It may be true that there are more disturbing things out there than giant earthworm porn, but I refuse to believe it. Even if I have to stuff my fingers in my ears and sing “La la la, there’s no such thing!”
Monsters In The Closet
Warning- the following is sick, and explicit!
Enjoy the photography of Joshua Hoffine. He says that he stages these scenes in detail, and only uses Photoshop to make minor corrections.
Ooh, those are delightfully creepy! The one with the clown reminds me of Stephen King’s “IT”.
I’ll see your Joshua Hoffine and raise you a Mark Ryden. 
Are Ryden’s paintings supposed to be a take-off on something else? Some of the figures look really familiar – especially the little girl in the “Saint Barbie” painting.
Not sure, honestly. I know he’s done some fairly famous mainstream stuff, like the cover of a Michael Jackson album (I think it was “Dangerous”) and the covers of two Stephen King novels (“The Regulators” and “Desperation”), but I haven’t found any indication that he’s parodying anything in particular (except maybe consumer culture).
Byzantine’s over-reaction in that thread was creepy to me!
Me too, but it doesn’t kill the thread, which runs to over 500 posts. I just read the whole thing. (Yes, I did just get my first unemployment check; why do you ask?) :rolleyes:
Holy crap, I love this. I mean, in its own special way. Every time I read it it creeps me out again. Who wrote this? Where did it come from? Oof.
I posted these in another thread, but I have experienced three events which could possibly be described as “supernatural,” and were certainly, at the very least, very creepy:
When I was a teenager, I used to spend a lot of time at what was then the Museum of Man in Ottawa. The building where it was located had a reputation for spooky happenings. I knew one of the security guards who worked there, and while she had never experienced anything odd, she said many other guards had, to the point where some guards refused to go back after their first shift.
I was there one day when the museum was mostly empty, and I was wandering around in the section dedicated to human superstition, appropriately enough. Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed someone walking down the ramp into the same area I was in. The only reason I even noticed is because the museum was so empty. I didn’t think anything of it, at first, except my subconscious kept trying to draw my attention to something alarming. Eventually I looked over and realized that the person had passed behind a pillar, but hadn’t emerged from the other side. I stood and watched, and still the person didn’t emerge, which was odd. They couldn’t have gone back up the ramp without me seeing, so they must for some reason be standing behind the pillar – yet when curiosity got the better of me and I went around to look, there was no one there.
My second occurance was even more dramatic. I lived in a house for some time with what is called “poltergeist” activity. There were five of us who shared a large old house. The attic was constantly noisy, with sounds like someone walking back and forth on the creaky wooden floor. This could possibly be explained as settling, except that every now and then there would be the sound of one of the boxes stored up there sliding across the floor and then thumping into the wall.
When I first moved in, the room I was supposed to move into was still occupied, so I just laid a bedroll in the attic. They attributed the strange noises from the attic to raccoons, and they had bought a human trap. I was a little concerned about sleeping in an attic with a crazed raccoon, so they demonstrated the trap to me, showing that when it went off it was extremely loud, and there’s no way I could sleep through it. Every night, when I slept up there, they would bait the trap with a tin of tuna. Every morning I’d wake up, the trap would be set off, and the tuna would be untouched.
One day while I was alone in the house, I saw the attic door open and close by itself. My door was closed, but it had a transom over the top through which I could see the top of the attic door. I have to admit that my balls scurried up inside me and I didn’t have the courage to open my door and see what, if anything, was out there.
One night I got up to use the bathroom and found the toilet paper roll unspooling itself on the floor. The bathroom was a “cold spot” which was always several degrees cooler than the rest of the house – which I actually measured, to be sure. Who knows, maybe there was a draft or something.
The one event which sticks most in my mind about that house was the day I and one of my roommates were sitting in her room and discussing what we had experienced. She had seen similar things in the house, and both of us were trying to come up with explanations which didn’t involve the supernatural. As we were discussing this, the floor lamp tipped over for absolutely no reason and landed right in between the two of us.
The third event is the one which I think will draw the most disbelief here, but I’ll relate it anyway – and then my explanation for it.
I had a fundamentalist christian friend, and he was forever trying to “save” me. We were arguing about religion (again) one day, and he convinced me to get down on my knees and ask for “a sign.” He said if I was a true scientist, then I should be willing to undertake the experiment and accept any empirical evidence with an open mind. I agreed, and did as he asked, right in front of him. After an hour or so of chatting without any burning bushes or heavenly choirs, we decided to go out for something to eat.
We were crossing a local bridge and stopped to watch the city workers blasting the ice under the bridge. As I stood there, someone grabbed me by the jacket and dragged me away from my friend. Now, I’m 6’5" and roughly the size and shape of refrigerator, so I’m not someone easily “dragged away.” The person responsible was a black man, dressed in a black suit with a black car coat, black gloves, and carrying a black attache case of the type lawyers use. Without introducing himself, he launched into an angry tirade. He informed me that God had spoken to me twice before, and both times I had ignored him; that if I ignored him again, that God would turn his back on me for a very long time. And then criticized several things about me which I won’t mention because they were personal, but things which a stranger could not easily have guessed. At one point my friend came over and wanted to know what was going on. The Man In Black wouldn’t address him, telling me, “Send him away! I’m here to talk to you, not him!” My friend, mystified, went back to watching the blasting. Then, without waiting for a response, he turned on his heel and marched away, shouting at me over his shoulder, “Remember! You have been warned!”
I went and grabbed my friend and ended up babbling a bit about what had happened. He wanted to talk to the guy, but when we turned to run after him, he was gone. It was the middle of a bridge, and there’s nowhere the Man In Black could have gone unless he had jumped over the side. There hadn’t been enough time for him to sprint away, even if the sidewalks hadn’t been covered in snow and ice. And we’d have seen a car stopping to pick him up.
Now, for my explanation. I am an atheist. I do not believe some Jewish skyfather sent an angry black man to berate me. However, I have read enough Man In Black accounts to know that my experience is far from unique. These sorts of encounters have been happening to people for millenia – although until relatively recently, they were considered to be “demonic” encounters rather than Men In Black. My guess is that these Men In Black are archetypal in nature. Carl Jung noted that UFOs began appearing in great numbers only after the end of the Second World War, and proposed that they were in fact archetypal constructs: great, glowing mandalas in the sky symbolizing our universal terror of nuclear annihilation and our desire for spiritual unity to counter it. Likewise, I think the Men In Black are the alienated Other, the Doppelganger of existential mysticism. My encounter was not evidence of God, but rather evidence that we live in a representational Universe which answers constantly to our own mental state. In fact, I think we may discover that many of what we recognize now to be “supernatural” phenomena will one day turn out to be manifestations of deeply-rooted archetypal symbols.
**thetruewheel ** I masturbate with your underwear when you’re not home.
What? He said he… wanted… to… oh.
Well I’ll just be on my way then.
I was thinking the same thing about The Holders series. They would be so bad ass of a video game!
Ugh. The toilet paper unspooling itself in the middle of the night got to me. Maybe it really objected to being looped in improper underhand fashion.
When a person smiles, you can see part of their skull.
Another vote for the Dyatlov Pass Incident at Wikipedia.
You can?
A vaguely remembered post about a ouija board experience:
“Who is there?”
“Richard”
“Where is Richard?”
“Outside the door to the room.”
“Why doesn’t Richard open the door and come in?”
“Richard has no hands. Richard has teeth.”
Brrrr!
Intermission for scary thread
My family and I used to go camping there every year. A really beautiful part of the country.
Intermission ends
Okay, I shuddered at that last one.
ETA: Richard…
Fuck. That is seriously messed up.