured by shadow. 

Is technology going to save the future or ruin it? I’d argue it will do a little of both, but the barcode makes me think that this dystopian setting isn’t going to give the main character many chances to turn things around before everything falls apart. On the flip side, maybe the tattoo will give him the camouflage he needs to slip through the shadows and live well just outside the reach of mainstream society.

Picture description:  a group of businesspeople are wearing conservative suits and shiny leather shoes. They are facing the camera and pulling up the legs on their pants, revealing colourful striped socks on their legs. Their faces aren’t visible.

These people – and no, not all of them are men – grew up together. The hours they spent constructing imaginative worlds as children followed them into adulthood. Every once in a while, they take a weekend away from their adult responsibilities and revisit the magical places they’ve been telling each other stories about for as long as they can remember.

Their colourful socks are a dead giveaway that one of these weekends is about to begin.

Picture description:  a human skull and bones are partially buried in the woods. They are lying on top of and next to a very old flight of wooden steps. 

No, this person didn’t have a violent death. It was a good one, and their soul was at rest until this happened.

Here’s the problem: they had a wooden headstone and the graveyard they were buried in fell out of use a few decades after they died. A few hundred years later, the family who was planning to build a house here accidentally dug them up alongside the remains of a dozen or so other forgotten plots.

They will all be reburied soon. On an even better note, their headstones will all be made of stone this time. Soon they will at rest again, and this time it will be forever.

Picture description: smooth, grey stones that have been glued together to look like a flock of birds. 

I’m imagining  a lonely old man who recently lost his spouse and their dog in the same year. The man has been an artist for decades, but he’s never had this much free time to fill. Adopting a new dog from the animal shelter helped him fill up much of that time, especially since Oscar the dog loved going on walks even more than his new human did.

One  day he discovered some smooth grey stones while they were out on one of their walks. After collecting them for a few months, he began to glue them together to make little birds. He noticed a flyer that was advertising a community art event at the library. They were looking for more local artists to participate in it.

On a whim, he signed up. Not only did he sell nearly all of his birds, he met several other artists there and quickly developed strong friendships with them. Nothing could ever replace his wife or previous dog, but he wasn’t lonely anymore. He now had friends, a rewarding hobby, and many reasons to wake up in the morning.

Picture description: a blindfolded woman who is wearing a loose dress standing beside the ruins of an old building. 

Some books like to straddle genres. Half of the plot of this one would be a chilling ghost story about an old house that was so haunted it had been abandoned entirely. No one could ever convince the angry spirits who lived there to move on.

The other half of it would be a spicy romance between the main character – a psychic who believes that ghosts are more willing to talk to you if can’t see them – and the EMT who rescued her in in the first scene when she fell off the steps and badly cut her leg on a sharp piece of debris.

Picture description:  a woman is calmly standing upside down on her kitchen ceiling. The table, appliances, and everything else in this room are obeying the laws of gravity like normal. 

This is what happens when you only pay part of your monthly gravity bill. Will she learn her lesson? Only time and a few wacky hijinks will tell for sure.

Picture description: a ghostly woman carrying a lantern while walking on a beach. She appears on both the right and left side of the photo. There is an old building in the background.

The fact that we can’t see the face of this “ghost” makes me think it’s a woman pretending to be a ghost with trick photography in order to draw attention to the building in the background. Maybe she owns a bed and breakfast there and thinks she’ll get more business if people think it’s haunted.

Something tells me that the actual ghosts who live there won’t be to happy with this, though.

Picture description:   a giant paw print on the edge of a concrete step. The paw has four sharp claws that extend over the lip of the step and onto the side of the next step. 

Monsters are real. Not only that, but some of them have learned how to thrive in our modern, urban world while only rarely leaving behind traces of their existence.

The construction workers wondered if something had been lurking around their worksite at night or when they went on their lunch break. It wasn’t until this paw print appeared that they were certain something was coexisting with them.

Since it never hurt anyone and since the concrete had hardened by the time they discovered the print, they decided to leave it as it was. Maybe the creature will come out of the shadows for good one day if he or she sees it.

Previous posts in this series:

10 Pictures That Are Begging to be Turned Into Stories

10 Pictures That Are Begging to be Turned Into Stories, Part Two