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(Fark)   Welcome to the 2020 "Who The Hell Needs To Be More Scared?" Fark Halloween Scary Story thread. In the spirit of the moment, the top vote getter will get a full YEAR of TF. After that, the top nine runners-up will get a month of TF. Reminder: No politics!   (fark.com) divider line
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1330 clicks; posted to Main » and Discussion » on 31 Oct 2020 at 12:03 PM (17 weeks ago)   |   Favorite    |   share:  Share on Twitter share via Email Share on Facebook



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Hassan Ben Sobr
2020-10-31 1:16:45 PM  
Background; my dad was from the U.K., and when I was three he took me to his home town for a few weeks to visit his side of the family.

When I was eight I was asleep in my bed and gradually woke up with the feeling of weight on the end of my bed. I opened my eyes and saw that at the end of my bed there was an old man, sitting there with a faint smile on his face. He patted my leg and I went back to sleep. In the morning we learned that my English granddad had passed away a few hours previously.

That's it.
 
CAT-LIKE TYPING DETECTED
2020-10-31 1:16:46 PM  

gunga galunga: I'll be happy to help. I'm sure we all remember this classic from echo5juliet back in 2006 which became the stuff of legends in Fark Scary story threads for years to come.


Thanks..!

Hopefully we can can avoid any duplication as we go along..
 
GRCooper
2020-10-31 1:23:16 PM  

Definitely Not Someone's Alt: I hope we get more 1st person stories that at least have the premise of being real. The 3rd person ones make my eyes glaze over.


I was hoping to get through the day without having to relive the experience, but you had to ruin it.

When I was 7, Dad went insane.

We were getting ready for Thanksgiving, and the pressure was getting to him. Mom had all of the other dishes cooked, and all dad had to do was the ham. Nothing difficult, but he was in no mental state for it. We had a lot of guests coming and dad felt everything had to be perfect. Not just great - perfect.

So, trying to please him and be a good helper, I took the ham out of the oven when the timer went off. I dropped it. I looked up to the face of my dad, twisted in horror. He just stood there, holding a brush and a bowl of honey glaze.

As he held me down afterwards, he just kept muttering "this has to be done before the third person gets here" while slathering glaze over my eyes. Then he plucked them out and I can still hear the soft, wet 'pop' they made as dad ate them.

To this day, every Thanksgiving, dad talks about how delicious my glazed eyes were.
 
CAT-LIKE TYPING DETECTED
2020-10-31 1:24:56 PM  
I saw that this one was already been asked about, above..

(..I've been away from FARK the better part of a year so I don't know who's still around or not and, considering how scant this is, I'm gunna post a couple things I might not, otherwise, in trying to cover the Halloween classics..  Credit will be given to the original poster where possible..)

===   ===   ===

"Danny Doesn't Live There Anymore" - by a particular individual


Danny Nero shot my brother in the belly. I was 9 or 10, so my brother, Mark, was about 11, and Danny was maybe 13. Danny was crazy, but not in the way people like; and though his weapon was a Daisy air rifle, I'm sure if he'd had a real rifle he would have used it. Even before he shot Mark, I knew what he was: I had a dream that he blinded and killed a midget just for fun. When I woke up, I wasn't sure if it was a dream or a memory. I don't know where Danny is now, but if I had to wager, I'd put my money on prison. If I had to hedge my bet, I'd put a few bucks on dead.
Danny's dad came home from work that day and smashed the pellet gun against a tree. I never met his dad, but other kids said Danny was his father's son, so I'm guessing his dad smashed the gun not because what Danny did was wrong, but because it was dumb, and they both could have got into trouble. I feared for Danny's little brother, David, who was about my age, and his little sister, Danielle, who was maybe six. Normal kids. Some of the scariest people start out as normal kids.
A few weeks after the air rifle incident, the Neros moved away. It was such a relief, I couldn't adapt to it at first. Their house had been a hazard to avoid when I visited that block. Now I wouldn't have to walk on the other side of the street. I kept telling myself: "It's just a house. It's just a house. Danny doesn't live there anymore." Let's say it was out of habit that I kept walking on the other side, anyway.


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###


Our best friends, the Welches, lived between us and Danny's house. The Kaliczeks, Rick and Matt, were farther up the hill. They had older ties to the Welches, and they were a little older than Mark and me, so they were friends of ours, but mostly just friends of friends.
Rick was going places; you could tell. A little before this story happened, Rick went house to house selling raffle tickets for a tie-dye-colored bundt cake he hadn't baked yet. My mom was sick in bed but she bought a ticket, and a few days later he came over to give her the cake. I'm pretty sure he let her win just to cheer her up. That was Rick.
This was also Rick: He found, in the street, a key that could unlock most GM vehicles. I don't know why it existed. Maybe a car thief made it; maybe GM made it. What's important is that Rick loved to use it, but only because he could. He didn't steal anything--he just liked being able to. He'd unlock a door and lock it again, and walk away smiling because he possessed the key.


###


It was a Saturday soon after Danny's family had moved away. I went to the Welches' to see if anyone wanted to hang out. No one was home, but Rick was on their porch, also looking for company.
"Hey, Rick."
"Hey, Adam."
We determined we were on our own and Rick asked if I wanted to see something cool. "OK," I said. Why not? I hadn't hung out with Rick alone before, but he was the best thing going on this vacant afternoon, so I followed him up the street. Halfway to his house, he veered toward Danny's house.
"Want to see what's inside?"
"Sure," I said, not at all sure. Danny was gone, but it was still his house. Logic and curiosity won out, and I followed Rick to Danny's back yard. He opened the storm door and fiddled with something and opened the back door. He didn't need a skeleton key for that.
"Come on," he said. My heart pounded in my throat. Ah, adrenaline: the fuel of my childhood.
The back door opened into the kitchen, a duplicate of the Welches'. In the corner to the left was a quarter-circle padded bench behind the breakfast table; the fridge to the right, then the sink, and the stove against the far wall. Past the breakfast table, on the left, was the door to the dining room. Strange, seeing it vacant: It looked like the Welches' kitchen, but something was missing, or I was missing something. It was just... off.  I could faintly smell cigarette smoke, and what about strawberries? Before I could figure out what, I was following Rick through the dining room and into the living room. Empty. Into the family room. Barren. The main bedroom. Nothing. The bathroom. Clean. Then back to the dining room and up the stairs to the kids' room. Up the same half-spiral stairwell the Welches had.


###


We stood in a familiar but foreign bedroom. Aside from a few stickers on the walls and some old, yellowed curtains, the room was anonymous. Rick opened the drawers built into the wall beside the door. Empty. So were the closets. We went to the bathroom.
The bath mat was still there, a nudie photo from a Playboy was taped to the mirror; opposite it a smutty cartoon of a museum cleaning lady doing detail work on Michelangelo's statue of David. I examined it closely and for the life of me I couldn't see what the joke was. I still don't, but apparently Danny liked it enough to save it; not enough to take it with him.
We tossed the rest of the bedroom and found nothing.


###

All that remained to explore was the attic. It had been to our left as we came in, so it was to the right on the way out. Two steps led to a short, wide door. Rick opened it and flipped the light switch.
Toys covered the floor: board games, puzzles, toy guns and rifles, toy cars and trucks, Hot Wheels tracks, stuffed animals, a doll house, a Slinky, Mr. Potato Head, boxes stacked against the walls, and children's clothes everywhere. I could see brightly colored plastic blocks and balls and model airplanes . Paydirt! I started to rummage through this bonanza, but in less than a minute Rick said
"Let's go."
"What? We just got here."
"Ah, it's all crap."
"Let's take a look. This is what we came for."
"I don't have time. Come on." He sounded more nervous than I felt when we first entered the kitchen.
"But..."
"I'm going. You can stay if you want." Nope. Not alone in Danny's house, abandoned or otherwise. I followed Rick downstairs, through the kitchen where strawberries smelled like cigarettes, and out the back door. We went up the block to Rick's house and upstairs to the room he shared with Matt. It, too, was a copy of the Welch kids' room.
"I have things to do," he said.
"Can I hang out for awhile?"
"If you want to watch me do homework," he said. I didn't, but I did hope to pester him into going back to Danny's house.
"OK. Whatever," I said. Rick sat down at his desk and opened his math book and started copying problems to his notebook. I watched him for a few minutes, still thinking about all those toys. Rick was right; they were mainly for younger kids, but I didn't care. They were there for the taking; surely some treasure must be buried in the trash. I just needed someone to keep me company in Danny's house, where something was wrong.


###


"Let's go back," I said.
"No. I told you, I have to do homework." I had never seen a kid so eager to do homework, especially on a weekend.
"Just for a few minutes. We barely got to see what's in there."
"Go, then. I left the door unlocked. Just walk in."
"I'm scared."
"Of what?"
"Ghosts." I knew it was childish, and I wanted to look cool to an older kid, but that place seriously creeped me out.
"There's no such thing as ghosts."
"I know. I'm still afraid of them."
"Just keep telling yourself, 'there's no such thing as ghosts; there's no such thing as ghosts.'"
"It doesn't work that way, Rick. Come on, it won't take long, and then I'll leave you alone."
"Tell you what: Go without me. Give me a few minutes to do some of these problems, and I'll meet you there."
"OK." No sense arguing, especially with Rick. I went downstairs and out into the sunshine. I knew there were no ghosts; I also knew the place was lousy with them. If I went back alone I could get over my fear of ghosts and also score some points with Rick. I edged down the hill to Danny's house and lurked behind a tree, looking at the house, trying to work up the courage and also kill some time till Rick was done with his math. The sunshine made the ghosts seem less and less probable, so I walked around back.


###

A kid about my age was standing on the patio, looking at the door. He scared me for a second, but I thought I recognized him from the neighborhood. His blond hair was buzz-cut, and he wore a white t-shirt and blue jeans: a nondescript kid who must have had strict parents who wouldn't let him wear his hair long like most of my friends did in the early 70s.
"Hey," he said.
"Hey," I said back. "What are you doing here?"
"I was about to go inside," he said. "You want to see something cool? There's a lot of toys upstairs." Well, Hell. Competition.
"Yeah, I know," I said. "I was about to go take a look."
"Go on, then."
I hesitated.
"What's the matter?" he asked.
"Honestly? This place scares me."
"There's nothing to be scared of." I wasn't so sure of that, but I'd had enough of being the coward, so I just said
"I'm Adam."
"I'm Danny."
"That's the name of the big kid who used to live here," I said.
"I know. He was mean. I'm glad he's gone."
"Me, too."
"You gonna go inside?" he asked.
"If you go with me," I said. The idea of sharing the loot didn't seem like such a bad arrangement anymore. Ghosts will only appear when you're alone; at least that was my theory. Besides, half the fun was in exploring.
"OK. Go ahead," he said. I opened the door and walked into the kitchen. Danny followed me.


