X-Entertainment | Halloween Countdown ’08: Clever Filler Survey.

Halloween Countdown ’08: Clever Filler Survey.

Tonight, your mission is to tell everyone about things and experiences that have scared you. Sincerely scared you. Movies, odd sitcom episodes, wild animals, UFO sightings -- talk about your experiences in the comments. And keep it light. We've all had sick people in our families. I'll give the matter some thought and post my own a bit later.

Posted by Matt on 10/16/2008. E-mail me!

Discussion Thread: 211 comments

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You can always tell a poltergeist to lay off the noise. I have been in places with the little buggers, and after a while, you either get too creeped out, or too annoyed. You haven’t lived until you get to tell a spook that’s been opening and closing high cabinets to knock it off.

Chestnuts roasted by kingklash @ 10/17/2008 12:41 PM

If you ever get a chance, man, go to Savannah. You can walk around the city with an a drink and it’s perfectly legal, full of haunted places, beach, and oddly enough, at least 30 magic/oddity shops. It’s a creepy place but so cool.

Chestnuts roasted by Bill @ 10/17/2008 12:46 PM

Blazer – I have to agree, it’s pretty funny NOW. But 21 years ago I was the kid with the largest bowl of chocolate tooth rot on the planet – in a slightly damp She-Ra costume.

Chestnuts roasted by freakin_crazay @ 10/17/2008 12:50 PM

When I was 12, I made the mistake of watching The Exorcist at my cousin’s house, which absolutely ruined me for the following two or three months. One night shortly thereafter, back at my house, I was lying in bed, trying desparately to go to sleep (glancing at the clock every few seconds, calculating how little sleep I was going to get if I wanted to get up and get ready in time for the bus), when I heard a small pop in the ceiling in the corner opposite of my bed. My house was always settling somehow, especially during windy fall nights, but I was still on high-alert mode. You know the feeling, your eyes are as wide as they possibly can be, you can feel the blood rushing to your head, you can even hear your own pulse wooshing through your ears. That was young Armathrillo, rationalizing away a small creak while simultaneously preparing for an untimely death couresy of Lucifer and Linda Blair. As the wave of “don’t be ridiculous, it’s just wood” was preparing to wash over me, I heard another pop, then a scratch, then an absolutely maddening scurry, something was dragging itself accross my ceiling directly towards me! I pictured some gravity-defying baby with no legs and claw-like hands making its way towards me (think Trainspotting mixed with something from Silent Hill, though I hadn’t experienced either of those yet). I jumped straight the hell up and tried to make my way out of the room, and instantly went from out-of-breath to tunnel-vision to blind and stumbling. I stubbed every toe I had, and somehow between my room and my parents’ room, managed to calm down enough to explain that there was a fucking demon spawn in my room.
Mom and Dad came back with me, and I thought, “great, now it’s not going to do it again.” But it did! Clear as anything! It was the real deal! Though, we couldn’t see what was making the noise. Mom was almost as freaked out as I was. Dad, as always, was cool as a cucumber. “We’ll take care of it in the morning.” “Take care of what in the morning?” “The squirrel.” And, yeah, he was right. Though, who knows, it might’ve been possessed. Right? Right.
Cheetara: This was my favorite/most hated picture from Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark. I hate spiders.

Chestnuts roasted by Armathrillo @ 10/17/2008 12:55 PM

this super-violent Charlie Brown parody done by a Simpsons writer in 1986, called BRING ME THE HEAD OF CHARLIE BROWN, is really creepy/disturbing and surreal:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KPvogcM5FWU

Chestnuts roasted by Axel Redgrave @ 10/17/2008 1:36 PM

Some things that have scared, (and scarred) me:

Close Encounters of the 3rd Kind – especially the scene where the UFO ship comes down & abducts the kid. It’s clever that you never actually see the aliens, yet get scared shitless, (especially when they start unscrewing the screws on the floor, or their POV as they’re coming down the chimney).

Poltergeist – that fucking clown doll. I HATE HATE HATE clowns even to this day! Then when that big head popped up as Craig T. Nelson is pulling on the rope? Who would’ve expected THAT? Now the movie’s getting lampooned by him in commercials. Still scary as hell.

