• 100 prompts
  • Checked October 2026

Southern Gothic Writing Prompts

Kudzu, porches and things a family will not say, three premises at a time.

Southern Gothic Writing Prompts

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  1. Every door in a Delta farmhouse was hung to swing shut except one, which has stood open since the flood.It opens on the room no guest is given. Turn: a cousin from away asks to sleep there, and is let.
  2. A man is paid to burn the kudzu off one lot each summer, and each summer he uncovers the same house, with less of it left.This year only the chimney and a door. Turn: the door is locked from the inside.
  3. The cicadas come up after their long years in the ground, in a town where something happened the last time they sang.Everyone over thirty goes quiet. Turn: a child born since starts humming the tune that goes with it.

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All 100 prompts

The old house and the land 25

  • A boy is paid a dollar a week to wind the clock in an empty house at the edge of a cane field. Nobody has lived there since his grandfather was small. Turn: one week the clock is already wound.
  • A cypress swamp has crept up the back pasture for forty years, and the family moves the fence and never mentions it. This year the water is at the barn. Turn: wading out, the boy finds four older fences, each one farther in.
  • A dogtrot cabin stands empty in a cotton field, and every owner of the field has plowed around it without being told. The new owner means to pull it down. Turn: his tractor stalls on the same row three mornings running.
  • A family has rocked on one porch for five generations, and nobody has ever stepped on the boards under the end chair. Children are taught to walk around. Turn: a visitor sits there, and the whole porch waits to see.
  • A farm won at cards in 1890 has cost every generation something, and its owner now sets out to lose it at cards. He deals every Saturday at the feed store. Turn: no man in the county will take the chair across from him.
  • A grand house has been sold room by room for the taxes, and the family lives in the hall between other people's rooms. The buyers never come. Turn: one arrives with a key, to the room the family swore it kept.
  • A house on a river bluff loses a foot of yard to the water each year, and the family measures it every Easter with one stick. This year the stick reaches the steps. Turn: the grandmother chalks next year's mark on the parlor floor.
  • A magnolia planted over the old cistern blooms out of season in the years when somebody in the house is lying. The family jokes about it. Turn: this December it blooms twice.
  • A man inherits forty acres of red clay that grow nothing, and a standing offer for them that rises every year. The buyer has never seen the land. Turn: the first offer is older than the buyer.
  • A peach orchard was planted so its rows spell a word from the water tower, and only the family who owns it does not know. The town has read it for sixty years. Turn: the youngest climbs the tower on a dare.
  • A pecan orchard has not dropped a nut since the old man was buried, and the bank sends a man to appraise it. The trees are sound. Turn: the hour he signs the paper, it rains pecans on the hood of his car.
  • A tin-roofed farmhouse in the pines has one room that was papered over, door and all. The pattern does not meet there. Turn: the new wife cuts it open and finds the bed made and the lamp trimmed.
  • A widow rents out her upstairs to pay for a roof and posts the rules: no whistling, no clocks, nothing blue in the east room. The lodger keeps all three. Turn: there is a fourth rule, and she tells it only to lodgers who stay a month.
  • A woman inherits a house on the bayou on one condition, written in the will: the dining table stays set for nine. She lives there alone. Turn: after the first storm of the season one of the nine places has been used.
  • A woman keeps her late mother's garden exactly as it was, and the garden keeps raising things neither of them planted. This year it is a row with stakes lettered in her mother's hand. Turn: the stakes are new pine.
  • An heir comes to sell the family house and learns that the town has paid its taxes for thirty years to keep it standing. Nobody will tell him why. Turn: every family in town has something stored in its attic.
  • An old house on the levee has its high-water marks penciled up the stair wall with their years, and one is dated next year. It is the highest of them. Turn: the handwriting is the same as on the oldest mark.
  • The big house burned in her grandmother's day, and the family has lived ever since in the old kitchen, facing the chimneys. They still dress for supper. Turn: a letter comes for the house that burned, and the postman leaves it at the hearth.
  • Every door in a Delta farmhouse was hung to swing shut except one, which has stood open since the flood. It opens on the room no guest is given. Turn: a cousin from away asks to sleep there, and is let.
  • Every spring a grandmother stocks the storm cellar with nine more jars than her family can eat. She says they are for company. Turn: after a night of tornado sirens, nine jars stand washed on the top step.
  • The family graveyard has room for one more, and three cousins of an age come home for the reunion. The plots were measured out in 1880. Turn: each cousin has brought a present for the aunt who keeps the map.
  • The family plot behind a farmhouse holds a headstone, cut and dated, for a daughter who is alive and upstairs. Nobody will say who ordered it. Turn: she did, to see which of them would come and ask.
  • The kudzu has taken the barn, the tractor and the road sign, and this summer it reaches the last porch on the county road. The widow inside cuts it back a foot each dawn. Turn: it grows around her chair and leaves the seat clear.
  • On the live oak in the yard the family hangs a blue bottle for each relative who left and never wrote. The tree chimes in any wind. Turn: one bottle is found full of rainwater, with a folded page inside.
  • Two brothers divide the home place by painting a line through the house, across the kitchen and over the piano. Neither will cross it. Turn: the roof begins to leak along exactly that line.

