Tell me about a time when you were bone-chillingly, teeth-chatteringly scared.

In My Humble Opinion
41

I can sympathize with your son. I get those sometimes. Usually I just see a spider, or someone in the room with me. It almost doesn’t even faze me anymore. The worst is what I came in here to tell.

Just a few months ago, my husband was away for a few days, and I had fallen asleep on the couch, lying on my back. I heard something, and woke up to see a man leaning over me, reaching for my throat. It’s hard to explain to people who have never had night terrors or hypnogogic hallucinations, or whatever you want to call them, but it seems absolutely real. I have never, never screamed in such honest fear in my whole life. I went, “AAAAH! AAAAAAH! AAEEHEEEAAAAA!” I can tell you this because I could hear my voice as if it wasn’t even mine. Once I came around, it took me a good hour to stop shaking. My throat hurt for three days from screaming, and I cut the palms of my hands with my own fingernails.

I’ve always thought I’d be able to handle myself if I were ever attacked in real life. Now I know that’s not true, unless I managed to burst the attacker’s eardrums.

42

Okay, you can not just say this without elaborating. Details!

43

Short version:

I was out looking for fossils with my father and a friend of his in an inland sand quarry near Santa Cruz, CA. We were digging out of a vertical cliff-face (~20 ft) of sand and gravel. Despite being a kid I still thought it was stupid and dangerous, especially since bits of sand would periodically dribble down on us. I told myself that as usual, I was just worrying too much. Then the cliff came down on us.

I was trapped in a fetal position in sand the consistency and density of brown sugar. I should mention that I’d always had a terrible fear of drowning/suffocating. It was completely dark and silent apart from my screams. Since my little brain was releasing all the stress hormones it possibly could, my memory of being buried (as well as the days before and after) is fragmented and difficult to reconstruct or order properly. It’s therefore impossible for me to tell whether I was buried for one minute or fifteen minutes. In any case, as it turns out my father was also completely buried (deeper than I was, apparently), but his friend was only buried to the stomach: he dug out my father and then they dug for me. I felt fresh air on my arm and then their hands pulled me out and I spat sand for a while; my glasses were buried under four or five feet of sand, so I presume that’s how deeply I was buried.

I kept it a complete secret for about ten years because of the fact that if she ever found out, my crazy and abusive mother would certainly have sought sole custody of me, and very likely would also have pursued criminal charges against my father. I more or less lost my mind over the next few years due to the completely repressed trauma as well as a number of other fucked-up things in my life along with general adolescent misery. So in short I’ve been carrying around an (until recently undiagnosed) dose of PTSD since then.

The full story is a lot longer and far more epic/terrible; I wrote a short story of it, if anyone’s interested.

So I guess the moral of this story is that you should try to avoid being buried alive because it sucks.

44

On a very hot and humid day, my son and I sat underneath some power lines on our bicycles.They were towers with three lines on one side and three on the other. Maybe 30-40 feet above us.

We could hear the lines crackling and buzzing. Not only was the hair on my arms tingling, but we were getting small shocks from the bike frames. It was a little strange and I’m glad I had a witness as I would have never believed it from someone else.

45

She died, that was the creepy part.

46

One night I was scud running in a friend’s twin engine glider at 1500 feet above the ground. My ass became a card reader for every card in my wallet. Saw my whole line of credit flash before my eyes.

47

Another anecdote: when I was at school there was a big commotion in the playground because everyone’s hair was standing on end. I ran, as everyone else did, to have a look, and could feel my hair and sweater fizzing and crackling. We all thought it was great fun, and were pointing and laughing at the long-haired girls whose tresses were sticking up vertically, then after about a minute of this, the gym next to us was hit by lightning. Scared the living bejaysus out of pretty much everyone, especially the people who were actually in the gym, who thought it was a bomb.

48

Well, that’s a power line, though…I just didn’t know that lightning gave off warning before it struck. And I guess I just thought it came from the sky.

49

Great stories, these are bone chilling! Here’s mine: I must have been about maybe 9 to 11 years old, and sharing a bedroom with my brother on the second floor of our house. At the time, the house bordered on an open field that was most likely used for mine talings, as it never grew grass or many weeds (yea healthy place, that field) There were housing developments and hotels on all sides, so that field actually got quite a bit of foot traffic on it, from people getting from here to there. Although I lived in a small city, the light pollution from the snow kept us up sometimes so we slept with the blinds and curtains closed to keep it dark.

One night I’m having trouble sleeping. I toss and turn, but just can’t go to sleep, so I decided to pull the blinds up to just stare out into the night for a bit. I could see the stars so bright and the snow gleaming in the moonlight.

