It was similar to something from Jaws, if not in the levels of gore, at least in the levels of panic. There I was in the south of Spain in 1992, with a Spanish friend I was staying with. We'd taken his families mini-catamaran and sailed off the beach and quite a way out from the shore. We'd decided we were going to do a spot of snorkeling and see if the seabed beyond the shore had any life on it. Despite swimming the sea for the week we'd been swimming in the Mediterranean, we'd not had an experience with marine life before now, and we wanted to see if we could. As it turned out, we got our wish. Because one of us had to ensure the catamaran wasn't going to drift away while we swam around, we had to swim one at a time. It was my turn to dive off the catamaran and swim around. Alejandro, my friend, had already been swimming and was maintaining the position of the catamaran. I dived off the catamaran into the clear blue water and dived downwards. The water was quite deep and I wasn't planning on getting to the bottom, just enough to see if there were any fish swimming around. After a couple of minutes I needed to go back to the surface and get air, and my bearings. As my head broke the surface of the water I could see Alejandro furiously, anxiously beckoning me towards the boat. I wondered what was going on that could agitate him like that. "I saw a fin! I saw a fin! Get out, get out!". I protested, his words not yet reaching my brain. "It may have been a shark! Get the hell out of there!". I yelped and I climbed out of the water faster than I had ever done before, or since. We looked around and we didn't see any more fins. It may not have been a shark, but Alejandro, not a person given to panic, was quite freaked out, and his agitation had spread to me. We turned the catamaran towards the shot and sailed home. tomcosgrave {tom@tomcosgrave.com} 27 Oct 2002 |
Hasn't everyone played in cemeteries at one time or another? A few years ago, a group of friends and I snuck into the local cemetery for a game of hide and seek. Something about being in a graveyard at night scared us all on a base level, something perverse about playing a childrens game in the boneyard. It was a great old cemetery, lots of crypts and big monuments, trees and benches and iron fences--not those new modern "people gardens" where they try to make death so sterile that it's as if it didn't happen, like the one my dad had recently been buried in. I think that added to my daring, that need to confront death. So i hid in a crypt that I found unlocked. After I'd been in there a few minutes, I'd forgotten the game. It was just me in the dark with the remains of Xavier (perfect, right?) Something-or-Other. It was obvious people had been in there--stubby candle remains, empty bottles, and in the corner an empty condom package. I sat there, creeped out by being there, but fascinated, too. What was death? Who was this man whose tomb I had wandered in to? Who were the people who mixed death with sex here? Would Xavier have been shocked, or approving? After a while, nobody had found me, and I figured the game was over. I made for the door. It was locked. Then I panicked, yanking at it, seized with the idea that I would be in here for the rest of my life, die here, rot here, slowly. I kept thinking about an episode of The Twilight Zone I saw as a child, where a woman managed to get herself buried alive. I was terrified. Scared to death, of death. I heard screaming, and then realized it was me doing it. The door swung open to reveal my friends, lauging. They'd seen me go in, and had locked the door and waited. Bastards. I still like cemeteries. But I tend to stay out of crypts. stephie {the8rgrl@aol.com} 27 Oct 2002 |
Two words: ventriloquist puppet. A lot of you may be too young to have seen these things. But there was a ventriloquist, Edgar Bergen, who was very popular in the 1950's. It was a comedy act and the puppet's name was Charlie McCarthy. If I had actually seen more than one or two performances, I probably wouldn't be creeped out by the little wood thing. This popular act spawned a number of imitators and a hobbyist craze for ventriloquism that sputtered through the early Sixties, when I was born. I must have been three or four years old when I first had this nightmare. It remains permanently etched in my memory. The house is dark and everyone is asleep. I am up, alone. At the end of the hallway, the Puppet appears, grinning its wicked grin, and with a gleam in its unnaturally large white eyeballs it leaps into motion, coming for me. The puppet's limbs jerk and twitch and its jaws clack together in anticipation. I run like I have never run before -- straight into a gaping hole that shouldn't be there. I fall and fall and fall. Heart pounding, body sweating, I slam into consciousness. Ten years later -- 1978. I'm up. Alone. Watching Saturday Night Live. Commercial. A face fills the screen. I freeze. It utters these words: 'Abracadabra, I sit on his knee. Presto, change-o, and now he is me. Hocus Pocus, we take her to bed. Magic is fun... when you're dead.' I've never seen a more terrifying image, before or since. christopher 27 Oct 2002 |
