Will you please stop with your nonsense explanations!
The lock was installed to keep the insectile demons from hell from coming through the hidden access panel in the back of the closet and into our world.
That soft metallic chittering you hear from time to time? It’s just their carapaces knocking together as they wait for you to open the closet door one last time.
Regards,
-Bouncer-
This is a little more indirectly spooky and not as close to violence as some of the others, but it’s the most wigged out I’ve gotten by something external rather than my own imagination messing with me.
A couple months ago, I was sitting downstairs in my living room around 9:30 at night. It was an uncharacteristically windy night, the sort that usually means rain is coming.
I’m used to the nearby trees rattling against the house in such wind, and there’s usually dry plant debris that gets flung about, so hearing the occasional branch hit the outside walls is nothing new.
That night, though, as I was sitting not 10 feet from the front door, I heard what I first thought to be a branch. But the sound came from the door, not a wall, and there is no tree near the door. Further, it wasn’t a simple smack, like a branch hitting it and rebounding, but a slow, drawn-out sound, as if the edge of the branch was being dragged against the door. It sounded awful deliberate.
There’s a large picture window near the front door, which I usually keep covered since I prefer not to have anyone looking in, and at that moment you couldn’t have convinced me to push the blinds to look outside for any amount of money. There is a peephole in the door though, and after the scraping ended I took a quick look outside. Nothing near the door at all. I walked back to my chair, and the scraping sound came again.
I never did confirm what had been making the noise. It’s possible I only thought it was the door and there was a tree rubbing against another part of the wall, and the sound transferred. But it sure as hell sounded like it was scraping against the door, and I never saw a thing outside, tree or elsewise, that might have been doing so.
Given that I’m enough of a wuss that most ghost stories can keep me wide awake in bed, I’m amazed I got any sleep that night.
I wasn’t going to tell this one. It sounds stupid. And if I wasn’t there…yada…yada.
Back in college I had use of a car and several friends promised a pizza & gas money if I’d drive the 3 (two girls who were roommates & one of their BF’s to one of the girls parents house, outside of Princeton. On the way back to the dorms, one of those odd once-a-year fogs covered the county highway we were driving on. There were corn fields on both side of the road and visibility about 10 feet ahead when this old Ford pick up truck started to tail gate us. Badly.
I sped up. He sped up. I went faster. He’d get so close that I could only see the bottoms of his headlights through the rear view mirrors. And that’s when the girls started screaming. “Don’t stop! He’ll kill us if you do! Go faster!” They were freaked and putting on a screaming-fit show worthy of the Salem Witch Trials. Stupidly, I sped up and the Ford sped up. I looked at my speedometer, which was at 80+ when i realized that this was Stupid. Whoever it was would just run us into oncoming traffic or off the road at the first bend. So I took the car out of gear & hit the brakes. And those headlights seemed to just go out and disappear.
Now look, its a whole lot easier to believe they killed their lights & did the same thing in the fog but with better brakes & were 100 yards behind us laughing their asses off. But that fog bank ended when I got about 200 feet further on …and then the fog lifted 2 minutes later behind us. I didn’t see any lights behind us at all; from any farm house, from any car, from any county road street light. There were some stars. But nothing else between us and 3 miles of crops but wind and silence. I’ve gotta say, as practical jokes go? That worked.
We were sitting in a dorm room with some friends, likely smoking pot, and they were relating how they’d been talking about how, on some earlier occasion during a conversation about a ghost or ghosts, a glass mysteriously cracked. We were saying, “Yeah, right” when an odd crack sound came from a shelf over a desk. Sure enough, there was a shot glass with a big crack in it. They swore the glass hadn’t been cracked before and I definitely heard the sound. We all did because we all turned and looked at the same spot at the same time.
I was sitting at home one night, alone, and on the SDMB. I started reading this one thread, and it scared the crap out of me, and every time I tried to sleep, some tiny sound in the house kept me up for at least 20 more minutes. This went on all night.
Keep 'em coming!
I’ve told this one here before, but it’s possibly worth repeating:
As a teen, I often went over to the local shooting range to use their archery course. It’s a big range, the archery course and trap shooting area are close to the gate and the pistol/rifle ranges are about a half a mile further down a dirt road and through some woods. I was usually the only person on the archery range, and often there was no-one trap shooting either, so I was pretty well alone.
One day as I’m packing up, another car pulls in. It comes to a quick stop about twenty yards away when the driver sees me, and the driver jumps out and starts walking briskly towards me. He asked “What day is it?” Me: “It’s Wednesday.” He immediately asks again, still getting closer: “What day is it?”
Despite them being out of sight, there’s enough noise from the other ranges that maybe he didn’t hear me the first time. “It’s Wednesday.” “What day is it?” I have a sudden mental image of my family’s cat stalking a bird. This guy is approaching way too directly and way too quickly for a casual question. I start considering what to do if he tries to attack me, and my first thought is some Jackie Chan-esque vision of slamming him with a car door.
Car door. Oh yeah. The dirt road into the shooting range was steep and really badly maintained, so I’d driven my parent’s gigantic Chevy Suburban that day. I’m standing next to a freaking urban assault vehicle, with all my gear loaded and the keys in my hand. I swing the driver’s door open and step halfway inside.