There was a man walking out in the middle of the field.

I didn’t think much of it really. People did so all the time. Hell, I did it at night too, sometimes. The man stopped walking along in the field, and I saw him turn towards me. Although none of the lights were on in the house, he somehow knew I was there, awake and watching him. I distinctly heard a tinny little voice say THERE he is! and he rushed the house. And when I say he rushed it, I mean it was like Flash Gordon fast, he traversed what must have been 200 yards in less than a second. He jumped up onto the bare rooftop in front of my window in a single leap and was at the window almost instantly.

I had just gotten a good look at his face when… no. no that’s not right. He had no face. It was just a blank where his face should have been. I started shrieking bloody murder, screaming at the top of my lungs. My brother came over to my bed to shake me awake, then went to go get my parent. My parents burst into the room hearing my screams. They finally got me to wake up. I sat there, blubbering and crying, shaken by the ordeal. It wasn’t real. It was only a bad dream. It was such a vivid dream though, I still remember it clear as day over 20 years later. After telling them all about it, I went to sleep in mom and dad’s room that night. But before we left to go downstairs, mom closed the blinds to the windows.

Sometimes I wonder if the roof had had snow on it that night, if there would have been footprints…

Judging from Weog’s post, I may have had a night terror. I wouldn’t be surprised. I had a lot of sleepwalking episodes when I was a kid, and would frequently wake up in weird places in the house. I still have recurring nightmares from time to time about

A) a robot uprising
b) a zombie apocalypse, or
c) a bunch of ghosts trying to attack us.

50

It was a very cold and misty winters morning, still dark.

I was delivering mail to a Convent, they got loads of mail and had a very small letter box and I’m stood there feeding the mail through the slot.

I hear a swishhhhhh, swishhhhhhhh sound and glance around, coming towards me are two white shapes, I almost shat my self with fear.

Two nuns out for an early morning stroll glided past and my heart gradually returned to its normal beat rate

51

He assaulted me. I was #3 out of six eventually. That’s why the cops were so detail-oriented when they questioned me afterwards.

52

When I was in elementary school, one of our lessons that day involved slavery-era African American folktales. We were told about some form of ghost or demon that was at the top of the totem pole as far as bad entities, whose name was (IIRC) something like “Plat-eye.” For whatever reason, the lesson had scared me to the bone, and I went home (I was a latchkey kid) terrified that there was a Plat-eye inhabiting my house.

So I get home, and my overactive imagination has already terrified me to the point that all I can do is sit paralyzed on the sofa. I turn on the TV and watch Gilligan’s Island. It’s the episode with a ghost on it. I suffer through it, afraid to get up and change the channel. Brady Bunch comes on, and it’s the episode where Greg tries to convince the rest of the kids that the house is haunted. Having had all I was going to take of ghosts for the day, I somehow mustered up the courage to walk to the TV and change the channel to Sesame Street.

This day’s episode was sponsored by the letter B. Cookie Monster (or one of his friends) was making the “B^” (imagine this: ^ is a schwa) sound, repeatedly. “B^ B^ B^ B^ B^ B^…” until one of them got sick of it and, out of nowhere, screamed "BBBBB^^^^^^^^^^^^!!!"

Mammahomie had to steam-clean the sofa when she got home that night. :eek:

53

EvilTOJ, that freaked me out a bit. The worst part was the guy turning to look at you - made the little hairs on my neck stand up!

54

I’m so sorry, Baker, and for the others who truly suffered from their scares.

I don’t think I’ve ever been “bone-chillingly, teeth-chatteringly scared,” but there were four times when I was very scared:

  • Off the coast of North Carolina, out on a small boat with my dad when I was 9 or so, the wind blew us offshore and we had a very hard time tacking back into shore. I really thought for awhile that we might be blown out to sea before we finally made it to safety.

  • My first summer with my driver’s license, driving a car with three friends riding along as passengers, I was in a hurry, or showing off, and very foolishly passed another car on a twisty country road without being able to see that the road ahead was clear. It was, fortunately, but I was immediately hit by an incredible surge of regret and fear - what if it hadn’t been? What if we’d been hit, I’d lived and my friends had died? How could I explain what I’d done? What would I say to their families? I felt awful and scared for hours after it happened.

  • While in college, I was staying with a friend in Washington, D.C. I was alone in the house one night while he was out. I thought I heard noises downstairs and became almost convinced that there was an intruder. Not so convinced that I wanted to call the police and be embarrassed if I was wrong (I was younger and, I hope, stoopider), but pretty sure. I spent about an hour just sitting in a chair, very afraid, listening very intently for more noise, before my friend came home and I blurted out what had happened. We both looked and the house was secure; never did figure out what the noises were.

