The incredibly stupid stuff that scares you

I usually get up in the middle of the night but I also usually get back to sleep no problem. But the past couple nights I have can't return to sleep thanks to thinking about this basically not even a bit actually scary mirror illusion. There aren't any mirrors in my room, I never did this trick to myself, I don't look at my husband's face in bed and see it happen or anything. Just thinking about 'oh man our mind does creepy stuff in front of a creepy mirror,' something about it ––– too scary! But also totally harmless and silly! wtf??

I am also still easily scared by ghost stories before bedtime. Even just folk tales and urban legends that aren't of a scary nature! Thinking baout them before bed = small amounts of fretful sleep for me. Like it should be possible to read Snopes before sleepytime, but no. I blame Alvin Schwartz for making my mind associate the two things.

Sometimes hearing a strange dog bark at night scares me a lot, even though I own a dog that is one of the barkiest motherfuckers to ever bark. This is stupid!

If I am sleeping at an unfamiliar house and their clock is ticking really loudly, I sometimes feel afraid. Afraid of the most banal of sounds! How ridiculous.

roaches ._.

I think...it's actually totally reasonable to be scared of roaches even though they are nearly harmless? See also: earwigs.

silverfish

Way too long but: I have def had a "dissociative identity effect" looking at my face in the bathroom mirror when it is mostly dark in the bathroom, and that's with just a glance or looking for only a few seconds, I wd not dare staring for a minute!

But this is partly bcz I had a phase of having mundanely creepy, dark, slow-motion dreams which I couldn't tell from reality but where I had some control over what I did. I'd read somewhere that if you look at a mirror in a dream, yr brain works out that you are dreaming and you can start fully lucid dreaming. This never worked for me, but if I stared hard at a dream-mirror the image would go cloudy and distort and then I'd wake up. I guess the dreaming brain is not good at reflections, somehow?

Waking up is pretty useful if you are stuck in a bad dream and you're not sure if it is a dream, so I ended up doing it fairly often. If it didn't work on my face, I'd hold the palm of my hand up and that would always work.

But now if I stare at a dark, distorted mirror image of myself I have this creepy feeling rush over me like "ugh, is this real? am I awake? maybe not!" and that is not a good place to be when you actually are awake, so I don't like to do it.

(This also adds a further level of suckiness if you have a migraine, and you've dimmed all the lights because they make you feel sick, and then you catch a glimpse of your dark reflection through a jiggling distorted migraine pattern, and blah.)

creepy slow motion dreams are definitely a thing imo

Like lots of people if I get on a double decker bus, I like to sit at the front so I get a nice view and a bit of leg room. Sometimes I will become convinced that the bus is going to run over even quite distant or clearly safe people, because either the bus driver or the cyclist or the pedestrian will just not realise what I can so plainly imagine, and an accident will happen. By this point my fists will be punched up into little balls and I'll be staring intently out of the window at any moving object, presumably as some sort of mechanism whereby I feel if I've noticed it, then so will the bus driver. Unfortunately because I'm thinking this, the person-object in I'm focusing on is clearly in danger and so I won't be able to breathe until he or she, or the cat or dog or whatever, has been passed safely.

Sometimes I get scared when people drive above about 25mph and I clench the passenger seat arm rest and am not really able to converse properly.

They're clearly linked and basically I'm like those early 19th C rail passengers who worried if the engine went above 25mph their bodies would go flat.

In the spirit of this thread, I just looked up towards the kitchen window and the rain streaks and dirt smears have formed a streetlamp-lit halo around an unsmeared black angel shape hovering arms outstretched at the top of the window, and I got that little zzkk of irrational terror as yr mind convinces you there's something there, before you remember that you are not 6 years old and the dark shape is yr clothes abandoned on a chair and not monsters

grandfather clocks ticking is a creepy sound. smaller clocks ticking is just very annoying and keeps me awake. do not like ticking

Flying - stupid because it's completely safe

Houses with tons of windows at night - I feel like there are people out there in the dark looking in and watching me. It creeps me the fuck out.

When I was little I was scared of a door.

Pigeons.

When I was little I was scared of a tv ident.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qOGGGyi8vq4

OK, I still am a bit. It's that circle. I don't know why. (shudder)

I am also still easily scared by ghost stories before bedtime. Even just folk tales and urban legends that aren't of a scary nature! Thinking baout them before bed = small amounts of fretful sleep for me. Like it should be possible to read Snopes before sleepytime, but no. I blame Alvin Schwartz for making my mind associate the two things.

― Abbbottt, Thursday, May 12, 2011 1:54 PM Bookmark

http://i.imgur.com/ixtx6.gif

When I was little I was scared of a tv ident.

