Good Lord, man…wth do you live??? Come to the U.P., where none of that stuff ever happens!!
About 20 years old, went to the drive-in with my now wife on lovely evening. Double feature of “Sunday, Bloody Sunday” and “The Exorcist”. She had a midnight curfew, so we had to leave before the end of the movie. Drop her off, head for home. Pull into the family driveway, get out of the car, start for the front door. Full moon, still windy, trees waving, clouds going across the moon. Just then, I hear a voice behind me call out (actually sort of holler out) my name, sounding just like Mercedes McCambridge doing Lida Blair’s possessed voice. :eek:
I think it’s in Steve King’s “Tommyknockers” when a character sees two green lights dancing on her wall, and realizes the light is coming from her dog’s eyes. She talks about feeling the tendons in her jaw creaking as every muscle locks. That was me (along with frantically clamping down sphincter muscles). The paralysis only lasted a few seconds, and then I managed to turn around to see my four-year old nephew standing on his front step across the street. He had woken up, somehow decided he was alone in his house, started crying, and walked out on the front step to see his Uncle Moose across the street. You wouldn’t think a teary voice could be that loud.
I still remember how when I went to pick him up, my mouth tasted like I had been sucking on pennies.
9 years old
Grandma just died, which made me a latch key kid.
2 nd week in Grandma’s house [which we moved into], I came home from school and turned on the TV and sat down on the couch to watch. Heard a rustling of newspapers behind me. It was 3:30. Mom and Dad would not be home until 5:30. Sat there, alone, and it got dark, newspapers continued to rustle behind me. No other noise, just the TV and the noise behind me. No remote control in those days, so I could not mute nor adjust the volume on the TV. Then Dad came home and I flew off the couch to greet him at the door.
I looked behind were I was sitting…newspapers we placed over the hearth because they were painting the room and the wind was coming down the chimney and stirring them.
Two hours of terror for nothing.
…until I found the hook…
[quote=“AHunter3, post:66, topic:506806”]
When I came up onto flat ground my body felt like it weighed 2 lbs 3 ounces and my skin was glowing and **I was ready to pick up large trucks and small trees and fling them into the sky while snarling and giggling and peeing my pants.[/**QUOTE]
OMG!! I actually hurt from laughing at this. Had to read to my roommate and couldn’t get through it without cracking up. I know that feeling, but never heard it described so well. Thanks – I haven’t been feeling well for a couple of days and really needed a good laugh.
I’ve been told I’m somewhat of an empath. Perhaps that explains
- When I was about 20, my BF-future-husband-future-ex moved into a very nice, two-story condo. One night, his year-old son is staying the night. I am there, too. I wake up in the middle of the night to hear Sean, the baby, screaming his head off. This is not the I-woke-up-in-a-strange-place cry. This sounds like terror. I open the door to the room he’s in: he’s standing in his crib, holding out is arms to me, frantically bouncing up and down, tears streaming down his face, screaming. As I approach, I am enveloped in a deep, dark (yes, it had a color) coldness. The room wasn’t cold, just the area surrounding around his bed. There weren’t any air vents or open windows to explain it. Just a very nasty, threatening pocket of coldness.
Other times, I felt it at the top of the stairs, right on the landing. It never came downstairs. It was almost like it wasn’t able to. Very weird. Never found an explanation.
- Same man and I moved into an ordinary 3 bedroom ranch style house on an acreage with a barn. (Lord, I loved that barn.) Anyway, I find that I cannot go into one of the bedrooms. Don’t know why, but as I reach the doorway, I feel this deep, bone-chilling coldness. It’s a little like walking into a deep freeze; it has mass and you can feel the coldness in front of you and the warmth, quickly diminishing, behind you. The room, for no discernible reason, is uber-creepy with an underlying taste of sorrow. The dog won’t go it, either.
Was talking about it to the real estate agent who sold us the house. She confessed that the former owner’s 12-year-old son had shot himself to death in that room less than a year before. I moved out a month later.
