Haven’t heard from Wanks so I apologize up front!!!
OK Threedonians…. it is of course, Halloween. What are your top 5 Halloween memories? Or in the alternative things that creep you out or scare you?
1. Tarantulas… I can kill black widows and all manner of small spiders all the live long day. When confronted with a tarantula on our back screen a few years ago…. well… I vanquished that beast, but it took some soul searching. Who knew? Snakes, rats, etc. nothing.
2. Salem’s Lot scared the crap out of me when I was a kid — not so much subsequently, but the first scare is the best.
3. Watching Nosferatu alone in the dark in my 20s. Movies don’t usually creep me out… this one was an exception.
4. Exploring a cluster of old missile silos near my college… dark and spooky coupled with the vague fear of federal prosecution.
5. My first visit to a prison psych ward (just visiting as they say in Monopoly). The place smelled like death, guys banging heads on walls, doors, etc. moans, shrieks. It was daylight and it was still unnerving. Subsequent trips not so much obviously once you know what to expect.
5.
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not so much scary, but a movie called Frailty, starring Bill Paxton and Matthew McConaughey (sp?) really, really bugged me after I saw it in the theater. just creepy….I suppose because it it all too plausible.
Salem’s Lot stills spooks me as well.
spiders annoy me and creep me out and I will use everything possible to annihilate them. I know they do good, but why did God have to make them so creepy looking?
my scariest night ever:
I will never forget being in my mother’s house one night alone. Big, empty…I did not know it at the time, but whenever I visited there was always this loud banging from the garage. It came to the fore that night. I was on the couch in the den trying to get to sleep…when the loudest !!!BANG!!! I had heard happened. I nearly had a heart attack. I got up in a hurry, went to the entry way and heard another !!!BANG!!! and the mirror on the dining room (adjacent to the garage) almost came crashing down. Dear threedonians, my heart was racing. I don’t believe in poltergeists and all that mumbo jumbo (my grandmother had just passed away not too long before, and while intellectually I knew she was not there — and why would someone who loved you wanna scare the piss out of you anyway– there is a small part in the back of your mind that says “oh shit, I’m being haunted!”)
turned out the water heater in the garage had a minor gas(!) leak causing it to have little explosions I guess. and was fixed promptly before the house exploded.
but man, that was a rough night.
Things that creeped me out:
1. Visiting Simms Cemetery, a very old graveyard in Athens Co., OH while attending Ohio University. I and the people with me did see a bobbing light that couldn’t be explained. This was years before it became a hot attraction to tick off the owner of the property. The legend of the place includes Old Scratch snatching doomed souls from a large tree once used for hanging. Oh and the place is not very far away from an outdoor altar said to be used by a witch coven. http://www.athensohio.com/whattodo/index.php?page=131&item=672
3. Visiting Moonville in Vinton Co., OH. A deserted train tunnel said to be haunted by a dead brakeman. Even if it isn’t true, the air was hot, muggy and very heavy and the tunnel was home to the biggest spiders my husband has ever seen. http://www.ohiotrespassers.com/moon.html
4. Realizing as a grown-up that I grew up mere miles away from the stomping grounds of the Mothman. My mother, while with-child with me, was on the Silver Bridge the morning that it collapsed. Close call! http://www.lorencoleman.com/mothman_death_list.html
It occurs to me that just growing up in Ohio was a scary experience. Heck, living here now with Gov. Ted Strickland makes it scary.
When a youngun, I used to have those half awake nightmares of a tall woman in one of those ivory colored edwardian dresses holding a loooong hat pin. Because I was between sleep and awake it seemed she was right there coming into my bedroom. creeped me for years.
Even now, watching period movies, and the woman takes off her hat and hatpin I get the willies.
Lets see playing Ghost in the graveyard at the Catholic Cemetery on Halloween Night. I saw something in the old locked chapel that made me a believer. The place hadn’t been used for years and the windows were filthy. It was about 30 degrees, cold, beautiful Halloween night and I was hiding next to the chapel in some bushes while my friend tried to find us. I looked up and could see light from the moon and the street light filtering through the dirty window above me and something black and human shaped passed across that light in the window. I froze as it drifted across the window and was gone and then I screamed and then I ran. I might still be running today had my house been further away. I know now they can’t hurt us but still…
Going to a cool pumpkin patch and finding three awesome pumpkins of varying sizes. I named them Edgar Allen and Poe.
Waxing a high school enemies car. We actually used bar soap. Much easier to get out.
Dressing up as van Helsings daughter in the Frank Langella version of Dracula. That whole scene where Olivier drops his crucifix and you see Mina’s reflection in the water and then the camera pans up and you see her. Best example of what a vampire would actually look like ever.
Look at her in this clip. I did the same costume. Scared the crap out of people!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ODBFQUw7HB8
As a teenager, watching The Shining by myself, with no one else in the house, late at night, with a windstorm blowing outside.
The Howling freaked me out big-time first time around, and still gives me the willies.
