Scared Spooky at 7

The WHOLE time I was writing my stupid story for the contest I was thinking, 'Man, I need to write about something real, but I have nothing to write about.' I just love it when my students say that. And then, the second I pushed "post" on my story, I remembered a whole bunch of things.

This is how I saw spooky as a young 'un:

Vampires

Even though we didn't have any books called Twilight, I did read Bunnicula when I was 6 or 7 (yes, people! It's about a bunny that sucks the BLOOD out of vegetables!). I had my own room (my brother had the toy closet, hee hee) and it was kind of big. Plus we had a big, huge, lightless backyard. With trees behind that. I decided that I had to sleep with the covers up to my chin.

This way, Vampires would think I didn't have a neck. They would walk by my bed and say, "Hey, this girl doesn't have a neck," and move on. I woke up many nights worrying about being able to hold the covers up to my chin even in my sleep, and I tried to stay asleep on my back to do so.

I especially believed in this theory after I saw "Interview with a vampire" as a teenager.

Ghosts

I used to wake up at night because of my joints hurting really badly. It would keep me awake and I was afraid to get out of bed, so I would end up staring at the crack in the door so long that my eyes would start making those green lines around everything and then it would start looking like a shape of something in the dark. I was totally terrified that it was a ghost standing at my door, looking in on me, and just waiting for me to fall asleep so it could swallow me whole.

One night as I was practicing this scaring myself technique, there was a loud, screeching noise coming from downstairs. It went on and on for what seemed like an eternity, and no one in the house stirred. I lay terrified, waiting for the screeching to come get me with its knives, sharp metal, Freddy Krueger claws, or whatever it was. I finally started walking silently down the hallway and down the stairs (theorizing that if it couldn't hear me walking, it wouldn't get me, and if I saw it first, it would immediately disappear). I considered several times just getting my parents, but I also assumed that the evil demon was only torturing me and would only return once everyone was asleep again.

I turned on the kitchen light, shaking like a coke addict, and the noise immediately stopped. I looked around, petrified and almost in tears. My eyes searched for supernatural beings. I finally calmed down enough to turn the light back off and started walking back up the stairs, while still looking over my shoulder. Before I made it back to my bedroom the noise started up again. This time it sounded worse, and I started tripping towards my parents' bedroom like a victim in a scary movie--they can never run properly, and fall at the slightest dip in the ground and you think, "COME ON! RUN!" but they always get caught by the barely walking boogey man. The door opened before I got there, and my dad came out, looking sleepy and in his garments (extremely scary), and I yelled, "What is that noise!? DAD! There's something in the kitchen!!!" as if he couldn't hear it.

He looked at me and said, "Go back to bed. It's the hamster wheel."

He went downstairs to WD-40 the thing and I waited at the top of the stairs, sure he was going to start screaming for help.

The noise stopped.

Scary Movies

Once when my parents weren't home I watched a movie on tv about a girl who dies in a terrible fire and then comes to haunt the sister, and convinces her to help kill the family members one by one. In the last scene of the movie, everyone's dead except the sister (in a mental hospital) and the mom, who has been terribly hurt but seems to have escaped with her life. She's being taken care of by a nurse at home. No one knows about the dead girl being behind the whole thing except the sister, and suddenly, when the mom has been tucked into bed for the night after surviving this terrible ordeal, the girl says, ">

I saw "Event Horizon" in high school with some friends, and we got scared silly. Well, the guys didn't really admit it, but when I dropped Grether at home I was running late for curfew, so I left him at the front of his driveway. He lives in the hills of Wilsonville and his driveway was a block or so long, complete with an old growth woods surrounding the area, and no street lights. He called me the second he made it in the door and chewed me out for leaving him there. At the time he said it was the only movie he actually thought was scary.

Did I mention we watched it again when it came out on video?

I watched the original "Texas Chainsaw Massacre" with my boyfriend (and incidentally, Grether and his girlfriend) and purposely started making out with him (my boyfriend, not Grether) so I could stop watching it. Everyone was laughing at it except me. I was scared spooky. I still remember that meat hook.

Spooking Others

Mostly I only cared about scaring my brother. It was so much easier because he was 6 years younger than me. After we watched "Raiders of the Lost Ark", I screamed and screamed, and then flopped on the floor as if I were dead. He started crying and poking me and began to call 9-1-1. So I woke up immediately.

We also used to tell spooky stories to each other in my room using a keyboard musical instrument thingy. One person would sit in the closet with the speakers part of the keyboard, and we would stretch the microphone under the door where the other person would tell the story from outside the closet, and blow eerily into the mic and try to make sound effects to enhance the experience. It actually was kind of scary, especially because all of my dolls lived in the closet (the kind with the blinking eyes-- YEAH. Why else do you think I left them in the closet?). He thought I was really good at it and would beg me to be the story teller. When I was in the closet he mostly said "ooooooooo" and "then there was a GHOST!" and funny stuff like that.

Once I noticed that the wind was howling, and I swear I heard a name. Like "Mary" or something similar to "Mariko" if you were a really paranoid 10-year-old. I tried to record it on my keyboard thingy, but it didn't work. I decided that ghosts couldn't be recorded because they weren't constrained by mortal human world rules.

Unsolved Mysteries

My mom used to watch "Unsolved Mysteries". I was fascinated with it at age 10, in the same way I was fascinated with Stephen King (I devoured those books) and Dean Koontz. The bad thing about "Unsolved Mysteries" is that they reenact the stories, and you become convinced that it's actual footage of the situation. Out of all the unsolved mysteries I watched, the one that still kind of freaks me out is the TV that was alive. Two guys were in a haunted room at a hotel and these eyes popped up onto the screen. The eyes looked around the room and directly at the two guys, and when the guys unplugged the TV (I actually SAW them unplug the TV with my own two eyes, I swear its true), THE EYES WERE STILL THERE.

Whew. Totally FREAKY.