Very vaguely creepy.

In My Humble Opinion
281

This first one is vaguely creepy in the way the rubber glove that kicked this topic off is creepy.

#1- Awhile back we had an entire colony of ladybugs in our house. Ladybugs are fine until you start finding them in your cokes… Eww. Anyways, this was a couple years back. One of the ladybugs apparently… died, I guess, hanging of top of the door frame to the office. Now it’s stayed there, unmoving for nearly 2 years or so. And it’s starting to mold now. That’s starting to really disturb me, in a very vaguely creepy way. It’s a dead ladybug, on my windowsill, 2 years old, and half covered in white mold… not moving nothing. Just staying there, on the top of the frame… I’m not sure I want to knock it down, even though I’ve been considering doing so for awhile.

Not vaguely creepy but not really outright creeped out is…

#2- In '93 my parents and I stayed in England for about 6 months. The door to the cottage we were staying in was very annoying in that if you weren’t careful about shutting it, it would stay ajar. (You can see where this is going, no?) One day as we were leaving for town, Mum asked me to check on the door. I did, and it was shut properly. When we got back from town, it was ajar. We’ve never figured that one out.

Somewhat related to number 1 is…

#3- Mum and I were going to I don’t remember where. Well, we were on the main road and then suddenly, it seemed, we were on a back road, and had no idea where the hell we were. Even more disturbing then that was the fact we were getting low on gas. Well, seeing as how we didn’t know where we were, and this wasn’t a majoy freeway or anything, jsut back country road, we had no choice but to keep on going. We stop at this strange guy’s house. He’s out on the deck, which in this state isn’t suprising, but he’s just giving me the creeps all things considered. Not he himself but the whole fact that we were here having to ask him where we were. He seemed kind of confused, but eventually we figured out where we were from him. We got to a gas station eventually, and filled up. We’ve never looked at a map, but there is no way that we can think of that we could have ended up on that road… so we’ve not figured that one out either.

#4- This is only vaguely creepy. Late, late at night my hearing is pretenaturally good. I hear the slightest noises…

Like a complete idiot, I suppose, I read this thread at about 1:00 a.m. in the morning. I don’t think there’s much chance of sleep, at least restful sleep tonight for me now…

282

This is an urban legend. See http://www.urbanlegends.com/medical/blind_atomic_flash.html

283

Same here…it even extends to when I’m asleep. Late one night when I was about 15 I woke up because I thought I’d heard a noise outside. But then I didn’t hear anything more, so I rolled over and went back to sleep. The next morning I found out there’d been a very bad accident (I think with fatalities)…three-quarters of a mile away.

Know something else that’s creepy? This. And I was terrified of clowns beforehand anyway.

And re: the shortwave radio ‘numbers stations’ that a few people have mentioned - I used to come across them once in a while tuning around, and man alive, those things would give you the willies after a few minutes. Even worse were the more obscure ‘letters’ stations that did more or less the same thing, except they’d broadcast some sort of an ID for HOURS before they went on, over and over and over…creeps me out now just thinking about it, listening late at night, just a bedlamp on, to a vaguely mechanical male-sounding voice on the radio:

“Alpha Charlie India Romeo…Alpha Charlie India Romeo…Alpha Charlie India Romeo…”

Guh. Usually made it hard to get to sleep, as I’m sure my unwise decision to read this entire thread start-to-finish, alone, at midnight will too…

284

My ex-GF has a horrible ability to know when a friend of hers is going to die. Personally, I thought she was full of crap until I witnessed it first hand.

We had been living together for about a month. One night, she wakes up screaming and crying, and babbling incoherently. I asked her what the matter was. After a bit, she managed to tell me about her dream. It consisted of four or five of her friends that died suddenly all taking turns talking to her. They seemed to be telling her that it wasn’t her fault, and that they miss her. They tell her that she’ll get to see them before too long and that she will be loved and happy when she gets there. The thing that really bothered her was that one of the people that talked to her was her best friend, who was still alive. The last my ex had heard from this friend, she had gone out of state to visit family.

Needless to say, this disturbed me. She has had many instances of talking in her sleep, saying very bizarre stuff. Once she even argued with me in her sleep! I figured it was just another of her bad dreams, albeit a very distressing one.

