There's a short story by MR James called The Mezzotint, about an academic who buys an engraving of a country house, only to watch in helpless horror as a tragedy that occurred there plays itself out in the engraving. Could we use an old camera to create a similar story? An ancient Polaroid camera found in the attic of someone's newly bought house starts to produce a photo (say) every twelve hours - despite having no film in it. impossibly, the pictures show the new owners of the house - and ultimately accelerate to showing them being horribly murdered. Can they avoid the fate the camera predicts ?

I've got a bunch of little ideas swirling around and I can't decide which one to run with. They're all equally stupid. **Ed takes a trip to New Orleans and happens upon a mysterious little boutique he'd never noticed before called 'Voodoo Books'. It's filled with all sorts of trinkets and bits of nostalgia from bygone eras... and, oddly, had no substantial book section. When Ed asks the owner about why no books given the name of the store, he says he'd started taking things on trade for those who couldn't pay for books a long time ago and had come up with this treasure trove of odds and ends. Since the future of books were online, he'd decided to sell and trade trinkets of "unusual stature" instead. Ed starts to look around and stops dead in his tracks at the sight of an old Kodak Retina 1 folding camera from the '30s. His mind instantly flashed to his grandfather who loved to take pictures and had the same kind of camera. He immediately takes it to the counter and buys it. Once Ed gets back to his hotel room, he pulls out the camera and marvels at the novelty of it. He opens it up and notices there's still film in it and gets a little excited at the thought that it could contain some excellent vintage shots from some family vacation or something. He decides he'll wait til he gets home and give it to one of his friends to develop. Ed develops the pics and... 1) finds pics of Hitler and Eva and Eva is pregnant. WHAT!? where's little baby Adolf? why didn't the world know? 2) finds pics of Hitler and Eisenhower laughing and shaking hands. WHAT!?! WWII conspiracy... 3) finds pics of his grandfather wearing a German SS uniform. WHAT!?!? his whole life as a Jew here in the US had been a lie. They escaped and found refuge here and claimed to be Jews. 4) finds pics of a young man and woman in love and posing with guns... it's Bonnie 'n Clyde's personal camera. but wait, what's a young granddad doing in those pics? grandma?

This comes from real life. The last few weeks of my mother's life she kept talking about something of value that was in an old dresser in her garage. She was insistent, so I took the dresser apart and found nothing but those old telephones. So.... That's the set up. Someone is mashed up in a car wreck, hanging on to life and saying there's something of value in their garage. They die and the loved ones are going through the garage, finding the stash of old phones in a dresser, then moving along in their search. A phone in the dresser rings. What? They cautiously answer it and hear the deceased person's voice struggling to talk, saying something that doesn't make sense. As they continue the process of clearing out the house and garage they hear another phone in that dresser ring. Slowly they put together the snippets of what's said and realize they're oblique clues they must put together and follow because it's become clear their loved one wasn't killed in a random accident, it was murder. They have to follow incomplete bits of information and find the killer. As they get closer, a red phone rings with a message from the deceased urging caution. Their murder was part of a more complex situation, and the loved one is next. @Despina...I currently live in the Barrow gang's hideout. There's a monument at our little town's police station for the sheriff Bonnie & Clyde killed after robbing a bank in Fayetteville. I live on the land where they washed their hands. Ookey-spookey.

A man acquires a piece of land at an auction where he intends to build a country mountain home. There’s no info on the land other than the man died in the ‘80s and all the family has died so the land was seized and auctioned. Nothing unusual. When he goes to the land for the first time, weird things start happening. He sees a young girl in a white dress with a red ribbon belt standing off in the trees holding a dolly. He also swears he can hear a faint, muffled cry of a child but has no idea where it’s coming from and brushes it off as a wild animal. Every time he tries to raze the house (it’s way too overgrown and creepy for him to even bother going inside) and clear the brush, the girl appears. He goes to the sheriff and asks if there are any schools or any families nearby and he says the closest family or school is nearly 20 miles away in a different town. The next day he goes back and finally decides to check out the house. Imagine the dustiest, creepiest old house you can and that’s what he’s dealing with. Once he picks and pulls and fights his way through the brush to get inside, he sees a bunch of framed photos of children on the walls. No pics of parents or family portraits… just kids. As he turns the corner to enter the kitchen he sees the girl outside in the distance. He calls out to her but she does not respond, she simply lifts her arm and points towards the trees behind the house. He turns to look in that direction but doesn’t see anything. When he turns back, she’s gone. He ends up searching the house and stumbles across an old camera. It reminds him of one his parents had when he was a kid and notices there’s still film in there so he decides to keep it and develop it just to see if there’s any clues about the house and who lived here. He keeps coming back sporadically to clear brush and make it easier to get equipment in here to raze the house and clear the land for his own creation. As he does this, girl randomly appears and keeps pointing to the same location behind the house and he still randomly hears the faint, muffled cry. He finally decides to go in the direction she’s pointing and notices there’s a small 8x8 cinderblock shanty that’s been completely overtaken with vines and brush. There are chains and a padlock on the door. Nothing he can do about it now. When he turns to leave, she’s right behind him and he hears the crying again, only this time it’s a bit louder. She again points to the shed. He tries to tell her that he can’t open it right now because he needs bolt cutters, but this answer isn’t good enough and everywhere he turns she’s in front of him pointing at the shed. He gives in and goes back to the shed. He walks around it and tries to see if there are any gaps or loose blocks and notices a dip in the earth. He moves the weeds and vines away and sees that the entire base of the house is surrounded by chicken wire that has been imbedded into the ground. He bends down to get a closer look at the hole and sees a tiny clump of dirty, half buried blonde hair. He falls backwards and hightails it outta there. FF to him developing the film and seeing pictures of the girl in the shed on a tattered mattress, among other pics of children in squalor and one he thinks looks dead. He immediately goes to the police. The children are identified in the pics as missing kids from the ‘70s and ‘80s. They go to the shed and when they open it they see a tattered mattress, a dirt floor, and an old dirty doll in the corner. When they step inside and pick up a blanket on the ground they see a skeleton of a small child and a partially dug hole. The blonde hair he’d seen from the outside was hers. She’d been digging to get out and was trapped by the chicken wire. The man had died and left her in there.

