If you visit France’s Cote d’Azur in your lifetime, do everything you can to avoid a small town called “Blanche”. I was in the country once with my parents, around 8 years ago (I was 12 at that time; we were on a family vacation), and we found ourselves looking for a place to get some rest and enjoy some of the local color. We were getting really hungry on the road, so it was with some luck that a town, unmarked on our map, rose unexpectedly on the horizon. This was the town of Blanche.

Immediately after we entered Blanche, we noticed that the colors of the houses were darker than anything I had seen in my entire life – it’s not like they were black or grey, they were normal colors for walls – they just look… not right. It’s hard to explain; almost like it was a color that we don’t even have a word for because it’s so dark and strange.

A few minutes after driving around the town, we all began to notice the fishy stench – like a Friday market, except for the fact that no fish were being sold. The people in the town also had a really weird skin tone, almost frostbitten and tinged a deep blue – if I recall correctly, my father said something like “These guys sure look like the sea.” We had originally planned to stay in the town for a while, but my mother and my sister were so disturbed by the creepy atmosphere and the town’s denizens that they insisted that we keep driving and find a different town to stay the night.

When we arrived in the next town, it was like we all gave a gigantic sigh of relief at once – we felt that we were back in normal civilization. However, the people who ran the inn that we stayed at in the second town did tell us some very freaky stories about Blanche – stories that made us really glad that we didn’t stay there…