The next day, she talked to me again about the dream. She said that she was very worried about her friend, whom she had expected to call. My ex spent all day telling me how worried she was. This is when she revealed to me that she had other dreams that were very similar, the last happening the night before a good friend of hers died from AIDS complications. He too came and told her that it was ok, and he would see her again soon.

I could see her getting more and more upset that her friend still hadn’t called. I tried telling her that she was getting herself worked up over nothing, and that her friend was fine. She didn’t believe me. It turned out I was wrong.

The next morning, she again told me how worried she was, that she knew something terrible had happened. I told her to calm down. I made sure was ok, then headed off to work. I lived very close to where I worked at the time, so I usually came home for lunch, or to take a nap. I get home, and my ex is still very agitated. As I sat on my bed, I hear a gasping sound come from where she was sitting at the computer, staring dazedly at the screen. Her mouth opened and she let out a half-shriek, half-moan. She just kind of slumped there and began sobbing.

I rushed over to her and supported her weight just as she started to fall out of the chair. She managed to gasp out that her friend was dead. She had received an e-mail from her best friend’s brother with the news: her best friend had been killed in a car accident the same night she had her dream.

It was extremely creepy, and shattered my absolute cynicism of things like this. The creepiest part was, in her dream, her friends telling her she would see them soon. I guess that isn’t very vaguely creepy, it is very specifically creepy.

285

Hey those things are creepy…a creepy thing happened to my aunt and grandfather. They were in the apt in NyC. The bathroom window was open and…two bats flew in. They flew all over the place and my grandfather and aunt were petrified. At last, they opened another window, and one bat exited the building. As for the other bat, this is the “vaguely creepy” part. They opened the door (remember, this is an apartment), and the bat flew out into the hallway. Then they closed the door. And to this day, they don’t know what happened to the one that went into the hallway. Also creepy- the fact that they didn’t even go see what happened to the latter bat. Strange stuff…:eek:

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I wouldn’t worry too much about it. Their idea of ‘soon’ is likely to be a little different from ours. They have all eternity, now. Years and years could pass in an eyeblink, to them.

Myrddin

A man was talking to God, once, and he asked: “God, I know you exist for all eternity, so how long is one of your seconds.” God replied, “A million years, or so.” “And how much is one of your pennies worth?” “A million dollars.”
The man thought carefully for a moment. “God, can I borrow a penny?” “Sure. In a second.”

287

Know what’s scary? That creepy site someone sent, I forget what it’s called. But its the one with all the dead bodies. I kept looking at it, fascinated, even though I really didn’t want to. Plus it was night…and I had to go outside and walk the dog right after that. ::shudder::

Other creepy things:

  1. I was outside walking the dog and I go by this house w/ its porch light on (this is late at night). And just as I’m in front of it, the lights go out. This has happened more than once. It’s weird.

  2. Gloves. I was doing a dissection of various animals in Biology- creepy by itself. Anyway, we were each allowed to wear one rubber glove. And after you wear the glove for awhile and then take it off, your hand feels strange…I can’t explain it exactly.

  3. Those egg commercials on TV. It features these little egg shaped things. You break an egg and put the insides into the thing and then you put it in the microwave…the whole idea sounds rather unappetizing.

That’s all for now. :stuck_out_tongue:

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I’ll never be the same again, after reading these posts. “Very vaguely” should be stricken from the thread title and replaced with “absolutely, thoroughly.” Here are mine, but they’re of the vague variety not apt to terrify anyone:

**“Very vaguely” #1 ** happened last year. Two things to know: I like to burn candles and I like to sit on the back porch and read after children and hubby go to bed; I do it nearly every night of my life. Since I read a lot and like scary books, sometimes I’m outside by myself at 1:00 a.m., then have to creep into a darkened house to change and get ready for bed. Anyway, when was Hannibal released? This is of course the sequel to Silence of the Lambs. Though I actually found the book more intriguing than flat-out scary, it spooked me plenty on those creep-through-the-house nights. One night I come in and observe a candle that I’ve had going for several days (off and on) is still burning. I head for the bathroom and think, if that candle’s out when I come out the bathroom, Hannibal’s in the house with me. Heh-heh-heh, aren’t I smart for upping the spook ante on myself?

