“The Dress,” #99-word Story

Posted on by Colleen M. Chesebro

The Carrot Ranch August 8, 2022, prompt: In 99 words (no more, no less), write a story about “the one who left the dress.” A 1940s-era dress still hangs in an abandoned house. Who left it and why? You can take any perspective and write in any genre. It can be a ghost story. Or not. Go where the prompt leads! Submit by August 13, 2022.

Join in! It’s lots of fun to see what you can create!

Mildred hung the dress on a peg in the changing room she shared with the other actresses. She shivered. This place gave her the creeps. She’d felt odd ever since she’d arrived.

As a Betty Grable look-alike, Mildred often stood in for the star. But today, they had filmed the scene in this abandoned shack in the woods.

“Jack, in here,” a woman’s voice called out. “It’s still here.”

“What’s still there?”

“The dress. You know, the dress Mildred Setterfield wore as a stand-in for Betty Grable in the movie, “Suspense”. She died of an aneurism in this cabin.”

Check out the stories of last week’s challenge: Sweet as Cherries

67 thoughts on ““The Dress,” #99-word Story”

          1. There’s a BBC radio show called “Uncanny,” and in one episode an actor told about a true life story of a ghost that his daughter saw in the mirror of his dressing room while he was Facetiming with her. This was in London. But lots of theaters supposedly have ghosts.

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            1. I’ve always read that residual energy remains after a violet death. It makes sense. Some police notice the change in atmosphere at a crime scene, too. I bet that was a scary experience. That is what I was trying for in this piece.

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  12. Spooky.
    I still can’t leave a comment on your site. I had a long exchange with WP this morning, where they claim the problem is in my browser or your settings or my settings or your browser. Useless, those “happiness engineers”. I told them today I’m having trouble with every site, but they have no answers except to blame us…

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      1. I have Chrome on my tablet, Firefox on my computer. It doesn’t seem to make a difference. I guarantee it’s some bug with WordPress. Particularly since it changes the blogs I can and can’t comment on seemingly at random. Even the happiness engineer admitted that fact did not sound like a browser problem.

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  20. Very good! Reminds me of the movie “The Six Sence” where the ‘dead guy’ didn’t know he was dead. 🙂

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    1. I’ve read that places where a violent death took place often retain that strange energy. All I could think of was, what if the dress held onto that energy along with the cabin? It’s all made up… and I wasn’t sure if I could pull it off in so few words. 💜

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