You know, it very well could have been a fox. This was in the Philadelphia suburbs (so no mountain lions :)), but I did see a fox in the field behind our house years before. Maybe it was fighting with the birds and rabbits over the delicious burned cookies.
There’s the lightning strike just outside your window–the faint sizzle, the unearthly flash of light, the sharp bang-crash followed by the sound of booming rattling the windows. That’s in third.
The ghastly screeching-yowling-hissing noise of someone’s stray cat on the prowl outside in the streets (it sounds like a really ticked-off car engine) is probably second to the sound of your mother crying in the bathroom.
(She’d fallen down the stairs and hurt herself chasing after our dog, but she was okay–just badly bruised. It’s the worst feeling in the world to stand there and grab a thousand things–aspirin, a cold cloth–and feel helpless.)
In the echo chamber, it doesn’t take a lot to produce a hellacious racket. I discovered this a while back when the suction cups on the back of the shower radio gave out. The resulting CLATTERBANG was an instant wake-up for me. “The hell was that?” It was hardly anything at all, so it took me a while to figure it out.
I have two additional contributions. One isn’t so much scary as it is a delayed revelation of absolute horror; one is just funny.
The delayed horror:
Waking up, in a fog, to a strange sound in the house. Like… running water? A gurgling hiss, of some kind? I stayed in bed, blinking away the cobwebs, thinking: what could that be?
Huh, sounds like it’s coming from the basement. I hope a pipe hasn’t burst or something. Wander downstairs…
…to three inches of water.
The bottom had fallen out of the decade-old water heater.
That’s a sound that produces no immediate reaction but a massive “OH SHIT” adrenaline rush when you finally figure out what’s going on.
The funny:
This wasn’t a sound that woke me up. I was already awake, having come home after watching an extremely scary movie and being unable to sleep (not a common occurrence). So I’m lying in bed, trying to think calming thoughts, forget about the movie, it’s just a movie, sleep, blissful sleep, relax…
And I almost piss myself when a very large moth goes FLUTTER FLUTTER FLUTTER against the wall directly next to my head.
I gave up sleeping, went into the living room, and spent the night watching a Cheech & Chong marathon.
My story from slightly more than a year ago.
Earlier this week I heard a weird, kinda swooshy noise. I went out to my living room where the sound was coming from and found the cat trapped in the horizontal blinds. Oddly enough, he wasn’t complaining.
Well, not in keeping with most of the stories in this thread, my scary noise in the night really did turn out to be something scary.
It was 2:30 one night, when I was awoken by the sound of someone right outside my door (I live in a small two-floor apartment building) moaning, “Oh, God, oh, God!” over and over again, intermixed with the sounds of breaking glass. At first I thought, is someone hurt? Is something on fire and the sound of breaking glass someone getting the fire extinguisher? But the sounds of breaking glass continued, way too much glass just to be the pane over the fire extinguisher.
The man outside my door continued to moan, and I, out of bed by this time, peered out my peephole to see the door directly across from me standing halfway open and smeared with blood. I heard the sounds of the man, my neighbor apparently, running back down the hall, and I backed away from the door.
Then, WHUMP! More moaning, and WHUMP! on my door. At this point, I called the police.
Long story shorter, my neighbor had gone off his meds and had a psychotic break. The police hauled him away and I never saw him again. The next morning, I discovered the source of the breaking glass: the end of the short hallway had previously contained a floor-to-ceiling mirror. The mirror was smashed into tiny shards and the walls were smeared up and down with bloody handprints from where the man had cut his hands.
A few years ago my wife and kids went away for the weekend while I had to stay home because of work. I figured it was a perfect opportunity to watch all the movies she didn’t like. (you sickos, I mean horror and sci-fi films). The Exorcist had just been re-released, so I decided that not only would I watch it but I would turn off all the lights. Right at the point where she crab walked down the stairs (spoilered for anyone who has not seen the movie)
I heard the most god-awful screaming from outside. I jumped off the couch, tripped over the coffee table, spilling my drink and popcorn and turned on the lights.
It turns out the cat roaming our neighborhood decided now was the perfect time to become orgasmic with the local tom.
I went back to watching the movie. With every light in the house turned on. I even turned on the lights in the china cabinet. It took about an hour for my heart rate to not sound like the drum solo in Wipeout.
To add to the list of things that can sound like a woman screaming: a peacock.
