Stitch on 29/10/2008 at 13:59
Dead theater girls, bigfoot sightings, self-aware robotics, guardian peacocks, and the ghost of Indiana Jones!
This is exactly what I'm talking about :cool:
Keep them coming, guys.
rachel on 29/10/2008 at 14:09
Quote Posted by Stitch
My great-grandmother's ghost could appear and wheezily reveal tomorrow's lottery numbers and I'd merely write it off as dinner not sitting too well.
But at the same time, nothing quite converts me into a temporary believer like a good ghost story.
does not compute
Stitch on 29/10/2008 at 14:22
Sure it does!
I'm typically able to resist the part of our brain that likes making inaccurate sexy connections, but I still love getting the chills while trading spooky shit around a campfire.
We can maybe later segue this thread into discussion of actual causes behind some perceived supernatural phenomena, but right now I'd rather just be creeped out.
Shoshin on 29/10/2008 at 16:10
So I was spending the night at a friend's house. His bedroom was in the basement, so there were no windows, and when he slept, he liked it to be dark. So when he turned off the lights, it was pitch black. Couldn't see your hand in front of your face black. Anyway, we stayed up late, listening to records & whatnot (we were teenagers and in a band together, so listening to records was pretty much what we did, when we weren't picking up chicks or doing drugs. That's why it's sex, drugs & rock 'n roll, in that order). Finally, he turns off the lights, rendering the room utterly without illumination. We fall asleep.
Some period of time later, I wake up. Now here's the odd part. I can see. Everything is a weird shade of green, like I was wearing night-vision goggles. And I can hear, circling around me, just outside of my peripheral vision, I can hear.... something. But I can't turn to look at it. In fact I can't move at all. I am pinned to the floor, with this presence slowly circling, getting closer. I decide, for no reason that I can determine, that it is dog, or more precisely, a demonic dog. I don't know why. But it's getting closer, and I am as terrified as I have ever been in my life (before or since). And I cannot move. Literally frozen in terror. Finally, finally, I am able to let loose a cry of terror. The room returns to being pitch black, and my friend wakes up, wondering just what the hell my problem is. The presence is gone, but I remember vividly to this day the sense of dread, the feeling of a supernatural presence, and the feeling of being completely trapped.
It remains the scariest moment I've ever had in my life. And it was something I could never explain. The one utterly, beyond a shadow of a doubt, supernatural, demons are real moment in my life.
Until I read about sleep paralysis.
Science wins again bitches!
Gambit on 29/10/2008 at 19:36
You guys are lucky, I never had an extreme "Oh snap! We live in a world of mysteries filled with the supernatural!" moment.
But I had some interesting experiences with dreams in the rare cases I remember them.
Once I dreamed that I was dying. I was literally being pulled upwards by a cosmic white hole in the sky and I "knew" I was dying. Actually I could "feel" myself dying. It was sort like getting born again. I knew it was coming, that I didn´t want it but it was inevitable like an ant trying to swim against the waves of the ocean... I felt nauseous to the concept of going to the other side and never coming back, as would a baby in his secure womb. Death and birth seemed the same, always dreadful since you can´t even conceptualise what was on the other side.
And then I reached the white hole, feeling my soul, since I didn´t have a phisical body anymore, being torn apart, twisted in an infinite spiral.
At that moment, the turning point of death, I suddenly woke up, heart pounding like a motor and breathing like a marathonist.
I think that scientificaly during my sleep I put my body in a position that I couldn´t breathe. That crazy dream was probably a reflection of my body aknowledging that something was very wrong and went to hyper alert mode.
Gingerbread Man on 29/10/2008 at 22:41
Quote Posted by raph
does not compute
Quote Posted by Stitch
Sure it does!
Je n'y crois pas, mais je le crains. I'm the same way as Stitch.
Quote Posted by Random_Taffer
I've decided that GBM has most likely been abducted by The Grays
Don't think
that hasn't crossed my mind once or twice. :(
demagogue on 30/10/2008 at 02:16
Quote Posted by henke
Great story demagogue! :)
Just to clarify, you
are making it up though, right? Heh? :erm:
(
http://nn.cs.utexas.edu/pub-view.php?PubID=90) Am I? ;)
(BTW, I don't think the story's actually in that article; please don't waste time reading it.
But it was written around the same time by the professor, just to keep the mystery going...)
.............................................................
I have another story from the same class...