  • My final scare was similar to Hampshire’s. Two years ago, again off the coast of North Carolina, I was swimming not far offshore with two of my three sons, ages 10 and 7 at the time. A strong current kept us from swimming back in. Thinking it was a rip tide, I swam with the boys parallel to the shore, just like I’d been taught. They started getting tired and I took the hand of the eldest, asking him to take the hand of his younger brother. Slowly, laboriously, I made some headway and was finally able to reach the shore, towing them behind me. I’m convinced we came very close to drowning that day. :: shudder :: I was as scared as I’ve ever been as an adult, but I had to hold it together to keep the boys from panicking.

55

I am someone to get frightened and scared easily, but here’s one that was terrifying.

When I was young, say 4 years old, I stayed with my grandfather. We lived in what we called a ‘shop-house’ (you only see them at the Chinatown in Singapore now), and mine was a three storey building with a basement. They have existed since colonial times in Singapore, and are over 50 years old old. The floor was wooden and it was a run-down place with lots of crooks and corners for a young 4 year old to explore.

One fine morning, as I was roaming the first floor, I saw someone by the closed frosted windows apparently talking to someone. I was curious and I moved to the window. This was when the old floorboards gave way.

I fell through it - partially and for about five minutes I was stuck in the middle of the wooden floor, caught at the waist and legs waving below, with the basement perhaps five to ten metres below me. I began to screamed for my grandfather as loud as I could, convinced that I was falling through and about to die or some-such. He came down as quick as he could and for a couple of days I have a fever.

…

Now here’s an incident I do not know whether it’s real or I was merely dreaming. It took place at the same house too. I was eating dinner with my grandfather and older sister at the dining room when I looked out across the sky, I am saw the moon walking.

The circular moon had suddenly becoming a figure and began to walk across the sky. I remembered pointing outside at it and screaming, but my sister and grandfather said they saw nothing. Even now when I asked them if they remembered the incident, they still said no.

56

Was it a clown, per chance?
(We all float down here . . .)

57

No idea. From my memories, it’s looked like a blockly figure (pixel-like, as in computer graphics) marching across the sky with an axe on its back. It was quite a distance into the horizon.

That neither my grandpa nor my sis remembered it, combined with that I dreamed of Chinese vampires (jiang shi) hopping up the stairs later seemed to indicate I was just having some form of scary, livid dream. Dreams or not, I was absolutely terrified.

58

Remember the time Mom beat down the cotton mouth with a swim noodle?

59

I must have been about 11 or 12, and absolutely terrified of the Rapture and Tribulation. Due to the well-meaning teachings of my Christian school, I was convinced that everyone but me would be taken up into heaven and I’d be left alone with the evil, Satan-embodying Antichrist.

So one night I’m lying in bed, just thinking about all the terrible things that can befall me at any given time. From the bed, I had a pretty good view of the lighted hallway. Now, I know this was just the work of an overactive kid’s imagination. I know this. But when I glanced at the hallway, I could have sworn that I saw the shape of a man standing just to the left of my door. He had no distinguishing features; he was completely black, but solid.

I was alone in the house at the time.

60

I’ve always been scared of the dark and have trouble sleeping in the house when I’m on my own. This wasn’t helped by waking up trapped by a man lying on top of me - which when I woke up properly, turned out to be the quilt I had rolled myself up in while I slept. Even though it was a dream, it put the fear of Og into me about ever having Baker’s experience.

So this night, my husband is away and I’ve done the usual bedtime routine; double locked all the doors, pushed furniture against the bedroom door and taken two phones in with me (you know, in case the intruder cuts the landline). I’d just turned the lights off when an unearthly scraping sound starts from under the floorboards. WTF?! Our house is on stilts and it sounds like some-one has crept underneath and is running a sharp implement like a big axe (no, really) along the floor underneath my bedroom. The sound comes toward where I am in bed and then moves away…and then back again. Well, I am completely bone-chillingly, teeth-chattering scared. The sound goes on for about five minutes but I’ve seen enough horror movies to know that you don’t go outside armed with nothing but a squeaky, “Who’s there?” so I stay put and eventually the sound stops and eventually I get a broken sleep.

Next morning in the cold light of day I venture underneath the house and

find our goat Mrs Bucket sitting tucked up on a rock shelf underneath the bedroom floor and as she looked at me her huge horns scraped against the bedroom floor