I've never been afraid of spiders. On Girl Scout camping trips, I was always the one everyone woke up at 3 AM to get a spider out of someone's tent. I would use a paper cup and a piece of cardboard, gently remove the offending critter and let it go a safe distance away. One time it was a chicken. After college, I spent a year as an exchange student in Brisbane, Australia. After the school year was over, I wanted to travel. Tasmania, the island off the south coast of Oz had always sounded fascinating to me, and so it was. I bought a week's bus pass, stayed in hostels, camped, and even hitchhiked once when I missed a bus, something I would have never dared to do at home in Southern California. I stayed overnight in a campground near Strahan, a beautiful spot next to a stream. I was tired, so I set up my tent and crawled into my sleeping bag, lulled to sleep by the stream. Later, I was awakened by what I thought was water dripping on my face, right on my eye. I thought water had condensed on the inside of the tent and was dripping on me, a common occurence in tents, especially when it's cool. I wiped off my face with my hand and thought nothing more of it, starting to fall asleep again almost immediately. A few minutes later I was jerked into wakefulness. Something on the fingers of my outstretched hand, the one I had rubbed my face wtih, was wiggling! I jerked my hand to fling off anything clinging to it, sat up and seized my flashlight, heart pounding. I swept the beam around, searching for what had awakened me, and there next to my sleeping bag was something gleaming and stretching. It was a leech, hunching itself up like an inchworm, and searching again for the meal it had been deprived of. It was gray with darker black streaks, inching along using the suckers at either end of its body. Shuddering with revulsion, I seized a scrap of newspaper, scrunched it up and threw it outside the tent as far as I could. If I hadn't felt that thing land on me, I would have woken up in the morning with an eyefull of blood - leech bites continue to bleed long after they've had their fill. It was a small leech, and if it had been daylight, it probably wouldn't have bothered me at all, but being woken out of a sound sleep realizing something is after your your blood is damn creepy. I don't camp by streams anymore, and I am very grateful we don't have leeches in Southern California. Leeanne {oxyjulis@cs.com} 27 Oct 2002 |
I was at my grandmother's. I was about ten years old, and I was in the living room. It was Thanksgiving and I got up to go from the living room into the kitchen, to get a snack before dinner. There was a long hallway in between, with a large walk-in style closet. As I was passing it, a man's hand reached out grabbed my ankle. I looked down and screamed, and it disappeared. It did not let go and retract it disappeared. I screamed again and ran into the the kitchen, and every male member of my family was in the kitchen. We all went back to the closet and there was nothing there. A little background: The house was one of those you walk by and say "That house is haunted," even if you don't believe in ghosts. When I was older, my grandparents told me they bought the house from a man who couldn't live there any more because his only son had died of his wounds there when he returned from World War I. That may not be who this particular ghost was, but my aunt Fawn, when she lived there used to pray for a spirit friend to play with. Ever since then, I 've been able to sense presences. I live on the other side of the country now, and the house has been trorn down, but just telling this story scares the shit out of me. John {runsamuck@yahoo.com} 27 Oct 2002 |
Our small group of friends went camping somewhere around Banff back in 2000. We seperated the two tents between the sexes, boys versus girls. It was our last night there, it musta been around 3am. So upon retreating to our tent and zipping the enterance shut to keep out the cold and insects, we find a fat spider crawing, upside-down, at the roof of our small tent. The 4 of us scramble with our flashlights to find something to snatch it with. Finding nothing, I opened up a paperback novel I had brought along. I slowly and carefully placed it directly beneath the spider, preparing to slam the book shut. Sudden, our entire tent collapses on the four of and the spider. We hear the girls laughing as we, the masculine men that we are, scream for our lives. We were trapped under a blinding blanket of polyester with a spider, screaming to each other, "WHERE THE EFF IS THE ZIPPER?!" Daniel {ydhsu@dept-propaganda.com} 28 Oct 2002 |
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