The Eccentric Realist

A caveat, a lot of these horror stories are shared throughout Latin America and even back in Spain so some of these may have other versions in other countries. Seeing as we just lived a horror story in our game against Sweden, it seems only appropriate to share the ones we have. Horror is the gift that keeps on giving. Everyone has their own boogeyman to deal with, and some excellent storytellers, like Guillermo del Toro, have given the world a taste of what we can come up with given enough imagination. Here are a few of the stories that we've inherited from our strange past. 5: El Chupacabra That's a naked bear, but you get the idea We're starting off with a simple concept. This is one of the more famous tales, and there have been "sightings" all across the continent, including in the southern United States, and it's not uncommon to see news from even reliable networks concerning the possibility that it chose to attack a farm. This beast i...

Native Americans are a vastly diverse culture, despite many grouping them into one homogeneous group, and from the many tribes that have gotten to exist, we're bound to get some good stories. They're human, of course, so they have the same fears that we do, with a different way to express them. Here are some of their more interesting tales. 5: Kanontsistonties: The Flying Heads This one sounds almost likes something Junji Ito would have made up. These cannibalistic monsters came to exist because of a famine which wiped out most of a tribe. The young ones wanted to flee, but the elders were against the idea and would rather perish in their own land than leave it behind, so the young ones killed the old men. To dispose of their remains, they decided to decapitate the bodies and offer them to the gods for forgiveness, so they did, but one of the young chiefs entangled himself among the heads and drowned with them in the lake, and since then, the monsters appeared. As fo...

Looking from the outside, one could imagine Japan as a foreign world. Their culture is vastly different than anything conceived in the West, likely due to the long distance and their isolated nature, which gave them time to develop something different. They're still human, though, and like humans, have the same root fears which birth their stories. Here are a few of them. 5: The Ghost of Oyuki This is a famous painting of a female yurei, which is what they call their ghosts. This one was painted by Maruyama Ōkyo, founder of the Maruyama-Shijō school of painting. According to the inscription, the artist had a mistress at the Tominaga geisha house, who died young, and he, naturally, mourned her death. One night, the woman appeared at the foot of his bed, and he couldn't get the image out of his head, so he painted her as he saw her, pale with black eyes and long, disheveled hair.  4: The Speaking Skull Back in 1300, from a temple in the Nara prefecture ca...

“The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown." You've been afraid of the dark before. Your door's open, and you're afraid of looking through the doorframe and find someone, or something, lurking in the hallway. You tuck your feet into your bedsheets so they're not exposed, you bury your face so you don't see those things which look like monsters in the darkness, and you don't turn to look at the window because that's where anything could stalk you, watch you sleep.  Horror is one of the oldest forms of storytelling that humanity shares. The oldest recorded horror story elements come from Homer , one of the more ancient Greek writers. You'll rarely find a culture without some sort of folktale that they either made or borrowed from someone else. Nowadays there are some things you'll find everywhere. The ghostly hitchhiker that kills you if you leave it stranded,...