When I was a kid I spent my summers with my grandparents on a couple of acres of land in Central Florida. Orange groves to one side and pasture to the other. The closest neighbors owned peacocks which wandered where they felt like it. Those things screaming in the middle of the night used to scare me to death even after I knew what it was.
There is nothing quite like the sound of an air-raid siren (legitimately) going off in the middle of the night… :eek:
He wasn’t trapped. He *meant * to be there.
When the store across the street caught fire around 4:00am. I heard an alarm which woke me up, then I heard what sounded like running, the sound of somebody smashing in a door and then sirens and more sirens. When I looked outside, there were about 6 or 7 fire trucks and a few police cars as well. I went to go sleep in the backroom. My wife never even stirred. :eek:
A couple of sonic booms from an incoming shuttle is sure to start your morning off with some zip.
Noone Special, I think you win, given your location. :eek:
Early one evening there was a very active thunderstorm that passed through. Lots of very close lightning strikes. Skip ahead a few hours, everyone is asleep. From downstairs comes an extremely loud pulsing roar. Sounded like a rocket launch. When my dad opened the door to look downstairs steam came billowing out.
We lived in a house with a garage underneath the house. The electric hot water heater was in the garage. Apparently, as we were told later, lightning had struck the power lines and welded the contacts on the water heater’s thermostat. The noise was caused by steam pressure blowing out of the pressure relief valve.
My husband was out one night and I was home alone with the children, who were all sleeping. I was walking down the hall, which leads back into the house directly in from the front door. I’m something of a scaredy cat anyway, and suddenly I hear this clattering behind me and I take off towards the living room, goosed with fright, doing what my husband now calls The Tippie-Toe Run. It was him coming in, of course, and he could see me skedaddling through the windows beside the door. He gives me a hard time now about my devastating tippie toe run, and its deadly effectiveness against intruders. :o 
The worse fright in the night was years ago when I was living alone. Behind my apartment was a field, warehouses, railroad tracks and, beyond, a large church. The most God (ha!) awful screaming, complete with echoes, started up one night and scared the living shit out of me. It was just cats, which I’d never heard yowling at night before. Man, I thought I would never calm down, even after I looked out and saw the damn cats.
I had a good one the other night. For context, I live on my own and I’m a young female. Horror movie waiting to happen. We recently got some heavy rain and I woke up at four-thirty in the morning to intense, constant rattling. I only had one ear out, the other pressed to the pillow so I thought someone was having at my security doors and it sounded like it was coming from the backyard which my bedroom faces. I grabbed the large Maglite I have (not in case of a blackout), and investigated by peeking through the verticals into my yard. Now that I’m up, with my heart pounding in my ears, I realise its the water hitting the gutters and hurtling down the drain pipe.
But I’d already had my adrenaline shot and slept badly for the next three hours.
first night in my first apartment…
I had moved in, and set up much of the limited furnature, and gone to sleep…
A few hours later, I awoke to the most ungodly (I am not religious, but sheesh, allow me a metaphore here!) ataonal moaning by not one, but two people coming through the wall… …
It went on for a few minutes then sdtopped.
My phone was not hooked up yet… I didn’t know what to do…
I laid awake for a while… and eventually went back to sleep…
I mentioned it to the landlady the next day, and she laughed…
Turns out my nieghbours were both stone deaf, and I had heard them having sex…
Regards
FML
i woke up one night out of a dead sound sleep because there was something *growling * at me from the foot of the bed.
after i finished screaming and peeling myself off the ceiling, i deduced that there was nothing there and that i had been dreaming.
whatever.
for a moment or two it was seriously, creepily friggin’ REAL.
I’ve had a pair of racoons decide to get into a territorial squabble in a tree about thirty feet from my bed. (Since I had never heard a racoon in my previous 55 years and we do not have a large number of racoons near us, THAT was interesting.)
Our local exurban volunteer fire department fills the tank truck from the lake near the end of our road. Occasionally the ambulance crew comes along with them to chew the fat while they are pumping the water. It was around 3:00 a.m. when the ambulance got a call. They started down the road from the lake, but did not decide to hit the siren until they were directly in front of our house: full siren, whoopee siren, and all the lights they possessed at once. I had two cats sleeping on me that each dug in claws to launch themselves to safety and Deb made a grab for the “security” of my side that left bruises. So in the matter of a bit less than a second, I got the full benefit of two sets of sirens, a whole mess of flashing lights, about fifteen cats’ claws (they did not all sink in), and two hands trying to touch fingers inside my shoulder and upper arm.