You see this coming: the candle flickers and goes out just as I emerge from the bathroom, and since I’ve already doused the lights the whole living/dining room is thrown into pitch blackness. I must cross it to reach the stairs to check on my daughter. My head is filled with the sickly images of the characters and (remember) I’ve already told myself that Dr. Lector would be paying me a visit if the candle went out.

I did survive the incident, though I stuck to novels with decidedly uncreepy themes for several weeks after that.

Vaguely creepy #2 – My grandparents bought a new house in the late 50s and promptly remodeled it before I was born. I was never able to precisely figure out how things were arranged before the remodeling, but one result was the addition of new basement stairs into a new family room (which previously had been a breezeway-type porch, I’m told). The new stairs were hardwood and awfully nice. But the old stairs … they were still there, concrete, cold and leading to absolutely nowhere. Remember these were basement stairs, creepy by definition, yet that basement was a place where I played for countless happy hours in my youth. However, after playing a long time down there, I’d suddenly become aware of my very aloneness and glance nervously at those stairs. Those stairs to nowhere. When the remodeling occurred, they just sealed up the top of the stairs. My grammy used it as sort of an odd closet, and frequently put old boots or shoes on the stairs … like everyone does. Shoes to go upstairs. Except these stairs went nowhere. Up to nothing but floor. <shudder> I’d uneasily wonder where one would come out, IF you could just keep ascending those stairs…

289

wanna know what makes me get the creeps?

  1. yoda

  2. elmo

  3. rotting jalepeno peppers

  4. my neighbors goat who mysteriusly limps and only bleets when its inside

  5. the indestructible material twinkies are made of

  6. my cat (it has dreadlocks)

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:slight_smile: Silly Customer…you cannot hurt a twinkie! have you heard the urban legend? The one that says those hostess snacks don’t bake, but are “set”, like Jello.

Also animals can be creepy. Right after I read Pet Sem, cats and dogs (well…undead ones anyway) sort of creeped me out.

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One of the interesting things about this thread is the wide range of creepiness-tolerance.

On the one hand you have people saying “I walked out of my house one day and a bird was staring right at me! Isn’t that TOTALLY CREEPY??!!?”

On the other hand you have people saying “Once I was talking to my best friend and his jaw fell off and an eel squirmed out of his throat into my lap. I was vaguely creeped out.”

I have a pretty high tolerance, but the manmade lakes with whole ghost towns and trees at the bottom never fail to give me the willies. Part of this is due to a story called “Fishhead” by Irvin S. Cobb, from a collection called “Stories That Scared Even me” compiled by Alfred Hitchcock. This story describes that kind of lake exactly in much creep-making detail, especially since I don’t think it was deliberate-- the town was flooded with all the denizens still in it. (I might be misremembering this for maximum creepiness, though.)

But an urban legend I recently read about at http://www.snopes.com really creeped me the hell out:

During World War II Beth Lynn’s oldest son, Robert, joined the navy. Even before the outbreak of the war the boy had dreamed of being a sailor. He was a very dutiful son, and he wrote his mother regularly, at least once a week, sometimes more often.

After his ship went into combat in the war in the Pacific, Robert still wrote regularly. Sometimes he had to be very careful about what he said so as not to betray any military secrets that might then fall into the hands of the enemy. Letters often arrived with lines cut out of them by navy censors. These letters could be delayed for days, even weeks, owing to the uncertainties of mail delivery from a combat zone. But eventually they would show up in a bunch, much to the relief of Mrs. Lynn.

So she was not too concerned when a couple of weeks went by without receiving the customary letters from her son. But when the weeks stretched into months, Mrs. Lynn became deeply concerned.

Finally she contacted the Department of the Navy. After a long runaround and a great deal of red tape, Mrs. Lynn learned that her son’s ship had been sunk off one of the Pacific islands – which one she couldn’t be told “for security reasons.” The navy was not sure whether her son had been killed or had been captured by the Japanese. It was known that many Japanese ships had been in the vicinity when the ship went down, and it was assumed that at least some of the crewmen had been captured.

Mrs. Lynn was devastated. But she took some small comfort in the possibility that Robert had not been killed but had been captured and taken to Japan and would be returned after the war.

She clung to this fragile hope for many months. And then one day her prayers seem to have been answered. She received a telephone call from the navy. A letter from Robert had arrived from Japan. Naturally the government had intercepted all correspondence from the enemy and read it before passing it on. But this letter was perfectly harmless and would doubtless relieve her mind greatly. They would send it on to her.

