What sound have you heard recently that sent chills up and down your spine that someone else would not have found so scary?
To be clear, the following items are examples of sounds that do not count, because they are intentionally scary:
[ul]
[li]the roar of a lion;[/li][li]the thud of a car crash;[/li][li]the cry of a sick or hurt child;[/li][li]“I’m pregnant.”[/li][/ul]
For me, it happened last night. I was taking a load of pecans to a friend’s house to be cracked, when I hit the brakes hard to avoid a dog. There was a deep clunk, then a shshshshshshsh as 5 gallons of nuts in the shell spilled on the floor of the van.
For any parents what is just as bad as the “cry of a sick or hurt child” sounds, are the sounds of silence.
Those are the scariest! The last time I heard “nothing” for too long I found my son in my sewing room with my scissors, “just cutting stuff mom”! :eek:
Thankfully he was just cutting thread from spools, and cutting scraps of cloth from my trash box. Whew! I put a baby gate on that door mighty quick. He is five and could just about walk over it, but for some reason he doesn’t have the gumption, so gates still work here.
The screech of unoiled transmission sounds like an unholy mixture between a hyena in its death throes and iron nails drawn across a blackboard. It’s really scary when it wakes you up at 3 am.
I find the Microsoft Windows startup sound to be scary.
No, seriously.
Since I have scheduled events at night (backups, maintenance, etc.), I almost never shut down my computers. When I hear that sound, it means that one of the systems has crashed or rebooted, which means I probably have trouble to deal with.
I recently had an MRI for the first time. They told me the scan is “a little noisy.”
I thought it sounded very much like my heart exploding and my brain imploding simultaneously, but I admit it was hard to hear over the demonic klaxoning of death, doom, and despair.
When I was in Basic Training, the sound of the night-time Dorm Guard accidentally banging the butt of his M-16 into a bedpost while doing hourly headcounts in the dark never made me so much as roll over.
The sound of the heel taps on an Instructor’s combat boots quietly clicking across the floor at 4AM would make my heart hammer like a piston engine and have me wide awake in my bunk hoping he wasn’t about to get me out of bed to get on me about doing something wrong.
My parents recently bought a Sonicare toothbrush that, from several rooms away, sounds like the whining, droning Joker music in the Dark Knight soundtrack.
Ever since I’ve been home for winter break, I’ve been waking up or falling asleep with a vague sense of unease or even dread. Then I listen more closely and realize that it’s just the toothbrush.
Oh ya…I agree, that is a horrible sound, and feeling. I had an MRI on my head last year. My head was taped down to the table, and in a cage. I was in the machine about 45 minutes. I was screaming inside for about 44 of those minutes! Next time I am taking drugs first. After the exam my niece told me that she can’t even stand to have her ankle done without some valium. :smack: I wish I had known.
Oh man, I know. It’s like they’ll kill you if they catch you awake, so for some reason you stop breathing and don’t even twitch. They approach your bunk and you wish you could stop your heart because you’re sure they can hear it pounding. It’s like if you’re sleeping on the forest floor and a bear is about a foot away from your face, just sniffing around.
For me, the alarm clock soundis frightening. Years on conditioning where that sound has broken my most peaceful times has led to my fear of it.
We live under what is I guess the local hot-air balloonists’ flight path. They catch me by surprise every time. I’ll be out on the back patio sipping my early morning coffee and hear that ploooooookh! from the fire jet they use. It’s a loud alien sound so I of course jerk around and see a huge dinosaur/flying saucer thing in the air and freak. Oh, sure. It’s just a hot-air balloon, but my instincts in that first fraction of a second say “monster!” They float pretty low when they go over my house, so they are big when I see them floating unnaturally close to the ground.
