Nightmare Fuel / Zekkyou Gakkyuu

Per wiki policy, Spoilers Off applies here and all spoilers are unmarked. You Have Been Warned.

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Going camping is a lot less fun when you are killed, cooked and eaten by a pair of old Neat Freaks

• The Bonds of a Curse, though it has one of the few unambiguously happy endings in the manga, has Sakahara, who relieves his stress by dragging a puppy by the neck behind his bike until it dies (shown in a flashback, no less). And Sakahara's not sorry about it at all. His Karmic Death, which occurs offscreen, isn't too much fun either: getting dragged along by a truck after his clothes get caught on it (and the people who found the body couldn't bear to look at it). It doesn't help that there are psychopaths just like him in real life.
• The Kind Mama's House: "Welcome home, Anna-chan~"
  • Especially bad since, while many of the stories involve some sort of supernatural power, this one doesn't. It could easily happen in real life to anyone's child. There's also this note from Yomi after the story:
    Yomi: In an era where it is hard to see what's important to you...why would you seek safety in a person you can't see?
• Black Profile is especially scary because, unlike in the majority of the stories, nobody really does anything wrong: a bunch of schoolgirls, caught up in a trend of swapping 'profile cards', find a black card with nothing written on it that supposedly belonged to a girl who died. Shortly afterwards, one girl - who had written her ability to run as her best feature - is in an accident and loses her legs. Then the girl who had chosen her face is mutilated by glass shards. Even people who hadn't written anything are killed, and why? Because one girl in the class had written that she was happy to have a lot of friends...and now the ghost girl can be with her forever.
• The Matching Class's ending. Just...dear God, imagine having to go to an entire school like that, and knowing you can't stop it or escape.
• From the Land of Mirrors: At a school with a large mirror in the corridor, there's a rumor that your reflection can come out and take your place. A girl accidentally cracks the mirror over her friend's reflection one day, and the next day her friend not only has an injury in the same place, but her mole appears to have moved to the opposite side of her face and she's acting very strangely. The same thing happens to more and more students until only the first girl and a boy are left, reasoning that they can save everyone by smashing the mirror up with a bat. It turns out their classmates were just playing a prank, and it seems like the story will end happily... but because they were all reflections in the Land of Mirrors to begin with, they shatter into pieces of glass.
• Execution Classroom:
  • The concept of vigilante justice being delivered by girls no older than twelve is frightening even without the supernatural elements.
  • The person who's been bullying protagonist An is forced to sit in the chair and gets hit by a car, causing her to be critically injured. We then cut to An in the bathroom, and at first she looks remorseful. Then she starts insanely laughing, saying that said person deserved what she got (Actual quote: "She had that coming! If you do bad things you'll end up like that!"), and when her best friend Miyuu comes into the room reveals that she was the one who suggested the bully sit there in the first place.
  • An is targeted by the class president to be executed after she accidentally shoves Miyuu, because hurting people is a crime you know. Miyuu begs for An to be spared because she forgives her, so it should make it okay... and then the class president tells her that if that's the case, then Miyuu must be executed. And then while she is staring at her in shock, An tearfully approaches her, and helps with the execution. "Sit down."
  • The moral delivery at the end of the story: "Perhaps this chair, is in your classroom''. The next page where the credits are is blank save for Yomi offering the audience a seat in the chair.
• Black Forum:
  • A girl, Misa, uses the internet, namely her school's student forum, to complain about her Deadpan Snarker friend Eiko, talking bad about her behind her back for the whole forum to see, while putting on a sweet face to Eiko in person. One day Misa logs on and sees that there's a topic about her; clicking it reveals post after post after post of random girls saying they all hate her, that she's a horrible person, and that they'll meet up at a cafe to talk about her. Misa goes herself, in disguise, but no one from school is there. Despite that, the next day the girls are posting laughing comments about her ("Did she think we didn't see her?") and photos of her at the cafe. What's worse, Misa finally recognizes one of the names of the girls in the thread... and she died a week prior, despite her most recent post being that morning. Misa is so terrified that she stays at home, locks the door, and breaks her computer. Then the computer turns back on, and she checks the forum topic out of curiosity. The girls are going to her house and liveblogging their individual status, one saying that she can see the roof, one that saying she's on the front steps, and one saying that she's outside her bedroom door. She panics and breaks her computer, and then in the black screen's reflection, we see dozens of ghostly girls standing behind her, smiling eerily. We're here. And the ending reveals that Misa is now one of the ghosts and that they're now targetting Noriko, one of Misa's friends...]]