Mrs. Lynn waited anxiously for the letter to arrive from Washington. It came three days later. It was written on a thin, light blue paper. The letter didn’t contain much hard information. Robert merely reported that his ship had been sunk and he had been captured and taken to Japan. He was now in a Japanese prison camp. He said that though he missed his family greatly and wanted more than anything else to be home, his captors were treating him quite well.

Mrs. Lynn was almost hysterical with relief. She read the letter over and over again. then she looked at the envelope. It had a Japanese stamp. A Japanese wartime stamp would be quite rare in the United States, she reasoned. And her nephew collected stamps. He would be thrilled to add this to his collection.

So Mrs. Lynn steamed the stamp off the envelope. And there, in tiny printing where the stamp had been, was this message: They’ve cut off my hands.
(Cohen, Daniel. The Beheaded Freshman and Other Nasty Rumors. New York: Avon Books, 1993. ISBN 0-380-77020-2 (pp. 109-111).

http://www.snopes.com/spoons/legends/stamp.htm

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That’s pretty creepy, ejs. But how did he write the letter with no hands?

Someone fairly early on in the thread mentioned those spy radio stations that do nothing but broadcast numbers and plaintive flute-like melodies. And here I thought I was the only one. This is the scariest one for me:

“At 3,820 KHz there is a four-note electronic tune. The station never identifies itself; no one knows where the signal is coming from or why.”

I’m not kidding, that’s one of the most terrifying things I’ve ever read.

My dad once showed me a book of post-mortem photographs, and I have no idea why. That freaked me out, for a while.

Who has Vitalogy by Pearl Jam? Tell me that the booklet, particularly the part about how masturbating kills you, isn’t eerie. (They show a picture of a healthy-looking young man and then the next shot – after the symptoms of the “secret vice” began to show – and he’s gaunt and covered with sores and pale.)

Oh, here’s a good one: the other day I woke up in the middle of the night, wrote “nambrzlazla” on a piece of paper, and went back to bed. Hell if I know.

You know that part in Half-Life where, right after the experiment goes wrong and you leave the test chamber, you see that guy in the blue suit on the walkway above you, then he walks through that door and disappears? Also scary. Come to think of it, that whole damned game freaks me out.

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I’ve been holding off to add mine. I’m settled in with a cup of coffee, and the kids aren’t trying to kill each other right now, so what the heck…

I used to work in a bar. It was a big old building, and someone mentioned that it used to be a railroad station. Apparently, it was so cheap that it wound up being cheaper to move it to its location than putting up a new building.

From my first day on the job, the liquor room (located on the side, by the ladies washroom and the payphone) would creep me out. The hairs on the back of my neck would stand on end. I couldn’t stand to use the pay phone, or use the ladies washroom if I was alone, and hated getting liquor out of the store room.

We had a tv that was located above the storeroom (we had four tv’s in the corners of the room, plus a big screen tv set up in a lounging area). Every night when I would finish off my cash out, the tv (which was linked to the other three) would turn itself on. If I sat there and had a beer (often the owner and I would sit there and discuss how business was going, who to keep, who to fire, how to renovate, etc), the tv would keep turning itself on. I would keep using the remote to turn it off. The longer I stayed, the faster it would turn on, like labour contractions getting closer and closer together. If I really stayed late, I would be hitting the off button on the remote once a minute.

What was really creepy is that all of the tv’s were linked, and completely identical, and even shared the same remote. They all shaired the same power source too. Only the one tv would turn on. My boss was puzzled, and checked the connections several times over the course of 8 months or so. He kept saying maybe it was some sort of power surge or something. But why would it only affect one tv?

Not only that, but we had a loose closing schedule. If it was slow, we’d close down and midnight. If it was busy, we didn’t shut down until 3 am, and some nights I wouldn’t be done clean up until 4:30 (depending on how short staffed I was). It would only start when I was done for the night. Correction, after a few months, it would start at the end of my cash out, just as I was finishing up. It didn’t matter what time it was. Anytime between midnight and 4:30 am. The only constant was finishing up my work for the night. And the frequency always increased steadily.

