This was a plot for “Tales of the Darkside”, in a screenplay written by Stephen King. It was called “Sorry, Right Number” and is also in the King anthology, Nightmares and Dreamscapes
A woman receives a really strange phone call, someone with a familiar voice telling her someone’s in trouble. She never figures it out and shrugs it off as a prank call after checking with various friends and relatives.
Spoiler…
A month later, her husband dies of a heart attack. She moves away and for some reason, looking at her new phone, dials her old phone number-only to have her past self-answer. She tries to warn her past self about her husband’s impending heart attack.
Some of the stories on that thread are really scary!
About twelve years ago, and a friend and I were driving home from a bar. His truck broke down and we had to walk a couple miles to find a phone. We walked on some wooded rural roads.
I wasn’t real thrilled about this to begin with; it was about 1 am and there were no houses or businesses around.
Suddenly, there was a horrible scream a little ways up from us in the tall grass by the side of the road. I was so scared, I couldn’t move. I could NOT make my legs move. I thought a woman was being murdered. My friend said it was a cat or something. I still think that was bullshit. I mean, this was a bloodcurdling, terrified scream.
But somehow I walked by and nothing happened; nobody jumped out at us or anything and we didn’t see anything in the grass. But I still get the creeps when I think about it.
Damn you all! It’s 3 AM, I’m loaded up on caffeine, and the turtle story so thoroughly scared the hell out of me that I had to shut the door and turn off the music. And now I’ve got to pee!
And that Very Vaguely Creepy thread probably has my favorite La Llorona story on it, too. Punks!
I have to admit, DocHopper, while the explanation that it was a female defending a nest makes a lot of sense, my first thought was “The turtle spirit is angry because of the destruction of its culture and habitat!” and my second thought was “This is the embodiment of an evil wizard who was turned into a turtle by a powerful enemy!”
Don’t you just love the Crazy Human part of your brain?
I had a similar experiece once. I was with some friends camping in the Adirondacks, NY. While we were trying to fall asleep, we heard something akin to women (plural in my story) screaming. It was a really freaky sound too, since it wasn’t a scream of panic, but more of evil - like satanic witches or something (no offense to the Wiccans here). It really freaked me out. My friend who had camped in this area often said that it was a pack of coyotes on the hunt. He had heard them many times before.
Now that I live in the Big City (South Side of Chicago) I find that these creepy occurences are much less frequent than when I lived in the country/suburbs.
I lived in a rural town in Oregon for one year before I (literally) ran screaming to live with my father. I used to have to walk to school through the woods each day. Only half way through the year did I find out that, the previous year, a student had gone nuts and knifed two kids before castrating himself and bleeding to death. And where did he do it? Of course–in the woods that I walked through! Arrrrgh! Every time I heard a rustling in the bushes or outside my house, I was sure it was another crazed redneck with a sharp instrument looking for mayhem. As I said, I put up with this (and other icky things) for five or six months before calling my dad and telling him I wanted to live with him instead of my mom.
Then there was the time when my wife (then my girlfriend) lived in a basement apartment in New Haven. There were always creepy-crawlies of various species and orders in the place, but one night she was convinced that she’d seen a huge spider. She described it for me, and somewhat alarmed, I looked up Brown Recluse on the internet and showed her a picture. “That’s it!” she cried. [FYI, a brown recluse bite causes the skin to become necrotic and the tissue surrounding the area begins to die]. For the next hour, I turned over ever piece of furniture in the place, and every piece of lint or stray trash or shadow was a spider waiting to jump on me and bite me. I should point out that since we were poor students, there were exactly two lamps in the apartment and both gave off poor light–much like the set of a slasher film. After an hour we hopped in the car and stayed in a motel for the night. [shudder] The next day we found a large dead daddy-longlegs which seemed to have been the culprit. But still—yeccch…never living on the ground floor or basement again.
A few years back I was in bed and had a very vivid dream of someone standing over me watching me. I couldn’t move. When I finally woke up I found the hall light to be on (I never leave it on.) I went to turn it off and found the living room light to be on (I never leave it on.) I went to turn it off and found the front door to be unlocked. This was creepy.
However, with only a little logic it was easy to dispell the thought of someone actually having been in my apartment. You see, I am not a tidy man and for someone to have made his way through my apartment without tripping and awakening me is unlikely. And then for him to make his way out again, presumedly at a rapid pace, is even MORE unlikely. I passed it off as a weird chain of events and went back to bed.
I was about twelve, and I was in Egypt on a vacation with mom and dad. It was late at night, and we were watching whirling dervishes. It was a packed room, and we were the only foreigners.