###


"I hope my mom likes you," he said. What? I'd just met this kid, and he was already inviting me to his house? I didn't say anything. Again, in the kitchen, something seemed amiss. The image of a strawberry smoking a cigarette flashed through my mind. We walked through the kitchen to the dining room and up the half-spiral staircase to the kids' room.
"Go ahead," Danny said. "Open it." I climbed the two wooden steps and pulled the door open, reached to the right and flipped the light switch. The toys and boxes and clothes spread out before us. Why would the Neros leave this stuff behind? They could at least have given it to Goodwill.
I walked into the playroom, Danny still behind me. I waded a few steps into the tide of toys and began to survey. Rick was right; most of this stuff was worthless. Little kids' blocks and trinkets. Dolls and stuffed animals.  Lincoln Logs and Legos. Tinker Toys. And clothes. So many clothes. Maybe the good stuff was in the boxes. I kicked some toys aside and reached the first box. Empty. I knocked it off the box under it and opened that one. Also empty. And the next box, and the next. They were as empty as the rooms of this house. Some boxes had boxes in them. There were probably enough to hold all of these toys and clothes, but for some reason they were unused. Then I saw: each was marked "Toys: Goodwill" or "Clothes: Goodwill." Meaning the Neros never bothered to pack them up? Behind me Danny said
"We could play in here forever." From what I had seen so far, that didn't seem likely. I returned my attention to the toys. I found some plastic soldiers, like the ones I had at home, and started to gather them up. It was a start. I showed them to Danny, and he said
"My dad died in the war." I looked him in the eye for the first time since we entered the playroom.
"That's too bad, man. I know some kids at school whose dads are over there." It wasn't much of a consolation. We all had friends with dads in Vietnam. I was lucky mine got out on 4-F. Danny forced a half-smile and bent down to sift through the jetsam.
"So, you live with your mom?" I asked.
"Mmm... Yeah, and my sister. We got some money after Dad died. Mom bought a house and we moved here from Tulsa and we've been here ever since." I didn't say anything. I didn't want to know too much about this kid I had just met, and I definitely didn't want to let him unload on me about his dead dad.
"It hit her really hard. She didn't know what to do with me and my sister. She sort of... I don't know, I guess she just had to get away from everything and take us with her," he said.
"Hmm," I said. I picked up a small box and put the soldiers into it. Danny pointed to a rubber Godzilla and said
"Let's see that." I was jealous: I wanted it. I handed it to him. He made little gestures with it, like it was stomping Tokyo.
"Cool!" I said. "I wish I had found that!" Danny handed it to me.
"It's yours."
"Really? That's the coolest thing yet. Thanks." I put it into the box. I found a pair of glow-in-the-dark plastic vampire fangs, and handed them to Danny. He put them into his mouth and raised his arms like Count Dracula and leaned forward, baring the fangs. We laughed. He handed the teeth back to me. They were dry.
"All yours," he said. Into the box. We rummaged to the back of the playroom. I found a parking lot of Matchbox cars and put them into the box. So far, Danny hadn't saved anything. I came to a plastic rocking horse suspended by springs from a metal frame. I was too big for it, so of course I sat on it. The springs croaked their protest.
"Don't," said Danny. "My sister wants that. You'll break it." Fair enough. I dismounted.
"You know," I said, "I saw some Legos back there. I know someone who would want them." I turned to look back where we came in, and the room seemed different. Less colorful.
"Here's another door," said Danny. He pointed to a small hatch about two feet high and 18 inches wide, near our feet. It was white with a green knob. Strange, the details you remember. It was white with a green knob at the end of the attic, and Danny said
"You should see what's in there."
"Why?" I asked. "What's in there?"
"I don't know, you should see."
"My friends have the same door in their playroom," I said. "It's just some pipes and boards and stuff."
"I bet we could both fit in there," he said.
"I could barely fit," I said.
"Show me," he said.
"My friends found a stuffed eagle in theirs. It almost filled it."
"A real eagle?" he said.
"Yep. Mounted on a branch on a board. It was pretty cool."
"Definitely. I wonder if there's something stuffed in this one?"
"Why don't you go in there?" I challenged. He dropped it.
"I'm gonna go find those Legos," I said, and turned to wade through the toys and clothes.
"OK," he said. "I think I saw a stuffed rabbit over there. Save it for my sister."
"I'll keep an eye out for it," I said, and negotiated a path back to where we came in.


###

I found a rubber spider and put it into the box. A few steps away I saw a pile of Legos and slogged toward them. When I got there, most of what I had thought were Legos turned out to be colored wooden blocks. I picked up the remaining Legos. As I put them into the box, I noticed the plastic soldiers looked different, like they were made of metal. Tin soldiers, not plastic.
"Hey, look at that," said Danny. He was pointing to a toy rifle leaning against a doll house near me. "That's the kind the Japs shot my dad with. Lemme see it." This was getting annoying. Why did I have to bring everything to him? But I did, and went back to where I had been.
So many little kids' toys, but not only: About 20 feet of Hot Wheels tracks, and I reached for them, and there in a nest of train tracks, what kids had before Hot Wheels tracks, was a stuffed rabbit, ancient and threadbare, a deep brown stain on one side.
"Here's the rabbit," I said, holding it by the ears so I didn't have to touch that stain. Then I thought: Japs? In Vietnam?
"Great! Toss it here." I did. He almost caught it, but it went through his hands. He stooped to pick it up and I tried to find the Hot Wheels tracks that had been there a moment ago, among the train tracks that had not. I gave up and looked for the Mr. Potato Head I had seen near the door. I see his hand, ear, and eye poking up through some board games and Barbie accessories. When I pick it up, it's a real potato, black and shriveled and hard, and the features don't line up right. I can't decide if I like it or not. My ears pop. I smell cigarette smoke.
"Were you smoking up here?" I ask.
"Oh, that's my mom. She smokes."
"Your mom is here?"
"She's always here. That was her in the kitchen."
The room spins. As he speaks, I remember a woman sitting at the breakfast table with a cigarette in her hand and an ashtray in front of her. A gaunt, haggard woman with lines in her face, none from laughter. She wears a sun dress, once white, now yellowed, printed with strawberries. I have two memories: one of the kitchen empty but somehow wrong, and another of Danny's mom sitting there watching us without moving her head, smoking.
"Hey, Danae," said Danny. "Adam found your rabbit." He was looking toward the back corner where a pile of clothes gathered and stood and became a little girl of about six, blond like Danny. She giggled and stepped toward Danny to take the blood-stained rabbit. She cuddled it to her cheek and cast me a sad smile. She mounted the rocking horse and began to hum a song I didn't recognize. The rocking horse was no longer plastic and spring-mounted, but made of wood, on true rockers. I dropped the box and ran for the door and Danny came toward me, he came toward me and the way his feet moved through the toys on the floor of that attic, the way his toes moved through the toys as he came toward me and I reached for the door and Danny was there and I reached the door first and I didn't push his hand away, I put my hand through his.
I put my hand through his, and that instant I feel decades of loneliness and sadness, and in my head I hear Danny crying in outrage for his sister; he's telling his mother to stop, stop, STOP, MOM! I hear the door bang as I slam it behind me; I hear it bounce back open from the impact, but that's not right; there's a pause between the first bang and the second, and then more banging. I understand: Danny had me open the back door and the door to the attic because he couldn't. He could touch only what I gave him. I remember the door with the green knob, and I'm glad I didn't open it for him.
In two leaps I'm down the half-spiral staircase, charging through the living room for the front door. No way am I going back to the kitchen where Danny's mom has sat smoking for the past 25 years. The door to the attic stops banging. Footsteps are clattering down the stairs, and from the kitchen I hear her call:
"Danny, you did it again!"
The living room is furnished, and I'm about to trip over a coffee table in the middle of it. It's old, from another era, like the sofa and the chairs and the television-size radio against the wall. I'm going to trip over it, but I don't. I kick the table over and across the room; the table stays where it is. I feel nothing. Furniture can be ghosts, too, apparently.
I'm already familiar with this place by way of the Welches', so it takes me exactly 2.17 seconds to undo the bolt and the chain latch on the front door. I shove the storm door open and lunge across the porch and over the far rail. I almost land on someone beside the porch. I can't breathe, let alone scream, so I just flail. Someone grabs my wrist, and turns me around.


###

It was Rick, laughing.
"What did you see, a ghost?" I could only open my mouth and gasp. Rick looked up toward the front door and his smile faded. He kept the grip on my wrist, turned a little too fast, and pulled me after him, down the hill, past the Welches', toward my house. Before we got to the corner, he stopped us and sat us down.
"Jesus Christ, did you..." He couldn't finish.
"I TOLD YOU!" I shouted, and punched him in the chest. He didn't object.
"Jesus Christ," he said again. We crossed the street and went to my house. My folks were in the back yard; Rick and I went to the kitchen and got some Kool-Aid.
"What did you see?" I asked.
"Nothing," he said.
"Bullshiat. You saw it, too."
"No, I mean I saw nothing. Inside the house, inside the door, the house went black. Pitch black. Then it faded to nothing. No black, no white, just nothing. And then it faded back to normal."
"Did you see the kid in there?" I asked.
"Do you know what nothing looks like?" he asked. I didn't care.
"Did you see him?" I asked again.
"I saw a woman, I think."
"What else do you think?" I asked.
"Look, I'm sorry, OK? I'm sorry."
"Sorry for what? What did you do?"
"I didn't know. I didn't know, OK?"
"What?"
"The toys... when I was there before... They were in boxes. Someone came and dumped them after I was there."
"Yeah, well, someone did. It was Danny."
"Danny Nero?"
"No, Danny been-dead-for-twenty-five-years. Danny whose mom killed him and his sister. And herself. You knew, didn't you?"
Silence.
More silence.
"Adam." said Rick, staring at the wallpaper.
"What?"
"I think I remember something," he said. He was almost mumbling.
"What?"
"I think I might have dumped the toys out."
"You think you might have?" I said. "How can you not know?"
"I don't want to talk about it anymore."
"I bet." That was the one time I felt superior to Rick. He knew it, and he let me feel however I wanted. We sipped our Kool-Aid in silence, not looking at each other. A couple of minutes later my mom walked in from the back yard.
"Oh, hi, Rick. How are you?" Rick took a long drink of Kool-Aid and said
"Great. How are you?"
"Much better, thank you. And thank you for the cake. It was beautiful."
"You're welcome."
"A very nice cake."
 