Actually, though, I'm a little embarrassed to post it here because it's somewhat technical, and maybe a bit too long for a post.
(That sounds silly, doesn't it?)
So I posted it as an online doc (
https://docs.google.com/a/trioptimum.com/Doc?id=dcj39h99_3hmbg6xf7) here.
But here's a chilling sneak-peek:
Inline Image:
http://i33.tinypic.com/2ibjk8z.jpgtl;dr version: We were playing with a facial recognition program for occluded faces (e.g., a program that can recognize a face even with a big black bar over the eyes), and there was a trick you could use where the system could 'guess' what it thought a face should look like, even with missing information. This image is the result (the source image had no eyes). It creeped me out because it looked like he had ghost eyes that literally came out of nowhere, to say nothing of how inherently scary he looks by himself.
Scots Taffer on 30/10/2008 at 02:51
Creepy. Hmmm.
I used to camp out a lot as a kid, and when I say camp out I mean pitching a tent in one of our back gardens and then at night doing all sorts of illegal explorations and wanderings. Plenty of creeping around were done by us but not much in the way of creepy. You always expect weird and creepy shit to happen at night... far from it, in my experience, the weirdest and most unsettling shit happens in broad daylight.
I do recall three events that formed my imagination and creeped the ever living fuck out of me, but none of them are supernatural in nature. They all happened when I was around 11 or 12 in the lead-up to, or around, summer. All of the stories involve areas we called "glens" (as in hillside, dale and glen) near disused industrial estates (yay for 80s economic slowdown) that our parents told us to avoid like the plague as only undesirables went there (older drunken teenagers, druggies, homeless people or complete weirdos), which of course only incited us further to make them a regular place of residence.
There was always evidence of other groups frequenting the spots we visited but we never ran into them, except once but it was only a group of older guys from school who invited us to smoke weed with them.
The first incident was an abandoned iron ore smelting factory, now getting in wasn't terribly difficult - hop a barbed wire fence, find a sheet metal peeling back or a busted up door by some tramps/idiots and creep inside. The place was extremely freaky to the pre-teen mind whose imagination consisted solely of VHS tapes of 18-rated movies about murderers, slashings and other horrors. Plus what rusting, decrepit place devoid of life isn't a little unsettling and unnatural.
We came across a place obviously used as some sort of trench/drain for whatever and there was a ladder leading down to it. Now this was the middle of the afternoon but inside the air was heavy and there wasn't an abundance of natural light so the bottom of the trench was pitch black.
My mate dares me down into the trench, I'm not game but why not - what else were we in there for but to scare ourselves shitless and one-up each other.
I start down the ladder leading to the trench when there's a sudden clang somewhere deep inside the factory and that's enough to send my companion bolting for the back door. I'm halfway down at this point and figure, if there's someone coming through, I'm probably better hiding as opposed to coming up and trying to make a run for it. So I go down and tip-toe make my way into the darkness of the trench. I crouch there and wait for an eternity of ten or twelve minutes, in that time there's a clang maybe every minute or so, once it would sound just overhead, the next far away and then back again. No footsteps. No other sounds. Just the clang. It was hard to hear the distant ones over the sound of my heart hammering in my ears and my deep concentration of breathing as quietly as possible.
After a while I hear my friend shout out, obviously the coast being clear I got out of the trench, up the ladder and out onto the factory floor. There was no one around but my friend, lingering by the exit, and that's when there was a final clang. From down in the trench. Needless to say, I ran out of there was fast as I could.
The second time was in another glen itself. We had an area called the "red rocks", amazingly because the rocks were red and had quite a lot of clay around them. One day me and a few mates are ditching school by there. There's a "burn" (or river) nearby and a tunnel through a railway bridge. This tunnel is brick, slick, covered in graffiti and a prime place to dare other to do this, that or the other (a favourite dare that was never taken up was hanging from the lip at the top of the bridge over the water, probably a good 20ft drop, but the crumbling masonry provided us all with an out to avoid certain death).
Anyway, it's nearing the end of the day and we're bored so we dare each other to go down to the tunnel and get across to the other side as the burn was relatively slack that day - plus we either needed to go over the bridge or under and across it. Well, we're down there and I'm last to do it, my friends are across the water and at the exit of the tunnel and the current suddenly picks up a bit. Halfway across I'm sort of stuck on this disused shopping trolley as it begins to surge. Obviously in distress, this amused my friends to no end who then of course decide that it's the perfect time to leave me to my own devices.
