Life is good (mostly), you’re happy (hopefully), and it’s all puppies and flowers (unless you’re allergic). That being said, I’m interested in hearing about the weirder/creepier experiences and things that you’ve seen. The world is ful of strangeness, and we should enjoy every bit of it.
The only recent one I’ve had is a dream that everything in the Mutter Museum was alive and chasing me. Ugh.
The autoclave room at my lab. It smells, it’s damp, it’s dark, and it’s filled with giant, hulking loud autoclaves that remind me of crematoria.
They’re just large enough to fit a folded-up person and I wonder what it would be like to (somehow) get stuck in one.
The two creepiest/weird experiences both have to do with children – female, in this case, although not in the “Creepy Evil Horror Movie little girl” way.
One: I was a young teenager or almost-teen and went to a friend-of-a-relative’s house with my family for the holidays, and there was another family there whose dad was a oafish, large, literal mouth-breather. Several times he threatened his children (mostly girls) with physical violence (of the spanking sort,) which isn’t all that odd except that they looked very afraid when they did that. Plus, he seemed creepy. It seemed to me that such an obvious case of child abuse would have been spotted long ago, plus, it was unsettling that no one else agreed with me w/r/t my fears. It seemed like something out of the Twilight Zone. It turns out the children were later removed from his for child abuse.
The second time was almost the complete opposite. I was at a county fair with my mom and sister and went on the bumpercars. Well evidently there was a girl, 8 or 9 years old, who might have thought she recognized me or something because she struck up a conversation with me while we were in line to ride the cars again. I played along even though I didn’t know her (and she didn’t refer to anything we would mutually know, so I have no reason to suspect she thought she knew me). Then we were in another ride and she kept talking with me. IIRC the conversation was mostly about the fair and who would do the most damage to the other in the bumpercars.*
That was weird because not only did she strike up a conversation with me out of the blue, but no one else gave her the slightest notice or asked me how I knew her, even though my mom and sister were by me the whole time. I also didn’t mention her to them out of fear that I would seem to be making too much of a deal out of my fears of being seen as a predator. This is the first time I’ve written about that happening at the Carnival.
*Plus by the look and sound of her she didn’t seem to be part of a subculture that is more free about meeting new people, although there are of course variants in each subculture.
When I was living in Mexico City a rat got into our house from an open drain. But this wasn’t just any ordinary rat, it was almost three fracking feet long! Without the tail! I have an almost phobic fear of rats and mice and this thing was my worst nightmares come true. Thank God its size actually worked against it since it was too big to hide from our dog, who is only sligtly bigger than the rat but would otherwise have been no match for it if the rat stood its ground. My dad and the dog eventually chased it back down the drain.
Just the thought that they can grow that big…I mean, it makes you wonder what other horrors live down in the sewers and other god-forsaken places of the world. :eek:
When I lived in University City (fairly close to UCSD, for those from other parts) in the late 90s, we had a next-door neighbor who bred rats that big in his garage. They would wander across our back yard sometimes. Creepiest thing I’ve ever seen! Bout the same as yours–three feet plus long-ass tail. Animal Control busted the guy shortly thereafter and we didn’t see the rats again, but that sight will live with me forever.
Um… WHY, exactly, did he do this?
Damned if I know. I was 11 or 12 at the time.
Because you don’t have to buy them dinner first? :eek:
Tijuana-- sure it wasn’t a nutria?
Did anyone ever see the SNL clip where John Belushi made-up as an old man is talking about how he outlived all the SNL alumni. I found that very creepy after he died. Especially as he mentioned Gilda was the last to die. I do not know if they mentioned the second to last, but if I were they, I might be a little nervous.
Jim
This was several months ago. My husband and I were driving home pretty late at night and we were only about a block away from our house. We live in the burbs, and there are quite a few kitties who wander around at night so we’re usually pretty careful. We saw a young black cat on the left side of the street, and we slowed down to make sure she would make it across okay. We saw her scamper across the street about 50 feet in front of us, and then disappear. From the angle we saw her, it looked like she ran towards a 8 foot tall cinderblock wall, and was completely gone. There were no cars around for her to hide under, and my husband and I both saw her run across the street, and then she was just disappear.
However, as we pulled past the fence, we saw that there is a very small hole at the bottom that neither or us had noticed before. Thus solved the mystery.
The whole thing sounds silly in the light of day, but late at night when I was half-awake, it freaked me out.
I have two, one of which I have to take my parents’ word for since I don’t remember it.
The first one happened was when I was a young teenager. We had a small shopping center near our house, and I rode there on my bike to pick something up at the store. When I left to head home, I rode around behind the shopping center, through an alley. As I passed the back door of a restaurant, I saw, in a dumpster, what looked like a complete decapitated cow’s head. I even stopped to check it out (partly because how many times do you get to see a cow head in a dumpster, and partly because I wanted to make sure my eyes weren’t playing tricks on me). Yep–cow head. I rode home and told my mom about it, and she was skeptical. So much so, in fact, that she drove me back up there to have a look.
It was gone.
Mind you, this was no more than maybe twenty minutes from the time I saw the thing. Never did figure out what happened. Maybe somebody inside the restaurant spotted me checking it out and figured they should do something with it. But it was definitely creepy.