Resident Muslim [OhFark]
2020-10-31 1:35:21 PM  

Honest Geologist: Resident Muslim: Honest Geologist: Resident Muslim: Turing_Machine: Halloween is coming up, and it's time to start scaring the hell out of yourself. We'd like to help. Every year, Fark has a Halloween thread where Farkers share their own spooky stories. These are always fun threads, and a great way to kill some time at work. Here are the first 15 Fark scary story threads - now go creep yourself out.

2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019

Yay! Finally!
Thanks TM.

I can't remember if it was in one of these threads or another, but I think you posted one of the most unsettling stories I've read on here. About the burial of a guy who wasn't particularly well-liked?

I hate you for reminding me.
(Not really, but my jaw clenched and is still clenched from that memory.)
Here I was reading this thread and thinking I don't have any really scary stories to share, but that's mostly because I consider this story a religious story, a lesson, rather than a horror story per se, even though how much it freaked me out.
Anyhoo...this is a rewriting, not a copy and paste, to put me into the right state of mind.

In Muslim/ Middle Eastern cultures it's very common when someone who has passed away is mentioned, that a "God have mercy on him" follows directly after the mention.
I HAVE heard some people refrain from saying it when there was really, really  bad blood between them.
However, this guy was the only guy I ever heard someone say, after asking me if I knew that he had passed and I said yes, "May God NOT have mercy on him."
I had a working relationship with the guy, and on several projects I'd feel like the numbers weren't adding up, financially or that whatever day rate he was quoting me for the workers wasn't correct. Even projects that seemed lucrative ended up breaking even on the long run.
He invited me up to his apartment for coffee once and I was actually surprised at how well furnished his apartment was. I didn't say anything but he did; that his cousin who workEd in Saudi Arabia and had a lucrative job helped him out or lent him the money or something. I had met this cousin, and after this guy passed away the same cousin called me up saying how things are difficult for him in Saudi Arabia and if I could lend him money.
I ignored a lot of signs dealing with this guy and holding to my value of that I will only deal with people based on what I have witnessed and can confirm myself.
After he passed away I met a mutual acquaintance who brought him up and then asked if I had..."noticed anything" while working with this guy, in regards to his character. I just gave a frank no, but couldn't stop my gaze from dropping because I knew what he was asking.
The short of it, is that this guy, as amicable (and skilled!) as he was, apparently had dealt with a lot of people who ended up coming up financially short, some more than others, some much more.

This is the set up so that you understand what kind of character this guy was.

When he died, I got a call from his other cousin who at the time also lived in the same country. He had a heart attack, late 30s if I recall correctly from a two-pack a day smoking habit.

I figured that them not being from the country, that there might not be a lot of people for the burial, so out of courtesy and personal obligation, I went.

This was beyond "not a lot of people". Out of all of those years of him living in that country you'd figure friends or work acquaintances would show up.
None did.
I arrived there to find the cousin and the two very young sons. The cemetery caretaker(s?) and that's it. I have never witnessed in my life such a sparse number.
Recalling the story, I don't even recall us performing the Muslim prayer that is done as last rites, I think they did it before I got there.
Whatever.
We get to the grave site and as bodies are usually put into the graves by hand, and the two kids were just too young, I jumped in myself (I was much younger) and received the shroud-covered body.
This is what a shroud covered body looks like:
[npr.brightspotcdn.com image 850x849]
I would like to bring to your attention two points that will be relevant 1) you can see the string holding the two pieces of cloth in place 2) you can tell which way the body is facing from the arm placements.

So I lower the body into the grave, and start placing the cross pieces over the body that close off the "slot" where the body is placed on its right side, with the grave perpendicular to the direction of Mecca so that the body faces Mecca.
This is how a body in the grave is placed:
[i.ytimg.com image 480x360]
Again, notice the arms.
After placing the body, I loosened up the strings as per procedure, and after the first few cross pieces were put in place the cousin reminded me to uncover the face, again, as per procedure. Mind you, the first few cross pieces already cover the top of the grave, to give privacy to the face and shield the people there from seeing a dead face.
So I lean over and start loosening up the cloths at the face, they start separating...and I see a bald head. The guy was bald, so I figure that his chin is tucked in low and I need to uncover lower...still more bald head..."Did we lower him backwards into the grave??" I ask myself in panic, I look down and I can clearly see where the arms are, in the correct location, but all I keep uncovering as I go lower is baldness...like his head was twisted the other way around, like God didn't want him facing Mecca. The cousin senses me being distraught and asks if everything is OK, he can't see what I'm seeing because he was standing outside of the grave...and I reply with "I can't uncover his face" in as much a level voice as I can, so he says to let him try, him probably thinking that I couldn't loosen up the strings or cloth or something. I climb out of the grave and he goes in, he fumbles around for a bit, and comes out and I ask him, in as level a voice as I can muster "were you able to uncover the face?" While I tried my best to keep my voice level I'm sure there was a bit of panic in my voice.
Yes, was his simple reply, and I left it at that.

I felt so unclean. I don't ever recall actually feeling so unclean. I didn't/couldn't wait until I got home.
I stopped at the first mosque I could find, feeling sick to my stomach, walked into the bathrooms that had floor level toilets, stripped my clothes and hung them on the door and just frantically washed myself with the handheld bidet/hose.

To this day, and probably to the end of my life, I fear God's punishment more for what I might do to other people than what sins I might do to myself.

I don't think a lot of the heaviness of this hit me the first time I read it. I am sorry I brought it up. Wishing you peace.


It felt heavy revisiting it.
Please don't apologize, I am a man of words and to have them recalled is a gift.
I thank you for that gift.

In real life not a lot of people who know me, even those who know me really well know the story.
Mostly the ones that know me really well I don't tell it to for fear that they may recognize the person I was talking about because the guy and I worked together for a while and they might recognize some bits.
I don't like to speak ill of the living, let alone the dead.
 
baronbloodbath [TotalFark] [OhFark]
2020-10-31 1:35:30 PM  
-The Monster Under The Bed

I look under the bed ever night. It's almost always the same thing. A dust bunny on the verge of evolving into a dust jackrabbit. A quarter and some nickels that rolled away from my pocket in ages past. A half broken mechanical pencil, no doubt the remains of a fervent writing spree abandoned like some many other things I once thought I could leverage to fill the vacant hours. A tab for an energy drink mindlessly picked off and discarded, flung on a whim for a personal and ersatz demonstration of aerodynamics.

And a monster.

Oh, it doesn't look like there's a monster under there. Just because you can't see it or reach it doesn't mean it doesn't exist. I've made my peace with it. It's actually quite powerful, really. It lives off fear, drinks it, gains nourishment from it.
I imagine that it staked out its territory and protects it fiercely. These days, I only have a nightmare once a year or so; I rightly can't remember the last time I had one. I...It sounds so crazy, but I think it eats nightmares. Despite all the weird foods I eat, despite all the strange thoughts dancing in my head throughout the day. Despite all the gory horror films I watch on repeat.
No nightmares. Been about two years since the last one.

So, I have not disturbed its home. I'm pretty organized, and I would hate for someone to come in and mess with my treasured possessions on a whim. My weird pillows. My warm blanket.

I don't mess with it, and it doesn't mess with me. I'm sure it likes it that way.

-The Monster Above the Bed

I look above the bed every morning, around 4:39, not to put too fine a point on it. It's almost always the same thing. A pillow that says "Life's a Beach" and a pillow with a stylized pineapple. Greenish blue sheets that have an improbable amount of cat fur. A heavy blanket with a beach scene.
And a monster.

Oh, it doesn't look like there's a monster up there. Just because you can't see it or reach it doesn't mean it doesn't exist. I've made my peace with it. It's actually quite powerful, really. Despite having me, ME, taking up residence here, among the forgotten pencil and spare change, it has been sleeping so soundly.

I try to be so quiet, so invisible. You don't want one of those things to see you, do you? What would it do if it saw me, just trying to live in the safe dark corners of this world, scrounging on teeny tiny crumbs of fear while defending this patch of land from my feral kin? Some arcane ritual? Maybe bring in sage and copal? Bring the fires that brought my kind to the brink of destruction? No, I am happy with our current "arrangement".

So I have not disturbed its home. I'm pretty organized, and I would hate for someone to come in and mess with my treasured possessions on a whim. My growing dust bunny. My writing implement. My life savings of 40 cents. And this metal piece that says "MONSTER" on it. Why yes. I suppose I am.

I don't mess with it, and it doesn't mess with me. I'm sure it likes it that way.
 
CAT-LIKE TYPING DETECTED
2020-10-31 1:35:45 PM  
A popular classic from way back in 2012..always asked for.

Was a mystery as to what happened to the author for some time after, but he finally posted an unpdate a year or two back..not having any luck finding it, at the moment..if someone else remembers where this might be, please post it..!

===   ===   ===

"Turkey Feathers" - by Tharkin

Note--this is longer than I meant it to be. Sometimes I'm a little long-winded. I think it's worth a read though--it's all true and, in my opinion, pretty frigging creepy.

Here's something recent. Yesterday, actually. I can't say anything paranormal was involved, but I encountered several very strange situations in a short period of time in an unlikely area. Were they related? I don't know. Probably not. But suffice to say some bizzare shiat was happening in the woods behind my house last night.

Some context:

I live on a big hill in rural(ish) Maine. I'm a hunter, and deer season just started. I've been excited for this season because late last season I started hunting behind my house instead of another area that had gotten too crowded. I got a small buck up there at the end of last season, and this year I've seen a big one a few times and some sign that indicate it spends a fair amount of time on the hill behind me. The wife was working from home so I had a rare chance to get out during the week (I'm a stay-at-home-dad.)

