Mystery Writing Prompts

You filmed your girlfriend playing the “What The Fluff” Challenge on your Beagle. The sheet dropped, she was gone, and you got great footage of your dog’s response. That was three days ago. She hasn’t reappeared and the police are asking questions. Now, you and your dog have a mystery to solve.

In the post-apocalypse, you have a radio station, and regularly talked with a person at another radio station who you believe was the only other survivor. One day, that person stopped responding. Years later, your radio crackles to life and you hear: “Sorry for not responding, but I’m back.”

You nail the interview and get hired on the spot, but as your new boss shakes your hand he says "It's great to have you back." Likewise, your new coworkers seem to already know you, and act as if you've worked there in the past. They keep apologizing for 'what happened.' You have no idea why.

You are a SpaceX astronaut on Mars. The earth as you knew it was lost to a nuclear war between NATO and China/Russia. Luckily your mission was to construct the colony and you have enough supplies to survive indefinitely. It’s been 25 years since loss of contact. You hear a knock on the door.

The more dangerous a job is, the more it pays. You just took a job offer to stand in an empty room and do nothing for $100k an hour.

When you were a child, a mysterious voice whispered "follow the woman in the red dress with the gold polka dots". All your life, you never saw her. Now, lying in the hospital, 98 years old, you see a woman in a red dress and gold polka dots walk past your room.

You are extremely famous. Everyone knows who you are. The only thing is, you don't know why you're so famous. You don't come from a rich family and you're unemployed. You don't even remember how you got a mansion or a Lamborghini. Even stranger, everybody looks so scared when you bring it up.

The barista looks at you oddly. “Sorry, mate, no play money, only cash.” She reads the twenty in her hand...”America? Where’s that?” You see a world map among the cafe decor, and between Canada and Mexico is a wide stretch of water marked “Gulf of Atlantis”. You stumble out of the cafe...

You are a successful artist who has a condition where you randomly black out. When you wake up, you see that you have created beautiful masterpeices that you don't remember painting. Lately, all of your paintings have been more and more disturbing.

You wake up 7 minutes before your alarm, as you head down the hallway you notice everything is a low rendered wireframe version of your house interior. You hear scurrying and a voice whisper “commence quick launch simulation world 63,239,430 we have an unscheduled early rise here”

You are a police officer who has just arrested a scam artist for selling "elixirs of immortality". However, you discovered that his criminal records states that he was also arrested for the same crime in 1862.

You stare at the pills in your hand. The doctor taps his foot impatiently. "These will really cure me of hearing that voice?" you ask. The doctor rolls his eyes. "Yes, you'll never hear her again." You level your gaze on the doctor. "I never told anyone the voice was female..."

You are on a flight from Beijing to Seoul. Its should be a short two-hour flight, but five hours have passed and the plane has still not landed. There is nothing outside but dense cloud cover. There is no food left on the plane.The staff are confused. People are starting to panic.

You are a fresh junior researcher at NASA. While out for drinks with your new boss, you jokingly ask her why NASA hasn't explored the ocean with its resources. She turns pale and leans in close, then whispers, "We have. Why do you think we want to leave the planet so badly?"

While at a football game, you notice the man sitting in front of you is livestreaming the game to his cell phone rather than actually watching the game in front of him. You see on the screen a player running the football in for a touchdown, 32 seconds later you watch it happen in real life.

"Stop," commanded your GPS. "It is time you discovered the truth. In 400 Yards, turn left..."

You are trapped in an anti-time loop; Every time you are about to die, you wake up 24 hours later, with no recollection of how you survived. You lost a year of your life already and feel no closer to find out who wants to kill you.

You don't remember what you do for a living. Literally. You wake up, get in the car, then black out until you're back in your driveway in the middle of the afternoon 5 days a week, and you get a paycheck once a month.

After the death of a beloved American hero, all flags are flown at half-staff. Later that night, it's discovered that, somehow, the American flag on the moon has been lowered as well.

You have the ability to heal people from any disease by simply touching them with your left hand. As your popularity grows, people begin to wonder why you are wearing a glove on your right hand.

No one has died in 3 years, No one has been born in 3 years. You find video footage of the “Accident” that destroyed all life on earth 3 years ago, but no one can remember dying back then.

You're a psychic doing a game show. Unlike the other contestants, you're the real deal. They bring you all to a house where a crime happened in the past. When it's your turn, a ghost appears and tells you: "That's him, that's the one who killed me." Pointing towards the host of the show.

To your surprise, a SWAT team breaks down your door, rushes inside, and surrounds you. Only, their backs are to you, guns trained on the doors and windows. The closest one whispers, "Here they come."

An agent from the CIA shoved a briefcase in your hands, saying to protect it at all costs. Later an agent of the MI6 gave you another briefcase, with the same instructions. Sooner or later, the KGB, MSS, NSA, FBI, and the Mossad have all entrusted ominous briefcases at your behalf

You are a scientist working on "Project Ark," trying to translate all human knowledge into DNA code and put it in the junk code of a common virus, preserving our culture and technology beyond the death of humanity. While examining the common cold's genome, you realize someone beat you to it.

There's a forest that people say resembles the ocean. A forest where the land slopes endlessly deeper but the tops of the trees do not. Animals, plantlife... they're said to get stranger the further in one goes.

The men in your family die the moment they turn 18, due to a curse cast on one of your ancestors by a witch. You turned 18 a week ago and are still living, and as a result a descendant of the witch has arrived to figure out why you didn't die.

You are not the child of a powerful ruler, neither do you behave in such a way as to command power. You have never been violent, nor even aggressive. Yet, wherever you go, people fear you and treat you like a monarch or an emperor. You never understood why, until today...

You sleepwalk. Occasionally, you wake up sore, bruised, and with more money than you remember. Today, you wake up in jail, with a note in your own handwriting: "My bad. Hang tight, I have a plan."

"A watched pot never boils", as the old saying goes. Throughout all of history there has always been at least one set of eyes on the ocean. Today, for a split second, everyone looking at the ocean looked away at the exact same time.