A family secret 25

  • A family has farmed one piece of bottomland for a century, and a surveyor finds that the house sits ten feet over the line. The neighbors have always known. Turn: they have been waiting for the right year to mention it.
  • A family has kept its street-side shutters closed since the summer of the hurricane, and a new daughter-in-law opens them. People stop on the sidewalk. Turn: the house across the street has kept its shutters closed just as long.
  • A father's fishing camp on the bayou holds a second toothbrush, a second cup and thirty years of someone's crossword puzzles. He always went alone. Turn: the hand in the puzzles is his brother's, who was lost at sea.
  • A girl copying records at the courthouse for school finds her great-grandfather's name on the paper that closed the mill. The town has blamed a stranger for ninety years. Turn: at home, the mill whistle is the doorstop.
  • A grandmother's recipe box, left to the county historical society, holds one card that is not a recipe. It is a column of dates and the word paid. Turn: the dates match a neighbor's mortgage, month for month.
  • A man clearing out his late father's tobacco barn finds a second set of farm ledgers, kept in his mother's hand. His father's books show thirty years of loss. Turn: in hers the farm made money, and it went somewhere.
  • A man's two families, who live a mile apart on the same parish road, meet for the first time at the cemetery gate. Each brought the same flowers. Turn: the two widows have sat one pew apart for thirty years.
  • A mother tells each of her four children, apart and in confidence, that the house will come to that child alone. Each keeps the secret for years. Turn: she mortgaged it four times, once for each of them.
  • A page of births has been cut from the family Bible, and at the reunion an old cousin recites the missing page by heart. She has had two glasses of tea and the heat. Turn: one of the names she says is sitting at the table.
  • A parcel her brother mailed in 1962 comes to a house on a red clay road, and the woman opens it and goes to feed the hens. She tells nobody what was in it. Turn: that night she takes down the good suitcase.
  • A portrait over a Low Country mantel has a square of newer canvas sewn in where a child stood, and the damp is lifting it. The stitches give one by one. Turn: behind the patch the old canvas was folded back, not cut away.
  • A woman learns that the Gulf cottage of her family's forty summers is rented by the week from a man her mother knew. Her father never saw a bill. Turn: the man is on the dock with forty years of receipts and one photograph.
  • A woman sorting her mother's dresses in a cedar closet finds one with its hem sewn shut over something stiff. The stitches are tiny and furious. Turn: it is the deed to the neighbor's bottomland.
  • At a funeral a stranger in a good hat sits in the family pew, and nobody asks her to move. Each relative thinks another knows her. Turn: she is in the will, under a name they all know.
  • Every August the grandmother of a Delta farm family airs one quilt on the line that nobody has ever been let sleep under. It is the best in the house. Turn: this year she spreads it on the granddaughter's bed and waits to be asked.
  • Every eldest son of a family has carried the same name, and at the courthouse the newest learns the first one borrowed it. He took it off a headstone two counties over. Turn: the family it belongs to still lives there.
  • Every summer the whole family drives down to the river house, and every summer one aunt sleeps in the car. She says the house knows what she did. Turn: her niece sleeps in the car too, and is told.
  • Everybody in the county knows why the three sisters at the end of Mill Road never left home, except the three sisters. It is told at every beauty shop. Turn: the youngest, at sixty, goes in for a wash and set.
  • The family story is that great-grandmother buried the silver the night the river rose and never said where. Four generations have dug up the yard. Turn: a grandson finds it, and it is plate. She knew.
  • From a sleeping porch in August a grandfather asks to be driven one last time past a house his family has never heard of. He will not get out of the car. Turn: a woman on that porch lifts her hand as if he were late.
  • On a porch in the piney woods a grandmother shells peas and tells a visiting child the story the child's mother forbade. She tells it as if it were about strangers. Turn: the child asks why the girl in it has her mother's scar.
  • Three sisters in a river town have told one story of their father's leaving for fifty years, and the youngest changes it. The change is one word. Turn: the eldest corrects her, and gets it wrong the same way.
  • The town believes the judge's son drowned in the quarry, and the family lets it. He writes once a year from up North. It suits everybody. Turn: he comes home for a funeral, and the town will not see him.
  • Two families across a creek have not spoken since 1931, and their grandchildren find the same photograph in both attics. It shows the grandfathers arm in arm. Turn: there is a third man in it whom neither family will name.
  • The youngest daughter is the only one at the table who does not know that the cousin who visits each July is her mother. The cousin brings the same present each year. Turn: this July she brings a suitcase.

