Oh yeah, and there was the time two of my friends started banging on my window at 1am with a hunting knife…
You gotta love the folks around here! LOL! Good on you, Hampshire! 
Baker: Whatever you did to stay alive, I’m glad you did. :eek:
I gots two to share. One is a nightmare, and the other really happened.
I’m prone to nightmare, vivid dreams, and hypnopompnic visions, but the scariest dream I ever had was this one. I am sitting in my dad’s easy chair in the livingroom (dreamed this in my teens). Our house was a long, L-shaped ranch, and the room I was sitting in was in one end, and the short part of the “L” was the other (my parents bedroom). In the dream, I’m alone in the house.
I hear noises start up in my folks’ room. Not just little noises, but noises that sound like someone beating on the walls, knocking stuff over, and moving around the room really fast. I’m immediately terrified, not just as I would be in hearing an intruder, but also the extra fear of something supernatural, if you know what I mean. A kind of spiritual dread. I’m frozen from the fear and can’t even begin to obey my brain telling me “run! hide!” So I listen to these noises, and as I expected, the noises start moving into the hallway. The noise is still very loud and deliberate, and seems maliciously playful, like whatever it is knows I’m there and I’m afraid and so it’s drawing out the suspense by sssslllllooooooowly moving up the hall. I could even hear it bang on first one wall and then the opposite one. The hallway is dark, and the room I’m in is brightly lit, so I know I won’t be to see this…thing until it is nearly in the room with me.
Sure enough, it moves up the hall, and the noises make it sound like it’s halfway to me…when all of a sudden it’s rushing towards me, and I can hear its footsteps thundering towards me, and it bursts into the room.
The figure that appears is laughing and shrieking and performing some bizarre, against-the-laws-of-physics kind of dance. It has a wide, open-mouthed, toothy grin that seems a little too wide. It’s tongue, when it lolls out of that grin, is a little too long and a little too flexible, and looks strong. It’s eyes are joyfully, maniacally insane. It’s damn happy to be crazy and to be there to scare me so very deeply.
The figure was me.
Story 2:
I was terrified of my dad while growing up, and I won’t go into all that here except for this one thing.
When I was about 12, I woke up one night wanting some cold milk. I didn’t turn on any lights because my parents slept with their door open. Having just woken up, with my eyes already adjusted to the dark, I could see my way (down that same hallway from the dream) easily without lights. So I go to the kitchen, grab the milk, and take a long drink out of the bottle (which was a no-no). Put the milk back n shut the door, then head back towards my bedroom.
Only problem is, after the bright light from the fridge, the hallway looks pitch dark to me. I stick out my hand and touch the wall in the hallway to guide me, and I start to quietly inch down the hall.
I’ve only taken a couple of small steps when I freeze because I suddenly feel like there’s someone in the hallway with me. I think I might’ve heard breathing or something; I don’t know. Anyway, I freeze and I’m afraid, but not terrified yet. I pause for a second, afraid to speak.
Then I hear the specific metal sound of the hammer of a gun being drawn back.
I gasped, but could get in enough breath to say anything. A second or two later, I hear my dad say, “freeze or I’ll blow your brains out”. For a bit (seemed like a long time but prolly only a second or two), I’m trying to pull in air to say something and can’t. Finally, I managed a strangled-sounding, “daddy?”
I was fairly certain I was gonna get shot during that. I even had the fleeting impression of being a little sad that there would be so much I would miss out on, having a life that was only 12 years long. Not really “my life flashed before my eyes” as much as a big-picture glance at the whole thing.
Don’t know if I captured the feelings that resulted from those incidents, but they were both pretty scary, in different ways.
I always thought that at this point in my life, I would be visiting guys like this in prison out of the kindness of my heart.
I go to the bank to ask them to loan me money instead.
Good story. What’d your dad do next? Give you a big hug, or spank you into the next week?
Maia’s Well–your dad sounds like a scary guy! Good lord.
No hug. He didn’t spank me (not then), either, but he did say, “If you want to kill yourself, keep sneaking around in the dark,” and sent me back to bed.
Freudian Slit (btw, love your user name!), yah, he was da big scary. He often told me that he scared me so often in order to teach me stuff.
I spent most of my childhood walkin’ around like a long-tailed cat in an electric-rocking-chair factory…very carefully, very alertly.
