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Frightening Filler.

Sorry for the lack of updates for the past few days -- been busy with things that are much less fun than Halloween Cheetos and animatronic slashers. To keep things lively between now and the next post (which will be tomorrow, even if it kills me), how about a quicky spooky survey?

For you commenters: What's the scariest place you've ever been to, and what was so frightening about it? It could be anything from an abandoned penitentiary to a theme park ride.

I figured we were out of good Halloween survey topics by now, but I'm actually very curious to see your answers to this. Go!

Posted by Matt on 10/21/2009. E-mail me!



Discussion Thread: 144 comments

Scary?I would have to say…about the only thing I can think of would be the gas chamber during basic training in the Army.Kinda frightening when there’s no fresh air.Ya see…when you’re in the chamber,you’re supposed to take a deep breath and then lift your mask.I unfortunately,lifted my mask and then took a deep breath.Let me tell you,I thought I was gonna die!Oh and after you lift the mask,you gotta hang around and chill for a few minutes.Not spooky,but definately scary(it was to me at the time anywayz).

Chestnuts roasted by Jason @ 10/21/2009 9:54 PM

This is a difficult one, man…my first haunted house when I was 12 was pretty bad. But I think that the scariest place I’ve been thus far was in the dentist’s chair this April getting my first IV and getting put under for the first time to get my wisdom teeth out. And of course there was another patient ahead of me making my appointment later and having me just SIT there in the waiting room with the tension becoming unbearable.

Chestnuts roasted by Jessica Marie @ 10/21/2009 9:57 PM

I live near New Orleans, a city that’s notorious for being haunted, so I’m pretty used to the creepiness. The worst by far was one of my old band’s practice spaces. Our drummer’s dad converted an ancient pharmacy in our little town (the building’s practically a landmark) into an air-conditioning workshop, and our band practiced in the basement. The boarded-up door for the office of the doctor who ran the pharmacy was still there, as were the shelves where he would keep medicines and stuff. There was an ever-increasing CREEPY aura about the place, and our drummer finally said, “Yeah, he was also the town’s first coroner.” So yeah, that whole time, we were practicing in a a former coroner’s lab.

Chestnuts roasted by Jeremy Whatsisface @ 10/21/2009 10:14 PM

Mansfield State Reformatory, which is basically right down the street from where I live.

It’s where they filmed the movie Shawshank Redemption, which is awesome. But the place is also seriously spooky. There have been all sorts of rumors of ghosts and things there over the years (Ghost Hunters actually did an episode set there).

I can see why. The place is disturbing to the extreme. They make it up as a fun haunted house every autumn, but that actually makes it a lot LESS scary. Hanging out there with guys in masks pretending to kill each other is perfectly alright, but I wouldn’t want to be there alone. I don’t believe in spooks, but it just seems like the sort of place bad things are bound to happen.

Chestnuts roasted by Doctor_Who @ 10/21/2009 10:17 PM

Some abandoned slave shacks on a plantation in the middle of the night. A film company was filming a movie there, and they had taken down the barbed wire fence around the perimeter. After they shut down filming for the night, some friends and I took the opportunity to sneak over there and look around inside the shacks. It was creepy, but the scarier thought was that the owner would come out with a gun, or that the police would show up and arrest us. A car drove up and we all hid thinking it was the cops. Whoever was in that car got out and opened all of our car doors and then drove off. I guess it’s good we didn’t have anything valuable in there. We snapped a few pictures and one came out with a very typical white, casper-like shape in the middle.

Chestnuts roasted by Barbie @ 10/21/2009 10:20 PM

Skid Row at night. The homeless are often times worse than poltergeists.

