In my experience animal trophies (especially mounted heads) really creep up a place.
House-hunting, I saw a good example of creepy, which I’ve mentioned before:
An unfinished basement (think rough beams and floor of concrete, with random old trash strewn about) accessed by creaky rickety stares with, in the place that is furthest from the single bare lightbulb that illuminates the gloom … a room with a hefty door. Beyond the door is a poky little bedroom with a musty bed, a two piece washroom, no windows.
Best part: hasp for lock on the outside of the door. :eek:
Here’s a relatively subtle one: arrange things in patterns that suggest faces. Humans are very prone to interpreting things as faces. Got a blank wall? Hang two pictures on it for “eyes” and put a dark piece of furniture between them for a mouth. The front door should be flanked by two windows, so the building appears to be “looking” at you as you approach. Repeat as often as possible, ideally at least once in every room. Fireplaces can be great for this.
In pictures–photos, paintings, even photo albums, whatever fits the locale–have a few images of a family with one or more young children. Then have later pictures of the same family with at least one of child missing.
In some out-of-the-way place, leave a few toys, arranged to look like a child was just playing with them. Let them gather dust. A windowsill is good, so they’ll quickly get a sun-faded look, but you want a place where it won’t be obvious that you’ve deliberately left them alone.
Attics, like cellars, can be a gold mine of creepy. If you’re living in the place, you presumably won’t have pictures of strangers on your walls, or leave old toys sitting around the main rooms, but you could have all that in the attic, and just say that you haven’t been up there much. A trunk with a photo album (and filler) and a corner where a child appears to have hidden to play with a few toys would cover the previous two suggestions. You might also have a marked-up beam–either carved with something cryptic, like tally marks, or markings suggesting that something had been attached to it for a while. Attics are a wonderful venue for strange noises, too; just leaving something loose where air movements can make it knock into a stationary object would be a nice effect. Old music boxes are also good.
Prof. Pepperwinkle’s suggestion of dead animals is also dead on. A bunch of glassy eyes staring at you is a good recipe for creepy.
Plastic slip-covers on the furniture and lots of starchy doilies.
Crawlspace/trapdoor, of course. Locks on the outside of certain rooms. Secret passageways through the walls can be creepy, but it’s even better if they lead to the guest bedroom, complete with peephole. Locked from the inside, of course. Also, at least one fake doorway that’s bricked off, and preferably it isn’t obvious that it really doesn’t go anywhere.
Storage shed should contain lots of dangerous tools, all rusty and blunt. No chainsaw to aid S-Mart employees.
A variant on the Annoy-a-tron: a recording of that creepy “la la la la la laaaa” little girl chant, that goes off quietly and at random intervals, using acoustics that make it sound like the source location is changing. On search, it looks like they also make an Eviltron… Thinkgeek also had these pictures on oldtimey people that would change into demon faces when you shift perspective. No luck finding a link. Probably too overt though, it would be best paired with face detection so the faces would only look evil in the extreme periphery.
Animal heads just say hunting lodge. You need the kind that look like the animal was shot 100 years ago and had seen better days since, with all kinds of wear and damage. Wolves need to be snarling. Bonus points if it resembles the Swedish lion.
As suggested above, anything that shouldn’t be there. An old childless couple who have never mentioned having kids, but they have a pink girl’s room full of dolls. All facing the door. In fact, dolls anywhere count. :Shudder:
Wolves, snarling or not, are a bit overdone, I think. They’re good for a jump-scare in the dark, but not so much for building tension. Also, it’s been my experience that people like putting hats on any taxidermied animal big enough to hold one; a wolf in a fedora would kind of blow your creepy vibe.
Large numbers of little critters might be better. Harmless-looking things, like squirrels and rabbits, but lots of them. All in one place, like an army of undead varmints, all with accusatory stares in their big, lifeless eyes. Move them around occasionally, when no one’s looking–maybe just a few inches closer to the door of the room they occupy.
