Scaring the shit out of yourself

[Twelvetrees]

Does anyone else ever get into a mindset where you terrify yourself and make walking around your house an ordeal? I don't know how many times I've looked down dark hallways expecting screaming centipedes or Nemesis to come full fucking kamikaze at me.

[Phlexunger]

I think I do this weekly with the aid of youtube

[Guest boo]

That's surely just an Irish affliction. No, I don't live in constant fear like Irish folk do.

[chassis]

No really.

 

Although I wanted to watch Babadook last night but chickened out after watching the trailer. Maybe next week.

[Guest boo]

One could put it down to continual alcohol abuse, always having 'the fear' when sober.. but I've met t-total Irish who are even worse. Curled in a ball in the corner, not leaving the house for days because they saw a honey bee gathering nectar.. fucking nuts.

[chassis]

Sounds like a well spent weekend.

[eugene]

[peace 7]

Take out all the carpets and furniture from your house to get a solid reverb. Replace all your lights with just one that flickers, then in the middle of the night, cover your naked body in cooking oil and walk around your house holding a kitchen knife going "ha... ha... ha... ha....... cha... cha... cha... cha....... sa... sa... sa... sa......." When you pass a reflective surface and see yourself, you will become very scared with the stark realization that you are becoming retarded.

[Twelvetrees]

One could put it down to continual alcohol abuse, always having 'the fear' when sober.. but I've met t-total Irish who are even worse. Curled in a ball in the corner, not leaving the house for days because they saw a honey bee gathering nectar.. fucking nuts.

Ah yes, the old Irish weakness of alcohol withdrawal. The weakness we would have overlooked had the rest of the world not kindly told us.

[mcbpete]

As a teenager I once freaked myself out when cycling though a forest : I had this crazy notion (that I knew was crazy but continued the thought pattern of 'what if' so much that it became a possibility in my brain) that if I looked behind me that I'd have a vision of myself looking behind me seeing myself looking behind me... to infinity - a perpetual me looking back at me as far as the horizon.

 

The thought was so creepy that for the hours bike ride I refused to look over my shoulder.

[Candiru]

I used to think that an army of midgets from an order of hominid long thought to have been extinct will summon in droves and beat me with hammers while saying horrible threats and verbal abuse. After they bash my knee caps and knock out my teeth, they'll shove and empty wine bottle filled with rabid moles up my butt and beat me until it breaks. This will of course free the rabid moles to devour me from the inside out.

 

They will film all of this and send it to my family who will be traumatized for the rest of their lives. You can imagine why I was so worried. Now I just smoke weed and stay out of trouble.

[logakght]

Thinking about how things could go wrong terrifies me.

[modey]

As a teenager I once freaked myself out when cycling though a forest : I had this crazy notion (that I knew was crazy but continued the thought pattern of 'what if' so much that it became a possibility in my brain) that if I looked behind me that I'd have a vision of myself looking behind me seeing myself looking behind me... to infinity - a perpetual me looking back at me as far as the horizon.

 

The thought was so creepy that for the hours bike ride I refused to look over my shoulder.

trippin' baaaaaaallllls

[usagi]

I did something like this the other night lying in bed reading about haunted places on my phone while trying to fall asleep. I'm coming to the States in Sep and I want to visit some of them that will be on my roadtrip route, e.g. Clinton Road in NJ. anyone know any others in Eastern/North-Eastern US? would love to visit some haunted houses etc. I'll also be checking out Centralia PA aka Silent Hill.

 

whenever I get the jitters I remind myself that I have never, not once, encountered anything supernatural or paranormal of any kind. it doesn't always help calm the nerves because irrational fears be irrational, but it is there as a reassuring fact.

 

edit: I will probably also be passing through Detroit, should be tons of abandoned places to explore there

[YEK]

yeah, ghost stories spook me. aliens and such, not so much

[kokoon]

Does anyone else ever get into a mindset where you terrify yourself and make walking around your house an ordeal? I don't know how many times I've looked down dark hallways expecting screaming centipedes or Nemesis to come full fucking kamikaze at me.

YES! Especially when heading to bed, if I'm alone in the apartment. If I mess it up somehow and have to make a few steps in total dark before I flick the next lightswitch, I totally get terrified. Primarily it's got to do with fear of the dark, I guess, although I generally don't fear it, except in these strange self-induced situtions. Like I kinda feel it coming a few seconds before, but can't do much about it. Like some tiny panic attack. Also, I never really imagine in detail what would come at me, but it could be anything! Anything that doesn't exist, to be more specific, I guess that's the common denominator. I'm scared of the reality falling apart, that would really be a drag - to suddenly have to deal with screaming centipedes in your life, for instance.

