A yearly tradition of mine is to draw a baker's dozen monsters for each day leading up to Halloween. It started off with just the classic spooks, but has since gone on to cover everything from mythological beasts to literary nightmares to unsung creepy things I think deserve more attention.
Halloween '17
Sheet Ghost
An old discarded blanket stained with shame and despair, the sheet ghost spends its afterlife scaring little kids. The specter isn’t particularly frightening itself, but it can reshape its various smears into weird and terrifying images. Frightened children usually stain the sheet in return (they have many orifices...), something the ghost welcomes because the more miserable it is the more miserable it can make others.
Naturally, the sheet ghost HATES the wash. It nearly always sneaks out of the house undetected, but sometimes a well-meaning parent is just too quick.
Comfort objects are able to repel the filthy ghast -- kids claim their favorite teddies and toys literally fight back, but perhaps, just perhaps, the ghost just can’t bear to be reminded of its old life...
Haunted Armor
A magic suit of armor charged with protecting its castle and kingdom. But nothing could stop the ravages of time, so now the armor is left defending an empty plot of land. Fully realizing how pointless it all is but unable to turn against its orders, the automaton desperately wishes SOMEONE would destroy it already. Alas and alack, without an actual body it is, by definition, unkillable...
Until then, the armor might as well get some fun out of it by sassing its opponents. Really, a chainsaw? I’m not a tree, you drate-poking fustilarian lubberwort!
FishMen
The fishmen are symbiotes to the abyssal god Dagon, dwelling on his vast form and living off whatever scraps he blesses them with... or at least the fishmen did until Dagon disappeared. What happened they can't (or won't) say, but the deep ones are convinced they'll find him again. Eventually. If they're worthy enough.
In the meantime, the fishmen look for a replacement god-home. Most of the ocean's inhabitants are far too small, even the whales can only support so much. The closest match to Dagon's sheer size are these peculiar floating metal beasts, who are already home to weird small-headed parasites. The fishmen aren't opposed to sharing a host, especially since they live on the outside and these things seem to mostly live on the insides, but taking the grey leviathan underwater kills all the tiny-heads and inexplicably renders the greater beast brain-dead! Hmm, perhaps those vermin ARE it's brain, and they can be 'convinced' to breathe water...
Mushroom Men
The mushroom men are playful little scamps who can often be found dancing in a ring in groups of 32. These fungal friends more than happy to let humans join in, though they're not so keen on letting them leave. Sometimes they'll feed their guests to their mycelium core, sometimes they'll turn them into a cloud of spores, and sometimes they just want to dance for far, far longer than the humans expect. The 'shrooms keep them alive and well the entire time, of course, it’s not THEIR fault the humans lose track of the years...
Instead of the typical toadstool, these mushroom men are based on the "bleeding tooth fungus" Hydnellum peckii, which manages to look both horrifying AND scrumptious!
Jersey Devil
The cursed thirteenth child of Mother Leeds, the Jersey Devil revels in his infamous reputation, using it as an excuse to be as big of a menace as he pleases. Simply flying over town or screeching in the night is enough to cause a panic, but the Devil loves being creative. He might leave a trail of footprints leading somewhere dangerous just to see how stupid people can be, or perhaps he'll kill a farm's worth of chickens and toss them all on a neighbor's roof, or instead maybe he'll twist himself inside out in the middle of a road and jump at anyone who ventures near (because, naturally, a pile of organs isn’t scary enough!)
That boy ain’t right.
Brain in a Jar
Cloning a new body went a little strange. It's functional, at least. Although sometimes there are voices...
Incidentally, "disembodied brain" has always been a personal favorite character type of mine. THE favorite, really.
Gremlin
Gremlins love to play games. Unfortunately, their favoritest game is to see who can remove the most parts of a jet before it breaks down and crashes. Their second favoritest game is to see who's crash is most spectacular.
