What gives you the creeps?

[krymsonkyng]

I need to write a Gothic short story, though I have a few of my own ideas they all seem contrived and overly simple, SO

I want to know what gives you the willies in your everyday life. It can be anything as simple as cats to statues. I just want to explore ideas a bit more, and because my school is extremely isolated I'd like to see what (semi) normal folk worry about.

Any sort of help would be greatly appreciated :D

I've determined what I'm going to write about, but I still need help for it to seem not quite stalker-ish and more supernatural: I need small creepy phrases or references to ambiguous bits of information to work into my story.

I am going to have the narrator randomly find slips of paper with nondescript messages that eventually lead to... ? Not sure about the ending yet, but I know I want the messages to be mysterious: The first few are a series of colors in HTML code. After that it starts getting personal (the name of acquaintance who dies soon after he finds the note, a street where a car accident happens). I want the messages to be obscure enough not to be presentable to authorities, but not so far out there that the narrator can't figure them out without googling the phrase:

Examples include phrases like "Born on a Monday", "The god of war has but one arm", or even something as simple as "poppies".

They need to reference something, in order to drive the narrator and the reader nuts, but it doesn't need to be important. Any disquieting Quotes, bible verses, or any blurb of text that would give you the willies to find on a scrap of paper under your pillow are what I'm looking for.

[*Classic*Charm*]

I cannot stand being poked. Creeps me right out.

My friend once pinned me in a corner and poked me all over, and I ended up crying in the fetal position. :blush: It gives me goose bumps and this feeling in the spot I was poked that doesn't go away. Ugh it's just awful.

[Lily Adams]

People touching/fiddling with their eyeballs. I hate it when people put in contacts or flip their eyelids or whatever. Can't stand it.

[Riesa]

black teeth way back.

[Zee.]

I find ..disturbing things, creepy
Like for example, movies, some people find that gorey messy stuff scary, i don't. Recently i watched a movie where i could have sworn i saw some face pop up around the corner in the background, no one else could see it though.
THAT creeps me out

[krymsonkyng]

I find ..disturbing things, creepy
Like for example, movies, some people find that gorey messy stuff scary, i don't. Recently i watched a movie where i could have sworn i saw some face pop up around the corner in the background, no one else could see it though.
THAT creeps me out

Agreed something hardcore. Once I swore I saw a face in the wood of an old dorm door, but my roommates couldn't see it. I had some trouble sleeping there, so I ended up playing way too much poker next door.

Nice sig btw.

[imthefoolonthehill]

I think the creepiest thing on the planet are people with adamant, unshakable, blind beliefs.

[Chava]

I think the creepiest thing on the planet are people with adamant, unshakable, blind beliefs.

That, and the notion that there is only one truth in the world.

[sprinks]

Ventriloquist dummies


*shivers*

they're not natural.

[imthefoolonthehill]

You should write about an army of black-toothed Ventriloquist dummy cultists who communicate by touching their eyes and poking each other.

Instant classic.

[sprinks]

You should write about an army of black-toothed Ventriloquist dummy cultists who communicate by touching their eyes and poking each other.

Instant classic.


none of us would read it though :p:lol:

[papayahed]

People touching/fiddling with their eyeballs. I hate it when people put in contacts or flip their eyelids or whatever. Can't stand it.

Oh, exactly.

Birds creep me out. Not the normal outside flying around kind. Those large ones at the pet store that sit on the perch out in the open. They just sit and watch. I have this fear that one day the bird won't like something I'm wearing and attack and peck my eyes out.

[Zee.]

Agreed something hardcore. Once I swore I saw a face in the wood of an old dorm door, but my roommates couldn't see it. I had some trouble sleeping there, so I ended up playing way too much poker next door.

Nice sig btw.

Why thank you :]

[Niamh]

the sound of forks scraping off plate makes my skin crawl. And cracking knuckles. *shudders*

[sprinks]

And cracking knuckles. *shudders*

oh dear :p. I'll have to wrap myself in bubblewrap when you visit! :p Any time I move, I crack! Even the slightest thing!

[Niamh]

No no! dont get me wrong, its when people just randomly crack them that gets me. My bones crack all the time. Just watching people do it with their knuckles...*shudders*

[Scheherazade]

No no! dont get me wrong, its when people just randomly crack them that gets me. My bones crack all the time. Just watching people do it with their knuckles...*shudders*Just reading that makes want to crack my knuckles!

:D

[sprinks]

Okay, I'll write a note on my hands saying "Don't crack knuckles!" :D. Because otherwise I'll do it! (habit from having cracking competitions with the guys.)

[kasie]

Rats. And mice. Have had them both in my kitchen (ah, the joys of living in the country) and had the screaming abdabs for weeks afterwards - every unexplained rustle was/is Them coming back. Have only ever managed to read 1984 once.....

[The Comedian]

Nothing.

[theoryofsilence]

nothing really.. my family has been tryin to creep me out for teh longest time.. they have found nothing yet.. even the goriest movies ever.. but i will say one thing...

when my friends talk to me about guys.. ugh.. just nasty to me... im gay so you would understand in my shoes..