Chestnuts roasted by mezzanine @ 10/21/2009 10:32 PM

It’s a toss up between breaking into the then abandoned now tore down Byberry mental hospital and the similarly abandoned Pennhurst hospital. Breaking into sppoky places is a hobby of me and friends, and here’s some good links.

http://www.opacity.us/site30_pennhurst_state_school.htm#gallery65

http://www.opacity.us/site10_philadelphia_state_hospital_byberry.htm

Really, those picture put it into perspective way better than I ever could

Chestnuts roasted by Precursor @ 10/21/2009 11:03 PM

In college we ventured to Stull, Kansas which is one of the purported 7 Gateways to Hell. It attracts so many curiosity seekers that they finally tore down the abandoned church. You can Google “Stull Kansas” and see tons of pics and stories- spooky!

Chestnuts roasted by MikeyD @ 10/21/2009 11:30 PM

For me it is a tie between Frankensteins Castle, or at least that is what we called it. The place was decked out and had tons of actors including one that chased me right into the crotch of some hapless bystander.

The other also took place in Germany. The base was an old converted hospital that was only occasionally lit up, leaving lengthy darkened areas…in an OLD HOSPITAL. Quite creepy.

Chestnuts roasted by 9Line @ 10/21/2009 11:32 PM

I went to Alcatraz with my ex-girlfriend five or six years ago when I flew across country to visit her. While I’m sure a shell of what it used to be and what it is in movies, it still creeped me out yet fascinated me all at once.

Chestnuts roasted by Andy @ 10/21/2009 11:36 PM

Some of the scariest incidents for me have happened inside cars.

One time, my father and I were driving home in a from a comic convention in a rainstorm so hard the wipers wouldn’t wash it away. That scared me.

Another time, the skies were so dark I looked outside and saw a tornado. That’s not something you want to see.

I was scheduled for surgery at a hospital a couple hours away one day, but we were supposed to have to have an severe snowstorm. So my mom and grandmother decided to go that night. Of course, the storm hit and we hit an ice patch and skidded. I screamed.

I’ve also been with my mom in a couple of minor accidents, which can be scary.

Chestnuts roasted by King JLA @ 10/21/2009 11:40 PM

Another tale from Grandma’s house.
My aunt was staying with my Grandma for a while. One night my aunt told my grandparents she was going to a party and would be back later that night. It was a warm summer night so both my grandparents spend most of the evening on their porch. As evening turned into late night they wondering when my aunt would come home from her party. Grandma said as they sat on the porch they saw the headlights of huge Cadillac pull into the drive way. May aunt got out of the car, passed my grandparents and barely said goodnight. My grandparents figured she’d had a busy night (in addition to a few drinks) and thought nothing of it. The next morning my grandma asked who drove the Cadillac that dropped her off. May aunt replied that she walked home and didn’t know anyone who owned a Cadillac. The dispute was never settled. My aunt died some years afterward and to this day we wonder who the mysterious “ghost-driver” was. Weird.

Chestnuts roasted by Church @ 10/21/2009 11:44 PM

I have two places:

First is the Municiple Auditorium in Shreveport, LA. It has a long history of ghosts and was recently on Ghost Lab. It is one creepy place. My experience came on a night when we had a meeting in one of the ballrooms. I stayed afterwards to clean up and as we shut off the lights and headed to the front door we heard a scream. It was blood curdling and scared the sh*t out of us. We ran to the front, asked the guard to lock up and got the heck away. The building in itself is spooky enough, but add ghosts and who knows what else and it is too much. They actually do a haunted tour around halloween.

The second was just south of my town, there is an old belltower that was once part of church. As legend goes, a bride hung herself in the tower after her soon to be husband was killed on the way to the wedding. The belltower is all that remains. Across the street is an old country store that was converted to a underground music hall. One night after a concert a few of us wandered over to the tower. We didn’t see or hear anything but there was just a presence, just made the hair stand on the back of your neck and gave me goosebumps.