As I sat there watching the dervishes spin around and around and around, I got to feeling creepy.
Then I noticed these three old Egyptian guys, sitting in the row ahead of us and a few seats to the left. They were wearing turbans, and were not watching the dervishes at all.
They kept glancing at each other then towards my family. Not in a “look at the foreigners” way, and not even in a “what are they doing here?” way.
My active mind figured they were conspiring to kill us and that at any moment we would be mobbed by old Egyptian men.
I find it very vaguely creepy that each instance of the words “very” “vaguely” and “creepy” in that thread is in red - since these were posted months before we had the ability to code in color.
Myrnalene, maybe I’ve just been whooshed, but you do realize that that’s because Gadarene posted a URL from search results which includes the following: “highlight=very+vaguely+creepy+or+vvc” ?
Before I got married, I was living in a small duplex. The house along with a dozen identical ones, was on a dead end road with fields on either side. One night while it was snowing, I was watching t.v., and my two cats seemed very interested in the back door. This was a solid steel door with no window, that led to a small patio. Something bumped against the door, the cats scattered, I turned the outside light on, and heard something very large run down the metal steps. The only window that looked out onto the patio was in the bedroom. When I got to the bedroom, the cats were in there looking at the damn window, and they were freaking out. I didn’t look out the window, I didn’t open the door, and I slept on the couch. The next morning, there were huge dog-like footprints in the snow on the patio, and… this is the really creepy part… there were back footprints underneath the window, and front footprints 6 feet up on the window ledge.
Once, a friend and I were walking around after dark. We decided to walk by the local scatepark to see if anyone we knew was down there (By skatepark, I mean some ramp-type boards and metal pipes spread out in an old parking lot). Anyway as we were walking towards it, we saw a dog sniffing around a shortish clump of dead grass. So I go over to pet the dog and see a guy crouching in the grass and he just kind of slinks away. Scared the BEJEEZUS out of us!
I’m constantly spooking myself out. I have this weird half-asleep thing where I think I see things when I’m awake. One time I woke up (as I thought) to see an old woman standing at the end of my bed flapping her arms up and down. I slept with the light on after that.
Another time I was camping and woke up earlier than everyone else. I must have been suffering from sleep deprivation because everything seemed spooky to me then. I wanted to read, but for some reason I couldn’t find my book. I was being quite noisy but no one else in my tent even stirred. A cock (rooster for ‘merkins) was crowing repeatedly, but it wasn’t a nice sound – it sounded at once plaintive and menacing. Then the tent started making flapping noises and I thought it was the day of judgement and the angels of death were coming to get me. Ahem, well, that’s what I thought at the time.
One more story and I’m done! Yet another time I was staying in a strange house in France. I woke up in the middle of the night as you do to go for a pee and as I walked down the corridor I saw a faint figure, a girl, standing at the other end. Now I’m one of those sad people who’d really like to see a ghost but would probably faint from fear if they actually saw one. For a split second when I saw the figure my stomach lurched horribly and I let out an audible gasp. Then a second later I realised it was my reflection in a mirror. (Who puts a mirror at the end of a corridor?? It’s asking for trouble!) Anyway, next day at breakfast one of the people I was staying with said ‘I heard a strange thing last night. Some one in the corridor gasped and then started giggling.’
I used to live in a little village in rural England - with no street lighting. One night a few years back, my brother and I were sitting around the house when we heard a scream coming from outside that was so horrifying that I finally understood what the term “blood-curdling” meant.
We both jumped, then froze, looking at each other, and I said “holy shit, a child’s being murdered.” We ran and got a baseball bat and a maglite, and as we were doing so we heard the screaming again.
We set off into the dark footpaths that run throughout the village for about two minutes, creeping, hearts thumping, towards where we both thought we’d heard the horrible shrieking coming from, and, as we rounded a bend in the path, we suddenly came face-to-face with the source of the agonised wailing.
It was an escaped peacock. If you’re in an area where people keep these birds, mind your nerves. Their calls might explain some of the unidentified screams that other posters have heard.
I had never heard of the “VVC” thread before starting this one, but it was a hell of a read…I’m glad I’m carrying on a tradition or something, if you want to consider this VVCII, go ahead…
Something that always creeps me out are those isolated houese you see, both out in the country and in the city. It just makes me wonder about the people living there all alone. Especially if the houses have boarded up windows. As someone else has mentioned, it’s like that very freaky X-Files episode, “Home”.
Also whenever someone mentions how “deep” a city is, such as how far down the New York tunnels go…that weirds me out a little bit.
