Maybe this will end up getting moved but when I’m in doubt I try to post here in MPSIMS…
Do you hardcore skeptics ever get scared?
Not as far as someone jumping out of a closet and surprising you, finding out a family member may die soon, having a gun pointed at you, etc but more like if you were in a dark house in the middle of nowhere and completely alone inside and there were well known rumors that it was haunted and you had to watch ghost stories and horror movies all night, are you enough of a skeptic that your mind wouldn’t play tricks on you?
In other words would that situation scare you at all?
As for me not being anything close to a skeptic I know I would be very nervous in that situation even if nothing could really harm me.
Dark sinister places do scare me - but my sceptic side ensures it remains as a vague feeling of dread, not a specific mind-game imagination-run-riot episode.
It is quite possible that such a situation would scare me. After watching The Ring, I became, uh, ‘extremely attentive’ to all those little sounds an old house makes all of the time, but are rarely noticed.
The human creature is hardly always logical. It is one thing to know that Casper does not indeed exist; It is another to let a fertile imagination have a bit of fun every so often.
I used to be, but I cannot recall any recent times. Either I grew out of it, or more likely my life the past few years has been scary enough from bad life events for me to worry about anything else.
Heh, heh, heh. I know a guy who, after watching The Ring forgot that he had set his television on an alarm to wake him the previous night—in the middle of the night!—and hadn’t shut it off. He said that he was pretty freaked out when the predictable comic narrative unfolded.
I do get freaked out sometimes. My sister lives in a house that’s about 130 years old and when I was house sitting I had what must have been a mix between dreaming and waking: I was dreaming something creepy, which doesn’t normally bother me, but when I woke there were two creepy, glowing eyes glaring at me through the doorway to the bedroom. Since I don’t sleep with my glasses on, it took me a couple of minutes to sufficiently shake off my sleep & dream and realize that the “eyes” were a convenient alignment of two electronic kitchen devices.
Needless to say, when I was working at the funeral home, bringing a recently deceased into the darkened, empty place at 3:00am and undressing the body so that it is ready for the funeral director to do the embalming, well…that could be creepy at times.
I would note that as a skeptic, I am just that: skeptic. I don’t believe that there aren’t ghosts; I don’t believe in ghosts. Besides, I would imagine that it is in our genes to get creeped out by things that go bump in the night.
Of course you get scared. Humans are emotional creatures and sometimes that over-rules logic. But for me it would have to be a something a bit more than just a creepy old house.
It’s part of our survival instincts to be nervous in unfamiliar circumstances and there’s plenty of real scary things in the world. So it needn’t be ghosts that’s got you worried. The skeptic’s solution to the ghost stories may be just as unpleasant.
Scared of imaginary creatures in the dark? Never. Horror movies are, you know, works of fiction–they’re fun to watch becaause they give you all the delightful frissons of being scared, but nothing in them is real. There are no such critters as ghosts, vampires, werewolves, or zombies, so it makes no sense to be scared of what doesn’t exist.
OK, good point. It’d be interesting to know if the knowledge of poisonous spiders effects Brit-arachno-phobia, or if it’s just their freaky-crawlyness.
It’s size with me. Money spiders don’t bother me at all, more than an inch or so long and i get skeeved by them.
Back on thread - I am definitiely a skeptic, but a late night horror movie, followed by having to go upstairs in the dark can get a little creepy. Even though I know, subjectively, its the same damn staircase that it was at noon. There’s a little irrationality in all of us I guess.