Creeping thyself Out

[Phil_A]

Back when I time to waste on such things, I had planned to go out and get some pictures for a stop motion video I was making out in some nearby woods. The location was a small but dense patch of woodland that runs right alongside the Icknield Way, the ancient Roman track that stretches from Norfolk to Wiltshire.

I had underestimated the amount of time it would take to trek up there with all my gear and dusk was already upon me by the time I crested the hill. For some reason I abruptly decided I was going to leave the path and go the rest of the way through the woods themselves.

The combined noise of birds and beasts as the darkness descended was so overwhelming it provoked some kind of primal dread in me, I've never known anything like it in my whole pampered townie existence. Just a really powerful sense of "Oh fuck I really shouldn't be here, I need to get out NOW." As if for a moment I connected to some kind of race memory from our primitive ancestors, the terrible fear that at any moment you could become prey.

In some woods in Bedfordshire.

Just opposite a golf course.

There's also a hill nearby which is supposedly haunted and has witches buried there or something, but I've been up there loads of times and it is disappointingly unspooky. But those woods, fucking hell.

[BlodwynPig]

Thank you Phil. Moments like these are the reason for my existence. My plan this evening is to go into the woods at the top of the golf course to look for deer at dusk. As long as I focus on the deer I should be OK, but remembering this thread won't help.

[BlodwynPig]

Turns out the fox I spotted last night was a coyote.

[Icehaven]

Many years ago a friend of mine lived in this slightly too big, slightl creepy house, and one evening when his family were out  we were generally messing around trying to scare each other etc., and suddenly all the lights went out as a fuse had blown. Naturally this set off a mild if exhilarating panic but he eventually found the fusebox and switched it back on, panic over. We'd literally just got back into the living room and sat down when Elgar's Cello Concerto suddenly started blasting at full volume through the house. It has one of the creepiest, most jarring starts to a piece of music ever, proper Czechoslovakian animation suicide scene stuff, and we'd had a bit of a thing about it for ages, because of how shit scary it is, so we both just sat there actually laughing in terror, unable to fathom how this was happening and what the fuck was going on. 
Turned out the power cut had restarted the hi-fi they had in the front room, and if there's a CD in there it automatically plays it (having speakers throughout the downstairs of the house didn't help either). The 5 minutes or so it took us to work this out were, apart from Ghostwatch, the most completely freaked out I've ever been to this day.

[SteveDave]

One time I went babysitting with my friend Sally when I was 16. On the way there her father said "You know the house used to be a care home and the man who ran it was a spiv who would bury the dead residents in the garden" To which I nervously laughed. It was autumn time so it was dark when we got to the house which was accessed by a looooong, unlit drive with trees either side of it. Her father dropped us at the far end and we made our way to the house. As we got to end of the unlit path we were greeted by a slow moving stooped over old lady. We screamed and ran either side of her to the very well lit house.

Turns out it was the owner of the house's mum. They also had a Dalmatian who would piss whenever it got excited. 

Great days.

[BlodwynPig]

Bench update

[Dex Sawash]

A ghost has shat on it

[manticore]

A 16 year old having problems with feelings of chronic unreality. Watched the Bob Hope film 'The Cat and the Canary' which despite being a horror comedy is actually dead freaky and chilled my soul.

Left to go up to my bedroom and there was a preternatural screaming sound coming from inside. It just went on and on and I stood at the bottom of the stairs not knowing what to do. The world was ending and I was going mad.

Eventually I forced myself to go up and go in and it was revealed that I had left my grandma's cassette recorder running, and this is such ancient times that it didn't have the facility to just turn off when the tape ended, so it was just stuck there and emitting this hideous sound.

So the world didn't end and I didn't go quite insane in 1977.

[Brian Freeze]

Thinking about being out in the woods and purposefully getting myself as shit scared as Phil A describes so beautifully up there I remembered another time we'd do it on purpose.

There was a bench by the side of the road down to the shore. The bench had a wide view of the bay and was a fantastic place to sit and watch the clouds go by. Behind the bench there was a curious way the hedges had been laid. They didn't meet square on at the edge of the field but were tucked inwards for some reason and this reason had been lost to time as it had overgrown with brambles. It had overgrown with brambles like a bastard and they looked like they were hiding something, a dark, hard looking wound of something that didn't look very friendly.

We'd sit with our backs to this place for as long as we could and try and scare ourselves daft before legging it for the safety and openess of the shore. My go to bogeyman was a werewolf coming right over the brambles to rip us to shreds. Massive eyes it had. Great fun.