Very Vaguely Creepy IV

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

I was driving home last night after getting off work at 10:00 PM. It’s about a 15 minute drive and, for the most part, along a long, winding, dark and forested road. There are houses along the road but they are very spaced apart. I usually go well below the speed limit at that time of night because there are always rabbits and deer and the occasional bear.

Last night, as I came around a curve I noticed a figure of something dark up ahead so I slowed right down. I realized it was a person, facing away from me. They weren’t walking, they were just standing there. Then I saw that there were actually two people just standing on the side of the dark, empty road facing ahead with their backs to me. As I passed them, one of them slowly turned their head and looked at me as I drove by.

I felt like I was in a horror movie. You could not have paid me a million dollars to stop.

2

A few years ago my gf suggested a drive to Smicksburg, a heavily Amish area not too far from us. It was a drizzly autumn day. We had fun exploring the shops and we were going to head home, when my gf suggested we see where a backroad went.

After driving awhile, I was going to turn around as we weren’t connecting up with any recognizable roads, when I saw two little kids standing along the road by a card table.

It was weird. The road we were on was dirt/gravel/red dog and the table was set back a bit on an intersecting driveway with no house nearby. The kids were Amish girls, one was 6, the other maybe 10, and they were in full stereotypic Amish dress. They weren’t smiling, were likely chilled, but they were manning this table, selling baked goods.

I immediately began pulling over, so we could buy some authentic Amish food, but my gf freaked out. The girls freaked her out. She couldn’t even explain why she was so freaked out, but she was honestly afraid!

I ignored her. I got out and bought as much of their stuff as I could easily carry, paid and tipped them. I wished them well and got back in the car. Neither kid had smiled or spoken, other than to whisper my total.

The food was fine. Some cookies, a mini shoo fly pie, etc. Edible but not great. My gf to this day gets chills thinking about them.

3

Always a bad idea.

[quote=“kayaker, post:2, topic:931546”]
but she was honestly afraid!
[/quote] That’s because what your describing is evil, but you don’t know it yet. You didn’t buy any creepy 19th century dolls did you? :grinning:

4

Only if it’s dark and the weather is crap.

“Explore more if you have the time,” is my driving motto. You never know what lovely sights you might see.

5

Obligatory pop culture reference.

It sounds like the OP might’ve been passing through Salem’s Lot. I wouldn’t have stopped either.

6

About 10 years ago on Thanksgiving, everyone is over at my parents house and my sister, out of nowhere, decides she wants to take a crack at learning to drive stick shift. Now, she’s not going to learn the way I did, which was literally pulling out into traffic and hoping for the best, she’s far to panicky for that. So we went to our old grade school. It has a huge parking lot with no obstructions. Big enough that you can easily get up to a pretty good speed before having to turn. Anyways, we’re driving around in circles, IIRC, I was still driving at this point, and she noticed a person in the building. We tried to ignore him for a while, but he was just…sitting there. We drove up to the entrance, I got out and walked to the door and he was sitting in a seat with his back to us. Now, this school doesn’t have any kind of night watchman or janitors/maintenance workers during the night, but my only guess was that someone was working late and happened to fall asleep. Whatever. Well, ‘whatever’ is how I felt, my sister was in full on ‘fight or flight’ mode. Learning to drive stick wasn’t going to happen tonight so we went back to my parents.
We mentioned it to my dad who also agreed there shouldn’t be anyone in the building at night, handed me the keys to the school and told me to go check it out (he was chairman of buildings and grounds for a very long time and still had some keys).
We got back, the guy is still sitting there so I let myself in and, well, here’s what we found.

7

I thought it was going to be Michael Jordan a la Home Alone.

8

I had one of those life size cardboard cutouts (standee?) of Michael Jordon in my bedroom when I was growing up. Wasn’t even a sports kid, I won it in a raffle. Scared the bejesus out of anyone that walked into my room and turned on the light (especially at night).

9

And one of them was floaty, and the other one gimpy!

10

Last year I was touring the old Montana State Prison and came across this “artwork” in one of the cells, left over from an exhibition. It was called Jerry’s Nightmare, and it was way more than vaguely creepy.

11

This may sound crazy, or like I’m making it up, but a couple of people I went to high school with would sometimes amuse themselves by going somewhere, and sitting motionlessly as they could, and stare at someone. They made wagers beforehand over how long the person would take to move out of sight, upon spotting them. And kept a diary of who, where, when, how long, and how much.

They said they liked the challenge of trying to pick who would freak out easily, and who would try to be stoic about it. They also liked that eventually, everyone got pretty uncomfortable, and moved.

They were actually pretty creepy even in “regular” mode, come to think about it. I never accepted a ride home from either of them, even if other people were going with them.

On that last one, it was sort of a “thing” at my high school to give a lot of people rides home once you got a license. I did it too-- I would choose to drive my uncle’s 72 Chevelle that needed transmission work, over one of the smaller, newer cars, because of the number of people who could fit into it (before seatbelt laws).

These guys wore a lot of black, chains, leather, and skipped class to play tabletop games.

