Yah, me too! I’ve had more scary nightmares than I could ever write down, many of them recurring, but nothing horrified my soul like that one. Freaked me out a little to write it down.
Man, I love that feeling!
Ever visit Creepy Pasta?
No. I noticed that mentioned earlier. Going to google now…
thanks for the suggestion!
You know, most of the stories, especially the ones about the assaults, are horrific, but I honestly think that I would have woken myself up by PISSING AND SHITTING MY PANTS if I’d had that dream. That might have been the creepiest (not the scariest, which are two different things for me) frigging thing I’ve ever read.
Nothing really scary, per se. In the panic/anxiety category, there was my 4th semester at college. About halfway through, I stopped going to classes. Just missed a couple days, then a couple more, then with each passing day the enormity of the task of getting caught up increases, and the thing just snowballed. Missed maybe 6 weeks, still telling myself that in a day or two I’d go to all my professors, beg forgiveness, and salvage what I could.
Then one night I was playing spades with a few friends and one of them casually mentioned that it had been the last day of classes that day. Gulp. That was a long, uncomfortable night.
Damnit, Varlos, now I’m going to have that dream about being in school and having no idea what my homework assignments are because it’s a dream but it’s still panicky.
Couldn’t you have talked about something fun like the time you were babysitting for a family and the parents called to check up on you and you mentioned the creepy life size ceramic clown and they were all, “WHAT ceramic clown?” and you were all slaughtered? Or the time you spent a night in a cabin with hideous pictures of demonic animals and then you woke up and there were no pictures, only windows?
I had that dream last night without even reading his post and I have been out of college for many years. It was pretty terrifying.
You know the other common dream of suddenly finding yourself naked or in your underwear in a public place? That really happened to me. I had a sleepwalking problem in college and I lived on campus. I also slept during odd hours. I awoke finding myself standing in the middle of the main campus quad in only my bikini underwear. I was so shocked that I didn’t know what to do. The right thing would have been to just run straight back to my dorm room but no. I ran into a busy building instead and locked myself in a bathroom stall for more than an hour while I regained my composure. Of course, I eventually had to come out…
It’s funny how reactions can differ from similar situations.
I used to live in a first floor apartment (motel-like where all of the apartments had outside entries). The two main rooms were in front and one night i left open the window in my bedroom to get some air. At 3 am someone knocked on my door. For some reason I didnt say anything or turn on a light, just got up, threw on some shorts, and walked around to the front door. Then i heard a noise in the bedroom. As I rushed back in I found a guy halfway through the window. I ran up and punched him in the head, boy was he surprised. He had knocked and got no answer, so he pulled off the screen to climb in thinking no one was home. He quickly pushed himself out and ran off. My response, i closed the window and went back to sleep. I don’t think my heart rate even went up.
Contrast that with a few years later, living in a house with a lame housemate in a not great neighborhood. I awoke at 2 am in my upstairs bedroom to the front door opening, but my housemate had left for his girlfriend’s house for the night. I was shaky and sweating but I got up, grabbed a golf club (the putter because it’s heavy and short thus easier to wield) and crept down the stairs that were covered halfway down then opened onto the living room. I poked my head around and the door was open. At this point i figured my best defense was a good offense, so i jumped down the last few stairs yelling and running through the rooms to scare anybody off. Nobody there. Seems my housemate had pulled the door shut when leaving but it didn’t latch and he was too lazy to lock it (he didnt really have anything worth stealing so what did he care). No more sleeping that night.
So I was much more scared by something that didn’t happen than something that did. The brain is a funny thing.
Growing up in a small house in Maine with acres of woods behind us and acres of woods across the street from us. We had a few neighbors in walking distance, but you couldn’t see their houses from ours. The house never worried me as being haunted, but I was not a big fan of the basement, particularly the part that was walled off (it was a half basement and I never ‘got’ what was behind the other half).
It was a Friday night, I was 12, my mother had gone out for the night dancing as she often did, and my brother, 10 at the time was spending the night at a friend’s house about a mile away. I used to stay up late because I was always a scared kid, and the comfort of watching Friday Night Videos (or Saturday Night Live) would eventually lull me to sleep.
At about 10pm, I thought I heard a noise coming from the basement, namely the basement door opening. The door was locked, but we had accidentally broken the window some time before and it was covered with cardboard, leaving it very easy for someone to get past. I played off the sound as my imagination running wild and focused EXTRA HARD on the tv to make the fear again go away. But then I heard something bang against the furnace. That was not my imagination, but maybe it was a squirrel or a raccoon. My heart raced more knowing that that was not the case, so I turned down the tv and listened even more intently. It was then when I heard the first heavy footstep on the basement steps. I was shaking, I was going to die, I didn’t know what to do, oh my god my mother would come home and see my bloodied corpse (for some reason photos from the book Helter Skelter were stuck in my head). Then came the next step, and another, slowly, deliberately. I didn’t know what else to do, I grabbed the empty Coke bottle (they were glass in 1982) and went to the basement door in the kitchen. As I heard the steps finally reach the door, I swung the door open as hard as I could, waved the bottle around and yelled at the top of my lungs.