Yesterday wasn't great weather--Sandy was not a big deal this far north but we did get some effects from the very outer edge of it--it was pretty windy and alternating from light rain to pounding rain off and on. I had it in my head that even though the deer likely were not moving much, *I* could move and the weather would cover my noise and scent pretty effectively. Also I thought it would be cool to say I went hunting in a hurricane. I'm kind of a dork sometimes. In short, damn if the weather was going to keep me from going out.

Anyway:

I set off at a bit after 3pm. There's an extensive network of snowmobile/ATV trails on the hill and I had only covered a small percentage of it. My plan was to walk along those trails and at least scout some new ground even if I didn't see a deer (I didn't.)

After maybe 45 minutes of walking I was well into an area I had not been before. I started walking a sort of grid pattern through a brushy area hoping to flush out a deer if one was bedded down in there. A little bit into the brush I found a turkey feather standing straight up, the quill pushed into the dirt beneath the leaves. I thought it was interesting that it had fallen in such a way and got stuck, but figured it was just one of those weird things that happen. But then I found another, and another, and another. In the space of maybe 200 square feet I found a dozen of these, all exactly the same--standing straight up, the end pushed into the dirt. They seemed to be evenly spaced. This isn't a spot that Joe Schmoe is likely to just be messing around in--it took effort to push through the brush and there were quite a few thorny plants. But I don't think this could possibly have happened naturally--someone put those feathers there. Weird as hell. But I was there to hunt, so I made my way back to the trail and kept moving.

Shortly after this, the sky opened up and it started absolutely dumping rain. Just pounding. I had put some distance between the place with the feathers and decided to hunker down to see if it would let up in a few minutes. I leaned against a tree and watched the trail behind me in case a deer in the area had the same idea. After about 5 minutes I saw some movement coming up the hill toward the trail. I got my rifle ready, but it turned out not to be a deer. A flock of turkeys walked up the hill, across the trail, and into the trees on the other side. That in itself isn't at all odd. What was odd was the way they were walking. Very calmly and evenly, not really looking around much, all moving the same direction in a tight cluster. If you've seen wild turkeys moving before, you know that this is not normal. It's also not normal (AT ALL) for a fox to be walking along with them, but sure as hell, there it was. Just slowly trotting along parallel to their path in a straight line up the hill not 10 feet from the turkeys, with neither seeming to give the other a second thought. As the last few turkeys came onto the trail a racoon that I hadn't seen crossed the trail between me and the turkeys. Same deal--just walking up the hill in no particular hurry but in a straight line and not paying attention to anything but the ground in front of it. This was not a dense area of woods--I watched these animals walking for several hundred feet and their behavior never varied. At this point I was just astounded. I had different things going through my mind: I've heard stories about animals sensing things like earthquakes and leaving the area. A flood? Not likely--there aren't any real streams or rivers on this hill. A fire? There hadn't been any lightning yet (soon though) and there was no way anything was going to be burning in this rain anyway. Was the whole frigging hillside going to come down in a mudslide or something? But it didn't seem to me that these animals were trying to escape something that was scaring them. If anything, it was some of the calmest behavior I've ever witness in wild animals. If I wanted to get really creepy about it I'd almost say it was more like they were moving toward something than away, but that's editorializing and maybe injecting more strangeness into the situation than is warranted by the facts. At any rate, it was weird as hell and a little bit unsettling.

So at this point I'm a little bit perturbed and the whole "being in the woods during a storm as the light starts fading" thing probably wasn't helping my mindset. I kind of told myself that I was being silly and got up to keep moving, as it didn't appear the rain was letting up in the immediate future. I had also begun seeing flashes of lightning, though it was a ways off yet. I gave myself half an hour before I had to start heading back to the house, because with the cloud cover and rain it was already getting dim and I knew darkness would come early and quickly. I wasn't at all concerned about getting lost, but I didn't really want to be banging around in the dark woods in a storm with a flashlight either. At this point I had pretty much given up on seeing a deer--they would certainly all be hunkered down--but wanted to keep scouting out this new area--it would be my only chance before the weekend when I'd next be able to get out hunting.

A little bit down the trail I came into a large stand of tall pine trees. It had clearly been cut and replanted years and years ago, then selectively cut more recently--all of the trees were in straight rows, all the same species (white pine) and every 5th or 6th one was missing. Areas like this are pretty common out here, and walking through them gives an interesting effect--you can see a long ways down the row you are on and on a diagonal between rows, but not far between those areas or to your sides. Each couple of steps you take shifts it a bit and gives you long views in another direction while blocking the long view you had before. I moved from one row to the next just as lightning flashed and was incredibly startled to see that someone was standing on the right side of the row maybe 150-200 feet away with his back to me, looking up into the treetops. Startled doesn't even begin to describe it, really. It jumped the hell out of me. There was simply no way anyone else was out there. Now if this was a ghost story, you know what would happen next: My eyes would readjust and the figure would be gone. In fact this is exactly what was in my head during that couple seconds of semi-blindness: If that person is not there, I am going the hell home right now. But as my eyes adjusted I could see that he was indeed still standing there.

Now, this area is a minimum of a half-hour walk from the nearest road. I've looked at town maps and google earth many times in the last year to get some idea of the lay of the land. There are not any houses in that area. It's just woods with snowmobile trails going through it. This guy was not hunting--he had nothing in his hands and wasn't wearing orange. He was just out in the middle of nowhere, in the pouring frigging rain, standing with his arms hanging down at his sides and staring up at the trees. No raingear either--he was absolutely drenched. Weird as hell. I stood waiting for him to turn around so I could wave, letting him know I had seen him and wasn't going to mistake him for a deer and shoot. After maybe 20 seconds he walked forward (away from me) to the next tree and looked up that one. I looked too, and didn't see anything out of the ordinary. Just regular old pine trees. This went on for maybe a couple of minutes and 4 or 5 trees before he went to the other side of the row and turned my way. We was looking my direction, not up, so I gave him a wave and looked up into the trees myself like "What are you looking for?" and looked back at him. He didn't acknowledge me in the slightest. Just took a few steps to the next tree and looked up. No gesturing, no using his hands to shield his face from the rain, nothing. We were not far apart, there was a clear line of sight, and I was wearing a blaze orange jacket and hat. There is no way he didn't see me, and it should have startled him as much as it had startled me to see him. At that point I had pretty much had enough--I'm going the hell home to dry out, eat some dinner, and clean my gun (not in that order.)

Nothing else happened on the walk back until I had almost gotten home. Next to my house is a large clearing surrounded by a few lines of electric fencing where my neighbor keeps about 30 goats. They are usually out wandering around and pretty spread out, but in inclement weather tend to stay in a sort of barn he built for them. As I walked down the path next to that clearing I saw that all or most of the goats were out--they were just standing in the wind and rain (which was still coming down hard) at the fenceline on the uphill side of the clearing, looking up the hill into the woods. It took me maybe three or four minutes to walk from where I could first see them to get past them. I didn't see any of them take a single step--just standing there, looking up the hill. It made me think of the turkeys, fox, and racoon I had seen earlier--if that fence hadn't been there, would the goats be walking up the hill too? I don't know. Maybe not. But in my current frame of mind (thoroughly creeped out) that was the first thing that came to mind.

So. I got inside, ate dinner with the wife and kids, cleaned the gun, etc. Nothing else the slightest bit out of the ordinary happened. If any of these things had happened in isolation I probably wouldn't have thought anything of it. But the fact that they all happened in just a few hours out in the woods during a storm while it was getting dark--yeah. Creepy. Creepy as hell. I'll be going back into that area this weekend early in the day. I can't say I'm not slightly apprehensive about it, but I did see lots of deer sign last night. It's too good a spot to stay away from. Plus I'm kind of curious--I'm going to try to find those feathers again, and go down the hill where I saw the animals come up to see if I can find anything unusual.
 
echo5juliet
2020-10-31 1:40:43 PM  

gunga galunga: CAT-LIKE TYPING DETECTED: HAPPY HALLOWEEN, Everyone..!!

..seems a little anti-climactic after all the horror the year has already brought..

Alot of great stories/writing above, and a little kerfluffleing too..guess last year's proposal to have a separate thread for 'real,' personal stories and one for creative works never gained any traction..

Sad to see that contribution this year has been so anemic..under 100 posts and a mere 11 hours left in what should be the best holiday of the year..  Only to be understood, with everything we've all been dealing with and going through..    =P    Also sorry to note that the classics don't seem to have made any sort of a showing in this thread. I guess I'll step up to the plate and start with those..one per post, methinks..

(..if any were already posted and I missed it, my apologies..)

Here's the first, an absolute classic:

Ted the Caver

I'll be happy to help. I'm sure we all remember this classic from echo5juliet back in 2006 which became the stuff of legends in Fark Scary story threads for years to come.
______________________________________​_______________________________

I was driving a shortcut from Twentynine Palms, CA to Albuquerque, NM. Twentynine Palms is located in the desolate high desert east of LA. The shortcut was all two lane road through total nothingness, except for passing through Amboy, CA. Amboy is a nearly abandoned town nearly as far below sea level as Death Valley, with a dormant volcano and lava field on one side and a salt flat on the other. It was also, at the time, a hotspot for satanic group activity.

So I was driving by myself in the afternoon. I stopped in Amboy and snapped a picture of the city sign, just to prove I was there to friends who dared me to take that route to I-40. I got back in my car and proceeded to drive up into the mountain range between Amboy and I-40.

Once I reach the top I am driving north through a canyon with high grass on both sides of the road. Up ahead I see some stuff in the middle of the road. As I approach I slow down to see a red Pontiac Fiero stopped sideways across both lanes, a suitcase open with clothes scattered everywhere and two bodies laying face down in the road, a man and a woman.

I stop a hundred feet or so away and the hair on the back of my neck is standing up. Being a Marine, I reach under the seat and pull out a 9mm pistol and chamber a round. Something seemed very wrong, it looked too perfect as if it were staged. An ambush? Was I being paranoid? Something was just wrong. Getting out of the car seemed unthinkable, it was the horror movie move.

As I scanned the road I saw a line I could drive. Pass the guy in the road on his left, swerve to the right side of the woman, behind the Fiero and I'd be on the other side. I dropped it into first gear, punched it and drove the line I planned.

