I think I must have a different idea of what is creepy than everyone else... What I was really looking for with this thread was mundane things that become creepy, perhaps because of where they are. Children's laughter for example. Creepy when there are no children around.
I once had a guy stand at the end of the aisle I was in at the store and he just stared at me smiling. I didn't know him. He followed me to the registers and I didn't want to go to my car afterward. I've also been on walks and someone has followed me. Just at enough of a distance I don't know if they are or not. One that was creepy but ended up being okay, I was getting home one night and had to get some groceries out of the car and I heard someone running. I thought maybe I'd need to hurry into the backseat for safety as this guy came flying around the corner of one of the apartment buildings and slammed into the hallway. Then this dog runs up and kind of looks around all tough, like it was about to bite the balls off this guy, and I just stayed still until it ran off.
People and animals standing there staring for no apparent reason. Not necessarily staring at me, but just at anything or nothing at all. Also, darkness. I'm not afraid of the dark.... but I cant sleep with my door open at night. Something about looking down a dark hall creeps me out... like, I keep thinking I'll see something move out there. idk. I'm trying to think of a scary movie that I watched that really stuck with me and why... but the "why" has always been for morbid reasons, not "creepy" reasons.
Yep to J-Horror. I don't mean Hollywood remakes, but the originals in Japanese (with subtitles, obviously).
Nah. Im kind of a J/K-Drama person. If we are talking about foreign horror... The creature in Zone Blanche is pretty creepy. You never really see it, and never really see it KILL anyone. But you see its shadow, and little glimpses of it. Its got horns like branches and stalks people in the woods. You dont really notice it until it moves, then your like "wtf was that???" Oh, the deer spirit from Princess Mononoke, too! I guess deer spirits creep me out?
I can't do J-Horror but Silent Hill is one of my favorite movies. Minus the part in the bathroom. That part is always fast forwarded. I thought of another creepy thing: when I sat next to this girl who used heroin and I didn't know she was on something but she said there were bugs in her face. Said it nonchalantly at first and then spent half an hour drooling onto her desk. She kept asking if I could see the bugs. I could not. But I got her a paper towel and that seemed to help her a bit. I dunno. Just sometimes I remember her kind of tracing her face the way a beetle would while trying to escape the squish. And the dead eyed stare as she drooled. Very disconcerting.
The jingle of an ice cream van on a rainy winters night. Or that time I was putting fuel in my car and I randomly had the realisation that I've never seen a hearse at a gas/petrol station. As I looked up, a hearse was cruising by and the two men were both looking at me as they passed. I caught their eyes as I looked between the two fuel pumps and then a couple of glimpses as they moved passed the various advertising boards and what not. I did the best stiff upper lip I could but it was on my mind the rest of the day.
Once, a long time ago . I was walking home in the early hours. I could hear footsteps behind, so I walked a bit faster . The steps behind did the same . Eventually I was almost running when I reached the house were I lived . I run up the path , to the door , I turn to look at my pursuer . There was a man , stripped to the waste and carrying a suitcase . I let myself into the house.
Years ago, my parents bought an old school house in the Dorset countryside. Opposite was a small church, but other than a couple of farms, there was nothing else around for miles. My Dad said he was regularly woken in the middle of the night by the sound of children singing in the church. If he went downstairs, the sound had always stopped. Mind, he did like his whiskey.
I was backpacking once, on my own, through the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. I stopped overnight at a designated campsite, where I was the only person around. However, a little ways over, there was a tent that looked like it might have held four people. The tent was propped open, there was lots of debris around ...clothing, stuff left over from a meal, an open cooler, camp stools, etc. No car and no people. It was early evening when I arrived. I just assumed these folk had gone off for the day, and would be back at night. I set up my own tent far enough away so when they came back I wouldn't be disturbed. Went swimming (in Lake Michigan) had a nice meal, and went into my tent for the night before it actually got dark, got into my sleeping bag, and was out like a light. I woke up in the middle of the night, to hear footsteps sneaking around my tent—in the dark, no flashlight or anything. I just froze, frantically trying to think if I'd left anything outside the tent that might give away the fact that not only was I on my own, but that I was a young woman on my own. I hadn't. (I'd even brought my bathing suit inside the tent, thankfully.) Anyway, eventually the footsteps wandered off. I didn't close my eyes again all night. As soon as it got daylight, I packed up, got my tent packed ...and headed out. The tent 'next door' was exactly as it had been the night before. Nobody there, no change at all. What happened to those people? VERY creepy.