  • In the end, Yomi is seen chatting about the events with Mio and Anna, the girls from The Devil's Game and The Kind Mama's House respectively. It makes one wonder where the unfortunate girls in every chapter go after they die.
• The Money Tree: A young girl, Akane, has acquired a wonderful bonsai tree that sprouts an insane amount of money. But as more money grows from the tree, people who have used it begin to disappear — her classmate and said classmate's mom, her father, her mother... and then it ends with Akane being dragged underground by the tree's roots as her extended family gushes over her wealth inside the house. One of the last pages shows the ground beneath the tree, as its elongated roots wrap around and emerge from skeletons of everyone who vanished over the course of the story.
• Best Friend: An antisocial girl, Miho, wishes to have friends, and one day she suddenly starts receiving mysterious notes. Miho believes that the sender is one of her elementary-school classmates. Time passes and she befriends some classmates, becoming happier. But not so fast, bucko. The sender of the mysterious messages is a stone statue in the road that feels lonely, and one day she appears in from of Miho, kills her, and turns her into a statue so they can always be together. And the statue doesn't simply appear before Miho and cast some creepy magic, oh no. She pursues her at impossible speeds as poor Miho runs down the hall, finally catches up to her and sits on her back, and then grows heavier and heavier until she breaks Miho's spine and sprays blood on the floor. And the whole time, the statue is cheerfully calling her name, either oblivious or uncaring of Miho's suffering. And then the sequel reveals that the statue has been transforming more antisocial girls into statues in order to have more friends.
• The Home of Dolls is about a young girl, Asako, assisting a seemingly sweet elderly woman who owns a massive collection of lifelike, ornate dolls. Meanwhile, some of Asako's classmates, teachers, and other people have been going missing. Asako soon discovers that the old woman has been kidnapping people and turning them into dolls. Asako sets the dolls on fire, and the old woman apparently burns to death trying to save her dolls. That's not the end, though. An epilogue that takes place ten years later shows Asako, her mother, and her young daughter being approached by an elderly woman with bandages wrapped all over her badly burned face. And then the bonus pages show two new girls assisting the elderly woman and admiring her dolls... which now include dolls of Asako, her mother, and her little girl.
• The Slit-Mouthed Woman, dear heaven. Self-Fulfilling Prophecy, Cold-Blooded Torture, and Body Horror combine in the worst way possible for the poor teacher, and the person responsible for this is the protagonist. And the protagonist's reason for starting this whole chain of events? The teacher was friends with a guy she liked. That's literally it. The worst part: the protagonist could've stopped it at any moment by just confessing, but just runs away when she sees the mob coming.
• The Land of Mermaids: There's a rumor at a school that if you're a beautiful girl, the mermaids in the pool will take you to their land where only the most beautiful of them all may go. Nana, a girl who is very self-conscious about her image and envies others who get compliments about how pretty they are, is dead set on trying to be one of the chosen few. Her desire to be chosen only worsens when two popular classmates of hers disappear while in the pool, supposedly taken by the mermaids. She finally breaks when her best friend Hatsuki, a Meganekko whom the protagonists consider rather plain-looking but who apparently cleans up nicely, disappears after Nana accidentally pushes her into the pool. How much does this break her? She steals as much money as she can from her parents to afford a plastic surgery that will change her appearance drastically. Believing herself to be beautiful enough for the mermaids, she goes back to the pool and waits in the water for them. And lo and behold, she finally gets to meet the mermaid! Only it's not a mermaid — it's a horrifying Chain of People made of all the girls who disappeared, ranging from Hatsuki to girls from past years. Each rotting body is hugging the other very tightly and it's a very long chain. It can be assumed that each one of these girls envied others for their beauty and sought out to drag those they envied down into the water and never letting them go, making them part of this chain. The ending reveals that Nana is now part of the Chain of People, and the last scene shows her targetting another pretty girl in the pool. On top of that, said scene only shows her teeth. We never see the rest of her.