1. Having a dream about my mother’s aunt who had died a week before the dream, and then waking in the morning to find out that my parents saw her ghost in their room during the night. Since I thought it was just a dream, I wasn’t scared that night. The next night when it was time for lights out … that’s when I was scared sh*t.
2. Feeling the floorboards in my old apartment move as if someone was walking across them … then having multiple guests see someone walking across the room, independently on different occasions. I never saw it, but I knew it was there.
3.When we were stupid kids, we had a seance in my basement and demanded that Lucifer make his presence known. Just then, a loud clap of thunder sounded accompanied by lightning, and we all cowered like sissies.
4. Seeing The Exorcist as a kid. Still freaks me out.
5. I was home alone at night in the 80s, reading Whitley Strieber’s alien abduction book, Communion, when the dog started barking at our dark hallway. The dog never barked like that for any reason. After reading that book, it freaked me out.
Honorable mention: Watching Yanni videos.
I lived in a place with a lot of historical importance in recent history and the house we lived in was wierd wierd wierd. A few times I had the someone walked past me and it was one of those things that you see it out of the corner of your eye. Thats always fun because your sitting there going, I know I am alone. I know no one else is here so A my mind is playing tricks on me or B: I need to get Father Paul over here with his secret book and the Holy Water. And if you are worried about something going on, the Prayer to Saint Michael is a good way of making whatever it is thats causing you to have issues with your abode to go away.
We had countless poltergeisty episodes in the house I grew up in. Poltergeists are almost always associated with the presence of children, and I must say the episodes decreased as my sister and I aged. I was also a sleep-walker, so I think some of the odd stuff; things moving at night, etc, were me on late night rambles. We had a Ouija board, and nothing much would happen except when one particular neighbor girl and I would use it. Then we would get a lot of intriguing things spelled out.
My sister and I slept in an attic and there was always creepy stuff going on in the crawlspaces. My friends would sense creepy stuff when they slept over, too. One friend told me a house was more likely to be haunted if the individual numbers of the address ad to 13. Ours did.
I’ve had too many odd things happen to mention, and I’ve rationalized most all of them except two. Here is one of them:
In College a had a nightmare that Satan had come into my dorm room and was talking to me; we debate good and evil. It was one of those extremely reaslistic dreams where you dream you are in your bed, and everything in the room looks just as it does when you are awake.
I was scared during the nightmare and still shaken when I awoke. I went to breakfast with a roommate and after 10 mintues or so one of us remarked that the other was unusually quiet that morning. The other (I forget who said what) replied, “I had the strangest dream…” Then we both simultaneously retold our nightmares. They were identical, although our conversations went differently. Like Matt’s tale of his Aunt’s visit, we both dreamt of a visit from Satan. For the record, I think my roommate handled the debate better. I did not reason as clearly as he during the conversation, but I think I was more afraid.
+JMJ+
Oh, wow, Rufus. That’s really creepy. =S
I took a photo in a cemetery about ten years ago, amongst a bunch, that was forgotten all these years. Recently, while looking through photos for nostalgia’s sake, I came across the photo and it shows a ghost, or ghostly activity. I never caught it before. It’s not the type of photo with a blemish that people pass off as a ghost photo. It’s different and has wisps of smoke, or whatever coming out of a statuary grave marker, and there’s an image of the back of a woman and her shoulder length gray hair in the foreground … superimposed over the grave.
That would freak me out. If you go onto you tube or google, google Robert E. Lee’s ghost. Someone took a photo of her mom or somebody at Gettysburg and just over the woman’s shoulder is a man in Confederate uniform. The man’s image is not in color. The photo is. People thought it was a monument but where teh photo was taken there is no monument. The image is of a heavier man than Lee. I am thinking it was Longstreet. Also I found some video of a british cemetery that shows a see through woman visiting a grave. Its been shown not to have been tampered with. Its a bit cool.
Longstreet would have a good reason to haunt the place. I don’t know about the authenticity of this photo, but it would be cool if it were real.
http://home.att.net/~chuckayoub/Jim-Morrison-Ghost.html
+JMJ+
5. Making my own costumes and winning prizes for “Most Original” and/or “Scariest” at my neighbourhood’s pre-Trick or Treating Halloween party. Everyone still remembers my Headless Horseman. =)
4. A Filipino-style Trick-or-Treating, complete with painted dancers beating drums and paper mache giants. (I don’t think I could explain in a comments box.)
3. Getting a betamax tape from my cousin full of Halloween-themed commercials she taped off the TV for me. (She lived in LA; I lived in Manila.) I still remember the “Don’t take unwrapped candy” message featuring the Evil Stepmother from Disney’s Snow White and the pumpkin carver designed so that children could use it safely.
2. Helping my little brothers make their own costumes–and raiding my own closet to help them out, like a good big sister.
1. Now that I’m “all grown up” . . . Annual Halloween party at a friend’s house, where nobody will mock us for still wearing costumes and which always ends with a Horror movie marathon!
I was thinking of posting that. I find it interesting. Of course there are detractors but who knows. I hold onto the axiom: There are more things in Heaven and Earth Horatio than are dreamt of in your science…….