Oh yeah, my sister was once robbed at gun point. That was a pretty scary thing to hear about. She still hasn’t gotten over it.

Chestnuts roasted by Ben @ 10/17/2008 2:21 AM

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Many years ago, me and my friends would play hide and seek in one of the cities oldest graveyards “Old Gray”. A couple of scary things happened, the worst being the time when after setting in my hiding spot for 15 minutes or so without seeing or hearing from anyone else (there was around 12 of us) I started walking along the main path towards the gate.  From the corner of my eye to my left I noticed a large black figure keeping pace with me on the other side of the path  – 10 feet or so. I refused to turn and look directly at it and just began to nervously talk out loud, hoping one of my friends would answer. All that came back was a heavy breath/moan noise from the thing on my left. I picked my pace up a little bit, as did the figure. Only now it began to talk, saying something along the lines of “come here boy”. A quick glance over just to be sure one of my friends wasn;t messing with me made revealed a hand reaching toward me in a grasping manner… though it was still several feet away and couldn’t reach me. It never stepped onto the path, but stayed in the grass.  I was begining to lose my cool and panic when out of the blue I could suddenly hear my friends screaming and calling my name – from outside of the cemetary gates. I finally just broke into a dead run and never looked back.

I found my friends all hiding in various places outside the gates, some as far as 3 blocks away. They all told me stories of seeing the black thing walking around. A couple of them had been hiding behind what they thought was a statue for a couple of minutes before seeing it move it’s head and stare down at them.

* a few years ago, I was looking up haunted places around town and came across a few stories of people claiming that Old Gray is haunted by a Black Aggie.    Was that what we saw? I’ve always had my doubts, my best guess was we stumbled across other people in there for whatever reason and they decided to have some fun at our expense. But it was one of the worst scares of my life.

** Also – Matt or anyone else wanting Halloween themed items – Jones soda has 3 Halloween flavored sodas. I don’t remember the flavors, but the cans have large faces of Wolfman, a vampire and Frankenstein monster on them. Target has them for $1.99 for 4 8oz cans.

Chestnuts roasted by Hippie Joe @ 10/17/2008 2:44 AM

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Sorry about the sloppy coding; I thought I’d hit “preview.”

Chestnuts roasted by Alex @ 10/17/2008 4:11 AM

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And sorry about that post.  Mild newb confusion here.  I meant to link to an old “Operation” commercial (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TnjT1AloSNw) that would send me running downstairs as a kid whenever the Smurfs went to commercial.  I would actually hold my ear against the door to listen for when the show was back on and it was (presumably) safe.

Speaking of “screamer” videos, it seems a fire safety commission in Britain used the same format for one of their public service announcements.  I won’t link to it, but be assured it’s even worse than that fake car ad with the zombie at the end.

Chestnuts roasted by Alex @ 10/17/2008 4:15 AM

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Ok, here’s a weird one. (and I apologise to everyone if it’s kinda long!)

Around the beginning of December in 1999 (I was in my second-last year of high school in Pakistan) this really crazy story broke in the local news about a serial killer who had kidnapped, tortured and killed over a 100 young boys, dissolving their bodies in a big tank of acid in his house. He’d actually not even been caught..he’d just gone into the police station and reported it himself, told the police where to find the bodies, then walked out again (yeah…I know, I don’t think he was in the best of mental health, and the police weren’t exactly on the ball either).

Anyway, I used to walk down to the nearby video store a lot to rent movies in those days (it was about a 15 – 20 min walk). I’d take this inside road past all these houses, and the road would curve down and around to the shops at a pretty steep angle (my brother had actually had a BAD car accident on that road a few years prior, so I always felt wary of it). I’d usually go down in the evenings, just about twilight, and it could get really spooky (Street lights were, of course, non-existent!).

As I was returning back home one evening (just past twilight, but the stars weren’t out yet), there’s a guy standing outside a house, smoking and mumbling to himself. I walked past, he made eye contact with me, then he smiled and nodded “hello”. I nodded back to him. All of a sudden he flicked his cigarrette at me angrily and in a really guttaral voice, said “behen CHOTH!” (a common Urdu curse word that roughly translates into “sister-f*cker”).  I freaked out and jerked back, and just tried to ignore it and walk on.