A stranger in a small town 25

  • A bee man comes to take a hive out of the courthouse wall and says that the honey goes back farther than the building. He cuts it out in slabs. Turn: in the oldest comb there is something the town buried on purpose.
  • A dowser hired in a drought walks the whole town with his forked stick and stops, every time, at one family's front steps. They have the only dry yard on the street. Turn: he will not say that it is water he has found.
  • A drifter hired to repaint the water tower paints, where the town's name was, what he can see from up there. It is one word. Turn: the council meets, and votes to leave it.
  • A girl of ten gets down from the train alone with a tag pinned to her coat, addressed to a house that burned. A family takes her in for the night. Turn: she knows which drawer in their kitchen holds the spoons.
  • A man arrives to settle the estate of a woman the town swears never lived there, and he has her house key. He tries it at every door on Main Street. Turn: it opens the hardware store.
  • A man buys the shut funeral home on Main Street and opens it as an ice cream parlor without changing the sign. In August the town comes anyway. Turn: he keeps the back room locked and the lilies fresh.
  • A man comes buying old family quilts at far too high a price and asks each seller only who slept under it. He writes the names down. Turn: he is piecing them into one quilt, and it has a pattern.
  • A man comes to dig a well for a farm family, eats at their table all summer, and never strikes water. He is good company. Turn: he has been digging somewhere else on the place at night.
  • A man in a white linen suit buys the diner a round of sweet tea and asks which family owns the land with the sinkhole. Nobody knew of a sinkhole. Turn: by Sunday four families have gone out quietly to look.
  • A man walks into town leading a mule loaded with furniture, and three families each know a piece of it. It went downriver in the flood of their grandparents' day. Turn: he has come to ask what he is owed for storage.
  • A man with a surveyor's chain says he is laying out a new highway, and every family along it asks him to supper. Each explains why it should run through the neighbor's. Turn: he is from no office at all. He likes supper.
  • A piano tuner comes through a river town every seventh year, and after he leaves one more parlor piano stays locked. He takes no money. Turn: this time he is asked to the one house that has never let him in.
  • A portrait painter paints the town's families from description alone, and every picture has a relative nobody described. The likenesses are good. Turn: the families hang them anyway, and start setting an extra chair.
  • A seed salesman is told at every house on a swamp road to call on the family at the end, and the road ends in water. Everyone gives the same seven names. Turn: on the far bank there is washing on a line.
  • A stranger takes the spare stool at the barber shop every Saturday and loses at checkers to anyone, for a nickel a game. He is the worst player in the county. Turn: he has now lost to every man in town but one, and asks for him.
  • A stranger wins the pie auction, the hog calling and the raffle at the county fair and gives every prize back. The town loves him by Sunday. Turn: by Monday he is on the ballot, and then they learn for what.
  • A stranger's car gives out at the edge of a town in festival week, and the town insists that he stay and judge the tomatoes. It is an honor. Turn: every judge before him has stayed on, and there is a street of their houses.
  • A well-dressed man takes the best room at the boarding house and asks for the mail that has been held for him. There is a shoebox of it. Turn: the oldest letter was postmarked before he was born.
  • A woman drives into a mill town with a trunk of dresses that she says she is returning to the women they were made for. Every measurement is right. Turn: one dress is for a girl who has not been born yet.
  • A woman rents the old doctor's house and begins handing things back around town: a ring, a christening spoon, a watch. She found them in the walls. Turn: the last parcel in the wall has her own name on it.
  • A woman steps off the noon bus in a town with no hotel and asks the way to a family that left in 1952. She has their door key. Turn: it fits, and the kitchen calendar inside is on this month.
  • A woman writing a history of the county asks each porch for one story, and afterwards the family cannot tell it again. They remember that there was one. Turn: the oldest man in town offers her his on purpose.
  • A young woman arrives claiming to be the granddaughter of the town's rich recluse, and the recluse says that she is. The town knows he had no children. Turn: he has waited forty years for anyone at all to claim it.
  • At a church homecoming a stranger knows every word of the hymn the congregation stopped singing after the fire. The old people go still. Turn: she sings a verse that nobody living was taught.
  • The new schoolteacher is given the room over the feed store and finds the last teacher's lesson book, stopped mid-word. The children will not say why. Turn: the next page, in another ink, is addressed to her.