A Chicago TV crime show host visits a garage sale at an old home and finds a stack of old newspapers from the 20s where a front page photo shows a building long demolished, and he realizes he knows where Al Capone's near mythical vault is located. However, word gets out, and soon he finds himself on the run from a number of people, including Capone's granddaughter who wants the treasure, worth billions, to fund her own criminal empire

An avaricious man has his missing aunt declared dead. Unfortunately for him, his aunt is a powerful sorceress, and after punishing her nephew appropriately she attempts to retrieve all the belongings sold at a garage sale. She gets them all, save one: a camera that captures the soul of any mortal whose photo it takes. However, it hasn't returned because its naive and unaware new owner is a Soulhunter, a being tasked with capturing and delivering rebel souls to hell. Now she must find him and help him reject his undesired destiny, and then release those souls he unwittingly captured before they are delivered to a place from which there is no return.

A physicist visits a yard sale and finds a late 70s newspaper with a photo showing a missing friend smiling in a crowd. Back at his office, there's a letter on his desk, whose contents hold an original print of the same picture and a note from a very famous man: the reclusive founder of the world's biggest conglomerate who happens to be the missing friend. At his office, the now 60 year old friend explains that his accidental journey to the past has caused a time-space rift, that it's taken him 40 years to calculate how to repair the damage, and that because he's too old it's up to the physicist to take on the one-way mission by traveling back to the day in history the friend arrived in the past and killing the inadvertent time traveler.

I like this one!

I love this one too. Rocked by her husband's gruesome death (he's crucified by the Muslim Brotherhood) a young widow (Ria) ( a photojournalist) travels to the Middle East after she receives a mysterious gift--from her late husband. (An olive wood coffee table with a letter giving her details about the story he was investigating and a mysterious photograph of her husband, a Muslim man, and a strange flash of light that was taken the day he died.) After meeting with her news contacts at the hotel in Rafah, she learns the Muslim man is a journalist (farad) reporting near the Gaza Strip for BBC. They warn her it is far too dangerous to leave the hotel at this time. Rebels of the Muslim Brotherhood kidnap American journalists but their courier (Imad) promises to bring her back before sundown. While investigating the supposed area where her husband died she begins taking pictures. Imad warns her it is time for them to leave. Distracted, she visualizes, her husband's anguish begging God to help him. unable to hear Imad's warnings, Ria is mugged, beaten, nearly killed until a mysterious man rescues and nurses her back to health. After three days she awakens to find the handsome stranger, without identification, money or any-recollection of who she is--until he gives her camera back. Observing the beautiful hand made furniture she decides to take pictures and spies something vaguely familiar-an olive wood coffee table. Overcome with emotion, she becomes confrontational demanding to know where it came from. "From a tree,I would suppose." "I'm serious where did it come from? I have one similar to it." "I wouldn't say similar, Ria. Every tree is different from their roots up to the leaves that fall to the ground with the ripened fruit we eat to nourish our minds. Food for thought-something you are lacking." (She becomes transfixed--almost deflated when he spoke her name) "Here." (He escorts her back to the bed cot then hands her a plate of food. Unable to ignore her hunger, she begins to eat fully aware he is watching her. She goes into reporter mode.) "Thank you-- for saving my life." "Finish eating."(The man smiles and nods and knows she isn't done questioning him. He begins to walk away from her bedside and heads for the door speaking rather quickly.) "Uh---" "My name is of no concern but because it will give you some peace, (he writes it down for her. Ria struggles trying to pronounce it) "B en Ha-e-lo- " "Just call me Ben, its easier. now, get your rest we leave for Gaza in the morning. " As the story progresses we learn later in the story Ria's journey into Gaza is indeed a dangerous one traveling through the underground tunnels where she finally meets up with Farad a Palestinian journalist who was the one that sent the package to her insisting her husband wasn't investigating the Muslim Brotherhood---he was investigating Ben the carpenter. When Ria asks Farad why would her husband be investigating a carpenter she begins to develops her film only to be awestruck when every picture she'd taken of Ben is not there-only a flash of light. It is revealed that Ben is short for Ben Ha Elohim which means-Son of God. Ria's name is Maria which means Mary. Her husband's name is Joe short for Joseph and Ben is there by her request when she asked For Gods help in her struggle to come to terms with Joe's death. The crucifying is real and is being done today in Egypt. The Muslim Brotherhood are punishing those for Allah against Christians that will not submit. Her husband was an American TV journalist-an easy target.