So I'm stuck there, listening to my friend's cruel laughter ringing up the tunnel, the water picking up around me, my precarious position on the rotting shopping trolley in danger when I notice a ragged children's doll all torn up and missing an arm, and what looks to my eyes like blood splattered all over it, caught in a branch downstream. Having an overactive imagination, this prompted me to get out of dodge fast and I start making my way over the extremely slippery makeshift bridge of big stones, rotting planks of wood etc, getting my shoes and school trousers extremely wet and mossy in the prcoess. And just as I reach the other side I turn and see the distinct shape of an adult male at the mouth of the tunnel at the opposite end. He's just sort of standing there in semi-darkness, peering over at me, not following. I freak the fuck out and run to catch my mates, who I didn't tell the story at first but later revealed to some of them in private - who believed it was probably just some security guard from somewhere nearby who heard the laughter. Perhaps, but then next time I was down there I couldn't help but notice the doll was gone - that said, it was in a river... so maybe the current took it?
Lastly, I was completely alone one day coming home from school on one of my ingenious little routes that took me places I'd never been before. This was a totally different glen from the other two, between a Franciscan seminary and a still-used iron-ore factory, it was colloquially referred to as "the blackwoods". I remember it was a warm summer and I was trudging through slightly swampish territory, there were a lot of brittle dense thickets and trees, so visibility was shithouse. I'm plodding along, wondering why I have these great and wonderful ideas when I hear something behind me, snapping branches or whatever. I stop, look, nothing. I start off again, this time it's off to my far right. I stop, look... nothing. Rather than ignore it, I head in the direction and that's when I hear a sudden splash.
I freeze, wait to suss out what's going on and then start to creep forward. The thick brush suddenly gave way and I was in a fair sized clearing with a fairly deep looking pond and in the middle of the pond was a swan. A black swan, the Australian type with the red beak that I'd only ever seen in books about Australia that my Granddad had. It was in the middle of the pond, staring at me, it didn't move once, just floated there watching me. I told my Granddad later and he didn't believe me, thought I was pulling his leg (not that I wasn't prone to telling stories...).
Years later it was noted in the local papers that black swans had been found breeding in a loch maybe ten miles from where I'd seen that particular swan and they had no idea how they got there.
Random_Taffer on 30/10/2008 at 03:45
I grew up in rural Iowa, about ten miles from the nearest town where I went to school. It was all gravel roads, farmland, and thick, relatively unmolested forests.
To this day I have this absurd fear that someone or something is hiding in my backseat while driving alone at night through the country. Now that I'm older, I usually just crank the music, think about daytime things, and can manage with little trouble, but in my high school days, it was not uncommon for me to break into sweats while driving and constantly check the rear view mirror, just waiting to see some demonic visage leering from the darkness behind me.
I would make frequent stops on the side of the road, turn on my dome light, and turn around to check the backseat and floor for any hiding fiends. I don't know why I became so fearful about this. I haven't seen any movies that I can recall where this has happened, and I haven't ever had a traumatizing experience in a car excluding a wreck or two, that I can recall.
Anyway, one night in my sophomore year of high school, I was having a particularly panicky episode and driving down the gravel road at about 70 mph in an effort to get home as fast as possible. My eyes constantly flitting to the rear view mirror and expecting to see something terrifying with each glance, I could barely keep a steady grip on the steering wheel as my hands were slicked with nervous sweat and shaking in fear. Again, I can't tell you exactly why, but this particular night I was so scared that I was nearly reduced to tears, which sounds so completely ridiculous as I'm typing it, but it was what happened.
It was probably around 10:00 or so (sometime in Autumn) and I had almost reached home. I remember breathing a great sigh of great relief as I pulled into my parent's familiar driveway, the yard lamp post illuminating my surroundings warmly.
I was safe at last, I thought, and gave a nervous chuckle as I realized my own ridiculous behavior.
Something touched the back of my neck.
I screamed, jumping up off the seat, my head colliding with the driver's side window and tore that car door open.
As I scrambled up the steps to my front door I realized that whatever had touched my neck was still touching it!
I reached back and felt...the god damn tag on the back of my shirt!
It must have been flipped out when I had gotten into the car and had somehow flipped back down to touch my neck when I got into the driveway.
I laughed myself silly, and ever since then I haven't been that scared in the car alone at night. I still get that creepy feeling from time to time, but usually don't allow it to grow into something out of my control.