now that im reading these responses, I'm getting the gist of it. I made a thread months ago about paranormal occurrences, this is a rundown of weirdo stuff: walking on the PA turnpike in the middle of the night with 5 drunk acquaintances after being stranded at a gas station by a pink stretch party bus that picked us up on the side of the road (long story....). hours and hours pass walking (in the wrong direction, we found out), with 2 of the people im with freaking out and crying, all cellphones had died, I was barefoot because my borrowed shoes had broken. Suddenly a light turns on in the distance on a hill. It was a church. an hour later, help came. Got back to campus at like 4am. Mom always said it was our guardian angel looking out for us. doing my homework in my single dorm room at my desk. around 3am, the books on my shelf fall off and land beside me. I dont think anything of it and put it back on the shelf over head. few minutes later, the books fall off again. I put them back, thinking maybe i bumped the desk. few minutes later, the mirror ACROSS THE ROOM falls off of the wall and shatters. I got THE HELL OUT OF THAT ROOM! I had the nun that lived down the hall come and bless my room more recently: my childhood home. We moved into it when I was almost 9. the rooms were painted all sorts of odd colors, except for the door to my bedroom. It was painted white, but you could see that a name on the door was painted over. If you stood far away, you could see "Cynthia" on the door. Growing up, every time something weird happened, my older brother would say "Cynthia's coming to get you" and piss me off. Well, I come home from graduating college.... and the chandelier that hangs in the split level landing above the front door....thats been there since we moved in....with no problems structurally at all...... comes crashing down. No one was hurt, but it was still so weird! And my brother says "Cynthia did it"
Oh goodness, creepiness is perhaps the hardest thing in writing. How in the world does one get a reader to fear something? I knew someone who had an experience like J.T. did. He and his wife were living in military housing, and for some reason whenever they would lose their keys, the keys would end up on the top of their bookcase. They also had weird experiences like seeing visions of an adult male around the house, or doorknobs moving when no one was there. It turned out that the family that had lived in the house before had a grandfather, and that grandfather put keys on top of the bookcase to keep his grandson from getting them. He later died. The couple prayed enough and the spirit went away, but then they heard about someone else in the housing having problems. As for stuff that scares me....it's really abstract. True story, as a kid I was completely frightened by the game over music from Yoshi's Island. I'd figured that if you listened to it until you heard the "twing" sound at the end, you lost your soul. I was also horrified by the secret copyright screen in Donkey Kong Country 2. Grandpa had the Nintendo hooked up to some weird machines to make it work on his old TV, and the cartridge must have detected this, because when I started the game it just loaded the game over screen with this text about how copyright infringement is bad. I was so horrified I almost cried. So I guess the lesson in all of that is that: 1. Interruptions of normal things is creepy 2. Quiet things are creepier than loud things 3. Feeling guilty of something you either didn't do or had no clue you did is the creepiest thing ever. 4. An abstract sense of something wrong is creepier than something obviously bad.
My university was a boys orphanage during WWI. Then became a seminary school. Then a womens college. The nuns basically lived there and died there. Literally.... They built a retirement home on campus so the nuns that went to school there, and taught there, would have somewhere to live (id walk across campus to visit them on holidays). My freshmen dorm was right across from the cemetery where they buried the nuns and the children from the orphanage that had died there. The older wings of the campus, the elevator is still active. Its an old kind of elevator with like an iron gate that you have to shit, and it is really wide. The campus historian says its how they would get the bodies in and out of the building. When i was a freshmen, i heard that the campus was haunted and that people reported seeing a little boy sitting in the cemetery. I thought it was a load of crap. Something the upper classmen told the freshmen. I also didnt believe in that kind of stuff. When i told the historian (who i volunteer under) about the mirror incident, he showed me records of the women who died in that dorm. Apparently, one of the nuns jumped out of the window 2 doors down from where i was living. That freaked me out
Man, I hate those kinds of elevators. The hospital I was in at the end of 2018 reputedly had incidents where at night, people would hear the sound of a patient trolley being wheeled towards them from behind, accompanied by nurses talking. But when they made way for it, there would be nothing there. The hospital had long, lonely corridors and there'd often be no one around. That'd freak me out. One thing that I remember was when I was about 7 or 8. I was making a model rocket. I'd spilled some water on the table and the model was resting upright on top of the water. All of a sudden, it started spinning around, slowly. I hadn't touched it. I put my hand on it and it stopped. I was home alone at the time. I'm sure there's a simple physics reason why it did that but I stopped building model rockets for a while.
They're Ozzy Osbourne's favorite kind. Though for urinals he prefers landmark buildings like the Alamo.
***shift**** I have started using my phone to access this site recently. Big thumbs, little/sensitive touch screen. Best typo ever. Im going to leave it!!
I love to drive. Long road trips, especially. I know some who can't stand it but you put me on a solo haul out in one of the lonely places...throw on some music, fix your speed, and sit back and relax. I do some of my best thinking in those circumstances. The sense of moving light, without the weight of all the crap you own pressing down on you...it's the best kind of peace, with one major exception: Gas stations after dark. Unfamiliar territory? Check. Questionable twitchy types loitering by the doors? Check. That weird green cast you get from old floodlights? Highly questionable restrooms? Having to sit still while you fill up, with your movement options limited and a great big OUTSIDER sign hanging over your head? Oh yeah. Good times.