All I could think of was that new story and the 100-boy killer, and I could feel each foot of mine actually shaking as I was walking. I looked back and I couldn’t see him, but I just kept walking on, trying not to break out into a full fledged run home (because I’m oh-so-tough, right? ).

Anyway, I get to the top of the road, and the SAME guy is standing right there in front of me again, and he’s still smoking a cigarette, and he had some kind of switchblade or knife in his other hand! I still don’t know HOW the hell he got in front of me, but it scared me like crazy to see him there again. My heart pretty much thumped away like a jackhammer and I couldn’t stop myself from breaking into a sprint. I just ran like a maniac all  the way home. I kept having this image of him throwing the knife at my back as I was running; and even as I ran into my house I was sure there’d be this knife sailing past me, whooshing past my ear like some scene out of a movie.

Nothing happened though. I got inside, locked the door, ran into the kitchen. I then I realised I’d dropped the movie while running. There was NO  way I was going out again that evening. I ended up paying the lost-cassette fee to the videostore. Never even tried to look for the movie either (I think it was “Blue Streak” actually….). Never saw the guy again, but I never walked down that road at night again either.

Scared me like mad at the time , funny to think about it now I guess!

Chestnuts roasted by divechaz @ 10/17/2008 5:33 AM

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To JESS: I am originally from the Scranton area. Suscon Road is nuts! HEre are a few scary tidbits, since, for some reason this stuff gravitates toward me. 1) I got a part-time job in college (1982) as a janitor at our Parish school. (St. Mary’s, Dickson City) The guy who was full time janitor, and also the Gravedigger at the church cemetery got pneumonia, and I had to fill in for him. For WEEKS. Although in modern times they now use a backhoe to dig the graves, the gravedigger has to jump in with a shovel and square off the grave, so when they lower the concrete vault, it will sit properly. One time we had to dig a hole in an “old” section of the cemetery. The State of Pennsylvania didn’t require concrete vaults until 1965, and the grave we were digging was between 2 other graves already occupied. One from 1949 and the other from 1956. Now, despite the fact they were required in 1965, concrete vaults were coming into vogue after WW2. So to hedge our bets, when the guy with the backhoe arrived, we told him to favor the side of the new grave toward the grave from 1956, hoping there would be a vaulted coffin in there. If there was a concrete vault, the job would be a piece of cake, since you just hop in, scrape the dirt clean, and line up the new vault. That, and you don’t have to worry about breaking up the decomposed remains of the dead person already in there. So the backhoe was going further and further, and no sign of a concrete vault. We were already 7 feet down. (the term 6 feet under is a myth. Technically, there is no legal requirement for how deep you have to go. Some vaults are 3 feet below the surface!) And we see the ground is really wet too; we must have also hit a mini water table. Then we smelled it. And right before our eyes, the dirt along the side our hole that faced the grave from 1956 crumbled away, and THERE IT WAS!!! Scary as shit, a f***ing coffin. And not a metal one, a wooden one. As the dirt crumbled, little rivulets of water were trickling from the bottom of this rotted, decomposed coffin. And it smelled. The water must have collected in the space inside this coffin. If you are wondering what it looked like, imagine a generally flat dirt wall of the grave, and you could just see the one flat side of this wooden, Dracula looking coffin, flush along the wall of the grave. So the dudes with the backhoe took a breather, and I guess this was the natural moment in that day’s endeavor for me to get in the hole with a shovel, and square off the bottom of the grave. I jump in, and my head is a foot or so below the top of the grave. The stink is incredible; there is nothing on earth that smells like a decomposed human being. As I mentioned, the dirt was wet, and mucky, and I was having a hard time getting leverage to toss it up OUT of the hole, instead of placing it on the grass if the hole was just under 6 feet. So the guys with the backhoe tell me to stand to the far side of the grave, and they will try to scoop up some of the muck. You never think about it, but when a backhoe gets to work, they have to rev up the RPM’s of that thing. Which in turn caused the ground to vibrate. Now, what happened nest occurred in about 2 or 3 seconds, and we all saw it happening at the same time. The vibration of the backhoe caused the walls of the grave to vibrate. Now, because we had dug down 7 feet, we were about 2 feet below the coffin in the next grave. As I stood there the bottom of the coffin was at about my knees, and the top was around my elbow. In what seemed like a slow-motion 1 or 2 seconds, the wall of the drive started to break up. My adrenaline shot up, and my brain started into slow motion mode as well, you know, that mode that everyone experiences before something bad is going to happen. (i.e. a car accident, falling off a ladder, etc) Just then the backhoe assistant guy yells, “It’s caving in! You better get out of there!” But I’ll tell you, it’s like all those stories when someone is in a life and death situation and they get that super human strength. One second I was standing in the hole, and the next I was like Superman coming up out of there. I got up quick enough in time to turn around and see the entire volume of earth and coffin tumble out to where I was just standing. A worst case scenario would have been that the whole deal would have caved in on me, and I would have been on CNN in a “fluke,tragic death” story. It could have happened since the top of the hole was a foot above my head. I bet all of you are wondering what we saw when the crumbled remains of the coffin and occupant tumbled out into the daylight. Well, since there appeared to be an underground spring percolating through there, the solid remains of that person appeared to have been converted into a mass of reddish clay. That’s my guess since this clay looked nothing like the dirt around it. But it still smelled to high heaven. And when the funeral was over, and I had to manually shovel the pile of dirt into the hole, the dirt was mixed with shards of wooden coffin, and that clay like substance. Ashes to ashes, as they say…