I passed the back of the Fierro without hitting it or either of the bodies in the road. I continued forward a couple hundred feet and slowed down so I could breathe and let my heart slow down. As I looked up into the rearview mirror I saw that the two bodies had gotten up to their knees and twenty or so people emerged from the tall grass on either side of the road by the car and bodies. One of them, presumably the leader of the group, walked out a few feet ahead of the others and glared at me. It was Bill Murray. He said, "no one will ever believe you".

At that moment my right foot smashed the gas pedal to the floor and did not let up until I had to slowdown for the I-40 east onramp.

I will never know what would have happened to me had I gotten out of the car to check on the bodies or stopped my car closer to them. Somehow I do not think it would have been good. Sometimes real life can be scarier than a movie.


Did somebody mumble my name?
 
CAT-LIKE TYPING DETECTED
2020-10-31 1:43:05 PM  
Here's an SCP entry that was popular on here some All Hallows back..  Feel free to add in just about any other SCP's just because..    =)

===   ===   ===

SCP-087 - The Stairwell
 
CAT-LIKE TYPING DETECTED
2020-10-31 1:46:00 PM  

echo5juliet: Did somebody mumble my name?


Happy Pumpkin Day..!

Haven't seen you in..well, at least as long as I've been gone..    =P
 
darth sunshine
2020-10-31 1:48:29 PM  
once upon a time there was politics.
the end
 
CAT-LIKE TYPING DETECTED
2020-10-31 1:49:40 PM  
Short but sweet..always a Fan-favorite..!

===   ===   ===

"Fishy" - by Quexy

Psychosis or ghost story, I don't know.

When I was little, probably about four or five years old, I had an imaginary "friend" (I think.) It was yellow and about four feet tall (taller than me at the time), bipedal, and had oversized eyes that always looked straight ahead otherwise, relatively human and naked. I called the thing "Fishy." The wierdest thing, though, was it scared the hell out of me. I didn't want anything to do with it, and I couldn't imagine, as a child, that it was coming from inside my head.

It "walked" (more like skated along) on the walls in the rooms of our house, and apparently could not leave those surfaces. I knew that if I played outside, it could only follow me to the limits of the garage. It always followed me, too, even though I often told it not to. I had difficulty concentrating on drawing things or reading because Fishy was always standing somewhere on the wall, looking over my shoulder. It did not ever sit down, it didn't have facial expressions, and it never made any noise.

The only times I ever interacted with Fishy were when I was sick in the middle of the night or when I woke up panicked from nightmares. Those times, if I looked at it intently, Fishy would methodically start drifting along the wall towards my parents' bedroom; around the corner, out the door, and down the hall. As soon as he was out of sight, I'd start calling for Mom (as in: "Mooooom, I'm gonna barrrrrf...") and she'd show up quickly (god bless ya, mom) to help me through it. Fishy would come back, though, as soon as I'd recovered. Then it would stare for the rest of the night, two days, or longer, in the direction of my parents' room.

It finally vanished when my sister was born in 1992. I was almost 8 years old by then, and I'd been ignoring Fishy for about a year, but not so much that I didn't notice it had learned to fly off the wall and visit the floor from time to time.

There was one instance, in the last two months of Fishy-ness when I saw it at someone else's house; a new home that friends of mine, two sisters, were moving into. Their father walked into the room where we were playing with the moving boxes to give us another one, and in the darkened laundry room behind him, filling the entire doorway at many times it's normal size, was Fishy, staring down the father's back. It wasn't scary, so much as irritating.

We moved away from there less than a year later.
 
Leftbehindandgladofit
2020-10-31 1:58:30 PM  

Resident Muslim: Honest Geologist: Resident Muslim: Turing_Machine: Halloween is coming up, and it's time to start scaring the hell out of yourself. We'd like to help. Every year, Fark has a Halloween thread where Farkers share their own spooky stories. These are always fun threads, and a great way to kill some time at work. Here are the first 15 Fark scary story threads - now go creep yourself out.

2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019

Yay! Finally!
Thanks TM.

I can't remember if it was in one of these threads or another, but I think you posted one of the most unsettling stories I've read on here. About the burial of a guy who wasn't particularly well-liked?

I hate you for reminding me.
(Not really, but my jaw clenched and is still clenched from that memory.)
Here I was reading this thread and thinking I don't have any really scary stories to share, but that's mostly because I consider this story a religious story, a lesson, rather than a horror story per se, even though how much it freaked me out.
Anyhoo...this is a rewriting, not a copy and paste, to put me into the right state of mind.

In Muslim/ Middle Eastern cultures it's very common when someone who has passed away is mentioned, that a "God have mercy on him" follows directly after the mention.
I HAVE heard some people refrain from saying it when there was really, really  bad blood between them.
However, this guy was the only guy I ever heard someone say, after asking me if I knew that he had passed and I said yes, "May God NOT have mercy on him."
I had a working relationship with the guy, and on several projects I'd feel like the numbers weren't adding up, financially or that whatever day rate he was quoting me for the workers wasn't correct. Even projects that seemed lucrative ended up breaking even on the long run.
He invited me up to his apartment for coffee once and I was actually surprised at how well furnished his apartment was. I didn't say anything but he did; that his ...


TIL, you can manage to kick my butt in what I know was a true story. Well done, sir.
 
Resident Muslim [OhFark]
2020-10-31 2:01:04 PM  

toraque: Wenchmaster: FNG: Wenchmaster: Not sure if this will fit:

No one read that, or is going to buy your book.  This is the wrong thread for whoring it.

Keep things to personal stories.

Since you object to reading long texts, I'll keep this short in an itemized list:

1- I've seen several obvious fiction stories posted above mine. You do not appear to have any objection to those.
2- Nowhere does the thread originator say personal stories only. It just specifies "your spooky stories". This is MY spooky story for this year.
3- Anyone who doesn't wish to read it is free to skip it. I do note that at least two people appear to have read it (based on the "SMART" button clicks), so you're obviously and demonstrably wrong. Quelle surprise.
4- I cranked this out in a couple of hours after work, right before posting it. I don't have a book. Nice of you to think I do.
5- If you're not the thread originator, you have no business setting rules for this thread. If Turing Machine objects, I'll ask the mods to remove my story. Your opinion on this subject is worth exactly jack.
6- Many Farkers (including me) have posted fiction stories in several past "Spooky Story" threads. There's usually at least one person who isn't the thread originator whinging about other people's content in these threads. Congratulations! You're the one for this thread.

There's always at least one.  I stopped submitting stories to these threads because I didn't want to have to deal with it.  Happy Halloween, everyone.


Put whoever on ignore and join us.
If I recall correctly, toraque, you had some winning stories in past years.
 
echo5juliet
2020-10-31 2:01:49 PM  

CAT-LIKE TYPING DETECTED: echo5juliet: Did somebody mumble my name?

Happy Pumpkin Day..!

Haven't seen you in..well, at least as long as I've been gone..    =P


Still lurking. 16 year later, a few gray hairs, a little more scotch damage to the liver. Don't get much Fark time anymore, real life is an evil taskmaster.
 
abhorrent1
2020-10-31 2:02:52 PM  
I don't know how spooky this is but...

When we bought out first house, it was in the city (Chicago) It was a two flat with a garden "apartment". We lived on the first floor and rented out the garden apartment and the upstairs apartment. When we moved in there were tenants in both. They mentioned hearing noises and stuff but I wrote it off. The house at the time was 106 years old, everyone had dogs and/or cats, and it was the city where everyone is living on top of each other so ...

The first thing I noticed was in the room we had set up as the office in out unit. We had one of those fake trees/plants in there. It was about 6 feet tall or so. And every once in a while I would hear it rustle like some had walked by and brushed against it. I would look back and see some of the leaves moving. Problem was it was in the back corner of the room and not in walking path. Plus I was usually alone. The house also had radiator heat and no window so it wasn't caused by HVAC or a breeze or anything like that.

We also had a security system and I kept getting calls at work that the alarm was going off from a tripped motion detector. I assumed the dogs were setting them off despite ADTs assurances they wouldn't. I still think it was the dogs but who knows. We eventually just got rid of the motion detectors.

At one point both rental units were empty. We did some minor renovations on the upstairs until like refinishing the hardwood floors and updating some appliances and the fixing up the bathroom and stuff like that. I would work on it on nights and weekends when I wasn't working. That's when the noises caught my attention. I would still hear people coming and going on the back and front stairs, soap bottles and tools and stuff I left laying around would tumble into the sink or tub or onto the floor. My wife didn't hear anything which isn't surprising. She's one of those oblivious people that could get hit by a train she didn't hear coming.

Then one night we were sitting watching TV and she finally heard it from the unit above us. It sounded like a child running across the floor. You know, like a toddler running around with those little hard soled shoes they wear. I looked over at her and she was looking at me with eyes as wide as saucers. I said "SEE!"

Things happened the whole time we lived there but most of it was meh so we were never afraid to live there.

Weird noises, lights being on that I was sure I turned off, stuff falling off of ledges or shelves etc. A lot of it I could rationalize as being just an old, crooked house. Whether or not that was the case i don't know. There were definitely some things that happened that I couldn't rationalize.

/csb
 
gunga galunga [recently expired TotalFark]
2020-10-31 2:03:12 PM  

echo5juliet: gunga galunga: CAT-LIKE TYPING DETECTED: HAPPY HALLOWEEN, Everyone..!!

..seems a little anti-climactic after all the horror the year has already brought..

Alot of great stories/writing above, and a little kerfluffleing too..guess last year's proposal to have a separate thread for 'real,' personal stories and one for creative works never gained any traction..

Sad to see that contribution this year has been so anemic..under 100 posts and a mere 11 hours left in what should be the best holiday of the year..  Only to be understood, with everything we've all been dealing with and going through..    =P    Also sorry to note that the classics don't seem to have made any sort of a showing in this thread. I guess I'll step up to the plate and start with those..one per post, methinks..

(..if any were already posted and I missed it, my apologies..)

Here's the first, an absolute classic:

Ted the Caver

I'll be happy to help. I'm sure we all remember this classic from echo5juliet back in 2006 which became the stuff of legends in Fark Scary story threads for years to come.
______________________________________​_______________________________

I was driving a shortcut from Twentynine Palms, CA to Albuquerque, NM. Twentynine Palms is located in the desolate high desert east of LA. The shortcut was all two lane road through total nothingness, except for passing through Amboy, CA. Amboy is a nearly abandoned town nearly as far below sea level as Death Valley, with a dormant volcano and lava field on one side and a salt flat on the other. It was also, at the time, a hotspot for satanic group activity.