The WorldVision logo scared the hell out of me!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hM4D6PUPe-8

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_0uZqgmOGrrE/SeENDm-pb7I/AAAAAAAAAJo/WfeRH1Ct5Gw/s320/flowersintheattic.jpg

Who are these templegoing VC Andrews people?

You guys who are afraid of idents must have seen this, right?

The S From Hell

I'm afraid of so many things that I can't separate them into entries for this thread. You know, other people, the outside world, etc etc.

I did wake up in the middle of the night the other night and there was a dark pillo in front of my husband's face, and I thought of the creepy ibis-looking guy that stands in for David B.'s dead grandfather in Epileptic:

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2228/2038873118_62e6441fab.jpg

I also could not get to sleep the night I read Epileptic due to a haunted post-read felling.

I wish there was a way to hide that terrible gif Pleasant Plains posted!

It's the Flowers in the Attic gang -- when I was a kid I had to wrap the book in foil and hide it under my bed (terrible idea, I know) in order to thoroughly contain the evil. Still gives me the willies.

Add to list: White farmhouses in a state of extreme disrepair, but with signs of people still living in them.

The Flowers in the attic kids were/are so creepy.

http://i.imgur.com/U172I.gif

Add to list: White farmhouses in a state of extreme disrepair, but with signs of people still living in them.

Uggh yes, my family lived next to one of these for a while –– once there was a dead donkey outside for a whole week.

NO!!!!!!! That's awful.

Dilapidated farmhouses are creepy as fuck but I'm sort of drawn to them at the same time. There are a lot on the North Fork of Long Island and I've taken tons of pictures of them because I find the creepiness beautiful at the same time.

oh yeah you can see them along any road in upstate ny including major highways and they are so creepy but appealing i agree!

roaches ._.

last year my bf & i were renting a very cheap duplex that was infested w/ roaches. the place was an insane mess when we moved in & when we were cleaning it the first weeknd we forgot to clean under/behind the fridge. about three weeks later we finally got around to pulling the fridge out from the wall to clean & there was a handful of dead roaches. but we also noticed that there was a like half inch space btw the floor and the baseboard so we sprayed cleaner into the crack & a flood of roaches came scurrying out onto the floor. we ended up killing several hundred of the fuckers forcing them out from the wall but there were mounds of them. it was so gross

x-post yeah harb upstate NY is full of them

Lamp that sounds so gross. I was served a dead roach once in a chinese joint. I nearly died.

sometimes when i open my flesh it looks wrong in there, like there are things i don't understand, things that shouldn't be there, like someone put them there for an experiment maybe but it's hard to tell. i get scared and i don't know what to do. there's all this noise and light and i try put the things in my flesh back together so they make sense but it's really hard and maybe they were never right to begin with.

then i have to go to the hospital, and this one nurse has a weird gap between her eyelid and the eyeball, like her face doesn't fit. i wonder if dirt maybe gets in there sometimes, or bugs even. so that.

Like lots of people if I get on a double decker bus, I like to sit at the front so I get a nice view and a bit of leg room.

oh man sitting in the front seat of a double decker is the worse, because there's no protruding snub where the engine is - the drivers like to show how much of a handle they have on things by braking at the very absolutely last minute and stopping inches away from the next double decker.

contenderizer what the hell was that youre creeping me out man

wrong thread?

roaches don't really scare me, insects that normally exist in a state of flying don't scare me (flies, bees, wasps), but crickets and grasshoppers and bigass bugs that fly scare the shit out of me

I am on a double decker bus right now. was really disappointed we couldn't the front seats.

couldn't get*

I really hate walking by a closed supermarket at night. I don't know why but seeing the aisles empty and hardly lit always makes me shudder.

i don't really get scared of much, but once in a while, i get incredibly paranoid about people lurking in the shadows waiting to jump me on my bike. which is actually a reasonable fear, as this happens all the time in my neighborhood.

Sometimes I will become convinced that the bus is going to run over even quite distant or clearly safe people, because either the bus driver or the cyclist or the pedestrian will just not realise what I can so plainly imagine, and an accident will happen. By this point my fists will be punched up into little balls and I'll be staring intently out of the window at any moving object, presumably as some sort of mechanism whereby I feel if I've noticed it, then so will the bus driver. Unfortunately because I'm thinking this, the person-object in I'm focusing on is clearly in danger and so I won't be able to breathe until he or she, or the cat or dog or whatever, has been passed safely.

Sometimes I get scared when people drive above about 25mph and I clench the passenger seat arm rest and am not really able to converse properly.

I am like this in cars generally, when I'm in the front passenger seat. Taxi drivers especially. I am a tense ball of terror feeling like we're playing frogger with traffic and obstacles and are gonna smash into something any moment.

