Looking for spooky coffee stories to tell in the dark? Searching for harrowing tales of haunted cafes, werewolf baristas, bone dry cappuccino, and deadly drive-thrus? Look no further! Each year we team up with Pacific Foods Barista Series and look for talented writers to contribute tales of coffee terror to Sprudge. In 2021, we featured seven horrific humdingers for Halloween—but coffee horrors are a year-round experience for many, so we’re showcasing them here!
New Coffee Horror Fiction!
Ghosted Delivery by Mike Ferguson
A loading dock can be a lonely place when you’re waiting and no longer hoping, when the sun is about to abandon the day and the dying light pushes your shadow far back into the small roastery where only one bag of green coffee remains, when the pallet of coffee you ordered three weeks ago is two weeks late and nobody can promise you anything but uncertainty and the vague notion that it’s on the road somewhere.
Read Ghosted Delivery by Mike Ferguson
Rise of the RoBarista By Arielle Rebekah
“Your beverage will be ready shortly,” Jennifer beeps eerily as the sound of steaming liquid screeches through the air. Moments later, they begin to glide toward the crowd, and out of the corner of my eye, I catch a glimpse of the beverage they’re holding: a white paper cup filled to the brim with bright red liquid, blackening as it drips down the sides, and a long finger curled over the edge.
Read Rise of the RoBarista by Arielle Rebekah
The Haunting of Kuromame Kissaten by Hengtee Lim
The door to the coffeehouse is always locked. People who try to pull or push on it find it unwilling to budge. But for the curious, the ones who see the lights and smell the coffee and refuse to give up, the door will sometimes open. They knock—once, twice, and then once more—and the door is said to creak open upon the echo of the third knock.
Read The Haunting of Kuromame Kissaten by Hengtee Lim
Bean and Gone by Ever Meister
Though Gray was prepared for coffee to become illegal, they never expected it would last this long. Surely some kind of revolution would take place, certainly things would change? Three years into the coffee ban, they remembered that coffee was often the fuel of those revolutions, and coffee houses the center of political action and activism. Even Gray, who in a former version of life had chained themselves to the Ruggles station in protest of police brutality, before the police became what they are today.
Read Bean and Gone by Ever Meister
Extraction of Madness by Nathanael May
As the water began to seep slowly through the grounds and dripped into the bottom of the Chemex, she looked more closely at the barista in the pictures. It only showed them from the shoulders down, and only their hands and the Chemex were in focus in most of the shots, but… it looked like her, didn’t it? A white shirt, a black apron, even their skin was the same color as hers.
Read Extraction of Madness by Nathanael May
A Cafe Darkly by Lorenzo Wang
So startled by a flash and boom as lightning lit the desolate room,
she sensed a presence in her cup… a moon? A pearl? An eye!
A horrible… human… floating eye… in beverage black as pitch
that watched her in this cafe darkly, daring her to cry.
Read A Cafe Darkly by Lorenzo Wang
The Stages by Niki Tolch
She reached for her phone to text her mom that she’d managed to make the worst coffee in the world before she remembered her mother’s phone had already been disconnected. Her mom wasn’t there. Even though she would swear she could feel her right next to her.
The 2021 Halloween Week on Sprudge is presented by Pacific Foods Barista Series.
Explore our archives of scary stories here!