Now add to this the fact that over the years, probably 80% of our staff complained of hearing someone call their voice while they were cleaning the ladies washroom in the morning. Completely alone, almost always with the front door still locked, they would assume that it was someone else who worked there and had a key, and would come out to see who it was. Sometimes 3 or 4 times during one cleaning. It happened to me so many times, that I quit coming out to see who was calling me. Sometimes I would come out just to de-crepify myself though…

The final straw came when one of the other staff was in the snack bar, filling up the creamers for the day, and heard laughter clearly echo throughout the building. She called me, totally freaked out. She wanted to wait outside the building until some customers came in.

After that, I got mad and started yelling at the tv at night, telling it to shut the hell up. My boss looked at me strangely, but after a week or so, it worked. The tv never turned itself on for the rest of my time there (about a year).

Is that creepy enough? Yikes. I’ve always wondered about that place, and that corner…

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I’d forgotten; someone mentioned graveyards when discussing the lakes covering whole towns. They move the bodies in instances like this.

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Well, since the thread has been revived, I’ll add:

  1. My brother died at 3:17am. I was on a plane at the time, rushing to his side, and I knew when he died. So did my sister, who was in her home. She says she saw two figures (my brother and my grandmother) at the end of her bed.

For an entire week afterward my father and I both woke up at exactly 3:17 every morning. We had some mild poltergeist activity the next month, too. I appreciated it, it let me know he hadn’t just vanished into nothingness.

  1. Every year for the last 8 years at least one person I know has died unexpectedly. That’s not counting the elderly relatives.

  2. There’s something that looks like blood spatters on the oak cupboard door in my new apartment. I never noticed it until a few days ago, it blends in with the wood so well.

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I almost forgot about the weirdest thing that’s ever happened to me. On December 9th, 1989, I started reading a science-fiction story (can’t remember name or collection) at around 9pm. The character wakes up not remembering where he is or anything, so he calls a date-and-time service.

The service tells him it’s December 9th, 1989, 9:10pm.

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I asked my dad (ex-Special Forces radio man–expert on this type stuff). This is what he said:

—The numbers are probably a geological survey or something of that nature broadcasting the readings off their instruments. It’s not a code–they use letters in codes (numbers too, but there’s always some letters in it).

—The 4-note flute-sounding one is a sound to tune your radio to, to check your equipment and such.

–(This one is a known fact from the gospel of radio operators, BTW)–WWV broadcasts morse-code letter "V"s for a whole minute, then Greenwich mean time, then "V"s for another minute, then the time again, then "V"s…That way everybody in the world can get the same, correct time whenever they want to. That was one of Dad’s most important duties as a radioman–check WWV every morning and set the time.

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Urbanshocker-- that’s a good question, and snopes.com offers both variations that make more sense (cutting off his feet or tearing out his tongue) and a panoply of reasons why this story doesn’t hold water (mainly, mail from POWs doesn’t have stamps). But still, for some reason, that version still creeps me out the most.

An ex-girlfriend of mine once had a creepy TV experience-- one night she was watching TV, and it started turning its own volume up. The remote was accounted for-- neither she nor her dog was sitting on it. But whenever she turned it down, it went back up. When she told me about it, years later, I insisted it was more likely to be a problem with the TV than a message from the spirit world. She insisted she was too creeped out anew to continue discussing it.

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Not nearly as creepy as some of the things I’ve read here, but it still kept me up a couple of nights.

My wife works in a hospital lab and occasionally has the late shift. I was asleep–deeply asleep–when she got home around midnight.

I didn’t hear her come in. First I knew was when I woke up screaming (deep, primal, terror-style screaming). At the same time, I realized I’d just thrown a pillow at her. (A surprisingly accurate throw, too.)

She turned on the light and that broke the moment and woke me. I stayed awake for quite a while.

I know it sounds pretty comical now, but at the time it terrified me. I don’t know what dream she’d interrupted, why I thought she was a mortal threat, or what I expected the pillow to accomplish.

This little incident is number one on the list of reasons I don’t have a gun in the house and, especially, near the bed. A pillow in the gut is comical, but…

KC

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A local cemetary has a sign at the entrance alerting you to the fact that it is a “Non-Perpetual Care” cemetary. I’ve always wondered what that meant. You can’t leave Uncle Fred there for good? Do they lease the plots, or what? Gotta dig 'em up after fifty years? Disturbing…