• Make-Believe Sisters. Holy moly, Make-Believe Sisters. The protagonist, a third-grader named Haru, feels like The Unfavorite since her three-year-old sister Mii gets all the attention and babied, while Haru is practically ignored and scolded for nearly everything. A wish on a shooting star causes her and Mii to swap bodies, meaning that Haru-as-Mii gets babied and loved, while Mii-as-Haru cries in confusion and is scolded. Sounds okay so far? Well... First Mii-as-Haru decides to imitate something Haru did earlier and threatens to cut Haru-as-Mii with a butcher knife. Then she gets jealous when she sees her sister being pampered while she isn't... then she remembers something else Haru did earlier: threatening to throw something of Mii's out the window if she didn't want it. Mii-as-Haru takes her sister, wrapped in blankets, and carries her to the window, saying "I should throw away things I don't want. I don't want Haru." The two switch back just then, and Haru finds herself in her own body... only to discover, as her mother screams behind her, that in switching-back, Mii has been dropped and killed. Fridge Horror kicks in when you realize that not only is Haru scarred for life, but so are her parents, as they've seen their elder daughter murder the younger. Either Haru, the parents, or all three are probably going to be institutionalized... and the family we see watching the news story on it is implied to abuse their small son.
• The Do-Gooder Club, in a subtler way. A girl, Kaho, wants to join a club so she'll have someone to be with while her friend Risa spends time with her new boyfriend. She comes upon the Do-Gooders Club, a small club consisting of three others who generally just help others around school and town; stopping bullies, finding lost items, picking up litter, etc. At first things seem great, until Kaho happens to see two of the girls trashing a club room. She runs to tell the club president... who just smiles and says that she was hoping Kaho would find out soon. See, the Do-Gooders Club does good deeds, yes... but only after they cause trouble. They trash rooms so they can clean them later, steal items so they can pretend to find them, and pay students to bully others so they can step in. All so they can have something to do that will get them praised. And what's Kaho's reaction to this? She's totally alright with it, even taking part in the deeds herself by shoving Risa's boyfriend in front of a passing car, hospitalizing him so he'll be more dependent on Risa, just like Risa had hoped. The fact that these are people, including Kaho, who would willingly and happily cause trouble just to fix it and be praised later, and Yomi's narration saying that these types of people exist and are more common than one might think, is just chilling.
• The bonus mini-story Colorful Strawberry. A young girl, Mika, discovers a strange strawberry with a frightening face that eats anything she doesn't like. First it eats her vegetables for her... then her grandmother's annoying dog. Then it eats her grandmother, apparently at the girl's command. Then Mika visits her mother in the hospital after her mother gives birth to Mika's new baby sibling. She then cheerfully gives her mother the strawberry, saying it's a present for the baby. Earlier, Mika claimed that she hated the baby...
• The Requirements of a Belle: A girl, Yuri, is jealous of Atsuko, a girl who was once fat but has lost weight. She goes to great lengths to try to become skinnier, but Atsuko is always lighter than her. Eventually, Yuri becomes crazed with jealousy. She cuts off chunks of her hair, cuts her finger nails to the nub, and even stabs herself in the stomach. All of this is horrifying, but then we find out Atsuko's secret. "If you can't get rid of what is on the outside, get rid of what is on the inside." Then we see under her shirt...
• The Last White Day: A popular girl, Moeno, receives cream puffs for White Day and eats them... but after that, she feels sick to her stomach, tired, and seems to have a stalker. Said stalker slips notes into her pocket ("Did you like the cream puffs?") and even sneaks into her house to write "Don't be scared" on her shirt. And then comes the ending. The one who sent the cream puffs was a boy she'd rejected earlier... and he killed himself to put his own flesh and soul in the cream puffs. While he cheerfully and psychotically tells Moeno that they'll be together forever, she remembers her mother's scissors had gone missing earlier... and the boy is somehow able to stab the girl from inside her own stomach, with said scissors. No, it doesn't make sense, but Rule of Scary. A yonkoma in the volume's omake puts a humorous spin on the ending, but Fridge Horror kicks in when you consider the boy's point of view, which brings a new Fate Worse than Death to mind.
• The Queen's Trick: A young girl, Kumi, is jealous of Mirei, the "classroom's idol". Everyone thinks Mirei is cute and treats her specially, but Kumi is One of the Boys. After wishing she could be cute and "treated like a girl", Kumi accidentally inhales a flower... and the next morning, awakes with a sprout on her head that only she can see. The sprout somehow causes the boys in class to treat her nicer and call her cute — even male teachers give her special treatment, and her rambunctious brothers adore her. The flower grows bigger and bigger as Kumi desires to be cuter, cuter than Mirei; eventually, all the males in the class, including the teacher, are bowing before her and calling her their queen. Then the flower starts to rot... The girl grows tired, weak, and is finally attacked by the boys in her class as they demand something of hers as reward. Kumi falls off a roof and dies, while the boys happily lick up her blood, cooing about how sweet it tastes. And it is revealed that Mirei's secret to being the class idol is that she also has a flower of her own, but doesn't waste it like Kumi did.