So I was driving by myself in the afternoon. I stopped in Amboy and snapped a picture of the city sign, just to prove I was there to friends who dared me to take that route to I-40. I got back in my car and proceeded to drive up into the mountain range between Amboy and I-40.

Once I reach the top I am driving north through a canyon with high grass on both sides of the road. Up ahead I see some stuff in the middle of the road. As I approach I slow down to see a red Pontiac Fiero stopped sideways across both lanes, a suitcase open with clothes scattered everywhere and two bodies laying face down in the road, a man and a woman.

I stop a hundred feet or so away and the hair on the back of my neck is standing up. Being a Marine, I reach under the seat and pull out a 9mm pistol and chamber a round. Something seemed very wrong, it looked too perfect as if it were staged. An ambush? Was I being paranoid? Something was just wrong. Getting out of the car seemed unthinkable, it was the horror movie move.

As I scanned the road I saw a line I could drive. Pass the guy in the road on his left, swerve to the right side of the woman, behind the Fiero and I'd be on the other side. I dropped it into first gear, punched it and drove the line I planned.

I passed the back of the Fierro without hitting it or either of the bodies in the road. I continued forward a couple hundred feet and slowed down so I could breathe and let my heart slow down. As I looked up into the rearview mirror I saw that the two bodies had gotten up to their knees and twenty or so people emerged from the tall grass on either side of the road by the car and bodies. One of them, presumably the leader of the group, walked out a few feet ahead of the others and glared at me. It was Bill Murray. He said, "no one will ever believe you".

At that moment my right foot smashed the gas pedal to the floor and did not let up until I had to slowdown for the I-40 east onramp.

I will never know what would have happened to me had I gotten out of the car to check on the bodies or stopped my car closer to them. Somehow I do not think it would have been good. Sometimes real life can be scarier than a movie.

Did somebody mumble my name?


Hey, there you are!

I hope you can forgive my small embellishment. I couldn't resist.
 
CAT-LIKE TYPING DETECTED
2020-10-31 2:04:21 PM  
A drive-by favorite..no title, no attribution but one to remember..

===   ===   ===

"Daddy, I had a bad dream."
You blink your eyes and pull up on your elbows. Your clock glows red in the darkness - it is 3:32 AM.
"Do you want to climb into bed and tell me about it?"
"No, Daddy."
The oddness of the situation wakes you up more fully. You can barely make out your daughter's pale form in the darkness of your room.
"Why not, sweetie?"
"Because in my dream, when I told you about the dream, the thing wearing Mommy's skin sat up."
For a moment, you feel paralyzed; you cannot take your eyes off of your daughter. The covers behind you begin to shift.
 
Leftbehindandgladofit
2020-10-31 2:04:52 PM  

CAT-LIKE TYPING DETECTED: Short but sweet..always a Fan-favorite..!

===   ===   ===

"Fishy" - by Quexy

Psychosis or ghost story, I don't know.

When I was little, probably about four or five years old, I had an imaginary "friend" (I think.) It was yellow and about four feet tall (taller than me at the time), bipedal, and had oversized eyes that always looked straight ahead otherwise, relatively human and naked. I called the thing "Fishy." The wierdest thing, though, was it scared the hell out of me. I didn't want anything to do with it, and I couldn't imagine, as a child, that it was coming from inside my head.

It "walked" (more like skated along) on the walls in the rooms of our house, and apparently could not leave those surfaces. I knew that if I played outside, it could only follow me to the limits of the garage. It always followed me, too, even though I often told it not to. I had difficulty concentrating on drawing things or reading because Fishy was always standing somewhere on the wall, looking over my shoulder. It did not ever sit down, it didn't have facial expressions, and it never made any noise.

The only times I ever interacted with Fishy were when I was sick in the middle of the night or when I woke up panicked from nightmares. Those times, if I looked at it intently, Fishy would methodically start drifting along the wall towards my parents' bedroom; around the corner, out the door, and down the hall. As soon as he was out of sight, I'd start calling for Mom (as in: "Mooooom, I'm gonna barrrrrf...") and she'd show up quickly (god bless ya, mom) to help me through it. Fishy would come back, though, as soon as I'd recovered. Then it would stare for the rest of the night, two days, or longer, in the direction of my parents' room.

It finally vanished when my sister was born in 1992. I was almost 8 years old by then, and I'd been ignoring Fishy for about a year, but not so much that I didn't notice it had learned to fly off the wall and visit the floor from time to time.

Ther ...


When I would stop drinking for a day or so, I was far enough along for Delirium Tremens to kick in. The ghost of my cat, Weasel, would appear to me, and walk the walls and the dresser. Between that and the auditory hallucinations, it convinced me to stop drinking for a bit. The momentary eye spiders are bad enough, but when your dead cat comes back and starts climbing the walls, and the BBC World Service all of a sudden starts playing 1960's Soul music, you start re-evaluating your life choices.
 
azn_firebug
2020-10-31 2:22:48 PM  
My son is 4 and is in the phase where he says creepy weird stuff, like telling his daddy about the people who have triangle heads and no mouths. Or he'll say that sometimes people eat humans, a bull shark's favorite food is old people, etc. A couple of things he has said were true that he would have no way of knowing.

May 2018: I had a positive pregnancy test, we were going to have baby #2. My son was not yet 2 at this time. A few weeks later I miscarried. My husband is the only other person to know about the miscarriage, didn't really say anything to anyone about it because I hadn't been that far along. We did eventually (and recently) have baby #2; she is 9 weeks old. About a month ago, my son tells Daddy that he loves his baby sister and he's glad we get to keep her because his baby brother died and we didn't get to keep him.

A few months ago my son told his Daddy that food lady's husband died (she cooks the food at his daycare). My husband asked me about it since I work at the daycare part-time and thought that I would know something about it. I didn't know and asked one of the teachers at the daycare about it. Food lady's husband died six years ago. A few weeks later I saw food lady and she mentioned my son; it weirded her out that he had said her husband had died because she never mentioned the man in front of my son's group. It's possible that he overheard some kids say that the lady's husband was in heaven but she hadn't talked about him at work in several months.
 
CAT-LIKE TYPING DETECTED
2020-10-31 2:23:38 PM  
Well, that's all the top-of-the-head classics I've got for now so I guess it's time to post my (..since 2014..) yearly Halloween contribution.

For what it's worth, I'll just hope to make clear that this is an actual, personal experience.  The events described happened, the people and places are real and what names are mentioned have not been changed to protect the innocent..    =P

===   ===   ===

When I was young (9 - 15, roundabouts), my parents would take the family..mom, dad, me, younger brother..camping/cottaging every year at the very end of the season, so as to get better locations at lower rates. Invariably, we'd go with a couple or couples that were friends of the family and it would be a nice group-event weekend or longer.

One particular couple..Dave and Karen..went along every year and my father and Dave were, and are, fast friends.

The year of this story, we were in a cottage on a small lake (about 2 miles in diameter) during a near-perfect autumn in, I think, the Southern Tier/Finger Lakes region of Western New York. It was only my family and Dave and Karen, this year.

One thing that is of importance to relate is that Dave and my father fancy themselves amateur architectural buffs and love looking at vintage/old/historical buildings/houses.

Bear with me here...

Often, camping/cottaging as late in the season as we did, the 'regulars' would already be gone for the season. Summer homes, fishing cottages and the like would be prepped for the winter and locked up for the season..awaiting the return of the owners the following spring.

To my father and his friend, "looking" meant breaking in to fully check the place out. Never did they do damage, or tamper or take anything..they just found the most interesting deserted home, picked the lock or the latch, let themselves in and looked at all the original woodwork or styling or whatever..then lock everything back up, as it was, when they left.

I don't recall how old I was, but this particular year it was apparently decided that my brother and I were old enough to tag along for the house they'd singled out, halfway around the lake.

I remember everything very vividly..from the outside appearance to the door we entered to the whole of the interior. The rear door was locked with a padlock through a bar latch. However, the securing screws for the bar latch were exposed, rather than covered by the bar..three phillips-head screws out and we were in.

We wandered about the ground floor..I recall the place being a bit musty and darkish, but very nice..if cluttered. There were some comic books lying about, which delighted me, so the owner must have had children.

It took a few minutes, but my father noticed something seemed not-quite-right..it took a bit, but it was realized from an almost inaudible background hum that the fridge was still running. Looking inside it revealed about a half-case of unopened Labatt's beer bottles..an indication that the place may *not* be closed for the season, obviously.

Oh, well..the adults think..we're already here, haven't seen any cars or activity the past couple days, and only have the upstairs to look at..may as well finish up..

So we head upstairs..the layout is simple: Stairway goes up one side of the house and tops off at one end of a hallway that traverses the length of the building. It is the only way up or down. Off this hallway, all to the left, are four evenly spaced doors.

We enter the first room. It's empty save for a MASSIVE brass bedframe. No boxspring or mattress, just the frame..and by massive, I mean just that. My father and Dave marveled over the solidity and craftsmanship of the thing. Wide, high head and footboards with corner-posts that only barely fell short of making it a full-blown four-poster bed..and all welded; no screws/nuts/bolts..the thing was either assembled in the room or the room was built around it. There was absolutely no way it was brought, complete, into that room..I doubt it would fit through patio doors iff'n the entire door assembly was taken out in advance to clear more space.

So, they ooh and ahhh over the brasswork a bit more and we move on to the next room..which is totally empty. Move to the third room..which is totally empty. It's becoming clear the family only really uses the ground floor while they stay here.

We're getting ready to move to the last room when there's this sudden, loud crash. First thought in all minds: the owners are back and we're waaaaaay busted.

My father moves to the head of the stairs..looks down..goes down..nothing. Nobody there, nothing obviously out of place (from what was remembered, walking in), nothing. Shrugs all around..head off to room four, with the general feeling of 'let's look at this final room, then get out before we really get caught.'
We enter the final room to find it completely empty..save for a huge, welded brass bedframe.

Father looks at Dave, he looks back, Dave runs out of the room and down the hall. A moment later we hear him cry out and we all run back down the hall to the first room..which is now empty.

I don't actually remember us getting out of the house, but I know it was fast and I know they didn't bother to screw the latch back on. To this day, my father and Dave will both acknowledge the event..but won't talk about it and my brother doesn't recall it at all. As far as best I know, that was the last 'house inspection' that they ever attempted.