This is why I dont drive :(

Oh and Abb I LOVE "Epileptic"!!! That book made me cry floods of tears. I liked the beaked grandfather, he didnt scare me, he was weirdly comforting.

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

Aw man it's sad that you're so scared of driving. I know other ppl like that and feel bad for them cause driving is awesome.

lol dayo plague doc is epic not scary!

I'm gonna sneak into your house while wearing a plague doctor costume and stand over your bed and wait until you wake up

Yeah i am terrified of driving and it is very frustrating :( I have to live with a lot of good public transport around and it's easy to get by but I cant just run off and have a holiday.

x-post hahahahahaha

pls don't do that

Speaking of things freaking me the fuck out, this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cycVTXtm0U0

I dont know why this does when actual Max Headroom never did. Something about the weird video and sound quality? The mask? I dunno.

Oh and Abb I LOVE "Epileptic"!!! That book made me cry floods of tears. I liked the beaked grandfather, he didnt scare me, he was weirdly comforting.

yeah, one of my favorite books ever. amazing storytelling and jaw-dropping art. have stolen SO MUCH from that dude. babel #3 supposedly on the way...

Oh yeah that Max Headroom pirating thing is TERRIFYING.

roaches don't really scare me, insects that normally exist in a state of flying don't scare me (flies, bees, wasps), but crickets and grasshoppers and bigass bugs that fly scare the shit out of me

― you ain't my son, you my motherfucking flopson (dayo), Thursday, May 12, 2011 8:22 PM (30 minutes ago) Bookmark

we got roaches that fly @ u face down here son

Feeling Trayce on driving. Just re-learning now, and I'm ok with the instructor but I still can't quite imagine driving on my own.

I'm scared of driving, too, and Adelaide's public transport sucks compared with Melbourne :(

I guess the dreaming brain is not good at reflections, somehow?
Need a bigger CGI budget

I stared into a mirror when on acid, once.

... never ever do this.

That creepy warning at the beginning of DVDs that refers to some kind of ominous resolution adopted at the shadowy INTERPOL General Assembly in Stockholm, Sweden on September 8, 1977.

Along with Trayce... we once turned the videocamera on, set it on top of the television and watched ourselves. It made it that much easier to watch the horns grow.

Mold and bugs, tiny things alive in places where they shouldn't, that sort of thing creeps me.

I stared into a mirror when on acid, once.

I'm not saying I've done this. No. But idk why sober mirrorland is so scary to me when maybe, maybe other mirrorland I have looked at with enjoyment?

I also obviously speak hypothetically and btw my name is actually Ethel.

(looked at my hands. They dried up and wrinkled into 80 year old prune hands, it distressed me greatly)

I'm not saying I've done this. No. But idk why sober mirrorland is so scary to me when maybe, maybe other mirrorland I have looked at with enjoyment?

― Abbbottt, Thursday, May 12, 2011 8:25 PM (19 minutes ago) Bookmark

i'm half okay with mirrors on acid/shrooms. sometimes yes, sometimes no. worst mirror drugs experience was staring at myself (yeah, on acid), and realizing that my hilarious butthole surfers t-shirt was covered with pictures of dried-out dead people. like really realizing it, and also realizing that my fellow travelers must be bumming on shit. so i changed my shirt, and then everything was cool.

mirrors are seriously spooky shit though. worse when i'm not high. i am always scared that something will be wrong when i look, that my face will be a monster or that something else will look back at me. much worse when i'm alone, at night, in an unfamiliar place. verges on the phobic, like i have to force myself not to look.

1st "shit" = it, duh

"I keep looking in the mirror/afraid that I won't be there"

I stared into a mirror when on acid, once.

Did this on mushrooms, was pretty amazing to be honest and not scary. Girlfriend at the time knocked on the door saying "are you ok, you've been in there for 20 minutes"

never been on psychedelics but being drunk and looking in a mirror is no fun. you get this sort of unfiltered look at yourself which is how I imagine other people must see you.

For me the mirror thing was like an existential crisis, like "OMG I DONT EVEN EXIST I AM JUST THIS WEIRD SET OF PICASSOIAN PLANES IN A MEAT BAG ARGH"

guys i was in stupid atlanta once and had a double palmetto scare where i threw back the covers and the motherfucker was in my BED and then after squealing like a g-d pig i stepped back and had one of them wriggle out from under my foot

my heart is swelling with southern pride because of this thread

I think thats roach eggs.

i hope it bursts

oh shit we did that backwards

XD

hehe

-spiders (tiny or huge equally terrify me) or any creature that looks like a spider i.e., crabs live or dead won't eat lobster crabs shrimp etc due to the resemblance. Other bugs don't bother me strangely.

