One of my absolutely favorite SDMB threads to read was the Very Vaguely Creepy thread, the original of which seems to be (quite unfortunately) purged, but the sequel to which can be read here. If you’re not familiar with the concept, basically recount your very vaguely (or extremely) creepy stories, natural or supernatural, mundane or eerily exceptional. I expect some thoroughly spine-tingling reading.
Very Vaguely Creepy is GONE? That was one of the first threads I posted in!
Last night, I had a very vivid dream about an insect infestation in my bathroom. I thought for sure I was dreaming and tried to wake myself up…it didn’t work until much later. Then I dreamt that I was lying in bed and couldn’t move anything…not even open my eyes or talk. Then slowly I was able to…and then I was awake. It was horrible.
Holy crap, the sequel was in 2000? I must have been lurking here forever. Does it creep anyone out that I’ve essentially been reading all of your posts since (at the latest) the first VVC thread?
About a week ago, I was at dinner with my girlfriend and my mom, and there was a map of Maine on the wall by our booth. I took a vacation to Maine back in junior high with a (then) close friend of mine…let’s call him Nathan. Nathan eventually began attending private school, and we sort of lost touch. I’d heard several years later that his mom was diagnosed with breast cancer. Anyway, the map reminded me of Nathan and his family, so they briefly came up during our dinner conversation. I was kind of unsure if his mom had made it through treatment, so, to avoid a potential downer conversation, I didn’t bring it up.
Nate has kind of lost touch with most of his old friends, so I’m not really sure what he’s up to nowadays. Regardless, he still remains fond to me as a childhood friend, and his parents were always very kind, so I was really hoping that his mom was OK. Lo and behold, my mom ran into Nate’s mom while filling up her gas tank the other day. She looks to be healthy and, if not completely recovered, is certainly beating the cancer at the moment, according to Mom. This came as a relief to me, until I brought it up to another friend of mine, who told me that she had in fact died three years ago…
OK, just kidding. That last part isn’t true. But I do find it extremely coincidental that, right after I was reminded of her for the first time in years, I suddenly received assurance that she was doing alright. It’s not really creepy at all, unless you get creeped out by good news. Which would be very creepy of you, ya big creepazoid.
Good call reviving this thread, Lama Pacos. The original is still one of my all-time favorites.
Man, I use “very vaguely creepy” as a descriptor even IRL.
I find the whole sprouting of new plants V/V/C. Remember the “experiment” you had to do in grade school, putting a bean on a damp towel in a jar in your closet? When that sprouted, V/V/C. Ivy putting out new little shoots? V/V/C.
Not quite sure if this qualifies as “creepy” but does make you go hmmmmm:
On our 10th wedding anniversary, Typo Knig and I had reservations at l’Auberge Chez François in northwestern Fairfax County, VA. En route, we had to travel along some very narrow, winding roads. A car coming the other way lost control on a curve. crossed into our lane, and hit us head on.
All four of us (Typo and I, the 19-year-old driving the other car, and his friend) walked away because all 4 of us were wearing seatbelts.
The kids were riding in was a convertible, a Chrysler le Baron or something. Had the kids not been buckled in, they’d have gone through the windshield or perhaps they’d simply have been thrown from the car.
The “hmmmm” part? The passenger had not been buckled in. Until about a mile back on that same road. Something in his brain said “We’re getting to a windy stretch of road, better buckle up”.
The story would have ended with something rather different than giddy “I’m alive!” laughter if he had not listened to that little voice.
I find it very vaguely creepy that the last post in the original thread was right before 9/11 - I just think about how people were having a good time freaking themselves out with that thread, and then 9/11 happened and nobody was in the mood.
About fifteen years ago one night I read Colin Wilson’s short story “The Return of the Lloigor,” part of an anthology of Lovecraft inspired stories. The story concerned the Voynich mauscript, which I thought Wilson had made up but which turns out to be real, albeit possibly a hoax. The story took place in Wales.
The next afternoon I went to the used bookstore where I worked. One of the great things about working in a second hand bookshop, especially one that sometimes deals in antiques, is the utterly random stuff that comes in the store. Lying on the buy desk that day? A book on the Voynich manuscript. Right next to it? A guidebook to Wales.
Freaked me out a bit, it did.
I find saltwater aquariums very vaguely creepy. Mostly it’s how you can buy a piece of live rock and wind up with who knows what living in your tank. I read a thread on another board by this guy who bought a rock and a while later had animals turning up dead or missing…turns out, he’d had a mantis shrimp come in on that rock, living in his tank unseen for months, that was slaughtering all his fish.
Sure, it’s more challenging, and aspects of it are completely fascinating, but fuck that. Maybe I’m a control freak, but I’m sticking with freshwater.
That is shudder worthy. I googled “mantis shrimp.” I did not like what I saw. These animals–shrimp, lobster, the like–truly, the insects of the sea.
Have to say, they are pretty bad-ass. They can crack aquarium glass and strike so fast that they create cavitation bubbles!
During a visit with relatives in his hometown earlier this summer, my dad had a weird experience. Some background info: My dad (let’s call him Bob) has an older brother (let’s call him Bill). One night Dad was chatting with one of his aunts. She’s in her 80’s, and hasn’t shown any signs of dementia or erratic behavior. They’re sitting on the porch, talking about weather, general neighbourhood gossip, the usual stuff. Suddenly, she stops in mid sentence, turns to my dad and says “Isn’t it terrible about those Flair Brothers?”