Trick or Treat..? For me, I somehow think it ended up being both..
 
CAT-LIKE TYPING DETECTED
2020-10-31 2:36:49 PM  
I'm off t'do CAT-LIKE things, for now..  Everyone have a great Halloween Day and Eve..I'll pop back in here and there, definitely for the wrap-up long after the candy-seeking (is anyone still doing that this year?) ghouls and gremlins have quit the dark for the safety of their homes..
 
billybobtoo
2020-10-31 2:53:02 PM  
True story.
Back in the day when I was a young college age man, i worked at a Chicken Delight joint. Did food prep and delivery in a Nash Rambler with a giant chicken head on top and a sterno stove where the back seat should have been.
I got a delivery order for a house a bit out of our delivery area. It was a rainy night as I recall. The house was an old Victorian style house. I rang the doorbell. It was opened by an elderly woman in a long black dress. Not fancy....more like something Mrs. Danvers wore in "Rebecca". Of course her hair was in a bun. She asked me to wait in the living room while she fetched her purse. I entered the living room and to my astonishment saw 9 washing machines in a semi circle, equally spaced. The were unplugged and not running. The rest of the furnishings were quite nice....oriental rugs, great curtains and lamps, etc.
The lady came back into the room with her purse and I noticed she seemed to glide along the floor. The long dress came down to the floor. She gave me a handsome tip and I left as quickly as I could.
 
UnrepentantApostate [TotalFark]
2020-10-31 3:05:25 PM  
Here are some clips from Local 58.  Something seems a bit off out there.
 
doomsdayaddams
2020-10-31 3:05:44 PM  

Parthenogenetic: They're animated .gifs, you might have to click on them if viewing on mobile because Fark that's why.

Artist is Brian Coldrick

[64.media.tumblr.com image 636x863]
[mindspaceapocalypse.files.wordpress.c​om image 636x863]
[mindspaceapocalypse.files.wordpress.c​om image 636x863]
[mindspaceapocalypse.files.wordpress.c​om image 550x778]
[mindspaceapocalypse.files.wordpress.c​om image 636x863]
[mindspaceapocalypse.files.wordpress.c​om image 636x863]
[mindspaceapocalypse.files.wordpress.c​om image 636x863]

[mindspaceapocalypse.files.wordpress.c​om image 636x863]


I LOVE these!
 
FNG [TotalFark]
2020-10-31 3:12:06 PM  
Thanks for keeping the thread alive CAT-LIKE :)
 
I should be in the kitchen
2020-10-31 3:27:31 PM  
I love this annual thread and wish I had an actual scary story to contribute but here's the best I can come up with: the time I scared the hell out of myself and my best friend in middle school.

During sleepovers we often snuck out. We never did anything too bad and usually ended up walking to a gas station about a mile away to buy a bunch of candy, then stayed up all night playing Super Mario Bros. So, there was this new crappy tract home subdivision going up, the roads were completed and the houses were just being built. We cut through there rather than walk up the busy main road. It was very dark and a bit spooky because nobody was living there yet and as we passed by one of the houses, I asked her "what would you do if we saw a face in one of those windows?" She didn't reply and we walked in tense silence for a minute before she looked at me and asked "why did you have to say that?" We both took off running the rest of the way, and ran back home from the gas station. It wasn't really a scary situation but I just had to open my stupid mouth and psych both of us out.
 
what the cat dragged in [TotalFark]
2020-10-31 4:24:59 PM  
Many, many years ago I was riding a hare scrambles race: the Virginia City GP. I was on my fourth lap and dog-tired, yet determined to finish that lap. My brother had already crashed out and I was the only one in our crew still riding.

Weather was coming in. It had stated to rain a bit, with thunder and lightning making an appearance in the surrounding mountains. Quite spectacular. I was looking at this as I was flying down a fire road as fast as my KDX200 could take me - about 65mph tapped out.

What I *wasn't* looking at was a softball-sized rock dead-center in the road. Which I tagged at full clip. This rock sent me and the KDX into a wild tank-slapper wobble that rocketed me up the hillside - right into the waiting lava rocks much bigger than the one that had sent flying.

Somehow I managed to thread the needle, missing the rocks and kept it upright until I came to a stop. At that point I reflected on how ugly it could have gone, but by the grace of the unexplainable, didn't. It certainly wasn't due to skill on my part.

The kid on the Yamaha behind me couldn't believe it. He had bore witness to the almost-carnage, eyes as big as saucers. He rode up to me to make sure I was ok. All he could manage was 'awesome save!'

And it was.
 
Resident Muslim [OhFark]
2020-10-31 4:29:21 PM  

CAT-LIKE TYPING DETECTED: HAPPY HALLOWEEN, Everyone..!!

..seems a little anti-climactic after all the horror the year has already brought..

Alot of great stories/writing above, and a little kerfluffleing too..guess last year's proposal to have a separate thread for 'real,' personal stories and one for creative works never gained any traction..

Sad to see that contribution this year has been so anemic..under 100 posts and a mere 11 hours left in what should be the best holiday of the year..  Only to be understood, with everything we've all been dealing with and going through..    =P    Also sorry to note that the classics don't seem to have made any sort of a showing in this thread.  I guess I'll step up to the plate and start with those..one per post, methinks..

(..if any were already posted and I missed it, my apologies..)

Here's the first, an absolute classic:

Ted the Caver


Thanks.
I've never read that one.
Long, but gave me a lot of atmosphere.
 
carkiller [TotalFark]
2020-10-31 4:31:45 PM  

Duck_of_Doom: Scary thing to see: transverse view, poorly attached fresh thrombus bobbing in the common femoral vein, moving with the bloodflow, and watch as a bit breaks off and disappears from view.

Translation: blood clot now headed to heart, and possibly lung.


As a pulmonary embolism survivor, can confirm; very scary.  Bonus: mine wasn't discovered right away, so by the time treatment began, part of the lower lobe of my right lung had gone without a blood supply for almost two weeks, and died.  So I'm just a little bit revenant now.
 
Boe [TotalFark] [OhFark]
2020-10-31 4:36:28 PM  
Yay! One of my favorite threads.

/carry on
 
litespeed74
2020-10-31 4:37:54 PM  
Not a specific scary story about something happening but more of a spooky and creepy place-
Masonic Temples.  The one in Spokane is creepy AF.  We used to go to church there sometimes, my friends and I used to explore around the place.  I still remember the old man smell in every room we discovered.  Word is there was a tunnel from the temple going 'somewhere'.
 
Wesdog
2020-10-31 5:28:51 PM  

west.la.lawyer: COVID 20, transmitted by eye contact.


So 99.9% of Farkers don't have to worry about contracting COVID-20
 
Resident Muslim [OhFark]
2020-10-31 5:32:19 PM  
Leftbehindandgladofit:

Thank you.

Moving onto family.
Grandma on my mother's side had two of my cousins living with her to keep her company. Their mother didn't mind as she were just two houses down from her mother's place and the eldest was still with her.
These cousins' room had a lot of weird stuff happening, TV turning on, radio coming on on full volume.
Once one of those cousins and myself were walking into that room and something scurried along the wall and behind the bed.
It was about the size of a cat. But all it was was blackness, blackness with an undefined edge. Think horror movie style blackness when a shadow would break away from a dark area and move on its own.
Our reaction wasn't "what was that?!" it was, both of us turning to the other and exclaiming "did you see that?!"
I went around the bed to peer into that small wall space between the bed and the wall, to see what was that that just moved so quickly.
There was nothing there. The side table was against the wall and the bed against the side table. The bed itself had a frame that went all the way down to the carpet, so nothing could have climbed under it.
So weird.

Moving onto gramma from my father's side. While first gramma was religious, this gramma was more spiritual. Tough.
Think Granny Weatherwax.

Two stories from lore and two told to me by those close.
1) Paternal grandma's brother was walking back home on the beach when he saw his sister sitting there, at an odd time.
He reached out to gently place his hand on her head and ask her what she was doing at such an odd time when his fingers just sank into her head.
He squeezed his eyes shut.
When he reopened them, the apparition was gone.
2) my grandma had a lady that did work for them that had her toddler kid with her. Grandma is sitting around when she see the toddler moving about and she calls to him and sits him on one knee. As she was playing with the kid, she looks up and sees the mother walking towards her...with her child by her side. My gramma does a double take and whomever/whatever was on her knee was gone.

Told to me by my aunt-in-law, when I was a youngster that my grandma had a certain relationship with "the other people", and gave me some details, but all I could recall was that every once in a while some of her jewelry would go missing and she's say "fine, just make sure you return it"...and ol and behold, it would be returned, to where she looked.

When this grandma passed away, my uncle was asking my aunt to where should he greet the mourners and she points to one of the rooms.
He enters and exits quickly, and hisses at my aunt "why didn't you tell me there were women inside?!"
She replied that there aren't any.
They reopened the door and the crying women he had seen inside were no longer there.

When horror movies or fantasy movies talk about how there is a veil between our world and another/others and that sometimes things go through, I feel like I know what they are talking about.
 
Raoul Eaton [TotalFark]
2020-10-31 5:45:53 PM  
When I was 17 I lived in a small town that had railroad tracks that curved around behind the high school playfield and ran straight south through town.  There was a long-standing rumor that if you stood on the tracks at night and looked south along the straight track you could see a mysterious silent glowing object float toward you over the tracks.  It seemed to happen randomly, no particular time of night.  I thought it was bullshiat made up for gullible idiots, or maybe some kind of visual illusion.

One night my friend Tom said he wanted to go to the tracks and look for the light.  I was bored so I went along.  I stood to the side while Tom climbed the roadbed and stood on the tracks peering south into the gloom.  I was even more bored, so I told him let's go do something more fun like get a burger at the all-night diner.

Just then Tom started yelling "I see it!  It's some kind of orange ball coming toward me!"  I didn't see anything.  I was about to climb up the roadbed for a better look when I realized there was a fast-moving train coming around the bend from the north.  Tom was looking south, so excited by the glowing orange ball he didn't notice.  I tried to yell to warn him when suddenly I felt a strong hand clamp over my mouth.

The train hit Tom, and it was as horrible as you could imagine.  I screamed, and looked to see who had silenced me an instant before but no one was there.  I was hospitalized for a while due to the trauma.