The worst, however, was the first night we dropped the hook. My last two summers in college, I worked as a seaman aboard Great Lakes ore boats. Generally we simply tied up at docks, so the anchor chain is not a familiar experience. About two weeks after I had come aboard for my first season, (so I had the belief that I was familiar with my environment), the Soo Locks got socked in by fog and we had to wait in the middle of the river for the fog to clear and the boats ahead of us to pass through the locks. To do this, we slowed down to a standstill in the middle of the river and dropped the anchor. The anchor chain locker was about 30 feet from my berth (and the whole foc’s’le is welded steel with no insulation) and the noise that multiple tons of steel chain makes when it rattles through the hawse pipe 30 feet from one’s bed when one is fast asleep and has never heard it drop is LOUD. It is also protracted, so that as I awoke to this terrifying and completely foreign sound, it simply went on and on. It sounded as though we were tearing the bottom of the hull right out. Meanwhile, since I had expected to be roused out of bed to handle the lines at the locks, I was further troubled because the wake-up call was over a half hour late and no one was coming to get me despite the racket. So on top of being awakened by the most terrifying sound I had ever encountered, I was being left alone in the darkness to wonder whether I was supposed to be abandoning ship or whether I was suposed to be responding to an emergency station and I had no idea (in the fog of recently departed sleep) whether I was about to drown or about to be reprimanded for dereliction of duty.
(The fog had slowed our trip up the St. Mary River and they did not need my services in order to drop the hook, so they “let” me sleep past the hour when I had expected to be awakened to be put on the dock.)
(The sound of dropping anchor on an aircraft carrier is pretty damn impressive too.)
The scariest was when I was about 12. My bedroom was in the finished basement. My bed was against the outside wall. One night I hear a scritch scritch noise on the other side of the wall. Zombies were underground and digging through the wall to come get me! After a moment of being ridgid with fear my brain cought up and I realized it was only a mole or some other rodent. But for a minute I was sure it was zombies.
For me, one of the most mundane sounds scared the crap out of me - a ringing phone. I was in the Navy, deployed to Sicily, and about 2AM, the phone in my room rang. I’d never had it ring before, ever, and my grandfather had recently been diagnosed with cancer, so once I figured out the sound, I braced myself for bad news.
Turns out the drunken XO wanted all of the squadron’s officers to come down to the bar and drink with him. :rolleyes: I was furious, but being almost the most junior, there wasn’t a lot I could do.
Two other events - neither disturbing sleep but both loud and scary:
Night time thunderstorm in Florida, and we were without power. I was trying to keep my toddler from being scared, when there was a simultaneous flash/CRASH!!! Lightning had hit a big old oak tree in the back yard, blowing its bark off. Did you know certain oak bark can leave stains that look like blood on your driveway? Fortunately, it stayed standing, and shortly thereafter we had it taken down, but doggone, did it get my attention.
Some years later, I was home alone in our newly built house (still in Florida) sitting in my bathrobe surfing on line. Suddenly, the whole house shook and shuddered. A tree-sized branch fell off the giant oak between us and the neighbor and clipped the corner of the garage. No major structural damage, thank goodness, but it knocked some coquina loose, and messed up some shingles and trim. Honestly, from the sound and feel of it, I’d have expected half of the garage to be gone.
More recently, on more than one occasion we’ve been roused in the middle of the night by the air compressor in the basement kicking on because *someone * forgot to throw the breaker after he finished working in his shop. First time it happened, it scared me. After that, it just pissed me off…
My sweet kitty Ralph is a bit of a nut and one night very recently I was awoken by a horrific clattering. My small apt has sliding glass doors in my bedroom and they are draped in those floor length vertical blinds. It seems an outdoor kitty was taunting my sweet Ralph and making mean faces at him. So Ralph did what any cat would do.
He raced back and forth causing this ear shattering accordian clacking as those vertical blinds were rolled like piano keys during his frantic laps from one end to the other.
It was around 3 am and I had to slow my heart rate and get out of bed to turn on the outside light to scare the bully cat away.
Ralph was as big a puffer fish and his heart was beating as fast as mine.
That same evil outside kitty likes to fight in front of my patio at odd hours too, and THAT is a horrific sound to be started awake by, also.