My gods…
My aunt told me once of how a home she, my mother and my grandparents lived in was haunted. She was still a baby at the time. Ready?..
It was inexplicably cold around her crib. She would cry spontaneously sometimes and the cold would intensify. Other activity started happening. My aunt took ill. Finally one night she just cried and cried. The crib was chilly and my grandfather swore it just looked DARK over it. He grabbed his Bible and a vial of holy water he got earlier that day. He paced about the house reading louder and louder from the Bible, sprinkling the water as he went. After finishing at the crib he screamed “NOW GET THE HELL OUT OF MY HOUSE!”
Reportedly the feeling in the house changed almost immediately. My aunt stopped crying. She was feeling better the next day.
As for things that happened to me, they are mostly just dream related. I once woke up and noticed something looked off about my comforter. I sat up to find I was in a completely different place and surrounded by fantasy creatures. Creepy circus music started blasting. I then woke up, heart beating madly. It was several minutes before I was thoroughly convinced that I was awake this time. It was the only time I’ve had a dream within a dream, and thank goodness because damn was that freaky!
I’ve also had the “falling” dream. I was in some mall going down steep spiral stairs. I picked up too much speed and went over one turn about twenty feet up. I didn’t scream, just tensed up as the ground rushed toward me. I woke up just before impact.
I also had hypnogogia once when I was maybe ten. I woke up to a number of voices around my head saying “Hello?” So real, loud and freaky were the voices that I laid in sheer terror. I couldn’t vocalize. I couldn’t even close my eyes. I was terrified the voices would return. I focused intently on a diorama I had next to my bed. I stared at it for the next two hours until sunrise. Only then could I relax enough to close my eyes and sleep. I never told my dad, and suffered flashbacks occasionally for weeks after.
Nowadays I find I am just really good at terrifying myself. At night, especially after (ironically) reading or seeing something creepy, I get the feeling I’m about to see the most nightmarish and terrifying face or image when I open a door our look in a mirror. I totally get that “this is how I die” vibe. Usually just pushing on regardless disarms it. Wasn’t it Stephen King that said something about being most scared of what’s in his mind?
There’s probably more, but that’s the standout stuff.
A month ago or so I was at a Pagan thing and camping on someone’s property in Massachusetts with a friend. About 3 a.m., we’re awakened from a sound sleep by the most bloodcurdling, ferocious, slavering snarl that clearly conveyed I AM GOING TO DISMEMBER AND EAT YOU PERSONALLY. It was some kind of horrible wild animal, we were separated from it by a few mils of orange nylon, and we were completely defenceless. I literally thought it was going to come directly into the tent and we were both going to die horribly. Fortunately after a few terrifying minutes it went away.
Opinions were divided next morning what it was, but the consensus was a fisher cat, which is an unpleasant creature about midway between a weasel and a wolverine.
After wading all through that the link didn’t work.
nm
Years later and I want to know if you ever figured this out!
This is kind of long but it is the one time I remember being so scared I thought I would pass out and my teeth were chattering so bad that I couldn’t even talk.
I’m a pet sitter and one my of clients, well actually quite a few of them, live in fairly secluded houses back in the woods.
So I’m sitting for this client and I get to their house and they haven’t left yet. Since I ran into them still there they told me on of their cats has since passed on and that their pet rabbit had just died.
They were going to be gone for a week, and in the middle of the week they came home because a friend had died and they would be home for 2 days for the funeral and they would call when they needed me to start back.
After they went back on vacation I needed to call them for something, and half way through their message on the voice mail another voice cut in and said ‘We regret to inform you but (husband and wife) have just died, they were killed in an auto accident this afternoon’.
At that instead I saw them in front of me, in their red corvette convertible, with bloody faces and dead eyes.
Their daughters contacted me and asked me to continue sitting as they had arrangements to make and wanted me to take care of the pets so they didn’t have that worry.