• My Older Brother and I: A girl, Mana, wishes to have a kinder brother, and her wish comes true. In the end, she decides that she doesn't want the "perfect" brother she wished for, but her real brother and her real parents. To make her happy, the fake brother she wished for gives her family back and disappears forever, and the protagonist begins to repair her relationship with her brother. Then she overhears him telling a friend he wished for a "better" sister, and the final pages show the newly-made, fake sister sending Mana to the sand to be trapped. A yonkoma in the volume's omake puts a humorous spin on the ending, but Fridge Horror kicks in when you consider that the new fake sister is getting fed up with the brother and decides to wish for another brother...
• Guard of the Mountain, as shown above. An elderly couple runs an off-the-map campground with the simple rule of "Be on your best behavior". And they mean your best behavior... if you litter, urinate in the water, set off fireworks, or disrespect nature at all, they'll kill you with a hatchet, eat you, and serve you in a stew for the next campers. The scene of the 11-year-old protagonist fleeing their cabin while they grab her best friend, who is desperately screaming and pleading for the protagonist to save her, and drag her back inside is especially bad. And then we see a new batch of stew, and see strands of the girl's hair and a finger... And a sequel reveals Yomi cheerfully eating the stew with a Slasher Smile.
• Soprano of Miracles has a young girl named Uta elected to sing the lead in the school recital. Unconfident in her abilities, she wishes that she could sing as well as her more popular classmate. The next day, much to her surprise and everyone else's, she sings much more beautifully than normal, but there is a strange swelling on her throat. She checks it out in the mirror to find a veiny growth with a face at the back of her throat. She later learns from a teacher that many years ago, a skilled singer died right before the school recital, and she assumes that the growth is the spirit of the girl. She's willing to stab the thing in the back of her throat with a pen, but decides that if it will make her able to sing well for the recital, she'll keep it there. Come recital night, she can still sing beautifully, but the growth is gone. She believes that this is because the spirit was there to give her confidence enough to sing in front of everyone and has now moved on. Sounds like a happy ending, right? Cue the horrified looks on her classmates' faces as they see the ugly growth, which, unbeknownst to the girl, has moved to the back of her head. The last page has Yomi nonchalantly mention that the growth eventually took over Uta's whole body.
• Midnight Kotatsu: On New Year's, a selfish girl named Yuna steals her younger cousin's New Year's money and hides from him under the kotatsu. While there, she notices a slip of paper secured to the underside of it and takes it off... later learning that it was a seal, as her grandfather believed that beneath the kotatsu was a portal to the underworld. She shrugs it off, but that night, her cousin vanishes. Yuna briefly fears that he might have gone under the kotatsu, but insists that she had nothing to do with it if he did. But it's okay, as he was just hiding in the pantry and got locked in by accident, so the story of the gate to the underworld being under the kotatsu isn't true, right? And then that night, Yuna sleeps under the kotatsu and awakens at midnight to see a figure moving from room to room, checking on the sleeping occupants. She holds her breath, pulls herself further underneath to hide... and then her grandfather's grotesque-looking spirit peers under the kotatsu, cheerfully declaring that he's found her and is going to give her more money. The next morning, Yuna is gone...
• The Erasing Blackboard: Rumor has it that a blackboard in an empty classroom will Ret-Gone anything you write on the board with red chalk and then erase. Kaori decides to test this theory by writing and erasing "math progress tests"... and it works. She then decides to erase other things — bullying, tests, tomatoes in the school lunches... Everyone seems happier and Kaori feels like she's doing good deeds. But then she sees that the boy she likes appears to like another girl... and she erases her from existence. Then she erases a few more kids who she thinks are getting too close to the guy. She's about to erase another girl when said boy catches her and runs to find a teacher. Kaori panics, realizing that if others find out about the board, they could erase her as well... so she writes and erases "everything but me". To the reader it doesn't appear to work, as the boy returns with a teacher, but then notices that Kaori is gone. Meanwhile, Kaori turns away from the board and finds herself trapped in a blank white void of nothingness, for all eternity... Granted, she utterly deserved it, but still...
• The Nightmare Face that Lala's rival makes at the end of Marionette's Lover.