Heat and decay 25

  • A ceiling fan in the diner has turned since the day it opened, and the cook says that the day it stops, the town does. A storm takes the power. Turn: the regulars turn it by hand with a broom, in shifts, all night.
  • A drought dries the town pond to cracked mud, and in the middle of it stands a kitchen table with four chairs, set square. Nobody claims it. Turn: at dusk one family is seen carrying out a fifth chair.
  • A hotel on the square has let no room since the highway moved, and its owner changes the sheets in all forty every Monday. The laundry is her whole week. Turn: one Monday a bed on the third floor has been slept in.
  • A hurricane lifts the roofs off one street and shows, in every opened attic, the same kind of trunk. Each family thought theirs was the only one. Turn: the trunks have one maker's mark and one lock.
  • A man is paid to burn the kudzu off one lot each summer, and each summer he uncovers the same house, with less of it left. This year only the chimney and a door. Turn: the door is locked from the inside.
  • A peach crop is rotting on the trees because the pickers will not go into the east rows, and the grower walks out to see why. The east rows are picked clean. Turn: the baskets are stacked and tagged in his late father's hand.
  • A shut dime store still has everything on its shelves, fading, and once a year the owner's widow unlocks it for one sale. She chooses the customer. Turn: this year a child asks for the one thing she will not sell.
  • Air conditioning comes to a town that lived on its porches, and by the second summer nobody knows what the neighbors do. The porches fill with boxes. Turn: one widow still sits out, and now she is the only one who knows.
  • The cicadas come up after their long years in the ground, in a town where something happened the last time they sang. Everyone over thirty goes quiet. Turn: a child born since starts humming the tune that goes with it.
  • The heat buckles the rails, and a train stops for the first time in thirty years in a town it has only ever passed. The passengers get down for air. Turn: when it leaves, one woman has stayed. She was born there.
  • Heat lightning comes every night for a month with no rain, and the old men on a porch bet on which house it points at. The money is on the judge's. Turn: the judge walks over to put a dollar on his own.
  • The ice house is the only cool place for forty miles in August, and its keeper decides who may sit inside. He has a list and a long memory. Turn: the mayor is left on the steps, and the town learns why.
  • In a drought year the only green thing in the county is one family's front yard, and nobody has seen them water it. The preacher asks them to share whatever it is. Turn: they offer, and nobody will take it.
  • In a dry summer the river goes down and gives back a car, a safe and a church bell, each to a family that hoped it would not. The sheriff tags all three. Turn: the safe is the one that is claimed by two.
  • In a river town the damp gets into every piano, photograph and promise, and a man opens a shop that offers to dry things out. Business is good. Turn: what comes back dry is not quite what was sent in.
  • In a summer so wet that mushrooms ring the parlor carpet, the lady of the house receives her callers around them. Nobody mentions them. Turn: the ring widens each week, and now takes in the visitor's chair.
  • In the third week of a heat wave the courthouse clock stops, and the town agrees, without a meeting, to stop keeping time. Nothing is late any more. Turn: a note falls due at the bank, and nobody can say when.