Without intending to, I always pictured them when I read anything about the Columbine shooters.

The staring thing was interesting, though; it makes me wonder if the couple in the OP were trying to be creepy on purpose. At the least, they may have been people who lost a bet, or picked “dare” in a game of “Truth or Dare.”

Now, I’m sure they would have loved knowing people were really creeped out by them-- obviously, they were trying to cultivate it.

One of them was honest-to-gawd named “Thanatos.” That was his real name. His mother made really weird junk art. So weird.

I ran into one of them about 6 years after graduation. He owned, and used as his everyday car, a vintage hearse-- late 50s, or early 60s.

12

Put those two in Amish dress, that’s who was there. On a one lane dirt path, on a chilly autumn drizzly twilight evening.

13

I had a hypnopompic dream once (a night terror) which wasn’t vaguely creepy but was absolutely terrifying. At the time I was single and sleeping on a futon on the floor of my apartment bedroom. When I sort-of woke up my room was (according to the dream/hallucination) crowded with people in long black robes and hoods conducting a black mass and chanting at an incredibly loud volume. One of them was kneeling beside me giving me a running commentary. I was, in that state, convinced that I would see Satan enter the room (hooves and horns etc).

This was about 3 am and when I was able to force myself awake I had to leave a light on for the rest of that night.

I’ve had a loaded 7.62mm rifle pointed at me once and the dream was much scarier.

14

We bought this house to accommodate caring for MIL after a devastating stroke that left her fully bedridden. When we moved in it was utter chaos, setting up a hospital room, a care regime, diets, Drs, meds, plus we’d never owned a home before. Total chaos, believe me.

After a couple of nights getting used to the place, and being often up in the night, when I returned to bed I swore I could hear what sounded like people, moving around downstairs (Our bdrm upstairs!). Hubs brushed it off as new house sounds etc. But it wasn’t, every time I’d come back to bed, everyone else now sound asleep, after a few minutes I could hear what def sounded like people shuffling around. But I was too freaked out to go down and see, plus it was early days and I was mostly always exhausted so sleep would over take me quickly.

Hubs wouldn’t hear of it, insisted it was nonsense. I told a friend about it, and seeing it was upsetting me, she suggested, hey, maybe it’s her dead husband and relatives coming by to see that she’s ok! Somehow that spin took the edge off of the creepy for me. Next time I heard it, I simply called down and told them, ‘Shes okay, we got this, see for yourselves!‘ And with that they were never heard again! It’s funny how a different perspective can take the edge off the creepy.

This is def an old and creaky house, with a lot of history. But I never again heard anything even resembling what I experienced those first few nights.

She died in our home over a decade ago now, I still miss her terribly, and smile whenever I think of her.

Two nights ago I heard those very sounds again. I was so startled, and not being exhausted, I lay in bed and listened for a long time. I took a sleep aid last night because I don’t want things to start getting creepy again!

:::shiver:::

15

For some years, I was a volunteer frog counter for the state DNR. I had a route of ten checkpoints to be run three times each spring, to identify frogs by voice and estimate their numbers. I was probably “a creepy experience” ignoring someone passing on the road.

16

It depends how you’re wired I guess, but that spin certainly wouldn’t make me feel less creeped out.

17

Any chance they were taking a leak? I grew up in a small town and one summer night during my college years, my best friend and I were coming back from checking out the nightlife in a slightly bigger town near us. We pulled over on the side of this two lane highway to take a leak. It’s night time and we’re out in the middle of nowhere. As we’re standing there, I start seeing a dimly glowing cross in the sky. Bit by bit, it grew brighter. I asked my friend if he saw it too and he said yeah. Eventually a smaller crossbar grew under the first one and we realized we were seeing a telephone pole in the headlights of a distant car. For a minute there though, I thought the Rapture was going to happen as I was standing on the side of the road peeing. I don’t think it’s technically a sin but, all in all, I’m glad things didn’t end that way.

A few years later I was living on my own in this little house I rented. One night I had a dream that I was reading from an eldritch book. I knew in my dream that this incantation I was saying was going to summon some great evil. I woke myself up because I was talking in my sleep and actually saying what I dreamed I was saying. Now, I don’t believe in evil spirits but I gotta tell you, that knowledge did not help me get back to sleep that night.

18

I think this right here needs its own thread.

19

You mean, like “Ask a frog counter”?

20

Years ago I was heading back up to Wausau from Wisconsin. 90/94 North to 78 East to Portage then 51 (as it was then) North to Wausau. It was a December evening and around Portage there was a heavy fog. So heavy the semi next to me reduced speed to about what I was going; about 30 to 35.

About 25- 30 miles, maybe, below Stevens Point the fog shifted and both the semi and I hit our brakes simultaneously. You know in the old werewolf movies how the werewolf runs upright with his arms in front of him? The arms are bent with the elbows the lowest point then the hands flapped down from the wrist? Swear to god I saw that running across the road in the fog. The thing that bothers me most is: why did the semi brake when I did? Did he or she see it, too?