The same thing happened to me and 3 friends when I was a kid. Yes, I know it’s just another anecdote. We were at home alone during a thunderstorm. It wasn’t just our hair on our heads. Every hair on us felt like it was standing on end. We decided we should leave the house and went to a neighbor’s. It turned out we were fine. There was a flagpole in front of the house and a metal chain tied from the flagpole to the porch that we think conducted the electricity.
Although it was scary, I don’t think it reached bone-chillingly.
When I was in college I was wakened by gunshots once. It was Thanksgiving weekend so the area near my apartment was deserted. At something like 5am I was awakened by gunshots that sounded really close and loud. It turned out it was about 2 blocks away, but it was in a parking garage so they must have resonated. It was a campus cop and an armed robber/ mugger exchanging fire.
I didn’t realize how bad my fear of hights was till I had to get up on a ladder to help my dad put an antenna up on the roof. I made the BIIIG mistake of looking down and it took forever to get me to pry my fingers from the pole the antenna was attached to and belly crawl to the ladder.
The most terrified I have ever been in my life was when my daughter was three. We had been restoring our circa 1760 house for 5 years. There was a gigantic 200 year old oak tree not fifty feet from the house and a contractor friend warned us about the danger so we spent $800 to have a whole fork removed. There was a summer thunderstorm about 11 pm one evening and it produced a microburst (very similar to a tornado) that toppled it straight into my daughters room.
I was laying on the couch downstairs when it hit and I knew immediately what had happened. I was upstairs in less than 20 seconds but I couldn’t get her door open because that part of the house was about to go through structural collapse. I broke it down and the massive branches were pinned to the floor all around her like impaling spikes and rain was pouring in because much of the roof was gone. She was covered in debris. I just scooped her up and ran and called 911. The tree was so big that it covered all available doors on three sides while the house creaked and swayed.
The fire department had to respond to get us out and we stayed in a hotel room that night and…for the next five months while that part of the house was repaired for about $260,000 let alone the hotel bills. A difference of a single foot of branches coming down through the roof would have instantly killed my baby girl.
Bless your heart, darlin’! :eek::eek::eek:
I just watched that in my head as I was reading it, and it was very exciting scary heroic scene. But, oh goodness, to have actually lived it!
Your life has been way too exciting.
Sorry, but I have to say it one more time:
Bless your heart!
Once, when I was a teenager, I was lying on the couch some time past midnight, looking up at the ceiling and thinking about nothing in particular, when out of nowhere I got a powerful conviction, an absolute certitude that I was about to die. I was as scared as I’ve ever been and started praying. Eventually the feeling must have worn off and I went to bed.
Next morning my father told me that my grandfather had died of a heart attack, lying on his kitchen floor, sometime during the night.
I’ve read elsewhere on the Dope that this phrase is a Southern euphemism for “Boy, you really are an idiot, aren’t you?” I’m sure you didn’t mean it that way. Have I been misinformed?
It can be used that way but it can be sincere as well. It is all about the context and subtleties. My grandmother used to say it to me and I don’t think she wasn’t calling me an idiot. Wait a minute…
I believe you are thinking of “Bless your little heart” which may or may not have a derogatory meaning. 
This officially freaked me the eff out.
It’s like “Dude” which can mean anything from “Hello” to “Please put the axe down, I didn’t know she was you girl when I took my clothes off”.
I’m pretty sure this one was quite sincere.
I yield to a superior definition.
It can be used in that way, but it is definitely not how I’m using it here. I tried to use the “:eek:” face to convey the sincerity of the thought. Part of the trouble with not seeing faces or hearing tone.
Thanks for giving me the opportunity to clarify that!
Yes, the addition of “little” is a clue that it might be meant as a little patronizing, if not a genuine put down.
Another use is this: Say I want to insult someone, but I either feel some genuine affection/understanding of them, or I want to disown responsibility for the insult and demonstrate what a “nice” person I am (again, you’d have to hear the tone and view the expression to get which is which). I will state the insult, then add the “bless your/his/her little heart” on the end.
“Yeah, he’d climb a tree to tell a lie when he could stand on the ground and tell the truth. Bless his little heart.”
It’s interesting, but in my experience, even when it’s an insult, it conveys a kind of acceptance of human flaws, a sort of “the child cain’t help hisself” kind of feeling.
Although, that could be considered insulting, too, now that I think on it.