Chestnuts roasted by Alexander @ 10/17/2008 6:20 AM

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Mine’s not as creepy as most of the others, but it scared the hell out of me at the time anyway.

I was about 9 or 10. It was late fall/early winter, as I recall, and laying in bed, trying to get to sleep. There was nobody else in the room, and the radio was off, but suddenly I started to hear something, very faintly. At first I thought it was just some machinery from the industrail part of town (we lived less than half a mile away from it, so that wasn’t unusual), but it wasn’t like anything else I had heard before.

It started off very faint, sounding kind of like courdoroy pants zip-zopping past each other as you walk, but not really. It very slowly grew louder. At first I was just curious, but I quickly started to get nervous as it seemed to grow closer.

My room wasn’t pitch black, as the the sky was clear and the moon was full-ish, and there was a faint light coming from under the door, which was right accross the hall from the bathroom, which had a nightlight in it, so I could sort of see, but just barely. The sound continued to grow, and I didn’t even think to hide anywhere – I can’t say I remember why that didn’t occur to me, though. As I tentatively listened to the sound draw ever closer, the inky black shadows in my room seemed to draw together, forming a swirling vortex which shaped itself into a sort of face, but horribly distorted and extremely disturbing. The sound, by this time, was much louder, and seemed to originating from directly outside my window. From what I can remember of it, it sounded somthing like a combination of a person sawing throug tough wood, and someone panting heavily. I was amazed that neither my parents or my sister had come in to see just what the hell was making that noise- it seemed THAT loud, almost deafening.

Scared beyond any rational though, to the point that I don’t think I could possibly have moved if I’d wanted to, all I could do was watch, wide-eyed, as the shadow face opened it’s mouth wide, wider, impossibly wide, even for something that was only made out of shadow. The sound suddenly stopped, and I thought it was over… but after a second, the face emitted the loudest, most horrifyingly inhuman, tortured scream that I have ever heard, even to this day. It seemed last forever, but I don’t think it was even a full five seconds before I… well, I didn’t get out of bed so much as it seemed to instantly vaporize from underneath me. I ran so fast to my parent’s room, in the other end of the house, that I don’t think they even realized I had come in for a few seconds- and this was in a cheap mobile home, where every step seemed to thunder through every room in the house, no matter how quietly you tried to walk. I don’t think that I’d had ever moved faster before, or ever even come close since.

My dad went to my room to check it out, but said he didn’t see or hear anything. I was clingig to my mother and shivering the whole time he was gone, and even afterward it took me a couple hours to stop trembling. I refused to even go into my room without another person for months, and slept (when I did sleep, which wasn’t often) on the couch for around a year, with all the light in the living room on.

Chestnuts roasted by Isaac @ 10/17/2008 7:30 AM

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I’ve had many things that have scared me in my younger years, most of which have fallen into the chasms of my mind as the years have passed. But one that does stick with me is from when I was about 3 or 4, definately before school age.
One day my mother and I went into the local chemist (that’ll be drug store for US readers). While my mother was paying at the checkout, I reached up towards something or other colourful on the counter. The lady on the till snapped “Don’t touch that, or I’ll cut your tale off”. I ran crying out of the store – well which like 3/4 year old wouldn’t.
The lady appologised to my Mother, saying that she often said it to children in the store and it made them laugh(!)
I refused to go back into the shop for months and months afterwards – well which niave little 3/4 old wouldnt – not only did I think that this old battleaxe was going to yell at me, but that she was going to CUT MY TAIL OFF!!!! ….The fact that I didn’t actually have a tail didn’t occur to me!