That next night I’m washing a few dishes and I see my clients’ reflections in the window, standing there with their bloody faces and dead eyes. I don’t know what they want. When I clean the littler box, I stand up and turn around and they are standing behind me with their bloody faces and unseeing eyes. Every time I turn around they are there and I don’t know what they want, with their bloody faces and unseeing eyes.
Than I wake up!
Whew, just a dream, but everything in the dream was so real, down to the tiniest detail.
My clients were away, and I was worried about them but you can’t hardly call somebody up on vacation and say I had a dream you were dead and I want to make sure you are okay.
Finally they come home and I am relieved, all is cool.
A few months later they call me to sit again for another week. I have totally forgotten the dream.
I get there the first day and they haven’t left yet. She tells me that she left a note explaining everything but one of their cats has died. Also, a friend of theirs has passed away and they will be coming home for 2 days for the funeral and it’s all in the note. They are driving a red corvette convertible, I had never seen that car, didn’t even know they had one. They were going to the same place I had seen them in my dream. Their pet rabbit didn’t die, because they didn’t have a rabbit. They did have two adult daughters and my first thought is ‘if one of those daughters is pregnant I QUIT!’
Now this dream is on my mind. I’m okay during the day, but that last visit at night, in the dark, in a secluded house back in the woods… well let’s just say that dog got a very fast night time walk and I kept her cookies right by the back door so I didn’t have to go more than a few steps inside.
Of course I keep telling my self I’m just being a baby, grow up, it’s just a dream, etc.
Finally I get to the last day and I’m in the master bath cleaning the litter box, and I hear this rumbling noise. It sounds like it’s under the house and I’m like wtf is that. So I hurry and finish cleaning the box, and go out in the hall and
MY CLIENT IS STANDING THERE.
I damn near fainted.
I was shaking so hard she must have wondered what was wrong with me.
So they had come home a few hours early, the rumbling noise was the garage door. She apologized for scaring me, I think she doesn’t know just how bad it was.
Of course now I laugh at myself for being such a baby and letting my imagination run away with me.
Here’s a story where I was reduced to hysteric sobs and begging for my life, screaming and crying at the top of my lungs… definitely the most scared I’ve ever been.
I was very young, and my mom had rented a scary movie from the video store. My dad was out of town for some reason, so we watched it at night, pretty late if I remember correctly, with my sister, out in the living room. I doubt it was technically the first scary movie I ever saw, but at that point in my life, it wasn’t something my parents let me watch very often if at all. So it was a memorable experience. Little did I realize just how memorable it would actually be.
After the movie was finished, I remember being pretty scared. Mom tucked me into bed in my room, and my sister into hers. I remember that my closet door was opened, so I either asked my mom to close it for me, or I closed it myself before I got into bed. I wasn’t ever particularly afraid of closets when I was younger, but there was one of the stories in the movie that made me particularly afraid of my closet that night. So I had it shut.
I remember I was laying in bed, trying to not think about the scary things, when all of a sudden I swore I heard something rubbing at my closet door. Not quite a scratching sound, not a pounding… but just a very subtle rubbing noise. I told myself it was just my imagination and that I needed to just close my eyes and get to sleep.
It wasn’t long before the rubbing sound got louder and louder… and then I realized THERE WAS SOMETHING IN MY CLOSET TRYING TO GET OUT! The door was shaking violently; this was not my imagination. I immediately burst into tears and started screaming, sobbing at the top of my lungs. I must have scared my sister and my mom half to death with how loud I was.
My mom comes into the room, turns on the light and asks what the hell is going on. I manage to get out that there’s something in my closet. Well, she opens the closet to show me that there was nothing in there, when suddenly, something RUNS OUT!
It was my cat, Rocky! He had gotten shut in the closet when I closed the door (something I typically never do). Poor guy was pawing at the door, subtly at first, then more vigorously, to try and get out!
Well, I was so hysterical that it took quite a while for my mom to convince and show me that it was just Rocky, at which point I went from sobbing out of fear, to laughing and crying. I was still sobbing, but now I was actually laughing at how funny it was and how it all made sense. I think I apologized for being so silly and all that, and didn’t have any trouble getting to sleep after that.