Also, I never watch horror movies.

[ghOsty]

I wish I still got scared by shit like this, but I guess I've been into spooky stuff for so long I've kinda become desensitized to scariness, I wish I still got scared kinda easily because that rush you get from being scared is awesome IMO.

 

I've led ghost hunting trips with small groups through places and kept cool while everyone was freaking out, instead I just find it all fascinating. I'm the one in the group every halloween laughing and smiling as I walk through haunted houses. It takes a LOT for ghost stories, scary movies and such to really get to me in that level these days, I find paranormal, occult and other general spookiness fascinating and I love that kind of stuff I just don't get scared by it anymore...

the Silent Hill PT teaser on the PS4 was the first thing that really got to me in a while, and god damn was that great. Playing that in the dark by myself at like 2am gave me true chills for the first time in a while, I'm gonna be SO pissed if that project gets scrapped because of the shit between Konami and Kojima.

 

EDIT: I just read the video games thread....

 

...GOD DAMNIT!!!

[usagi]

^

[schafseckel]

all the time. i have this really bad habit of reading a bunch of scary/dark shit right before bed, it makes leaving my bedroom to take a piss a chore.

[morgang]

No really.

 

Although I wanted to watch Babadook last night but chickened out after watching the trailer. Maybe next week.

 

babadook is one of the best horror movies ive seen in a long long time. fucking incredible movie.

[joshuatxuk]

I did something like this the other night lying in bed reading about haunted places on my phone while trying to fall asleep. I'm coming to the States in Sep and I want to visit some of them that will be on my roadtrip route, e.g. Clinton Road in NJ. anyone know any others in Eastern/North-Eastern US? would love to visit some haunted houses etc. I'll also be checking out Centralia PA aka Silent Hill.

 

whenever I get the jitters I remind myself that I have never, not once, encountered anything supernatural or paranormal of any kind. it doesn't always help calm the nerves because irrational fears be irrational, but it is there as a reassuring fact.

 

edit: I will probably also be passing through Detroit, should be tons of abandoned places to explore there

 

My imagination was quite vivid as a kid, I used to freak myself out a lot before falling asleep. I love ghost stories and often seek out info about haunting and local legends. Besides Texas I lived in Okinawa and that island is ripe with both old lore and ghost stories stemming from post-war incidents.

 

I don't really freak myself out much now but in the last 10 years I've had a few very intense night terrors, including a couple with body paralysis where I actually watched myself squirming in terror, like an out of body experience. One early morning I woke up and saw something black and blurry fly past my head on the ceiling, but I assume it was a dream. That same place I had night terrors I recall waking up to very loud scratching in the walls around my bed and very piercing and scary screaming and cackling that didn't seem easily sourced at any particular direction or place. I assume it was some Halloween prank in our apartment as my then g/f were half-awake as we awoke to this is in terror but it was so bizarre and scary we just never really talked about it again.

 

The other frightening experience involved what I suppose people would call spirits or ghosts, etc. One was at a notoriously haunted dormitory and campus is Austin, TX called St. Edwards. I think I posted about it here years ago. I woke up and I saw a black shadow-y hand in a window moving. I tried to tell myself it was a shadow from a tree branch in the wind but it was a very looping and repetitive motion and it had distinct "fingers" and was almost beckoning me. I was spending the night with my then girlfriend and she rushed over and lowered the blinds. That same night I stayed over I, and I don't remember saying this but I recall the moments shortly after, woke my girlfriend and told her there was a kid standing behind her. She didn't look back and after what seemed like a long time I kind of snapped out of a trance look and asked what was wrong. She hadn't told me this before that night, but everyone had at some point thought they heard a little girl running down the halls in the middle of the night or seen a kid walking around then disappearing as soon as they followed her around a corner. The ghost girl was so well known that resident advisers warned new residents about her. Regarding "the hand," the next morning we were walking around and there was not a tree anywhere near that window. This was on the second floor too, and literally 100 feet from any foliage of any kind. She specifically didn't tell me that last night. Before that I was well-aware of weird stuff going on in that building: scratching noises and banging in the walls, odd popping noises, yet none of which easily explained as the walls and floors were concrete.

 

All of her roommates had been so accustomed to seeing "people" walk in and out of their room, but who weren't actually there, that they started to ignore the apparitions. The freakiest thing was early on the school year they would often wake up to one roommate staring at them wide-eyed but asleep, yet none of them had a history of sleep-walking.