The guy instantly stops. Like a cat, freezing when it’s been spotted. “It’s Wednesday.” “Oh.” He turned around and went back to his car. I climbed all the way into the driver’s seat, locked the door, and drove out in a hurry.
It didn’t really sink in until later. I’m still not 100% sure that he meant me harm, but there were way, way too many warning signals to give him the benefit of the doubt, most of which I didn’t consciously recognize at the time. If the situation had been slightly different, if I’d still been loading my equipment, or if I’d been driving a smaller car, I might not have thought to just get in. If he’d rephrased his question, asked with more normal timing, or approached more casually, I might have ignored my inner alarm bells. The kicker is that this happened at a shooting range - I guarantee he had a gun, either on him or in his car.
I was lucky. It still scares me thinking about how vulnerable I was, and how much of it hinged on chance. If he’d been a slightly more adept predator… Y’know, I really don’t want to think about it.
My aunt was in college at the right time and the right place with the right ‘look’ to have attracted Ted Bundy’s attention. She remembers being approached in a parking lot by a guy with his arm in a cast, a technique that Bundy used pretty frequently. Was it him? Dunno. Nothing happened, fortunately, so it’s just a vaguely scary memory.
I was a young slender brunette with long hair and hung out in a few local bars that were not that great [I had friends who worked in some pretty scuzzy bars] in 1989 and I was living on Alexander Street for a 4 month contract with Henze-Movats doing a refit at Ginna.
[ul]
[li]The Alphabet Killer, cold case[/li][li]Kenneth Bianchi, one of the Hillside Stranglers[/li][li]Angelo Buono, Jr., one of the Hillside Stranglers[/li][li]Arthur Shawcross, serial killer[/li][li]Francis Tumblety, one of the Jack the Ripper suspects[/li][/ul]
Not bad for a small city.
If he had said, “Is it safe?”, that would have been my signal to get the hell out of there.
Wow, I didn’t realize Rochester had that reputation. That is pretty good for a city that size!
I was driving to work early in the morning, like 5, 6. Deserted road, fairly out in the country.
A lone balloon drifted across the street.
While it probably had a very mundane explanation, my IT/Stephen King infested brain nearly caused me to drive off the road and I had the shakes for quite some time.
[ul]
[li]The Alphabet Killer, cold case[/li][li]Kenneth Bianchi, one of the Hillside Stranglers[/li][li]Angelo Buono, Jr., one of the Hillside Stranglers[/li][li]Arthur Shawcross, serial killer[/li][li]Francis Tumblety, one of the Jack the Ripper suspects[/li][/ul]
Well, to be honest, the Bianchi/Buono stranglings took place in California, and obviously the Jack the Ripper killings were in Britain. Only 2 of hte list were active in Rochester - Alphabet was 1960s and Shawcross was late 80s. There was some belief that Bianchi did a couple of murders in Rochester.
One of the scariest serial killers working the US was a Mexican that kept getting deported and sneaking back. He would hop a train away from the border area and kill people along the route the trains took. There were actually a couple or 3 serial killers that rode trains as hobo/bums and murdered along the tracks.
And I get seriously pissed when documentaries on TV get it wrong - serial killers kill a few at a time over a period of time and follow a pattern typically. A mass murderer kills a bunch at once, like the Columbine Massacre, and a spree killer is someone who starts killing, and will randomly kill people he/she runs across like Charles Starkweather with no particular reason other than the thrill of it. Dracula was neither a serial killer nor a mass murderer nor a spree killer. He was a ruling monarch at war. Just because he made a field of heads on sticks was more as a deterrent for Turks. Erzabet Bathory on the other hand was a serial killer as her murders were not based upon warfare nor legal activity - she was killing to get blood for beauty rituals and perhaps ‘devil worship’/witchcraft purposes.
Can you tell I was watching reruns of that idiot ranking murderers on how bad they are on his stupid scale?
I kept my horse at a farm on the outskirts of a small town. If you rode out from the barn you could cross a creek and go up the 80 acre pasture to a gate at the corner of a gravel road and a country highway, then go out and across the road to ride for hours across fields and through woods.
Alone or with one or two girlfriends I would ride out most nights after work, sometimes parking at the barn and sometimes parking at the gate, depending on where our horses were in the pasture when we caught them and whether we had our tack with us. One particular night I left from the barn and rode up to meet my friend Tracy at the gate to head out for a ride, so when we got back after dark she stopped and untacked at the gate while I rode back down to the barn.
After I fed and turned my horse out I drove along the gravel road back up to the gate to see if she was still there. As I reached her car my headlights illuminated a man walking toward her, who then turned around, got in a truck and drove away. It turns out that he had coasted around the corner from the highway and stopped his truck between her and her car. He told her that he was having problems with his truck and that it wouldn’t start, and, although she is very tough and self-reliant, she was creeped out by the menacing way he was approaching her. My arrival caused him to go back to his truck which, surprise, started right up.
It was creepy because up until then we felt perfectly safe alone there; even though it was isolated and dark it was our familiar haven. Some stranger had to have scoped out our routine to fake a breakdown and we didn’t want to think about what might have happened.