There are some people in this world who it would be a very, very bad idea indeed to cross, so ho’s the scariest person you personally know? Who, in your experience has been the most intimidating? Was it your drill sergeant, a local bully, your grandma? What made them so damn scary?
I am very hard to intimidate, but I think the two people who could really do so were:
My mother’s father. He was like a combination of Henry VIII and Edward G. Robinson. A real old-fashioned patriarch, and a sonofabitch to boot.
Irene Mayer Selznick. I interviewed her in the late 1980s and was shaking for *days *afterward.
Fascinating. What was it about her that was intimidating?
For myself, I have a pretty good crazydar. I tend to avoid really off-kilter, scary people. I find that you can generally almost smell the STAY AWAY vibe on some people. That said, I once had a friend who was a total Jekyll-and-Hyde, and alcohol was his trigger. It was uncanny. He was a friendly, professional, reasonable human being when sober. But get a few drinks in him, and he was terrifying. It wasn’t just that he was a mean drunk - it was that he was a mean drunk, and he completely spun out of control as well. I saw him pick fights, try to bite someone in the face (I had to drag him off and knock him unconscious), and other hyper-aggressive behavior. He never remembered any of it. True Jekyll-and-Hyde.
I once saw him head-butt a friend’s front door. There was a nail (for hanging wreaths, etc.) sticking out of it. He tore through his scalp with the nail, drove it partially into his skull, and split the door. As I stood there utterly horrified, along with everyone else on the front porch, he laughed it off and took another swig of beer, blood from his lacerated head running into his mouth along with the beer.
Eventually, I started avoiding him at all costs. I was afraid he was going to get himself and me killed.
I’m not particularly scared of anyone. But according to my dog I’m pretty terrifying when I raise my voice even slightly and there are people afraid to talk to me online.
So, me I guess.
There were a few girls at my high school you didn’t want to cross. One I remember particularly well was a huge girl named Mary Jane. She was almost 6 feet tall by 8th grade, and almost as big around as she was tall. She was as smart as a rhinoceros and as pretty as Rosie O’Donnell. She possessed the conflict-resolution skills of Courtney Love, and was as approachable as a rabid junkyard dog. I believe she got expelled for threatening a female teacher. It was rumored that her parents were druggies (hence her name), and our area had a big meth problem at the time. I wouldn’t be surprised if she had been heavily abused or neglected by her parents.
But, since I don’t know her anymore, I’d have to say my dad. He ruled the house with an iron fist until my mom got a divorce, and I’m no longer on speaking terms with him.
Maybe Chuck Norris, other than that…no one.
hmmmm, maybe its me?
The boyfriend of the boss-lady at the last company I worked for. He’s a for-realzies member of the Chicago mob and has been tried for murder twice (acquitted both times.) I believe he did time in the 70s for kidnapping. If you Google his name, you get lots of fun info about him.
That all said, he’s a really nice guy and seems like he’d never hurt a fly (imagine a kinder looking Joe Pesci). But knowing who he is always terrified the crap out of me when we would socialize together.
My dad. When he was younger, he was big and strong and mean. My earliest memory is of him beating my mom, and he also beat two of us kids- the youngest one didn’t experience that and had a completely different childhood than us two older ones. All of my friends and everyone in town that knew him were scared of him. He was one scary motherfucker. Now, I haven’t talked to him for 16 years- the only people that still speak to him out of my whole family are my mom (still together, although she left him several times and even divorced him once) and my brothers, occasionally. But according to my brothers, he had a stroke a few years ago that wiped out even the most remote of filters that he did have, so he’s a real piece of work now. He will go to a restaurant, and if the waitress makes the tiniest mistake, he will say things like, “You’re a stupid piece of shit!” When he gets mad at my brothers, he tells them to go down to the courthouse and change their last name. He’s truly an awful and miserable human being, yet he won’t just die. I joke that he’s going to outlive us all, just out of spite and to be an asshole. He doesn’t scare me any more, but that doesn’t mean that I ever will speak to him again.
Me. Even I don’t know what I might do next.
My mother terrified me. Adults were afraid to get on her shit list. At her funeral the priest couldn’t find anything good to say about her and turned it into a sermon about how not to live your life.
My younger sister’s husband is not a terrifying guy, and I’m not afraid of him or anything, but he can be very intimidating because he knows exactly what he wants, and he has zero problems getting it. I can see other people being afraid of him, who aren’t as familiar with him.
I don’t know her personally, but I find Callista Gingrich to be a highly creepy plastic android-looking life form.
The scariest guy I’ve known was not particularly intimidating, but he was a true sociopath. What made him scary was that he was very charming and didn’t seem at all threatening. In fact, he was funny and likeable. Unfortunately, he had absolutely no conscience whatsoever and screwed people over in various ways all the time, often without their knowledge. Here’s the kicker: even if it was with their knowledge, many of them allowed him to do it again and again because he was so manipulative and somehow managed to deflect all blame from himself. This guy could literally get away with murder and still have most folks thinking he was a great guy. To me, that’s scary.