[1n50mn14]

The sound of windchimes.

[Eugenie]

What gives me the creeps as you call it is when you are simply living and perhaps you walk into a book store or cafe or are taking a small break from work and perhaps you are drifting away..........then suddenly and without warning you look up and there is someone watching you, just staring and he or she , mostly he, has no real expression on the face, but the eyes. There is something there and you cannot tell if it is interest or malice and you feel your peace gone.
Once though it turned out slightly different, for what I have described has really happened to me.
A couple of years ago I was visiting a relative after work hours, well I was having a beautiful walk in the sun and taking my time. I saw a new shiney truck pass by and thought nothing of it. Then I saw it again and then again and it began to bother me. I could not see who was driving it.
Suddenly the truck stopped and a well dressed guy jumped out and starting following me. I freaked and started running and so did he.
Just as I got to the door of the place of business he pleaded with me to stop and said he just wanted to ask me out.
I ran into the building and got my relative and he came running out. He talked to the guy and to my horror to him to wait.
We actually ended up having sort of a dinner and he was genuine. He said he saw me and had to know me. He came again and he was honestly very nice, some body builder and instructor. But I never got over the fear and the next time he came to our house, I sent my sister and hid. I know, very mature. Eventually he gave up. Creepy though, hope it helps

[Niamh]

Just reading that makes want to crack my knuckles!

:D
Please dont! :(

Okay, I'll write a note on my hands saying "Don't crack knuckles!" :D. Because otherwise I'll do it! (habit from having cracking competitions with the guys.)

Please Do!

[Taliesin]

Actual - i.e not imagined - third-degree contacts with Lovecraftian deities.

They tend to be quite unnerving.

[Eugenie]

lovecraftien dieties?

eeeeeeeeeeeeeh.

[krymsonkyng]

Alright! I now know what my story will be about. After a random conversation with a stranger yesterday I had a touch of insperado. That said I want to include as many of these creepy things as possible (specifically those that have to do with strangers), but the main plot device will be the finding of notes in random places with nondescript messages.

That said, please keep posting creepy things but I have a request for creepy messages. So far I've come up with names, the code for different colors, and odd phrases like "Born on a Monday" or "The god of war has but one arm".

If you have any sort of ambiguous reference that you would be utterly shocked to find written on the back of a slip of paper you found in your pocket, desk drawer, wallet, pillowcase, shoe etc. Please post that too if you want :D

Thank you to everyone who's posted so far. This is a great help!

[amalia1985]

Priests...Lunatic, weird- looking priests...

[Emmy Castrol]

krymsonkyng, have you read any of M.R. James gothic short stories? Almost every story of his gives me the creeps!

[Sapphire]

Birds creep me out.
Definately, especially dead ones. Those feathers and the guts and... :sick: I just can't stand to look at it.
And young birds... they are so helpless (and naked), it is scary.

For free birds - there is always the risk that they pick your eyes out! Always...

Maybe you could make dead birds appear everywhere to create a scary atmosphere, or you could go for the "dangerous birds" act like in Heracles' sixth work the Stymphalian Birds (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stymphalian_Birds) or Hitchcocks the Birds (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Birds_(film)).

But then again, this might only freak people out who think birds are scary ;)

Edit Words that would creep me out, would be stuff that indicated that the writer knows what I have been doing that day - thus indicating I have been watched all the time. Maybe even like the writer is inside my mind... And not the "I know what you're thinking" phrase, but actually what I am thinking should be standing there to creep me out.
Maybe the phrases could be the last thing people say in certain horror movies, right before they die? Those should be easy to search for, might even be known by heart by some characters and would be meaningful when indicating an upcoming death ... It might be a bit too cliche though ...

[Emmy Castrol]

Me too!

I am so scared of birds, especially chickens. My parents like to kill their own chickens and when I was young, they had just bought a chicken from a farm and I was sitting in the back seat of our station wagon. The idiot farm boy didn't tie the legs of the chicken together properly and halfway through the car trip the chicken got out and didn't stop pecking at me until we reached home. I've been traumatised since.

I also don't like pigeons. Rats of the air. I am fascinated by big carnivorous birds though, like condors and vultures even if I am terrified of them.

[Pensive]

There was a time when it were lizards, now I find snakes much more creepy!

Oh and judging by some of the responses here, I guess there would be quite a number of people cursing me for having this creepy blue-bird as my avatar! :p

[1n50mn14]

Oh! I went through a phase when I kept getting back the wrong negatives with my photos after they were developed. This happened five or six consecutive times, and looking at the negatives were quite creepy. People I didn't know dressed up as aliens, once, a semi-snuff sort of storyboard.

Creepy. As. Hell.

[Annamariah]

And cracking knuckles. *shudders*

Cracking knuckles, popping joints... ugh. I can't help actually cringing or jumping a bit whenever people do that. It's just awful.

Just today a girl at the university laughed at me because the other day she watched me flinch every time a guy sitting next to me in class cracked his knuckles. I even pleaded him to stop, but he just looked at me weird and kept doing it... I couldn't wait to get out of there!