Tales From the Darkside TV show -Episode: Inside the Closet. Those red eyes. Oh God those red glowing eyes! Then when that little hand/claw just missed grabbing the girl’s foot? And then the payoff when we finally see the monster. Too bad the corny ending takes some of the edge off of the episode. As soon as I saw it was that episode, I couldn’t watch it.

Scream – (The original). Really tense & scary scenes all throughout. You never knew when someone was gonna get killed or who was doing the killing. Too bad they had to do Scream 2, Scream 3, Scary Movie & all the other knockoffs that have since marginalized the film.

Chestnuts roasted by Larry @ 10/17/2008 1:49 PM

My story is creepy but it scared me more than anything. I was about 9 years old. I had just been out in the playground and walked back to my aunt’s house with my cousin. Back then those white canvas Keds shoes were pretty popular. I noticed they looked stained on the toes like a dark brownish color. I didn’t think to much of it because I figured I may have stepped in something. Anyway I decided to take my shoes off and about had a fit. My feet were bleeding, not just one foot, both feet were bloody. I ran to tell my aunt confused because my feet didn’t hurt like I would have stepped on something or had blisters or anything like that. So she fills up the bathtub and makes me sit on the ledge to soak my feet and I cry and am screaming at the top of my lungs because it burns so freaking bad. I couldn’t stand having water on them. She started toweling them off and inspecting them to see if there were any cuts or openings. Not a single cut on my feet, no blisters, no nothing just blood. Unfortunately that isn’t the most horrifying part of my story. My cousin committed suicide later that evening. Years later in high school I took a psychology/sociology class and learned about stigmata. It makes me scratch my head still. was it? wasn’t it? was it a sign? why me? /off topic I am heading to Gettysburg and the Cashtown Inn tomorrow, so wish me luck on finding some ghosties!

Chestnuts roasted by michelle @ 10/17/2008 2:05 PM

Alf. I must have been about 5 when it was on. That weird brown dude scared the shit outta me.

Chestnuts roasted by Jambamagamba @ 10/17/2008 2:09 PM

just remembered another totally freaky TV show moment – there was a Halloween episode of Punky Brewster called “The Perils of Punky” that was two-part story. Punky and her friends battle some crazy evil monster/spirit/giant spider thing and it turns her friends into demons. The part that freaked me out the most was when Allen was embedded in a cave wall with just his head sticking out, and with demon eyes and teeth. This was one seriously messed up episode. Check out the last part here:

Chestnuts roasted by Carpeteria @ 10/17/2008 2:14 PM

Great stories everyone! I only wish I wasn’t reading these at work under fluorescent lights so that I could creep myself out a little more. Here’s mine. So I was around 7 or 8 at the time. One night, I wake up with a sore throat and a cough. I feel horrible, so I get out of bed and go into my parents’ room and wake up my mom. She and I walk down the long hallway from our bedrooms, then through the living room. She goes into the kitchen to get some medicine, turning on the lights and rummaging through the cabinets. You know how when your eyes are adjusted to the dark, turning on a light is really harsh, so I just stand in the dark in the living room, resting against a chair, waiting on her. When she’s done, she walks past me and I follow her back to our bedrooms. She used to always wear these long, flowing silky night gowns, so I grab onto a handful of nightgown and let her lead the way. Only, for some reason, she turns and goes into the spare bedroom instead. I walk just into the room and think “this is weird” and let go of her nightgown. Suddenly, she’s gone. I get panicky and run back into the kitchen where I find my mom, still rummaging through the cabinets. So, yeah. True story. Granted, it’s a true story from a possibly feverish kid, and aside from a few bumps in the night, nothing like that ever happened again at our house, but who knows? It’s still the scariest thing that ever happened to me.

Chestnuts roasted by velouria_78 @ 10/17/2008 2:27 PM

Great stories, I especially enjoyed Jesus’s and Bill’s.