In testament to the powers of the SDMB, I once got a great reply for a question I asked 8 years earlier. There was this store on Newbury street in Boston called Gargoyles Grotesques & Chimeras. It was the strangest store I have ever been in. You couldn’t even tell where it was if it wasn’t open. If it was, you would just walk in and it was nothing but religious artifacts strewn about in disarray. You could buy stuff if you asked but nothing had a price tag on it and it was quite dark in general. The owner just liked to talk about the artifacts in a mysterious voice. One of the key features was this really slow piano music that the owner recorded himself played in infinite loop.
You can creep out any space just by playing this in a loop. I sleep to it many nights.
Download the file called “The Anatomy of Melancholy – No Beginning and No End” from 1/4 of the way down the page here and enjoy your new creepiness:
Come to New Orleans. There’s a creepy abandoned house on every block.
If you have an extra bedroom, an empty nursery is always creepy.
This would be a good place to start. Odd angles and dim corridors would give you the most bang for your buck.
A door-sized piece of plywood nailed…heavily nailed …to a wall. Before putting it up, take a sledgehammer and pound a few good dents in it. Then put it up so that it looks like something big was trying to get out.
Or…
Cut a door-sized hole in the wall but don’t remove the piece. Patch it up and repaint the area so that it almost, but not quite looks the same.
Also…
Obtain an big, old, preferably rust-stained farm style kitchen sink and install it. Leave some antique surgical instruments lying about…
An apartment building I used to live in had a bizarre half-built series of rooms at the bottom of the building. If you went out the back of the building there was an enormous hole in the wall. Going in, it had concrete floors, lots of dust and leaves and random garbage strewn about and a series of unfinished rooms had been built down there. A couple of them had glass sliding windows but other than that they were completely empty. A couple of them had a hole in the wall and if you looked through it, it was basically just a tiny bricked-up space (maybe only a couple of feet by a few feet) other than the hole in it. One part of it was just a bunch of bricks that formed a tiny square room only a few feet by a few feet but it was literally just made up of bricks a foot or two high - just an unfinished wall forming a room. The ceiling was also really low. It was like they had started building an apartment and realized they totally screwed the plan up so they quit building, whacked the ceiling down on top and started again with the lower level of actual apartments. But there were a few wall sockets and ceiling lights put in and the electricity actually worked! It was really bizarre. I used to take people on flashlight tours of it at parties.
Man, I loved that place. After I left Boston I used to try to go back there whenever I was in town, and the owners always remembered me. They were sweet, weird guys. Until you said it, I never knew what the store was actually called, and it somehow never seemed to be in the same place it was last time I’d been there. I think somewhere in the back of my mind I always assumed I imagined it. 
[end hijack]
Flickering bathroom lights have always creeped me out. Bonus points if they only flicker when you’re in the shower.
I think we need to start a home creepification show. “Oh, this cellar is dreadful. It’s only used for storage, what a waste of potential! We’ll start by ripping out these shelves and hanging some manacles…” drastic needs to get back in here. We’re going to need a place for a pilot episode, and starting this thread is practically volunteering.
Keep the shelves. We can put pickled animal parts and jars of eyeballs on them.
Sounds like our condo. At least until we had the windows replaced.
Great ideas all around.
I really like the idea of padlocked basements and attics as well as a trunk wrapped in chains. I was debating what should be inside a locked basement, or attic, or trunk – and I’ve settled on a single antique ventriloquist dummy. Like one of these fellas:
The idea of a house with a face was inspired as well. Interior faces subtly suggested with a fireplace for a mouth would be perfect.
Also, one of the creepy old portraits should have the eyes violently scrapped off of the canvas. Perhaps even have the canvas scratched through as well.
Ideally, it would have a stone basement that’s below tide level. Let the ocean wash in some of its own horrors.
Maybe one of the hallways could have a low ceiling so you have to stoop. Also the doors are installed so that they won’t stay latched and will swing open into the hall.
I have the magic power to make sensor lights turn OFF when I walk by them. It seems like it could be trivial to make one that’s always on and turns off when it senses movement. Even better if it slowly dims, or flickers and sputters out.
Build a small room and tack up random photos of young girls all over it. And in a few newspaper articles which talk about unsolved murders.
Take a cue from Scooby Doo and black out the eyes, making it appear as if someone could stand behind the wall and look through the portrait.