On the TV/Film front, I am seldom truly scared; the only time I have truly been spooked up (and I’ve mentioned this before on the site) is the original version of ‘Dawn Of The Dead’. It was about 1996, and was on television for the first time, very late at night. I happened to click onto it, and was chilled by it, but couldn’t turn off. I had a job interview the next day (I was about 18) but couldn’t sleep after that. I slept with the light on that night, I’ll openly admit!! BTW, ‘Dawn Of The Dead’ now rivals ‘Back To The Future’ as my all-time favourite movie!

Chestnuts roasted by Jay Firestorm @ 10/17/2008 7:53 AM

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U know the bit on the ring when the music starts an she comes out of the tele..

Chestnuts roasted by Blazer @ 10/17/2008 8:08 AM

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Who Framed Roger Rabbit. My parents thought a film about cartoons would be fine for kids. Nope.

On another note, is anyone else having difficulty listening to Sounds of the Seasons online?

Chestnuts roasted by TB Tabby @ 10/17/2008 8:27 AM

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These jack-o-lanterns are pretty scary: http://ptnoticias.com/pumpkinway/

Chestnuts roasted by welma @ 10/17/2008 8:52 AM

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Casual Jeff: That is some remote countryside down there in that part of Virginia. My wife’s family has a house at Lake of the Woods, and it could get creepy in broad daylight in them parts! I hate to be a hog in these ghost stories, but Casual Jeff reminded me of one I forgot. Back in the early 1990′s, I used to be a Civil War re-enactor. (Ok, insert giggles here). And in May of 1994, I was driving through that general area of Virginia to meet my buds for a march the next day we would be doing. We were going to march to Spotsylvania Courthouse, and I was coming down from the area of the Wilderness. It was about 9:30 at night, and despite the long drive from PA, I was still bright eyed, refreshed, and in total clarity. I was driving what is essentially a winding country road with trees on either side. Now, that very night it was the 130th anniversary of the last day of the Battle of the Wilderness. Now, if you’re not a CW buff, follow me here, and you will understand this ghost story. (I came to this conclusion after the fact). On the last day of the Battle of the Wilderness, Grant pulled the Union troops out, and he headed south intending to capture the next important town, which would be Spotsylvania Courthouse. Robert E. Lee saw what he was doing and told all his boys to head south and reinforce the town. Whoever got there first would have the advantage, and it was essentially a race. Imagine the Rebs making a beeline to the south taking every road and evrey cowpath to get there. Fast forward 130 years to the night. Here I am driving at about 65 MPH along a road that goes essentially east and west. I had the high beams on, and was really concentrating on making good time, and really watching where I was going. As I was heading eastbound, I came around a curve, and saw something comin gout of the bushed from the left about 100 feet ahead of me. I looked like a deer, so I did the emergency stop techniques as best I could without locking up the brakes. As i got closer and the “deer” moved into the roadway, it kind of transformed into a silvery, “tingly” looking form into an upright standing creature. Adrenalin was flowing, and I prepared myself for hitting a flesh and blood creature. I knew I would be alright, but I knew I would e calling the insurance company. Although I was slowing down, I was still at around 25/30 mph I saw the incredible side view of a Rebel soldier, running from the left, (i.e. South bound toward Spotsylvania Courthouse). As I finally was coming to a stop, I was right on top of him, and I expected to run him over, but for the fact that just as my bumper went into him, he twinkled away into nothing. I blinked took a breath, and came to my senses realizing that I was now at a complete stop in the middle of the roadway, highbeams illuminating a clear night. And in the next few seconds, my reactive brain stepped aside, and allowed the cognitive part of my brain to process the fact that I had seen a Rebel soldier run out in front of me. Over the years as I told this story, I also tell people I can draw exactly what he looked like (as best as anyone driving that fast could), Maybe I will sketch him again, and link him to a post here…

Chestnuts roasted by Alexander @ 10/17/2008 9:06 AM

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