Scary things

[wagegoth]

RK, maybe you ran into the Carolina equivalent of the Jersey Devil. I had a couple times as a kid in the Sierra Nevada foothills that I was out walking and suddenly got the "Get the hell out of here, fast, NOW, RUN!" feeling, which I took seriously. The worst thing I ever knowingly ran into was a rattlesnake, but you never know what could be quietly lurking.

I specifically had one bad episode. One evening, right at sundown, I was walking down the hill from my friend's house. I had to pass through a small cluster of live oak and, just as I did, I heard a man's voice calling, "Help, help me, please, help." I froze. I stood there listening to this voice. It sounded like it was coming from a distance, from near the gate by our barn. It called a few more times, me listening, not moving, wondering if my family could hear it. Then the really freaky part happened. It changed to a woman's voice. It called a couple of times. At this point I was going from scared to terrified. Just then, my neighbor's dog came crashing through the brush, startling me, and the voice stopped. I RAN home, crashing through the back door into the kitchen, startling my mom. I never told anyone in my immediate family.

[4love]

Irrational fear, completely scary occurrence? A few.

1. I was home from school for some reason, and I was taking a bath. Mom had left the house to get something. I was maybe 6. The bathroom door was open, and the way the tub was situated, the short end was just inside the door to the hall, on the left as you entered... I couldn't see all of the hallway from inside the tub.

I was absolutely, one hundred percent convinced that there was something lurking out there for me. My mind conjured a long-legged, black cat, but whatever it was, it was no good. If I left the tub it would get me. Not necessarily eat, but get. Somehow. The water got cold, I ached from holding still, but I could not make myself get out of the tub, even to slam the door closed. I stayed in that tub until Mom came home, maybe half an hour later.

2. When I was in my late teens, my Grampa gave my family a bronze statue he'd acquired from the artist. It's an almost life-sized American Indian woman, wrapped in a shawl and wearing a doeskin dress, looking lovingly into her newborn baby's sleeping face. Her name is Spotted Wing.

This thing still scares the crud out of me at night. I can't look at it if I have to pass by when the lights are out, I'm too darn scared. I feel like she's going to grab me and make me like her, somehow. On some level, even in the broad light of rational daytime, I'm half convinced she could move if she wanted to.

3. Apparently Ft. Riley, Kansas has ghosts. Rather a lot of them, in fact. At least three lived in our housing the year Dad was stationed there.

I didn't believe any of this, of course. Until one day I was home alone. It's true that I was reading a short book of the local ghost stories, but that sort of thing has never made me hallucinate in the past. Then I heard the cavalry boots.

No spurs, for some reason. Just the sound of heavy, hard-heeled boots.

Like with the hallway cat, I just couldn't move. I barely managed to look up, through the doorway of the kitchen where I was sitting into the study/music room where the noise was coming from. I don't know how long I sat there, frozen. The sound didn't last long, but it felt like hours later that my family came home from their various pursuits.


So, yeah. Probably the three scariest moments/things in my life. Other than that, I'm terrified of spiders, but that's just a normal phobia.