Chestnuts roasted by tigerfan @ 10/21/2009 11:51 PM

I have two places:

First is the Municiple Auditorium in Shreveport, LA. It has a long history of ghosts and was recently on Ghost Lab. It is one creepy place. My experience came on a night when we had a meeting in one of the ballrooms. I stayed afterwards to clean up and as we shut off the lights and headed to the front door we heard a scream. It was blood curdling and scared the sh*t out of us. We ran to the front, asked the guard to lock up and got the heck away. The building in itself is spooky enough, but add ghosts and who knows what else and it is too much. They actually do a haunted tour around halloween.

The second was just south of my town, there is an old belltower that was once part of church. As legend goes, a bride hung herself in the tower after her soon to be husband was killed on the way to the wedding. The belltower is all that remains. Across the street is an old country store that was converted to a underground music hall. One night after a concert a few of us wandered over to the tower. We didn’t see or hear anything but there was just a presence, just made the hair stand on the back of your neck and gave me goosebumps.

Chestnuts roasted by tigerfan @ 10/21/2009 11:51 PM

Wow this is really sad! I love scary stuff, but yet… I can’t think of a single damn thing that has happened to me, or that I’ve done, that was literally scary in the Halloween sense of the word. This is depressing! :(

Chestnuts roasted by Ryane @ 10/21/2009 11:53 PM

Theme Ride: The Tower of Terror at California Adventures. I’d never been before this summer, and I screamed so hard I broke my voice! It was AWESOME.

In terms of actual places I think the scariest was the home of an elderly couple who went to my church. The whole place had a decidedly Texas in the 1970′s vibe to it. They probably could have filmed the Texas Chainsaw Massacre remake there and done virtually no set dressing. Myself and he other church teenagers were hired to go out there and clean it up– we were raising money for our mission trip to Honduras.

The placed was CRAMMED with EVERYTHING. We made jokes that this was where junk came to bury its dead. They lived in a small house that was PACKED with crap. Rooms full of junk. A whole bedroom stuffed, roof to floor, with plastic grocery bags. Carefully washed and stored used Slurpee cups, dome lids, and scoop straws. Empty Kleenex boxes. Broken toys that had belonged to their kids. This couple was in their late ’70′s, so their kids had to have been in their 50′s.

The couple in question were super, super nice, but their home was SO upsetting. Adding to the weird atmosphere was the wife’s father, C. He was over 100, still alive, and would slowly scoot himself along in his wheel chair, mumbling to himself in a high, broken mumble. He had complete dementia but it didn’t matter, because his voice was so thin you couldn’t make out what he was saying anyway. The best part was when he rolled into the bathroom while I was peeing, because the bathroom had no door, just a tattered blanket. That’s a hell of a thing to do to a 17 year old girl, I’d like it known.

Outside was worse that inside. They had not one, not two, but THREE gigantic Quonset hut hangers jammed FULL of dead cars, buses, RVs, and even a few planes, none of them in working order; supposedly the husband was going to cannibalize the parts from the various vehicles to create a home made RV of some sort, but I really doubt it ever happened. Had they sold all of it, even for scrap, I’m sure they would have made a fortune simply from sheer volume. What made it really fun was the rats: specifically the dead ones that their dogs and cats (of COURSE they had a million of them) would stash among the vehicular corpses to save for later.

We were there ALL DAY, too, from about 5 in the morning until it got dark, so probably 7 pm? Working constantly we barely made a dent, and there were at least 10 able bodied volunteers there that day. One of my friends told me that this couple had four different full sized refrigerators, JAMMED with food, some of which, based on the ice growth, was older than we were. The BEST was when they opened the 4th fridge and got a decomposing deer head staring back. Turns out one of their sons was storing there to have it mounted.

I was so glad to leave their place, and made it my quest in life to never, ever go back. I found out later from my sister that both the husband and wife had been through the Depression; as a result they simply couldn’t bring themselves to throw anything away, even trash.

It was seriously upsetting.

Chestnuts roasted by LemonWitch @ 10/21/2009 11:59 PM

The scariest place I’ve ever been was a mental hospital. Crazy people are freaking scary.

