I know I have told this on this board previously -
Back in the early 80s I was dating a guy that went to SUNY Brockport, and we decided that since my apartment lease was ending and the school year was about to start, we could get an apartment together near campus in Brockport and get a larger place than I could afford alone. So we got one, a third floor flat with the balcony facing the parking lot and school, and the bedroom windows overlooking the parking lot of a small shopping center, and then just past that the next shopping center which had a fast food burger place in it. He got a part time flipping burgers at the burger place, which was nice - he was walking distance from both his classes and his job.
Pretty much starting the first night staying there I started having nightmares, which for me is unusual - the normal creepies and crawlies normally don’t bother me. These were different - they almost always started with me unpacking the stuff for in the kitchen or living room and noticing that there were red and black scribbles and such on the walls and wondering why the maintenance people had not repainted between tenants. As in dreams, the scene segued to me laying in bed knowing that my BF was in the living room watching TV and I had just popped awake knowing that something was watching me. So I would do the barely crack an eyelid to see what was in the room. As always, there was a bunch of red and black stuff scribbled on the wall that I was looking at, and I could see a large black hooded figure with a black and white face like the guy in that Star Trek episode leaning on the door frame looking at me. I try to scream, but I can’t so Keith is sitting unaware that something bad is going to be happening to me.
Now for the creepy. It is several weeks after we move in and he is headed home across the parking lots after work. I am in bed sound asleep and as he walks in I wake up and he asks me when I got the new bathrobe with the hood he saw me wearing when I was watching the parking lot from the bedroom window. Later when I am moving the bureau we find a small necklace with the same crap that was painted on the walls in my dreams on it. It had apparently been left there by the previous tenants.
I stopped having the dream as soon as I slept anywhere but that flat, and they stopped for good after I moved out.
Love this thread. Great stories everyone, but why does this only come in October? I know it’s Halloween, but I’m sure you guys want this the whole year round.
I’ve told this story before … my creepiest experience was house-hunting with my wife.
We saw one place with an unfinished basement. Went down to have a look by ourselves, and we noticed that at the far end of the basement was a small room. Inside the room was furnished like a bedroom (the bed was still there, though musty with disuse) with a tiny two-piece ensuite washroom. The windows were small slits at the top of the wall that just let in a bit of light through light-wells.
The bedroom had an air of sadness and decrepitude (I mean, it was in an unfinished basement and just outside was a bare concrete area filled with the ancient furnace), but the really creepy part was … the door (a very solid door, not at all your usual interior door) had a heavy hasp for a lock on the outside.
To this day I know nothing about the sellers, but both my wife and I had the same thought - that there was simply no good, non-creepy reason for a bedroom set up like that. :eek:
My creepy story is about a guy I knew as a teenager. We went to church together and were roughly the same age. I was a real sucker for helping out the rejects back in those days, so I was called on a lot to do duty as a “date” to things like the prom. This guy, whose parents took care of the local cemetery, asked me to go to his at another school. But out of all the people I’d helped in this way, I declined his invitation because he creeped me the fuck out. Pasty faced, doughy, sweaty, large and looming, mentally thick with no social graces, pimply and just generally unkept and seemingly dirty. Whoever he had a thing for would have cause to run, if you get my drift.
Anyway about a month ago, he landed on our local news (first thing I’d seen of him in forever) as being arrested for child pornography. Seems that he’d had a ratty ass travel trailer located on some other guy’s property that he’d once lived in, but had abandoned for years. The land owner kept trying to get him to come get it, but that fell on deaf ears. Once he gave up, he went to clean it out and found all his stash of kiddie porn. Heebie jeebies man, if during the course of their investigation they also find some young girl’s dead body in a trunk under a floorboard somewhere, I would not be surprised in the least.
My thought at the time was that there must be a non-criminal explaination. Maybe a lodger who wanted to lock the room when he or she wasn’t in.
It certainly did look like a home-made prison, though. It is hard to imagine even the most hard-up person wanting to live in that room.
Subjectively, the whole house had a feeling of sadness and tragedy, like nobody had ever been happy there, though of course the overall decrepitude of the place probably accounted for that. We were not tempted to buy it, even though rationally speaking it was in a good area and could have been renovated into niceness.
My recollection was that the owners were very elderly, so any criminality must surely have been a long time ago …
Not exactly creepy, but weird: in the past week in DC we’ve had a woman get killed in front of the Capitol after a chase from the Whitehouse; reports of a mountain lion in the city; and a guy set himself on fire on the Mall. My mother in law was visiting and I think she couldn’t wait to get out of this crazy town.