This was a really big deal though because I was always a very skeptical kid growing up. I never really believed in any fairy tales, or anything like that. Didn’t believe in Santa Claus, or easter bunnies, or what have you. So even though I was young, I didn’t actually believe there could be any monsters in my closet… which is why it was just so scary that the door actually started rattling and something was trying to get me!
In the '80s I was playing a multiplayer fantasy hack & slash game on a computer terminal. It was about 2am, and all the lights were out in the building: the only light was from the dim glow of the monitor (at it’s dimmest setting). I was the only one in the building.
There I was, immersed in the game, fantasizing about fighting monsters, when a bat flew between me and the monitor!
In the mid-nineteen-eighties, I was 14 at and home alone at night with my best friend of the same age, when my older sister’s psychotic coke-head ex-husband showed up and tried to force his way into the house, with a butcher’s knife.
Mostly, it came in through the letter slot, while he wasn’t occupied pounding on the door as hard as he could.
He was gone before cops showed up, but it was still probably as scared as I’ve been in my entire life. (Although I’ve since had psychos try to hurt/kill me without any walls in between.)
Not my story, but my Mom’s.
My parents had thrown “after-prom” parties for my older sister and offered to do it for me. They were just get-togethers at the house that started a few hours after the dance ended. We served typical breakfast food (scrambled eggs, bacon, sausage, casseroles, etc.) buffet style. I initially refused the offer, but many classmates (and their parents) requested that we do it again, so we decided, last minute, that the party was on.
I live in a rural area and our church was located out in the middle of cornfields with the nearest neighbor a good half mile away. It is your typical small country church with the cemetery behind the building. My Mom went there at about 10:00 at night to borrow some large casserole pans from the church kitchen. When she was leaving, a pack of coyotes started howling from the back of the cemetery. She said every hair she had on her body stood straight up, and she dropped the pans and raced to the car. She sat there shivering while she waited for her heart rate to drop and her breathing to return to normal. After several minutes she was able to laugh about it, retrieve the pans and go home, but after 35 years she still says it is the most straight up scared she has ever been.
When I was about 12 years old, I woke up one night around 2 AM. The house was silent, except that about 15 minutes later, I heard a man laugh…very loud. Made my hair stand on end!
M. R. James told a variant of that story a long time ago. Guy inherits a house that supposedly has issues. His first evening there, he sits down in the library with a book and gets engrossed in it. The dog comes in and lies down next to his chair and he absentmindedly begins petting it. After a while, the dog gets up and goes out. The butler comes in after a while and the guy mentions the dog, and of course, the butler says “what dog?”.
Scary for me:
When I was a kid, I went to see Vincent Price’s The House On Haunted Hill at the Saturday morning Fun Club. It scared the bejesus out of me, to the point of having bad dreams for a week. Nearly 20 years later, I saw it listed on a late night TV Creature Feature…and found out it was supposed to be a comedy.
As an adult, there have been a whole bunch. Probably one of the worst was going into a dark warehouse as a deputy sheriff, looking for a burglar. I didn’t know if I was gonna get shot or stabbed in the dark, or if I would have to shoot the guy, or worse - if one of the other guys that came in with me would shoot me by mistake. Severe case of the trots when that was over.
In the house where I grew up, our bedrooms were all upstairs, and the single upstairs bathroom was at the end of a hallway that ran the length of the house. And the mirror over the sink was directly opposite the door to the bathroom. So if you were at the sink and looked in the mirror, you got a clear view all the way down the hall to the other end (which was the door to my bedroom).
One night, when I was about 10 years old, I was at home alone until about 9:30pm while my parents were out at dinner or something (I had no siblings). I stayed at home during the day in the summer a lot already, so being on my own for a few hours was nothing new, except for it being night time. To prove to myself I wasn’t scared to be alone, I spent the evening reading a book of spooky stories (ha ha!).
