Creepy Worlds #50

Young Hal watched helplessly as mysterious green beings spirited his parents away during a family vacation at Plandome, leaving him traumatized and alone—but two decades later, armed with an ancient clue discovered in a Luxembourg abbey, he returns to the very hotel where it all began, determined to confront the creatures and learn the truth about his parents' fate. What Hal discovers when the green people materialize before him forces him to make an impossible choice that will define the rest of his existence.

Jason Steele clawed his way from poverty to fortune through sheer ruthlessness, building a rocket company into a powerhouse—but when he meets and marries the beautiful Lana, she becomes his only softness in a hard world. Now, desperate to save her life, Steele must find a way to commandeer the very rocket he sold to a rival businessman and pilot it to the distant planet Andregos, where an impossible cure waits in the alien atmosphere. A tale of ambition, love, and the question of whether a man can outrun his own nature when the stakes are everything.

A neurosurgeon's peaceful island vacation is shattered when an urgent call summons him across a fog-shrouded Atlantic to perform emergency brain surgery—but his reluctant pilot, Joe Cardwell, begins behaving in a disturbing, trance-like manner during the crossing. What connects the doctor to his silent, glassy-eyed ferryman, and what impossible discovery awaits him at the hospital, becomes the heart of this eerie supernatural tale.

Bob Travis thought it would be simple to prove his courage, but as darkness falls over the lake, the teenage boaster begins to realize he may have bitten off more than he can chew. What started as youthful bravado has drawn him face-to-face with something far more unsettling than he bargained for.

When a life-saving serum arrives by plane through a fierce Alaskan blizzard, the desperate community celebrates the pilot's miraculous landing—until they make a chilling discovery in the cockpit. This haunting tale of mercy and the inexplicable explores what truly guided the aircraft to safety in its darkest hour.

Artie Howland, a ruthless promoter, preys on Dr. Fenster, an impoverished inventor with a revolutionary process for enlarging farm produce—but the process comes with an unexpected reverse side, allowing living things to shrink to microscopic size and grow back again. When Howland steals credit for the invention and frames Dr. Fenster for a crime, the desperate inventor uses his own discovery to vanish into the laboratory, leaving Howland to wonder if a tiny, growing threat might be coming for him. As paranoia and shadows play tricks on his mind, Howland can't shake the fear that his victim has found the perfect means of revenge.

Gus Larson, an agriculture student, spots what he believes is a flying saucer in the night sky near Smedley College, but his friends dismiss his claim as yet another tall tale from a chronic exaggerator. When Gus insists on staying behind to watch for the object's return, he gets more than he bargained for—an encounter that leaves him with missing memories and a very peculiar detail that his friends can't help but notice.

In "The Picture That Was Cursed!", a young actor steps into a role left unfinished by a dead co-star, only to discover the film set is haunted by the vengeful spirit of a woman whose murder is buried in its reels. As the camera rolls, the line between performance and nightmare blurs, and the past refuses to stay behind the lens.

Two characters dismiss superstitions as nonsense—until they admit there's one belief that gives them pause: the old "three lights on a match" curse. "Odd Beliefs!" traces the shadowy origins of this eerie superstition through three historical tales, from ancient Egypt to the high seas, each ending in fiery disaster when someone tempts fate by lighting three cigarettes or pipes from a single flame. A clever cautionary story that proves some old warnings might just be worth heeding after all.

Frank Masters, a renowned submarine photographer, discovers an impossibly massive clam shell in the Coral Seas off Tarawa—and when it opens, he finds an entire undersea city teeming with tiny inhabitants. Though he manages to capture the discovery on film before the creatures flee and seal themselves away, Masters faces a skeptical world convinced his photographs are nothing more than clever darkroom trickery. The real question becomes whether anyone will ever believe what he's witnessed.