-earthquakes. Been thru a few 6.0 - 7.0 here in So Cal (beginning with Sylmar '71 when I was a very little girl and thought it was the end of the world) Even the little 2.0 nothings effing terrify me. I wake up sometimes thinking that I felt one, and have to turn on all the lights and then....maybe...can go back to sleep but it takes a while as I am generally having a full blown breathe into a paperbag panic attack.

-as I have grown older driving over large overpasses and bridges scares the heck outta me too, this I believe is associated with the earthquake fear.

-the idea that I will quite likely die an old lady with two cats alone when the time comes, as I have no living relatives and my last close friend has recently married and moved to NY.

I don't know why but I've been thinking about death a lot lately, and it scares the shit out of me.

it can smell your fear

http://i.imgur.com/ixtx6.gif/

what the shit is this 'cause it is shitting me up

so scared i screwed up my bbcode

http://i.imgur.com/ixtx6.gif

Believe it or not, that .gif is scarier than the actual movie.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0z6xGU2_g9s

That gif is freaky as FUCK.

The quick shots of Captain Howdy in the Exorcist. Don't know why, but he scares the shit out of me.

That gif also plays on one of the incredibly stupid things that scares me, which is that I will discover that my loved ones are not who they say they are. Like, the idea of reaching over for Jeff at night and having him turn out to be ghoul is something that has occurred to me before and left me lying in bed immobile and unable to sleep. When I was a kid, I would occasionally become convinced that my parents were vampires or murderous Satanists.

The other incredibly stupid thing that scares me is the idea of seeing glowing eyes peeking in through a dark window. I have been known to run past windows at night.

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2710/4287703725_d4c565119c.jpg

http://i612.photobucket.com/albums/tt203/pplains/te_boo.gif

re: Mirrors

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NGcfPnMEWOo

guys i was in stupid atlanta once and had a double palmetto scare where i threw back the covers and the motherfucker was in my BED and then after squealing like a g-d pig i stepped back and had one of them wriggle out from under my foot

― cop a cute abdomen (gbx), Friday, May 13, 2011 12:25 AM (10 hours ago) Bookmark

Ugh. At first I was just thinking of the small ordinary roaches you get up here which I don't love but don't scare me. But like I said last night, Palmetto bugs are something else entirely. I have horrible memories of them from when I was a kid and we lived in Florida. This double palmetto scare would likely have had me in tears.

The whole mold thing is a good one but I don't think I'm SCARED of mold. I'm just really really grossed out by it.

In the spirit of the "incredibly stupid things" part of the title I think the houses with tons of windows at night thing really wins it for me because even though I know the likelihood that someone is out there looking in at me is incredibly small, I get so scared I've been known to move rooms just to avoid them.

Lol, Pleasant Plains.

do you guys getr scared by the demon face warps on youtube or do you just think they're funny?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BMWviYhD22Y&feature=related

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PtTB-685gIU&feature=related

Nah

I don't really get that scared by stuff I can tell or that I know is fake.

they freak me out a little, especially late at night.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UEELCc4kKxA

Yeah see that's not scary now but if I were watching this alone at night in a room with lots of windows it might.

I started a thread I thought was just a small stupid fun idea but it turned into World War III and now I don't dare click on it anymore :-(

There is an important moral to this, and that is: butts.

Pretty sure butts is the moral to everything.

http://www.4sportboston.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/its-not-your-fault.jpg

Stan, it's not your fault. It's not your fault. It's not your fault. It's not your fault. It's not your fault. It's not your fault. It's not your fault. It's not your fault. It's not your fault. It's not your fault. It's not your fault. It's not your fault. It's not your fault. It's not your fault. It's not your fault.

A+

whats the world war thread? do i need to go there and break things up?

No no, there's already been eternal bannings and a transatlantic conflict and then after I dejectedly posted "Oh. Okay then." I stopped reading and I don't know what happened since.
It's the P1pp4's 4rs3 thread on ILM and I don't think I'll ever start a thread ever again now. Not that I did that often before. ;_;

Thankig u, WmC

You shouldn't sweat it, Stan, though I kinda know the same feeling of unwittingly starting a shit storm and having to watch an unwanted thread continue to bob up and down on the Site New Answers page.

Also had no idea you were Belgian. It must be weird wearing wooden shoes like that.

No, that's the Spanish. We Belgians make the cuckoo clocks.

ha! okay, i read that thread. its not that bad. just people hating on whiney mostly. it would have happened somewhere else eventually. he can't help himself.

That creepy warning at the beginning of DVDs

The fear of getting arrested for tearing that tag on the mattress.

Just kidding.