Very Vaguely Creepy Rides Again

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

I can’t seem to find the first VVC thread, so here’s a link to the second one.

Mr. Rilch and I have been going through file boxes, trying to jettison what’s not necessary and file/organize what is. Saturday afternoon, I found a photo of a guy who was once a very close friend of Mr. Rilch’s family. Around the turn of the millennium, though, he did something that, while not illegal, was definitely a death knell for the friendship. Mr. X himself died about five years ago. (His son told us. We did not attend the funeral).

So I showed the photo to Mr. Rilch, and he tossed it in the wastebasket with other discards. This morning, Monday, I gathered up all the trash in the house to burn. When I was emptying that particular wastebasket, I thought, “The photo of Mr. X is in there…Maybe I should check to make sure it’s in there, so I’ll know it’s being destroyed for sure…Nah, it’s in there, and what’s the difference anyway?”

I put everything in the burn barrel, fired it up, and went back inside. Shortly afterwards, BOOM. I thought it was a gun going off, but when I looked out the window, I saw a corona of papers on the ground around the burn barrel, where an explosion had flung them. :eek: Good thing I was inside: if I’d been standing by the barrel, I would have been knocked across the yard, maybe had my eardrums ruptured, who knows.

Neither Mr. Rilch nor I could think of anything in the trash that might have caused that; no aerosol cans or flammable liquids. We’re usually pretty diligent about that stuff, anyway. Now I’m wondering if the explosion was, perhaps, one last eff-you from Mr. X. Or not, but it’s VVC enough to justify a new VVC thread, in time for Halloween!

2

I woke up at around 3am last night to some sounds coming from outside. Weird, slithery sounds. Like, a 5 second dragging/scraping noise and then 30 seconds of silence. Repeat. I knelt by the window trying to make out any details but I didn’t see anything at all. It was very probably just raccoons or something but it was not a pleasant way to wake up (and as a result I couldn’t fall back asleep!)

3

I’m curious where you live, that it’s cool to burn trash right outside your house? Are you in the US? Alaska?

4

I started a thread about this a few months ago when it happened but it’s still a mystery so I’ll repeat.

Around 9:30ish one evening there was suddenly an almost ear splitting ringing sound that I couldn’t identify. Someone suggested tinnitus but it was muffled when I went indoors. I walked around to the front of my house to see if people were reacting and there wasn’t a soul around. I couldn’t believe no one else was at least coming out of their house to investigate. It seemed to go on for about ten minutes and I was going in an out of my house, debating whether I should call the police (non-emergency). Then it just stopped. A friend at work lives a few blocks from me and she didn’t hear it (although she was in our local bar at the time). I checked on line the next day for any kind of explanation and couldn’t find a thing. Still have no idea what it was and why seemingly no one else heard it.

5

I’d guess someplace rural, where there aren’t restrictions on that sort of thing. No location listed in profile.

6

Electrophonic noise/microwave auditory effect, maybe?

7

That’s very vaguely creepy.

8

I’m in rural western Pennsylvania. I have a burn barrel at home and at work.

9

It’s a rural area, and not one susceptible to brush fires. The barrel is on breeze blocks, so it’s off the ground. The fire department (the firehouse is right next to where our lane meets the main road) inspected our barrel and said it was safe. We don’t get trash pickup, which is very vaguely creepy, so we burn what we can and compost what we can. For other garbage, outside of those two categories, we take the bag to whatever dumpster in town we can sneak it into. The fire department won’t let us use their dumpster, which is very vaguely jerkish.

10

I have a dumpster at work which I use for home garbage. I pay a monthly fee for weekly emptying of my dumpster, and it isn’t cheap. If I caught someone putting stuff in my dumpster (and I have) I’d call the police (and I have). Unless the fire department gets free dumpster service, why do you think they should let you use it?

11

Because letting garbage pile up is a fire hazard?

12

A few weeks ago I rediscovered the filtered PM section of my FB private message box. There were two filtered messages from strangers from over a year ago. Both were ugly comments probably from our local news page where things get ugly for no good reason. These were the only two messages in all that time.

Both accounts were memorial pages. Both of these guys had died since they messaged me. Don’t cross me, Facebook trolls!

13

It’s always interesting to see how little idea people in urban areas have about the freedom/privacy of living in rural areas. Not criticizing, just surprised. There are far fewer laws and far fewer eyes on you to care about what you’re doing on your own property. You can paint your house bright orange with purple stripes, shoot guns, build bonfires. If it snows you decide if and when you clear the snow. Nobody cares if you let your grass get too high. OTOH, you probably have no trash pickup, you are responsible for your own well and septic system, and there may be no Internet.

14

Yep, all of that. Until about a year ago, in order to talk on my cellphone I had to go outside to a spot between the back patio and the shed. I had no landline, by choice. Something changed and now I get a great signal inside our house. Thing is, I rarely talk on the phone, preferring text messaging.

15

As for being creeped out myself, I had one king hell of a vivid nightmare that is still a bit disturbing when I think about it, but I already posted it in full ghost-story detail in my October Dreams thread. If you don’t want to read it, I think I can distill the creepiness down into this tl;dr: “tiny fingerbones”.

'Tis better to give than to receive the creeps, though, and that’s what I did this past weekend. Our local boffer LARP had its Halloween game, which was (as you might expect) treated about as seriously as Spooky Scary Skeletons.

However, in one of the night-time segments, I was teamed up with another NPC* to be wraiths haunting a little stone-walled cabin, and we made the best we could of the scenario. We draped ourselves with our silly white “ghost” rags, and he stood facing the wall across from the door, waiting to let out a low moan when the players opened the door. That part proved to more effective than expected. Dim light and positioning helped him hit a sweet spot between “Blair Witch” and SCP-173, and–despite the fact that the players knew the figure was just one of their friends in a cheesy costume–one group noped right the hell out, slamming the door behind them.

Meanwhile, I was taking a more subtle approach, using his distraction and my knack for unobstrusiveness. I was standing right by the door, perfectly still, as the teams worked up their nerve and came inside. Then I waited longer, for them to realize that someone had been right behind them the whole time. It was quite effectively creepy, I think. (I even jumpscared a couple of people without ever moving. :D)

*An NPC is a non-player character in a game, basically an actor for the players to interact with.

16

One of my creepiest experiences was going to look at a cemetery in a state park (a lot of them encompass what used to be family farms, and have family cemeteries, and direct descendants can still bury people there as long as there are plots). Anyway, there was what looked like a very recent grave. The ground was raised, and it had been freshly seeded, and had straw on it. However, the date on the tombstone indicated the “resident” had died 10 years earlier.

This was in southern Indiana, right at the time that Orville Lynn Majors was undergoing trial for “mercy” killings at a hospice up somewhere pretty far north, but that didn’t mean that someone from that direct family line had not dies up there, and been brought down to be buried in the family plot (this was a cemetery where the oldest stones were hand carved). There had been nothing in the papers about a local case that needed an exhumation, so we wondered if the opened grave was part of the Majors trial.