When I was in elementary school, I was in the gifted program. The building we went to for gifted classes used to be a funeral home. I never saw/heard/sensed anything, but anytime I went up or down the stairs in that place, I got this weird, creeped-out feeling, and took those stairs two at a time.

Chestnuts roasted by Teddy Ray @ 10/17/2008 2:30 PM

Hm… I remember one time when I was four I saw Jay Jay the Jet Plane and had a dream that there scary happy faces were trying to kill me. My mom took away the tape… mine is patetic.

Chestnuts roasted by Aaron @ 10/17/2008 2:44 PM

As a child, I once saw a news broadcast wherein there was a crude animation demonstrating the way they would be fixing the Hubble Space Telescope. I was so afraid of the images on the screen, I was irrationally afraid of the Hubble Space telescope for years, and would hide behind the couch whenever it was mentioned.

Chestnuts roasted by podkayne @ 10/17/2008 2:47 PM

Oh my God, how could I forget the nightmare episode of Facts of Life?!?!? I don’t know if it was a halloween episode or not, but it scared the life out of me! All I remember now is Natalie being choked to death with fuzzy dice – which really upset me because she was my fave – and someone wearing a pig mask wielding a chainsaw.

Chestnuts roasted by bitchpants @ 10/17/2008 3:02 PM

This should have been the SNT!
I LOVE ME SOME GHOST POSTS!!!

Chestnuts roasted by ashley @ 10/17/2008 3:03 PM

The worst experiences for me are late at night when my brain dredges up music and defunct closing logo jingles from television shows I watched early on in my childhood.
The worst was when I was going through summer session studying for my American Government final. Three days were spent almost sleepless with the second variation of the Muppet Babies end music (The Muppet Babies/Little Muppet Monsters suite) playing endlessly in my head on a loop. By the third night, after my test, I was on the verge of freaking out.

Chestnuts roasted by palmerholic @ 10/17/2008 3:04 PM

My Grandmother used to teach an ROP class on Hotel operations. The hotel she taught out of was the actual Queen Mary in Long Beach which is well known for being VERY haunted. I used to frequent the Queen Mary with her and help out with little tasks like alphabetizing and such when I was a kid. She had an office that had a door that would NEVER stay shut. And when I say never I mean, even if it was firmly closed and locked from the inside. We would be sitting in her office and working on stuff with the door locked and it would just open itself up. Neither my Grandma or I had opened it. My Grandma was so used to it opening that she would always say something like “why can you just stay put? You open that door to get in and then you want to get right back out again?” It was like she talked with this thing that was opening her office door. Soon enough I learned to expect the door to open on its own too. It didn’t alarm my Grandma so why should it alarm me right?!?! Well one time she left me in her office alone while she attended to some other business and the door began to open itself again while I was there alone. But this time the door slammed shut. Up until now, whatever was moving the door was pretty gentle but this seemed aggressive. I freaked out and sat in my Grandma’s chair in the fetal position and waited for her to come back. When she did come back I had to get up and unlock the door from the inside again (since the “ghost” had re-locked the door after slamming it) and my Grandma could see the worry in my face. I told her what had happened and she said to me “Darling, Trudy would never do something like that…she is a friendly ghost, like Casper!” I assume that she used Casper as an example as I was a child and that would be a comparison that I would understand.

I don’t know why she called her that but I do know that “Trudy” slammed that door and scared the crap out of me. My Grandma thankfully never left me alone in her office ever again. But the door antics never stopped…the door opened itself until the day she stopped working there. I often wonder if it still does the same thing or if “Trudy” just liked hanging out with my Grandma.
I know what you think…and yes…this is a true story.