Dad: 
“What?”
Aunt: You know, Bob and Bill. The two brothers. Dying within a month of each other. Just like that! (snaps fingers)
She then immediately changed, picking up right at the word she had left off in her previous sentence, chatting about how nice the roses were coming in now that it was sunny again, etc.
As far as we know, both my dad and uncle are fine, and maybe this is her first sign of dementia or Alzheimer’s (it’s present in other relative the same age) but…still.
My Spanish teacher in high school often told stories of her childhood days. One summer, she went with her friends to a summer house, a cabin in the woods. It was a dark and quiet night. Somebody had brought along a Ouija board. They turned off the lanterns and began playing. It started off light-hearted but gradually got darker and darker. The responses started getting hurtful. Tempers flared. In an attempt to quiet things down, one of the girls asked about how her brother in the Navy was doing. The response: “He will die next October.”
That October, the girl got a letter from the Navy. There was an accident on the ship. Her brother was dead.
:eek: <---- The classes faces after that story. To this day, I have a fear of Ouija boards.
Oooh, I love creepy stories! I’m addicted to Weird NJ and the like, and I have a few stories of my own. I’ll start off with my time on the Navajo Reservation, where I spent three months living with no running water and no electricity with an old woman who spoke no English, our closest neighbor two miles away at least. We were near an old Anasazi site, completely covered in ancient pottery shards. Very beautiful, very remote, very vaguely creepy.
For instance, on the dirt road to the near by canyon, was an old stone building that clearly had not been inhabited for quite some time. Early on at my time there, I was walking to it out of curiosity. I got about 10 feet from it when this horrible feeling of dread hit me, and I ran the mile back to the homestead. A few days later, I was told that it used to be a trading post, and one day a man hit his head and was brought there to die, so they had to abandon it.
I had a dream one night that the woman I lived with was processing her corn, rubbing to ears of dried corn together to get the kernels off. I had never seen how this was done, so I was mighty surprised when the next day she showed me how to process her dried corn in exactly the way I had dreamed it the night before.
I really got in touch with nature, in sort of a creepy way. Certain animals, as I was told, are taboo in the Navajo culture, particularly bears, coyotes, snakes, and owls. I had run ins with all of these during my time there. For instance, I was carding wool one day when a snake popped out of the bag of fleece I was carding. We found bear tracks near the homestead, and I was told that it was believed when bears are sited, an enemy is about to attack. Two days later was September 11, 2001. Coyotes and owls are bearers of bad news, particularly if they cross your path. The woman I lived with could be the sweetest woman ever or the meanest. I took to thinking that you have to be damn tough to survive in the desert, and she had a reputation for being the toughest. Anyway, we didn’t get along all that well, and I felt like the animal world was trying to tell me to get out while the getting was good. I saw coyotes at least once a week, and one night a crazed one ran around and around my hogan for hours. One day when I was out for a walk, an owl flew in my path. I found out later that my car had been “borrowed” around the same time. The car was returned, but I left soon after.
As an epilogue, a couple weeks ago I went to the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, DC. In one of the exhibits was a near life-size picture of Roberta Blackgoat, an out-spoken activist and one of my closest neighbors. I had a flashback to the evenings I spent at her place with the creepy Vietnam Vet who worked for her, where she would insist on feeding me the tiny cherry tomatoes she had grown. She died soon after I left, and almost cried seeing her photo.
I was at a festival in the countryside. For some reason one of my friends had decided to dress in a most gothy way and everyone was calling her the Grim Reaper all weekend. It’s immortalized in a picture of her with my dog (the Hound of Satan picture).
When she got back from the festival she found out that a good friend of hers had died that weekend.
i moved to new york city recently, and live in a tiny, tiny, tiny efficiency apartment. my windows look out on a bunch of other buildings across a courtyard. all of the windows in the other buildings are boarded up, and in the building directly across from mine, there is this old, creepy winding staircase. the whole thing is swarming with pigeons. in between my building’s part of the courtyard (astroturf, lawn chairs, etc) and the abandoned buildings part of the courtyard (concrete) there is a chain-link fence topped with a swirl of razor wire.
i am not sure why the windows are boarded up (i would think, apartment prices being what they are, anybody in possession of an apartment building would soup it up and rent it out and make up their money in the first month), but the very vaguely creepy thing is, there are lights coming from the one of the abandoned buildings. the main windows are boarded up, but what i am guessing are the bathroom windows (they’re smaller) are not boarded, and there are vague but definite lights coming from two of the bathroom-type windows.
like the pigeons just pretend to be normal pigeons in the daytime, and then at night they go turn on the lights and hang out in abandoned bathrooms? or there are people in there? are they the only actual apartments in an otherwise empty building? that might be even creepier.
yams!!
Squatters.
Or a meth lab.
a meth-lab run by pigeons! :eek:
that might be the very vaguely creepiest thing of all.
yams!!
You know, I don’t usually like it when people sign off on their posts, but there’s something just so goshdarn heartwarming about every post ending in an exclamatory “yams!!”
even more heartwarming is the touching and inspirational tale of how i, a lowely tuber from southeastern indiana, grew my eyes out into feelers and learned how to type.
love
yams!!
Awww. That image is so cute. 
I don’t even know why.
Ok, back on topic…
Arcades: Very vaguely creepy!