Most, if not all, sociopaths I have met have been very charming.
I know one guy who appears to be the prototype for John Hawks’ character Teardrop in the film Winter’s Bone.
He’d spent quite a bit of time in prison. The interesting part is that he is a born-again Christian, a nice guy and I trust him with my house keys. But he looks and sounds incredibly scary, and I get the impression that he was a very scary man when he did the stuff that got him in prison in the first place.
He’s pretty much the obverse of Jasper Kent’s pleasant and charming sociopath.
Maybe I just never had the sense to be frightened of anybody, or just always figured that paybacks are a real bitch. The only guy I can remember who gave me real pause was when I was in the Navy on Adak Island. There was a huge Samoan guy (redundant, I know) there who was the meanest drunk I’ve ever seen. I saw him take on five Coasties in a club brawl and whip them all, even though he got his ear bitten off in the process. He was nobody to fuck with. . .ever. He was also our barber, and if he didn’t like you he’d clamp his hand onto your head so you couldn’t move and give you one raggedy-assed chop job. The guy was an E-3 with about 18 years in at the time, so had been repeatedly busted for brawling over the years.
I’ve had the same experience. I’d quip that we could be talking about the same guy, except that, alas, they aren’t all that uncommon. I’d say out of every 500 or 1,000 people, there’s one like this.
What scared me most about my guy is how quickly he could shift emotional gears. He could go from laughing to furious in a microsecond, then back to laughing. “Oh, don’t take anything I say seriously… I’ll kill that m…f… Jeez, don’t you recognize hyperbole when you hear it?” Yikes…
Due to confidentiality laws I can not give any actual names, but this is a true story:
Back when I worked at a clinic that had a heavy population of drug users, including some connected with the Federal Bureau of Prisons, a US Marshal Service van pulled up just outside. Two very burly marshals stepped, both these guys 6 foot plus and muscled. They opened the back of the van and this guy gets out. This guy was BIG. The two 6 foot guys only come up to about the middle of his chest. This guy also, obviously, likes to pump iron. He’s got the physique of a professional body-builder type a far as muscles go (not quite so “cut” - he obviously is carrying normal body fat). He is also in wrist cuffs and leg irons, both attached to a wait belt. He gets out of the van as if carrying a small hardware store of iron chains is no big deal, and likely to him it isn’t. The two marshals, who now don’t look quite as massive as they did at first, each take an arm and march him into the clinic.
By this time, most of the waiting room is plastered to the windows. Some of them even recognize the dude. When it becomes apparent that the big guy and his two guards are coming into our clinic the waiting room starts to empty out. Empty out the back way, down the fire escape, through the parking lot of the police station next door.
Let me paint that picture one more time. A lobby full to bursting with heroin addicts lined up for their daily methadone. Scary Guy gets out of van with two guards marching him towards the door. Stampede of heroin addicts out the backdoor ensues, because these addicts would rather forego the free opiate fix than be in the same BUILDING as this guy.
By the time Big Scary Guy and the guards had ridden the elevator up one single floor the lobby occupancy had dropped from about 150 to around 12.
THAT is the scariest person I’ve ever seen in my life.
He came to the clinic maybe all of three weeks (with two guards and leg irons each visit) and it turns out he really was THAT SCARY. He came for three weeks because that’s how long it took the director to convince the idiot who sent him there that there was no way in hell that guy belonged in an outpatient clinic. Again, confidentiality laws prohibit me relating details, but it came out that yes, he had worked for, earned, and absolutely deserved his reputation.
He never did anything bad while at our clinic. He was still the scariest person I’ve ever seen in real life. If he had wanted to do a Bad Thing while at the clinic there really wasn’t any way to stop him short of shooting him in the head and hoping it killed him instantly. Well over seven feet tall, about half that wide, strong as The Hulk (there was a bit of a resemblance - OK, he wasn’t green, but yeah, built like that), and absolutely no guilt or conscience in him.
I did my best to stay the fuck out of his line of sight.
I was 4 or 5. One of my sisters was in Clara Maas for a root canal and 2 rooms down from her with armed guards at the door was Mr. Boiardo Sr. I didn’t know who he was, but I’d heard the name and had seen some adults go pale when it was said. While waiting for a hospital pass to see her, one of my other sisters had mentioned that the he was the guy in the room down the hall who all the cops were guarding. And in a little 5yo voice I said, “Mr. Boiardo! Where…?” :smack:
A very thin gentleman in his 20s in a suit who slightly resempled Joaquin Phoenix spun around quickly as I said that. He looked at me and he patted me on the head and he smiled. I’ll never know who he was: perhaps family, or an associate, an employee, or just someone paying respects.
But I’ll never forget that smile. Ray Liotta had NOTHING on that smile. It seemed happy, picture-perfect. It looked happy. But even at age 5 I could feel it: that man, you left alone. And if he smiled, I had just one word of advice for you.
Run.
If correspondence through mail counts as “knowing” someone, then I “know” one of the most prolific serial killers of all time.