"You were jumping half a metre each time!" this girl said. I just couldn't help it, it wasn't deliberate :D

[Niamh]

I have no problem telling people not to do it! I know people who do it just to tease me. I cringe.

[Annamariah]

I also have a real "scary story" to share. This is very recent, in fact it only happened last night. I probably overreacted, but it was really scary.

Last night there was a party somewhere in this house, I think. Anyway, at some point during the afternoon there was a lot of shouting and swearwords coming from downstairs (I think), it sounded like an argument or something. For a while I wondered if I should do something, but as I couldn't hear properly what was happening, I decided to let it be. Then it was calmer for a few hours, just some occasional noise as usual.

Sometime around midnight there was suddenly loud banging on our door (this is a block of flats, I live in the fourth floor) and someone was ringing the doorbell many times. I was shocked, because no one ever rings our doorbell (if someone's coming over, we know about it before, and besides they can't get through the outdoor of this block of flats unless someone opens it for them). Before I had even time to think of what to do, the banging and ringing moved on to next door and soon it stopped altogether.

I was a bit shaken (for a moment I thought someone's trying to come through our door), but then I didn't think about it any more. But when I was going to bed and had just about fallen asleep, I woke up again to the banging on our door and the doorbell ringing. At first I didn't want to get out of my bed, and when I did, it had gone again.

Even though nothing really happened, I couldn't sleep well for the rest of the night, but kept having nightmares about people breaking into our apartment and myself being unable to move. I didn't hear the third time this banging on our door happened, but according to my flatmate (who missed the first two because she was already sleeping) told me it happened at 5 am.

There's no doorchain or even a peephole on our door, so there's no way to see who is behind it. Judging by the way this person kept trying to get into several apartments, it MIGHT have been someone who needed help. But as there was no way of knowing, I thought it safer not to open the door. For all I know it could have been some freak with a knife or something.

I haven't heard yet about any dead bodies found in our staircase, so I hope it was just someone who had drunk too much alcohol and thought it nice to try and wake up everybody in the house :p

[Eugenie]

rats and snakes, especially ones that run and creep out of a tiny bungalow in the still of a black night and you know people are living in there. :)

[Lynne Fees]

That's easy - mice:sick:
For instance, you are in your laundry room putting clothes from the washer into the dryer, when, out of the corner of your eye, you see a blurry brown figure dash across the shelving. You turn to look again, and you see another one. Then, you recognize them as - MICE!! So, you run up the basement stairs screaming at the top of your lungs the entire way.
My husband came running - he thought I had seen a dead body ~ also pretty creepy.

[Niamh]

mice are nasty. :sick:

[Taliesin]

I think mice are rather nice;
Their tails are long, their faces small;
They haven't any chins at all.
Their ears are pink, their teeth are white,
They run about the house at night;
They nibble things they shouldn't touch,
and, no one seems to like them much,
but, I think mice are rather nice.

Rose Fyleman

[SoonerSoul]

Any loud, buzzing, flying, stinging insect.... especially the wasp.
They just dont seem to like me much, and their unnatural.
This may may be slightly phobiotic of me....

[higley]

Spiders.

[dramasnot6]

Strange male stalkers.

[K.M Roberston]

Having my back turned to a dark door way, or going into a dark room. It's not the dark that i am afraid of, it's the unknown

[Eugenie]

Hearing the turning of the door knob to the front door in the dead of night and suddenly waking right up, not sure whether you locked it or not...

[Emil Miller]

That's easy - mice:sick:
For instance, you are in your laundry room putting clothes from the washer into the dryer, when, out of the corner of your eye, you see a blurry brown figure dash across the shelving. You turn to look again, and you see another one. Then, you recognize them as - MICE!! So, you run up the basement stairs screaming at the top of your lungs the entire way.
My husband came running - he thought I had seen a dead body ~ also pretty creepy.

I don't particularly like mice although they don't really bother me but I knew someone who worked in a large garage as a a mechanic. The garage had a big ginger cat and one day a colleague, with reputation for being bad tempered, found the cat sitting on his chair in the canteen and roughly threw the animal off and kicked it out of the door. The following day, the man was working in the garage when the cat came in with a mouse in its jaws. The cat walked calmly over to the man and dropped the mouse onto the man's feet, whereupon the mouse immediately ran up inside the man's trouserleg.
I was told that the man nearly had a heart attack as he started running around desperately trying to get his trousers off.

[JuniperWoolf]

The ocean is pretty damn scary, just thinking about being on a ship miles and miles above the sea bed with who knows what kind of monsters gliding around down there gives me the creeps, but I'd love it.

[Vonny]

double standards

[NikolaiI]

Stephen King stories, some of them. H. P. Lovecraft is a writer you should check out, if you haven't read him. He is great, almost brilliant, he writes about "the weird" and a few of his stories are Gothic to the core. I particularly remember one about a man who lived inside a vast, underground castle or something like that. A couple of times, I've gotten close to being spooked while reading his stories, but only a couple. The rest of the time I've just enjoyed them.

[Silas Thorne]

The movie 'The Ruins' gave me the creeps. It's quite original. Most horror movies are too predictable for me, but this one was rather good.