Chestnuts roasted by Wanda @ 10/17/2008 3:06 PM

I’ve always seen ghosts, and usually they simply stare at me a bit, and we each move on, but since I moved to Japan, only the less benevolent kind have been around. Despite noticing things like ghosts, I’m fairly oblivious to the real world. It wasn’t until my girlfriend pointed it out that the architecture of this apartment is really…odd. Nothing that would jump out at you, just random slants in the ceilings, and the fact that all the walls seem like they’ve just been put up recently. At one point this obviously wasn’t an apartment, but there’s nothing inherently scary about that. What was scary was waking up unable to move, with someone sitting on my chest stealing my breath. That was when I bought a cat. Cats keep ghosts at bay, which may sound ridiculous, but I’ve never seen the two together, and that works for me. I always thought my cat was cute because she would stare right through the crack in the doorway into my bedroom all night long, just watching me, but the the other day I noticed her doing the exact same thing whether I was in there or not. I would say it was just a cat being a weird cat if I didn’t know there was an old man with a grudge who spends his time pacing my room, waiting for my cat to go away. So what I really want to know is, what was this place before it was an apartment?

Chestnuts roasted by N @ 10/17/2008 3:11 PM

Great stories everyone, thanks for reminding me why I love this time of year so much. I’ve got one to add to the mix: When I was about 12 years old I went over to a friend’s house to spend the night. We were planning on going camping in the vast stretch of woods behind his house, and had been excited about this for the past week or two. We set out with our tent and sleeping bags, and after getting fairly deep into the woods we found what looked like some sort of altar in a clearing, with all sorts of bones around it. I don’t think they were human, but they were bigger than like chicken bones. Almost immediately I was overcome by this terrible feeling, almost to the point of nausea. I turned to my friend and told him how I was feeling and he said he was experiencing the exact same sensations. We quickly decided to get out of the woods and hightailed it back to his house. The scariest part was that around midnight that night the phone rang, and it turns out it was my mom. She was calling my friends parents to make sure we were OK because she had just had a dream about us being tortured in the woods by a witch. My mom isn’t easily excitable, so this dream must have really scared her senseless to call my friends parents in the middle of the night! To this day she still claims that dream was one of the most frightening and realistic she had ever experienced. It still chills me to think about what might have happened if we ended up staying in the woods that night.

Chestnuts roasted by viva haterade @ 10/17/2008 3:20 PM

Carpeteria!! I was just about to comment on that! I watched that episode recently as a grown up and it still freaks me out. The Allen head was the worst part for me too.

PS, I love this thread.

Chestnuts roasted by Mary Mary @ 10/17/2008 3:23 PM

That Simpsons episode where Homer builds toddler Bart a bed that looks like a demonic clown. Then Bart imagines the clown’s face lunging towards him, laughing like a maniac. I think that fucked with me more than anything that scared me in my childhood. Even though I’m a huge Simpsons fan, I refused to watch that episode till I caught it when I was 19. While that scene doesn’t scare me anymore, it does kind of give me the chills remembering how much it used to freak me out as a kid.

Chestnuts roasted by Stevus Erectus @ 10/17/2008 3:28 PM

I meant to mention this before, but I’ve never heard of sleep paralysis before, but I’ve experienced it! I went somewhere with my dad once and stayed in the truck while he went in the store. Well, I dozed off, but when I woke up, I couldn’t move! My eyes were open, I could see, but I couldn’t move a muscle! Freaked me out, but I never told anyone, and it never happened again. Thanks for reminding me, anniemagus!

Chestnuts roasted by Teddy Ray @ 10/17/2008 3:51 PM

I love that bit CAN’T SLEEP— CLOWN WILL EAT ME!
I just want to know why Homer made such an ugly-ass clown.

Chestnuts roasted by palmerholic @ 10/17/2008 4:08 PM

Rhino, I think you are talking about the Recognizers. They tried to stomp Tron when he made his escape. I was in a cemetary in
Mexico when some joker blew a truck horn. I did this to a
cousin of mine. When we were watching Arachnophobia, we were
watching the scene where the British dude was in the barn. When
the spider lander on him and bit him, I put my hand down on
her shoulder. She screamed. I was lucky she didn’t chase me
down the street for it. And for the guy who mentioned Large
Marge, I still won’t watch that scene willingly. And I’m an adult
now.

Chestnuts roasted by LoneStar76 @ 10/17/2008 4:08 PM

Hmm.. Stomping, yes. That sounds right. Maybe I’ll google it and see how silly it probably was.

Chestnuts roasted by Rhino @ 10/17/2008 4:17 PM

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