The forest grew on Halloween. Ghost trees rose through the pavement, mushrooms sprouting around their roots and along the asphalt streets like it was the finest loam. Birds flew through the foliage and vanished. Fox and deer poked their heads around the trunks of the trees or bounded across the road, causing vans full of trick-or-treaters to slam on their brakes. It didn't take much longer for the news vans to appear than it had the mushrooms. They too sprouted from the street, their strange stalks and appendages angling here and there. Some of them were probably convinced that they'd gone crazy, but they were determined to go quietly and doing their jobs, documenting the insanity until the nice men in the white coats came to take them away. Instead, they found that yes, their cameras could record the ghost forests just fine. Some places it wasn't forest, of course. There was tall grass prairie, which was more of a problem since ghost grass extended above the windshield of the cars trying to drive through it, and though it was mostly transparent, once you added up the blades of grass it because something that was quite impossible to see through.


Inspiration: "This is Halloween" - Marilyn Manson + http://www.flickr.com/photos/e_haya/9725445816/
Story potential: Medium
Notes: This is my second idea about ghosts (of some kind) coming back on the traditional holiday, and the regular world having to deal with it. Not sure if that means the idea is played out or if it means that there's really something there. Harrumph.

The experiment was supposed to produce a hybrid of the tea tree that would have extra power against mosquitoes but cause no reaction on human skin. A few human genes were slipped in, to make it produce an oil that would "think" it was human. Later some lab scientists blamed the part-time voodoo priestess who was also an assistant in the gene lab. Others blamed the gene splicer, said he'd gotten confused and slipped a few tea tree genes into a human. Nobody could quite explain how it was even possible for the treegirl to come to viability, but there it was. All the little sprouts in their controlled nutrient pouches, and one sprout that stayed curled up for a long, long time. Jokes were made about it looking like a fetus. Then the jokes stopped, as it became readily apparent that that's exactly what it was, even if it was green and had rootlets trailing out from it.


Inspiration: Flickr photo http://www.flickr.com/photos/neon_tambourine/6904691093/
Story Potential: Medium
Notes: Could be whimsical magic realism, but that's not really my cup of tea at the moment. So to speak.