 

I've been around someone who saw apparitions while we were driving down a Texas backroad looking for somewhere to pull off and stargaze. We pulled off of Highway_71 and drove down a county road for a couple miles then turned down a smaller very wooded road I randomly choose (we had never been in this area before, it was all on a whim) and my friend became very, very distraught. She said she wanted to turnaround I felt uneasy but mostly just concerned and worried. This was a pretty dark road, even with high beams on, and there was no easy way to turn around. She was saying that people were literally gathering around us, at this point closing her eyes and cowering. I finally pulled up to a turn and entrance gate of a house, which in hindsight I recall was occupied (truck, upkept) but with no lights on or anything. As I did a three point turn and the lights beamed into the woods I saw were were next to a large and old cemetery. I drove off and got the hell out there. Almost immediately she felt calmer and relaxed but not totally relieved until we got back to the main road and highway. We didn't really talk about it much, she said she felt like whatever was surrounded us was not so much hostile as it was telling us to get out, as if we were in danger. Using google maps I figured out what cemetery we passed and looked up who was buried there. Turns out a few were settlers killed near there in the 1800s by Native Americans and one of the deaths was actually a child who died of exhaustion after running for help as his family was surrounded and attacked.

 

I'm really close to a couple people, both women actually, who without any want or desire have a unusual amount of paranormal activity in their lives. Sporadic and not intense but persistent. They don't seek it out or talk about to anyone but those very close to them. It's funny because I find out what is apparently haunting and/or languishing nearby. They are often very peaceful and surreal sightings - seeing figures or flashes walk into homes or across fields, things like that. I've been told it's not unusual for this oddly graceful, likely Native American spirits, to glide across what is now farmland and ranches in the town my parents live in, including a big open field I can see from their house. I'm actually fairly close to a house that's pretty well known to be haunted, the couple that supposedly haunts it was this black husband and wife who passed away in the house but were never properly picked up by the local hospital, because of segregated medical services at the time. My neighbor, who is in here late 80s now, remembers seeing their bodies laid out on their lawn for an entire weekend until ambulance that served the black community finally picked them up. Neighbors kept them covered but couldn't do much else.

[Soloman Tump]

I like walking through the woods at night with my dog. You can hear all sorts of things moving in the undergrowth. The animals react to the presence of my dog rustling through the leaves, and if I walk with my little LED torch it really adds to the experience of reduced visual sense / heightened aural experience.

 

Can be scary as fuck!

[Twelvetrees]

YES! Especially when heading to bed, if I'm alone in the apartment. If I mess it up somehow and have to make a few steps in total dark before I flick the next lightswitch, I totally get terrified. Primarily it's got to do with fear of the dark, I guess, although I generally don't fear it, except in these strange self-induced situtions. Like I kinda feel it coming a few seconds before, but can't do much about it. Like some tiny panic attack. Also, I never really imagine in detail what would come at me, but it could be anything! Anything that doesn't exist, to be more specific, I guess that's the common denominator. I'm scared of the reality falling apart, that would really be a drag - to suddenly have to deal with screaming centipedes in your life, for instance.

Also, I never watch horror movies.

It's always reality falling apart for me. The other day I was imagining that I was in an unfinished video game and I had fallen through a hole in the map. I was falling down and I realised I'd be falling forever because I had no weapons to kill myself. So then I saw the unfinished enemies of the game, left under the map, moving towards me but their animations hadn't been set yet so they just moved towards me like they were statues on a conveyor belt. When they got to me just the touch of them was damaging me and I could nothing to move away. Freaked me out for hours.

[Squee]

Some movies still scare the living crap out of me, but it's not something that haunts me the next couple of days. My girlfriend on the other hand couldn't sleep after we had watched The Conjuring and The Strangers. Actually, we had to stop The Strangers right after that scene...

 

Anyway, I don't like being alone in my parents' house. That place just feels wrong. When I lived at home I didn't like being alone either because of all the weird shit that has happened there. For instance, one morning when my parents woke up all their living room furniture was placed around their bed. Some other weird shit happened which still freaks me out when I think about it. And yeah, that's why I don't like staying there by myself.

[Leon Sumbitches]

I think most people like scaring themselves like this to a greater or lesser degree. I have great memories of staying over at friends' houses when I was a wee fella and reading ghost stories/ watching creepy shit and genuinely terrifying the fuck out of myself. From time to time I'll still end up on a late night reading binge on t'internet, checking out creepy stories or whatever. Supernatural stuff scares the crap out of me for whatever reason, even though I've had precisely zero evidence of this sort of thing in real life. The closest I've come is sleep paralysis, which can be pretty unsettling.