Chestnuts roasted by Revbat @ 10/22/2009 12:14 AM

Wax Museums. I’m creeped out by those places.

As for an ACTUAL place where I felt scared, was the house that my dad’s friend built in the middle of the woods…in the middle of Upstate, NY. It was a well-built house, mind you, but the place was so dark and quiet. Did I mention that he’s also an antique salesman who is into collecting taxidermy? And wasn’t afraid to joke about stuffed owls coming to life in the middle of the night?

Chestnuts roasted by Invader Norbert @ 10/22/2009 12:56 AM

Waverly Hills Sanitorium

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waverly_Hills_Sanatorium

Been going there since I was a teenager. I’m used to it now, but back in the day when we would sneak up there in the middle of the night and walk the halls with nothing but tiny little keychain flashlights… it was pretty fookin scary.

Chestnuts roasted by Kogi Kaishakunin @ 10/22/2009 1:00 AM

Okay Matt, since you requested it: My ghost story.

I have been to Savannah, GA no less that one thousand times. Shit, I used to live there when I was in the Army. But it has only been the past few years that I have taken interest in the history of the old city. And it is a dark and macabre past. Did you know that most of the city is one giant grave yard? They just buried people where ever back in the day. Only the rich were given Christian burial privileges. So Savannah is known to be the most haunted city in America and it was there that I became a believer.

It happened here at The Pirate House. I knew about this place and the fact real pirates used to drink here as well as the ghost sightings but as many times as I had been there before, no luck. Only a fat bill and over priced beer. I dragged my poor ex-girlfriend there every time we visited and she had to put up with my dumb questions about peoples’ experiences.

But last year I went on business and I was able to pop over there at 10pm for a quick few Ghost Ales (excellent). They close at 11pm so I was the lone person at the long bar. I kept my dumb questions to myself because the bartender was busy closing down and didn’t seem like the chatty type. I couldn’t blame her. So, I half payed attention to the game on the flat screen at the opposite end of the bar and flipped through my Blackberry.

Then I heard someone running down the steps, very fast and loud, just out of view where the TV was. The figure stopped smack infront of the screen. I didn’t look right at him but kept flipping through old messages on my phone, quite aware that this rude figure made a better door than a window. Finally I put my phone down, picked up my beer and looked to see who was blocking the view and there was no one there.

I felt like I was floating. Finally, I have touched the ethereal plain. I can’t remember if I was holding my beer or I put it down but just as I was about to close my open jaw the bartender kick the double doors open from the kitchen, holding a glass rack. I about jumped out of my skin. She saw my face and just ginned.

“You saw something, huh?” Her candor towards the matter was about as shocking as the experience itself. I told her what happened and she smiled and nodded the whole time. When I told her about the loud noise of running down the stairs she stopped me and asked me to follow her to the end of the bar. I did so and when I turned the corner every hair stood on end.

There were no stairs at all. It was just a wall and an old wine barrel with a model ship on top. She explained that before the kitchen expanded there used to be a staircase to the upstairs but that had been removed years ago. I think she felt that I needed another drink so she and I went to another bar and proceeded to get drunk. I needed that.

The more I thought about my experience the more comforting it felt. Maybe there is something beyond death? I am hard pressed to believe that when we die there are pearly gates and a list but maybe we do go on? The thought that is disturbing is whatever came down the stairs, stopped for a good five minutes and I don’t think it was looking at the TV. It was looking at me. Goooood God that is creepy!

Chestnuts roasted by Bill @ 10/22/2009 1:10 AM

The creepiest place for me would have to be a place in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma called “Kitchen Lake Bridge”. The legend goes that a witch lived out that way and was killed when her house was burned down. Indeed, there is still a house foundation with a free-standing chimney about a mile or so from where the bridge is. Anyway, down around the bridge are all sorts of piles of trash, some of which are also burnt (supposedly her ghost goes around starting small fires in the area). When my wife and I went down there, we noticed the trash, and we heard something moving through the woods that sounded human. We snapped a few quick pictures and tried to record some EVP, but I think we just ended up with audio of me cursing a bunch because I was scared out of my mind.