My brother and his friend laughed their ass off at the payoff, having travelled a mile at night on their bikes on a country road in Maine to scare the piss out of me. I would have beaten them both to death, but I think there was not enough muscle strength left in me to do so.
Tommy, I’m in awe of your brother’s pure evil. 
Thank you, thank you. You’re too kind.
Seriously, of all of my scary dreams in my life, that was the worst. And I don’t even know why.
17 years ago (long before cell phones were popular), I was working late into the evening. I opened the door to our apartment and I knew immediately that something was wrong. My wife and 2yo daughter were gone. Dinner was still on the stove simmering to the point of being burnt. The light on the answering machine was blinking. The message was from my wife. It was short and succinct. “We’re at the hospital. Chelsea stopped breathing.”
I got to the hospital as quickly as I could, not knowing what to expect when I got there. My wife’s car was practically blocking the entrance to the emergency room. When I went inside, the nurse asked me if I had the daughter who was “choking”. I didn’t really know what was going on but I assumed that was me. They took me back into an examination room and I found my wife holding Chelsea with an oxygen mask over her face. It turns out that she had had an asthma attack. After 3 days in the hospital, she was released. She’s fine now and suffered no lingering effects other than having to carry a rescue inhaler with her for a large portion of her childhood. She only needed it one other time. She doesn’t carry it anymore.
I still get chills when I think about the words that I saw on her chart. “Patient was blue and unresponsive.”
I still tear up when I think about it too much like I am now.
I have that dream all the freakin’ time. I haven’t been in college for 20 years. Please God, make it stop!
TommyTutone: If my brother had done that to me, I’d still be planning my revenge 30 years later. I’m sure that it would involve driving halfway across the country and making an unannounced visit.
My father pulled that shit on me and my best friend when we were staying in a long deserted family cabin one night. The place had parts of the floor that you couldn’t step on because they would collapse. I opened up an old kitchen drawer once and a large rat jumped onto my chest. I have no idea what was going through his mind because we were heavily armed because hunting was part of the purpose of the stay. He deliberately and slowly opened the front door and made the floor creek at about midnight. We were laying on our cots and looking wide-eyed when we grabbed our guns. He threw the bedroom door open and I don’t know who was more scared because we were fully prepared to fire before we realized it was a sick joke.
Our circa 1760 colonial house has four rooms that are identical with fireplaces and two closets on one side…except for one and that is my office. It is missing one closet although it obviously has the same space for it that the other three rooms do. I have tried to figure out what is in there by looking up through the basement, down from upstairs, or from a side wall and I can’t figure it out without drilling and causing damage. It could be a cache of Revolutionary War rifles, a very old dead body or nothing whatsoever but there has to be a reason for it and it haunts me.
I found out I was afraid of heights 1/4 of the way up Mt. Tumbledown in Maine. At one point, I started begging my friends to leave me and get a helicopter.
In a more supernatural light, and I think I posted this here before, but when I was getting my MA, I spent a lot of time in my department, which was in an old former textile mill. The top floor, where all the offices and cubicles were, was high ceilinged, cavernous. Windows at the tippy top let in just a little dusty light. I was often there over the weekends to get work done where there were no distractions. Usually, there was no one else there, except for maybe the guy who lived in his cubicle.
Anyway, one time I was working at a computer in the lab that used to be a closet. No one else in the building, just typing away. All of the sudden, I hear a little girl laughing … right behind me.
I got the hell out of there and never worked on the weekends again.
I was about eleven or twelve, and at my friend’s house – her family had Cinemax. Well, Pet Semetary was on and she invited me over to watch it.
BAAAAAD idea. Right after the part where the wife tells about her sister, Zelda, who had some kind of menigitis as a child, and they showed her – holy shit!!! She was so skinny she looked like a monster, all this matted up hair, and her back was like a skeleton’s, and it was just so fucking CREEPY. I don’t think I got ANY sleep that night whatsoever.
(Dear GOD, maybe this sounds trivial compared to some of the others, but that character just scared the be-jesus out of me. Hey – I was a kid)
It contains a skeleton, curled on the floor where it died, the ends of its fingerbones scraped off, and scratches all over the wall.
Yes, but one of the fingers is pointing to the treasure!
I am so glad that this thread got bumped.
So much fun reading everyone’s scary stories.
I might not sleep tonight!
I had my 9 yr old son and nephew out snake and lizard hunting in a field near the house when a small pack of large dogs aggressively attacked us. The kids tried to run and I was bitten catching them. I had a large stick and waved the stick at them and yelled while slowly walking back to the car. The kids were terrified and wanting to run which would have been fatal. Besides the one bite they seemed to get no closer than about 10 ft but seemed to be gowing in confidence. Once I got to the car they just stopped the pursuit.