  • The magnolias bloom and will not drop, and by August every tree in town is brown with flowers that hang on. People stop looking up. Turn: the night somebody tells the truth at the town meeting, they all fall.
  • Mold comes up on the wall of a shut parlor in a shape the family knows at once and will not name. They hang a picture over it. Turn: it comes up again around the frame, larger.
  • Paint will not hold on one wall of the bank, and every summer an older name bleeds back through. It is the family the bank sold up. Turn: their grandson comes in to ask for work as a teller.
  • The paper mill shuts, the smell lifts for the first time in sixty years, and the town finds out what it was covering. It comes on the evening wind from the bottoms. Turn: the old people recognize it and close their windows.
  • Rust takes the town's welcome sign one letter at a time, and the letters that are left spell something. Drivers slow down to read it. Turn: the council votes on repainting, and the vote is a tie.
  • The Spanish moss on one oak has grown to the ground, and children dare each other to step in under it and count to fifty. It is cooler inside, and there is a chair. Turn: the seat of the chair is warm.
  • The swimming hole turns the color of tea, then of rust, and the old people say someone has come home who should not. Nobody new is in town. Turn: there is a light at the fishing camp that has stood shut for years.
  • Too hot to sleep indoors, a whole street drags its beds onto the porches and hears what the neighbors say in their sleep. By the third night nobody sleeps. Turn: one house keeps its windows shut, and the street starts to wonder.

How it works

Each of these 100 southern gothic writing prompts is set somewhere particular: a bayou house, a red clay road, a courthouse in a heat wave. The line under each gives one turn. The dread is quiet, and nothing is graphic.

Read the full guide

Put the place in the first sentence

Southern Gothic depends on where it happens. In The old house and the land a pecan orchard stops dropping nuts and a levee house has a flood mark dated next year. In Heat and decay the weather does the work: a courthouse clock stops in a heat wave, and the town quits keeping time.

Secrets and strangers

A family secret gives you the thing nobody says at the reunion: a second set of farm ledgers, a quilt nobody may sleep under. A stranger in a small town brings someone pleasant who wants something, the genre's villain in an innocent's clothes.

  • Let the weather act. A street kept awake on its porches by the heat will say more than any villain.
  • Keep the turn small and wrong: a clock already wound, a chair seat still warm.

Questions and answers

What is southern gothic?

Gothic fiction moved to the American South. Its stories dwell on decay, despair and the weight of the past on the present, with a taste for the grotesque, among derelict houses, old cemeteries and overgrown swamps. The name began as an insult.

Is this a southern gothic plot generator?

It does that job from a fixed list: a press gives you three small plots to choose from. The people, the ending and the family name are yours.

Are these prompts violent?

No. The genre itself faces the South's history of slavery, racism and violence, and those stories need more care than a one-line prompt can give. This list keeps to houses, heat, secrets and strangers, and nobody is harmed in a premise.

Does a southern gothic story need a ghost?

No. The genre holds the real and the supernatural in tension, and most of these premises can be read either way. A magnolia that blooms when somebody in the house is lying may be a family joke or something worse.

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