Other than that, when I was a kid I went to an after-school care center and every Halloween they converted the basement into a haunted basement and one of the workers would hide in the shadows and jump out to spook everyone (I, being a kid, did not realize that it was someone who worked for the care center and just assumed Freddy Kruger lived in the basement). The following Spring we had a tornado and had to go down there to hide. I didn’t know which was worse: not knowing if we were about to get swept away by a tornado or if Freddy Kruger would pop out of the shadows of the basement at any moment and kill us all.

On a happier note, I found some Mountain Dew Halloween themed cans!

http://www.kj103fm.com/pages/fritoontheradio.html?an=Mountain-Dew-Halloween-Themed-Cans!

(Tried three times to e-mail you the pics, Matt, but I kept getting my e-mail kicked back for size issues)

Chestnuts roasted by Frito @ 10/22/2009 1:20 AM

I live in Transylvania (yep, Romania) and I can tell you that I thought it was all “hype” and over-saturated media crap until I spent one very, long and frightening night in a mountain overpass near the town of Bran. Never, ever went back there nor anywhere close to there!

Chestnuts roasted by Soj @ 10/22/2009 1:22 AM

Creepiest place I’ve been to in recent memory was the Tilly Willy bridge, a local supposed haunted site. It’s even had the perfect name for some local folklore. My boyfriend and I drove over on a clear night, no fog or anything, but when we finally reached the narrow, one-lane bridge with no guard rails, my windshield started to fog up. Whether that’s just an effect of the humidity over the creek or the haunting that people had talked about, I don’t know. But let me tell you, navigating a car down a strip of concrete that’s barely wider than the vehicle itself is pretty damned scary when you suddenly can’t see.

Since the ghost legend is about a woman who tried to cross the bridge in her car and ended up steering the car over the side, that made it even worse.

Chestnuts roasted by Bella Donna @ 10/22/2009 1:30 AM

Precursor – Those pics are scary as Hell. I wouldn’t last 5 minutes in that place.

Bill – Great story! I had an experience with my first flat tire where a man stopped to help me. I swear he told me that he repaired military vehicles, specifically tires, in World War 1 but he didn’t look a day over 60 (keep in mind I’m 26 and this happened about 6 or 7 years ago). I also never shook his hand (something I always do), I don’t remember seeing where he came from or watching him drive off, and I can barely remember what he looks like (I’m great with faces…terrible with names…but great with faces). Both my wife and I believe it was my guardian angel in human form that stopped to help us because nothing else that I can think of surrounding that entire encounter makes any kind of sense. I also found a piece of grass stuck to my shirt when we were done that’s in the shape of a cross that I keep in my wallet to this day.

Finally, sorry about the link in my last post. Click my name for the pics of the Mountain Dew can.

Chestnuts roasted by Frito @ 10/22/2009 1:35 AM

Michigan Central Station, Detroit’s old abandoned train station. It’s fourteen stories of decay. It used to be a gorgeous marble monolith–now, it looks like people have gone through with sledgehammers destroying everything. The stairs are a crumbling death trap, but you can make it to the roof. On the way, you pass floors covered from ceiling to rotting floorboard with graffiti. Some of it, people have purposely made disconcerting. Because all of the windows are busted out, while you’re walking up to the roof, strange gusts of wind will catch you through places where the stairway has been destroyed.

But that’s not so creepy as exciting. What’s really creepy is the underground; an old docking area under the train station. It is pitch black and cavernous, criss-crossed with rusting rails and scrap metal. There are deep pits scattered through; I don’t know what their purpose was. We shined our flashlight down one and saw a dog skeleton curled on itself inside.

Chestnuts roasted by Alizam @ 10/22/2009 1:41 AM

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