The second is the one I have to take my parents’ word for. They tell me that when I was very young (somewhere around 3 or 4) they used to hear me talking to somebody in my room. When they went to peek in they’d see me standing up in my bed staring at some point on one of the walls. They asked me about it, and apparently I told them about “the pretty blonde lady in white” who came to talk to me. Somewhat later they asked me if she still came, and I told them no, that she’d told me I was too old to see her anymore, but that she’d always be there.
Either I had a very fertile imagination (quite possibly), I took church a little too seriously (can’t remember if they took me at that age), or there really was somebody talking to me. I guess I’ll never know.
I do not think they exist.
Here’s my most recent creepy/odd sighting:
I was driving through the neighborhood around midnight and saw what, at first glimpse, appeared to be a penguin waddling across the street. What? A penguin? I slowed down to investigate.
It was just a cat… walking sideways!
About nine or ten years ago, in the summer, we had an amazing series of thunderstorms almost every night. I had a raging case of insomnia, and gas was amazingly cheap (Ah, for the good ol’ days), so I’d take off driving and ‘storm-chase’.
Anyway, one night I was about an hour away from home, chasing a big one through some rural area. The paved road turned gravel, and the gravel turned dirt / mud. I began to realize I had little idea where I was, and should probably turn around. It’s pitch black, pouring down rain, and I’m making the three-point. Suddenly, I freeze. There’s a flash of lightning, and I’m looking at a farmhouse. In the instant of light, there’s this child… A little girl in a white night-dress… Staring directly at me. Not at my car. Directly at me. Right in the eyes! Like something out of some V C Andrews cover!
I turned and drove away VERY quickly. shudder
As for the most disturbing thing… I’ll just say I worked in a veterinary office and leave it at that. THere was something there so bad I’ve mainly blocked it out of my mind, as it makes me physically ill to think about it.
Not to make you question your decision to mostly block it out for your own sanity, but you know you can’t leave that hanging.
I swore I would never think about this again, but I am sleepy this moring and what the hell.
I lived in a very out of the way trailor with a very skeevy boyfriend a couple of years ago. This place was just awful, it made you feel bad just walking in it. Anyway, my boyfriend and I were asleep in the bedroom one night and something woke me up. At once noticed a man in my bedroom, I was not dreaming, he was there, dressed all in black with a very pale face, bright blue eye and a blonde crew cut. He was smiling at me, and not a “Hi, I’m Joe” smile, more like a "Which artery do you want me to start with smile. I jerked the cover over my head and didn’t move again until moring. Later on it happend again, only this time it was a very pretty little red headed girl witha green dress on looking very sad. After that I quit sleeping in the bedroom. The really bad part was that I was there alone at night a lot because the boyfriend worked night shift. I also didn’t have a phone at the time.
Iwould spend all night on the couch, seeing black shapes move all around the kitchen out of the corners of my eye, and hearing people (or something) stomping around outside.
Before we move there we lived in a house that had belonged to a crazy catholic priest. He was a horder of all thing strange, cleaning that place out was an experience I will never forget. He had also freshly nailed the basment and attic shut. There was a trap door that led to this other cement chamber under the house (beside the basement) that we could see down in through a hole but could never get into. He also had a collection of books that told how to embalm bodies, that looked quite worn and had some nasty stains. He had every playboy ever printed, but they had water damage from the holy water blessing he did on them to be able to read them 
He also had a book that he had made with plan for torture devices, with measurements, parts needed etc. This house was 1/4 mile from a cemetary known to be very haunted, called something like Seven Crosses. That house always smelled strange, no matter what we did.
BTW, I got rid of that SO and I have a normal house now, though I am wondering if I have some sort of imp that keeps stealing my husband cigs.
I was driving from Las Vegas to Burbank, it was 2 a.m. pitch black desert highway. I notice an orange glow off to my right I look out the window and I see a sight that made me almost drive off the road. The entire sky has split open and is on fire! Huge flames, hundred feet high, surrounded by pitch black, suspended in the middle of the sky, stretching for miles , parallel to the road. My mind was unable to account for this, was it the end of the world? It couldn’t be. Should I stop? Turn around? It was unbelievable. It took about 4 minutes of trying to grasp what I was seeing before I realized it was wildfire on the ridge that ran parallel to the road. The ashes that started to fall around me clued me in. Then it was behind me.
My guess- Miss Lucy Westenra.
Okay. I’m going to spoiler-space this, because it’s really not for the squeamish. It turns my stomach just to think on it. If you have a soft spot for animals in pain, or are at all squeamish, please don’t look.
We had a bloated female cat come in that was in very obvious pain. The vet examined it and had me immediately bring it into surgery and hold it down, as time was of the essence, and we didn’t have a way to fully anesthatize it quickly. Y’see, the cat had gotten pregnant, and the kittens had gotten stuck and died in the birth cannal. The bodies had become necrotic and were poisoning the mother. We spent about half an hour with a forceps pulling blackened, necrotic chunks of dead kitten out of the mother. The head of one really sticks in my mind.
And now, hopefully, I’ll be able to eat lunch today.