My wife and I had nearly the same experience while house-hunting about 10 years ago. The house, like all of the other houses in the neighborhood, was a standard one-story ranch with a basement; the basement had several rooms, one of which was a bedroom that, judging from the state of the room and the decorations inside, belonged to a teenage boy. It had a hasp on the outside of the door as well. I figured the kid wanted to lock it to keep his parents out of the room while he wasn’t there. We were Not At All Interested in the house – the place gave us the heebie-jeebies even before going into the basement.
Our old house is just creepy period. I didnt really know HOW creepy until after we bought it and I did some nosing around into the old records of it:
•former minister’s house and the front parlor was used as the Viewing Area for funerals.
•former Nazi sympathizer’s house
•a brick cistern in the basement (which has a partial brick/partial dirt floor) had old bones in it which I assumed were animal remains since they were pretty small. How the inspector missed this one is beyond me, and my bad for not checking it out before buying it. WTF.
My favorite part about that quote is how, whether or not it’s reasonable to scream at people for asking what time it is, the fact that it’s dark is in no way evidence that one doesn’t *really *want to know what time it is.
I can accept that she was frightened in the situation. But from where does this idea that nobody needs to know the time after it’s dark come from? If **agnesnitt **'s elderly grandma asked her what time it was, because she wanted to watch the evening news, would she get her head bitten off?
YOU DON’T NEED THE FUCKING TIME, GRANNY! IT’S FUCKING DARK YOU FUCKING OLD BAG!
Interesting how that works. I’m not a believer in the supernatural at all, yet I still had a good feeling about some houses when house-hunting, and a bad feeling about others. I assume it is simply the mind picking up various cues from what is actually there.
Speaking about creepy houses, this story set in my home town gave me the shivers. Surely it would not do the resale value of the place any good to have this published …
I’m not sure that childfree people feel the same way about such things. There’s a special sort of hormonal bonding event that leaves a lifelong impression when one has had or adopted his or her own child that makes reading things like this devastatingly sad instead of merely curious. Not saying that everyone should join parents in this feeling of dreadful sadness, but attempting to explain why some of us view such news as “bummer” while others squelch tears.
Postscript: children can be total shits and babies insurmountably needy, but they are helpless and utterly dependent and trusting and that’s what makes them precious. They believe that we will care for them and protect them, and that’s what makes the abuse and death of babies so very tragic.
Yep – I believe in the supernatural just as much as you do (which is not at all). Nevertheless, this house gave off a really bad vibe as soon as we walked in the front door. We ended up buying a house in the same neighborhood, about six or seven blocks away, and my wife and I walk by this first house every once in a while. We still refer to it as the <eddie_murphy> “GET OUT!!!” </eddie_murphy> house.
Like you wrote, I’m sure it was just a reaction to a number of real but negative sensory cues.
Sadness can be a component of the creepy. The thought of a neglected, hidden baby corpse mummifying in the walls gives me the shivers exactly because it is such a lonely abandonment of a child and because of the desperation behind the act - even though, of course, the real sadness lies in the death itself, as the dead don’t care where they are.
Heh, we had nicknames for many of the houses we saw when house-hunting too. Like you, I bought in the same neighbourhood as many of 'em, and still walk from time to time.
The one I talked about above was the “House of Horrors”. It was mulched to make way for a new house, which was for the best really.
Also memorable in the “under no circumstances would I purchase” file was the Cigarette House and the Cliff Dwelling.
Cigarette House would have been like living inside a cancerous lung used as an ashtray - it had been occupied by an elderly lady that defied the medical odds and smoked two packs a day in it for over 50 years. No superficial reno would ever have removed the stench.
The Cliff Dwelling was very unusual - it had a cliff for a backyard, looking down some 60 feet into someone’s backyard. The cliff ran the length of the street and every other house had concrete revetments that resembled Normady Beach defences holding it up … except this one, which was very obviously eroding away. A backyard garage was in the process of going over the cliff and about to become the neighbor’s involuntary property - it was held up by a single strategically placed cinder block.
Other houses were just plain creepy feeling, but none was a creepy feeling as the House of Horrors.
I’d known Dawn Breedon about twenty years before her baby’s father assaulted her with a knife, snatched the child, then feed the poor child a combination of cyanide and ammonia before taking it himself.