My bedtime was 9pm, so when the time came I was there in the bathroom brushing my teeth. The only light on upstairs was in my bedroom, where I had been reading that book of ghost stories, and the light in the bathroom where I was brushing my teeth. It was early October so the weather was still mild, though 9pm was after dark, and the windows and doors were open in most of our bedrooms (and the bathroom) to allow for a cross breeze.
While I was brushing my teeth, a gust of wind blew across the house down the hall, simultaneously blowing shut my bedroom door (and in a cascade as the gust of wind traveled, the open door to another bedroom) while blowing wide open the bathroom door behind me.
This startled me. Greatly.
I felt panic rising in me and forced it down by reminding myself, “It’s just the wind… Relax… Just the wind.” But now I had the terrible sensation of something being behind me… Creeping up behind me… Maybe even being RIGHT behind me…
I couldn’t bear it. I bolted upright to look into the bathroom mirror to see… NOTHING behind me! Whew! Ha ha! I’m just scaring myself being all alone in this house! I gasped in relief.
But then I realized: with only the bathroom light on and my bedroom door shut, all I had a view of in that mirror was what was immediately behind me. The entire hallway behind me was dark, and reflected nothing in the mirror. Panic began rising again.
I stared into the darkness reflected in that mirror, forcing myself to calm down by focusing on the little sliver of light that shone through the bottom of my bedroom door down the hall. By letting my eyes adjust, I could see enough detail near my door and then down the hall to see that no really, there was nothing there in the hallway behind me! Ha ha!
Relaxing for the second time, I actually laughed out loud at myself as I spit out my mouthful of toothpaste and began rinsing my mouth. That tingly feeling of something being behind me was still there, but clearly it was completely based on suggestion and irrational fears and had no basis in reality. Hey, maybe it hadn’t been such a good idea to read that book of spooky stories about ghosts and vampires and –
OMG. VAMPIRES.
THEY DON’T CAST REFLECTIONS IN MIRRORS.***
IF THERE WAS ONE BEHIND ME… THE MIRROR WOULD NOT SHOW IT!1!!
Blaaarrgh
AAAAUUUUGGGHGHGHHHH
I spun around a 180 degree turn with my toothbrush jabbing out in front of me at about where I figured the sternum of a vampire might be, on the 0.001% chance that I’d catch him by surprise and manage to stake him through the heart a moment before he pounced.
(Nothing there, of course.)
(Ha ha.)
(Ha.)
I’ve posted it before, but this fits the bill:
When I was a tween, I was in the habit of sneaking into the kitchen late at night when I was supposed to be asleep (far from my parent’s room, so they would not notice), turning on the light, and reading horror comics and scary books while eating peanut butter and honey sandwiches.
Unwise in many ways, and set me up for the scare of a lifetime.
I should explain that the kitchen table had a window that you could easily pull open sideways. This wasn’t a security risk because it was high in the air and although partly covered with thick ivy, the ivy could not support a person’s weight.
I was reading a book of horror stories and eating a sandwich, really scaring myself with the gruesome story, when I heard a gentle tap-tapping on the window. I looked up, expecting to see the ivy blowing against the window, and instead saw - a tiny, shrunken black human hand with claws trying to open the window!
I was so scared I was literally paralized. I could not even scream. I was thinking to myself “this is impossible, but it is happening - a couple of feet away from me”.
The black hand got a grip, and pulled the window fully open - and at last I let out a scream … startling the raccoon that was after the sandwich on the table in front of me. Because of the angle I hadn’t seen its face and it hadn’t seen me.
For reference, here’s what a raccoon’s paw/hand looks like:
Imagine that pawing at your window to open it at night.
Occasionally I have a nightmare involving some kind of evil predator, and I always am scared beyond belief. I can’t utter a sound, which is what really gets me. Then I wake up. 
Years ago I was camping by myself in the middle of nowhere. As I sat by the campfire, something began growling at me. I was mortified and picked up a big stick. Then I realized it wasn’t an animal growling, but an airplane passing overhead. Sheesh.