The little imps don't mean to harm the humans, though. They'll pester them, of course, laughing and chiding and flying circles around the pilots as they fall. The gremlins even assist the humans in deploying their parachutes (so they can mock them even longer, naturally)... provided those weren't tossed out as part of the game. If THAT happened, well too bad! Toodles, poor doomed man.
Golem
It seemed so easy, creating man from clay. Ancient texts from around the world agreed it could be done (and they rarely agree on anything), but simply sculpting a body and breathing into it didn't work. The creators had to research anatomy, dissecting and reassembling their fellow man until they had it figured out – and then they needed to see how far they could push lobotomy until they had a soldier that could follow orders without questioning the ethics behind it. But at long last they had their golem.
...and were immediately killed by it. Not out of any kind of revenge, but because the brute took the simple order to destroy very literal.
Worm
Hailing from an alternate reality (probably...), this monstrous worm feeds on decaying dimensions – not so much the objects inside but the very fabric of that particular space-time. Capable of moving in more than just the normal directions as well as flat-out drilling, ah, wormholes through the universe(s), the enigmatic annelid can suddenly appear out of nowhere, or out of anything, including its own coils. Consequently, the exact path of the beast is impossible to predict, even it appearing at all doesn't say much as the world may simply be "a little moldy" as opposed to "a bloated corpse."
In simpler terms, it's a horrible thing that bursts out of nowhere and vanishing just as quickly, leaving only the dread feeling that the trip to the store is somehow a little shorter...
Guillotine
The living guillotine brings justice to its wholesome little town, executing all who it-- er, the village deems "evil", such as witches, highwaymen, the snobbish elite, and those who make awful head puns. The town has gotten rather quiet since the decapitations started, which undoubtedly means it's gotten safer, although there always seems to be a new kind of criminal after they've finally made some... headway.
Space Bug
First encountered in the Betelgeuse star system, the space bugs are ravenous blood-drinkers that can splice their prey's DNA with their own, "evolving" into a new creature every time they feed. In fact, improving itself appears to be its primary motive. A patchwork of cloned genes, it can be difficult to identify a bug at all (at least before it has jammed its proboscis in you), and impossible to work out what a "natural" one would even look like.
Space bugs are solitary hunters, with no ruling queen or hivemind, and the bugs have been known to attack each other, some even specifically adapting to hunt their supposed fellows. Each bug is able to reproduce on its own, using its store of DNA to create unique offspring instead of mere clones, although this is seemingly done more to make room for fresh blood than anything else.
For some reason, the space bugs seem to avoid gaining sentience. Intelligence, sure, but never to the point of becoming fully sapient.
Evil Toady
The Toady is an evil being sent from the Dark Dimension to pave the way for his Overlord, a task that involves both vile unspeakable rituals and simple acts of spite. He meant to take a certain human as a host, but said person just happened to find a lucky penny and now the Toady is stuck in the body of a cooked chicken (he DID nab that person's eye; petty revenge does the rotten heart good). This little mishap doesn't foil his plans, though, being a dark magic user more than compensates for the lack of thumbs. Still, the Toady hopes his master will restore his body as a reward, though he's expecting She'll find it hilarious and make him keep it...
Evil Overlord
The evil Overlord is, well, evil. Quite literally made of pure, distilled wickedness, in fact, which she's able to shape into anything she desires. Having outgrown her home dimension, the Overlord has come here to conquer... maybe. As evil incarnate she MUST ruin things for someone else, meaning she can be rather flighty, suddenly dropping everything she's doing just to knock over somebody's drink (especially if there's like a computer or paperwork right next to it). Understandably, the Overlord often has her underlings work on anything important.
What we perceive as the Overlord is only a tiny fraction of her true self -- just her eye and mouth, in fact... and lots and lots of drool. Eww.
Evil Minions
A seemingly endless stream of minions are created to assist their Overlord. Some are fully sentient, some are made to perform one specific task, most are mindless things that just sort of congeal into being from the pure evil their Master is constantly exuding. They're all surprisingly resilient, the only way for them to truly die is if the Overlord decides to "pop" them -- which happens quite a lot since she's, well, evil.
