Dust and Echoes

On November 7, 1908, in the high-altitude silence of San Vicente, Bolivia, the law finally caught up with the "Kings of the Outlaw Trail." The official report was definitive: a shootout, a mercy killing, and a shallow grave. The era of the Wild Bunch was over.  Butch Cassidy...dead....so they thought...

But what if the greatest heist Butch Cassidy ever pulled wasn't taking gold from a train, but stealing his own ending from the han...

"Subject did not cast Expected shadow."

In the winter of 1962, the Arco Desert of Idaho was home to the National Reactor Testing Station...a 900-square-mile "cathedral of the atom" where the government performed the dangerous alchemy of the nuclear age. It was a place guarded by hardened veterans, high-voltage fences, and the most advanced sensors the Cold War could buy. They were prepared for Soviet spies. They were prepared for r...

September 1857, a wagon train of 120 men, women, and children...the "Ozark Aristocracy"...rolled into a high desert meadow in Utah Territory, driving a fortune in cattle and carrying the dreams of a new life in California. They never arrived.

What followed was the most chilling "false flag" operation in American history. For over a century, the truth was buried in a shallow grave, masked by a narrative of "savage" attacks. But the ...

In the frozen wilderness of 1903 Utah, the snow captures every secret with perfect fidelity. For the settlers of Iron County, the world is a place of rigid order and hard faith. But when a series of livestock killings begins, the local Sheriff discovers evidence that defies biological explanation. The tracks left in the mud do not belong to a wolf or a bear. They are massive, clawless, and disturbingly human.

This is not a story ab...

A TRUE STORY.  Five armed prospectors in a remote cabin were attacked by creatures that science denies... 

Welcome to Ape Canyon. 

In July 1924, on the volcanic slopes of Mount St. Helens, Fred Beck and his crew made a fatal mistake: they shot a massive, "Bigfoot" creature who was watching them from the cliffs.

THEN....That night, they struck back.

From the thunderous impact of boulders shattering the roof to the heavy, primal brea...

When the world refuses to let a star die, it builds something to replace her.

After the death of actress Tessa Hawthorne, a synthetic continuation wakes up years later...perfectly engineered to perform, speak, and exist on command. But fragments of memory begin to surface: a childhood trailer in Idaho, a grandmother’s kitchen, a death that doesn’t match the official story.

As the line between machine and person collapses, buried tr...

In the dead of winter, 1862, Jean Baptiste wasn’t just digging graves; he was harvesting them. To the families of Salt Lake City, the cemetery was sacred ground. To Baptiste, it was a supply closet. He cracked open coffins like walnut shells, stripping the stiffening bodies of the innocent...men, women, and children...treating them as nothing more than mannequins.

But the horror wasn't just in the ground. It was in his home.

When p...

Senior Marshal Silas Thorne thought he had seen every kind of evil the frontier could offer. He was wrong. When a simple government task in the remote town of Boulder ends in the brutal murder of his son, Silas abandons the law for something darker.

Guided by a mysterious Navajo man and an ancient legend...he carries his boy to the Warrior Cave to demand a miracle. He gets one.

But the thing that rises from the glowing green water ...

300 Miles through the Apocalypse. 10 Hours. One Way Out.

The infection hit fast. The panic hit faster. Now, Jed Thorne is driving a stolen Land Cruiser through a burning Utah, trying to get his daughter to the only safe place left: Dead Horse Point State Park.

But the safe zone is closing. At sundown, the military is detonating the only land bridge to the mesa, turning it into an impenetrable island in the sky. Jed has to outrun th...

In the isolated settlement of Terth, life is defined by the Burn Line...a shimmering, humming barrier that encircles the town, protecting the last of humanity from the radioactive wasteland outside.

To touch the Line is to burn.

To question it is heresy.

Caleb is a tower mechanic, dedicated to keeping the ancient machines running and the barrier strong. But lately, the silence speaks louder than the hum. He’s noticed gauges that ne...

The Grand Banks, 1755.

The fog does not roll; it exhales. And hidden within the stifling gray of the Atlantic, something waits for Lieutenant Thomas Halloway.

Halloway is a man of the Royal Navy, a scholar of the Enlightenment, and a believer in the rational world. He trusts charts, sextants, and the sturdy timber of the HMS Acheron. But when the fog clears, it reveals a vessel that defies all reason: a blindingly white craft, smoo...

Darius Enlo is five thousand days into a lonely mission to harvest a comet that will exponentialize Earth's AI models. Onboard are the scientists who will execute the plan on arrival, frozen in ice for the long haul. Watching over them alone is Darius, a transit caretaker.  But when an impossible message arrives from deep space claiming the mission is a death sentence for "his people", Darius must make a choice.

Does he trust the A...

Stewart believes he is just waiting out the clock. Retired, invisible, and adrift in a life that feels increasingly gray, he drives into the high Utah wilderness not to find something new, but to escape the quiet nothingness of home. He tells himself he is ready for the end.

But the mountain has a way of calling a bluff.

When a sudden winter storm buries the remote road and traps him in a freezing whiteout, the silence of the deser...

Sent to the dreary, isolated Oregon coast to stay with a grandmother they barely know, two city teenagers find themselves trapped in a war that is older than they are, and far more terrible.

Their family's history is the town's curse, and the only path to survival demands that they sail directly into the heart of the darkness. This is a story about the agonizing choice between running from your past, and the moment you decide to bu...

Thomas Reid is a literary star, his bestselling novel The Factory Grave, a golden ticket out of his blue-collar past. But the life he built withing a remote mountain fortress, the perfect family, the critical acclaim....it all feels like a fraud. He is haunted by a suffocating "survivor's guilt", a feeling that drives him back to the Utah wilderness for a reunion with Rudy, the best friend he left behind.  

He went for penance. He...

What if you found a VHS tape... that showed you the future?

It's 1992, and Clint Mercer is a lonely man living a quiet, predictable life. His only solace is the local video rental store, a relic of a bygone analog era. But when the clerk hands him a mysterious, unlabeled cassette with one word on it ...REWIND! his world is shattered.

It's not a movie. It's a prophecy.

Clint watches, horrified, as the grainy, handheld footage shows ...

Jack's a long haul trucker that's not just hauling freight.

He's cursed with a psychic radar for evil...a 'Thump' in his skull that screams for blood, freezes the cab with spectral dread, or heralds true, ancient darkness.

Blackmailed by a demonic 'Dispatcher' holding his sister's life as leverage, Jack is now on a cross-country run with an impossible cargo: a sealed, freezing trailer that's a beacon for every monster on the map.

F...

A collection of some of my favorite original short scary stories, volume 1.  What if the things you trust most...the deep silence of the woods, the familiar voice of a loved one, a desperate cry for help in the dark...were all just bait?

For this special episode, Dust and Echoes presents a triptych of terror. Three Original Tales of Terror from author James Cawley that explore the unsettling truth that we are never truly alone, an...

Seeking total solitude in the vast, silent corners of the Utah desert, a traveler believes he's finally alone. But the darkness is listening...and waiting. 

When a relentless siege begins against the thin fabric of his small tent, he is forced to remember the ancient, whispered rules of the night:

Don't speak,

don't whistle,

and never, ever tell the darkness your name.

This is a terrifying psychological battle against a patient ...