When I was discharged from the hospital I was racked with guilt (and extremely unpopular in town) because of my inability to warn Tom.  I went back to the tracks looking for an answer.  At night.  I climbed up the roadbed, watching very carefully for trains, and looked south where Tom had looked.  Complete blackness.  Then I saw a faint glimmer in the distance, and it grew brighter, moving toward me.  It was a glowing orange ball hovering over the tracks.  No.  Not an orange ball.  Now there were two orange balls, floating toward me in the silent darkness.
 
hiredgoonz [TotalFark] [OhFark]
2020-10-31 5:48:41 PM  

CAT-LIKE TYPING DETECTED: A popular classic from way back in 2012..always asked for.

Was a mystery as to what happened to the author for some time after, but he finally posted an unpdate a year or two back..not having any luck finding it, at the moment..if someone else remembers where this might be, please post it..!

===   ===   ===

"Turkey Feathers" - by Tharkin

Note--this is longer than I meant it to be. Sometimes I'm a little long-winded. I think it's worth a read though--it's all true and, in my opinion, pretty frigging creepy.

Here's something recent. Yesterday, actually. I can't say anything paranormal was involved, but I encountered several very strange situations in a short period of time in an unlikely area. Were they related? I don't know. Probably not. But suffice to say some bizzare shiat was happening in the woods behind my house last night.

Some context:

I live on a big hill in rural(ish) Maine. I'm a hunter, and deer season just started. I've been excited for this season because late last season I started hunting behind my house instead of another area that had gotten too crowded. I got a small buck up there at the end of last season, and this year I've seen a big one a few times and some sign that indicate it spends a fair amount of time on the hill behind me. The wife was working from home so I had a rare chance to get out during the week (I'm a stay-at-home-dad.)

Yesterday wasn't great weather--Sandy was not a big deal this far north but we did get some effects from the very outer edge of it--it was pretty windy and alternating from light rain to pounding rain off and on. I had it in my head that even though the deer likely were not moving much, *I* could move and the weather would cover my noise and scent pretty effectively. Also I thought it would be cool to say I went hunting in a hurricane. I'm kind of a dork sometimes. In short, damn if the weather was going to keep me from going out.

Anyway:

I set off at a bit after 3pm. There's an extensive network of snowmobile/ATV trails on the hill and I had only covered a small percentage of it. My plan was to walk along those trails and at least scout some new ground even if I didn't see a deer (I didn't.)

After maybe 45 minutes of walking I was well into an area I had not been before. I started walking a sort of grid pattern through a brushy area hoping to flush out a deer if one was bedded down in there. A little bit into the brush I found a turkey feather standing straight up, the quill pushed into the dirt beneath the leaves. I thought it was interesting that it had fallen in such a way and got stuck, but figured it was just one of those weird things that happen. But then I found another, and another, and another. In the space of maybe 200 square feet I found a dozen of these, all exactly the same--standing straight up, the end pushed into the dirt. They seemed to be evenly spaced. This isn't a spot that Joe Schmoe is likely to just be messing around in--it took effort to push through the brush and there were quite a few thorny plants. But I don't think this could possibly have happened naturally--someone put those feathers there. Weird as hell. But I was there to hunt, so I made my way back to the trail and kept moving.

Shortly after this, the sky opened up and it started absolutely dumping rain. Just pounding. I had put some distance between the place with the feathers and decided to hunker down to see if it would let up in a few minutes. I leaned against a tree and watched the trail behind me in case a deer in the area had the same idea. After about 5 minutes I saw some movement coming up the hill toward the trail. I got my rifle ready, but it turned out not to be a deer. A flock of turkeys walked up the hill, across the trail, and into the trees on the other side. That in itself isn't at all odd. What was odd was the way they were walking. Very calmly and evenly, not really looking around much, all moving the same direction in a tight cluster. If you've seen wild turkeys moving before, you know that this is not normal. It's also not normal (AT ALL) for a fox to be walking along with them, but sure as hell, there it was. Just slowly trotting along parallel to their path in a straight line up the hill not 10 feet from the turkeys, with neither seeming to give the other a second thought. As the last few turkeys came onto the trail a racoon that I hadn't seen crossed the trail between me and the turkeys. Same deal--just walking up the hill in no particular hurry but in a straight line and not paying attention to anything but the ground in front of it. This was not a dense area of woods--I watched these animals walking for several hundred feet and their behavior never varied. At this point I was just astounded. I had different things going through my mind: I've heard stories about animals sensing things like earthquakes and leaving the area. A flood? Not likely--there aren't any real streams or rivers on this hill. A fire? There hadn't been any lightning yet (soon though) and there was no way anything was going to be burning in this rain anyway. Was the whole frigging hillside going to come down in a mudslide or something? But it didn't seem to me that these animals were trying to escape something that was scaring them. If anything, it was some of the calmest behavior I've ever witness in wild animals. If I wanted to get really creepy about it I'd almost say it was more like they were moving toward something than away, but that's editorializing and maybe injecting more strangeness into the situation than is warranted by the facts. At any rate, it was weird as hell and a little bit unsettling.

So at this point I'm a little bit perturbed and the whole "being in the woods during a storm as the light starts fading" thing probably wasn't helping my mindset. I kind of told myself that I was being silly and got up to keep moving, as it didn't appear the rain was letting up in the immediate future. I had also begun seeing flashes of lightning, though it was a ways off yet. I gave myself half an hour before I had to start heading back to the house, because with the cloud cover and rain it was already getting dim and I knew darkness would come early and quickly. I wasn't at all concerned about getting lost, but I didn't really want to be banging around in the dark woods in a storm with a flashlight either. At this point I had pretty much given up on seeing a deer--they would certainly all be hunkered down--but wanted to keep scouting out this new area--it would be my only chance before the weekend when I'd next be able to get out hunting.

A little bit down the trail I came into a large stand of tall pine trees. It had clearly been cut and replanted years and years ago, then selectively cut more recently--all of the trees were in straight rows, all the same species (white pine) and every 5th or 6th one was missing. Areas like this are pretty common out here, and walking through them gives an interesting effect--you can see a long ways down the row you are on and on a diagonal between rows, but not far between those areas or to your sides. Each couple of steps you take shifts it a bit and gives you long views in another direction while blocking the long view you had before. I moved from one row to the next just as lightning flashed and was incredibly startled to see that someone was standing on the right side of the row maybe 150-200 feet away with his back to me, looking up into the treetops. Startled doesn't even begin to describe it, really. It jumped the hell out of me. There was simply no way anyone else was out there. Now if this was a ghost story, you know what would happen next: My eyes would readjust and the figure would be gone. In fact this is exactly what was in my head during that couple seconds of semi-blindness: If that person is not there, I am going the hell home right now. But as my eyes adjusted I could see that he was indeed still standing there.

Now, this area is a minimum of a half-hour walk from the nearest road. I've looked at town maps and google earth many times in the last year to get some idea of the lay of the land. There are not any houses in that area. It's just woods with snowmobile trails going through it. This guy was not hunting--he had nothing in his hands and wasn't wearing orange. He was just out in the middle of nowhere, in the pouring frigging rain, standing with his arms hanging down at his sides and staring up at the trees. No raingear either--he was absolutely drenched. Weird as hell. I stood waiting for him to turn around so I could wave, letting him know I had seen him and wasn't going to mistake him for a deer and shoot. After maybe 20 seconds he walked forward (away from me) to the next tree and looked up that one. I looked too, and didn't see anything out of the ordinary. Just regular old pine trees. This went on for maybe a couple of minutes and 4 or 5 trees before he went to the other side of the row and turned my way. We was looking my direction, not up, so I gave him a wave and looked up into the trees myself like "What are you looking for?" and looked back at him. He didn't acknowledge me in the slightest. Just took a few steps to the next tree and looked up. No gesturing, no using his hands to shield his face from the rain, nothing. We were not far apart, there was a clear line of sight, and I was wearing a blaze orange jacket and hat. There is no way he didn't see me, and it should have startled him as much as it had startled me to see him. At that point I had pretty much had enough--I'm going the hell home to dry out, eat some dinner, and clean my gun (not in that order.)

Nothing else happened on the walk back until I had almost gotten home. Next to my house is a large clearing surrounded by a few lines of electric fencing where my neighbor keeps about 30 goats. They are usually out wandering around and pretty spread out, but in inclement weather tend to stay in a sort of barn he built for them. As I walked down the path next to that clearing I saw that all or most of the goats were out--they were just standing in the wind and rain (which was still coming down hard) at the fenceline on the uphill side of the clearing, looking up the hill into the woods. It took me maybe three or four minutes to walk from where I could first see them to get past them. I didn't see any of them take a single step--just standing there, looking up the hill. It made me think of the turkeys, fox, and racoon I had seen earlier--if that fence hadn't been there, would the goats be walking up the hill too? I don't know. Maybe not. But in my current frame of mind (thoroughly creeped out) that was the first thing that came to mind.

So. I got inside, ate dinner with the wife and kids, cleaned the gun, etc. Nothing else the slightest bit out of the ordinary happened. If any of these things had happened in isolation I probably wouldn't have thought anything of it. But the fact that they all happened in just a few hours out in the woods during a storm while it was getting dark--yeah. Creepy. Creepy as hell. I'll be going back into that area this weekend early in the day. I can't say I'm not slightly apprehensive about it, but I did see lots of deer sign last night. It's too good a spot to stay away from. Plus I'm kind of curious--I'm going to try to find those feathers again, and go down the hill where I saw the animals come up to see if I can find anything unusual.


https://www.fark.com/comments/1060500​4​/124003900
 
orneryredguy
2020-10-31 5:50:50 PM  
"Honey, we have to talk," she said, but all he could see was the two blue lines on the test.
 
hobnail [TotalFark]
2020-10-31 7:02:02 PM  

Resident Muslim: Honest Geologist: Resident Muslim: Turing_Machine: Halloween is coming up, and it's time to start scaring the hell out of yourself. We'd like to help. Every year, Fark has a Halloween thread where Farkers share their own spooky stories. These are always fun threads, and a great way to kill some time at work. Here are the first 15 Fark scary story threads - now go creep yourself out.

2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019

Yay! Finally!
Thanks TM.

I can't remember if it was in one of these threads or another, but I think you posted one of the most unsettling stories I've read on here. About the burial of a guy who wasn't particularly well-liked?

I hate you for reminding me.
(Not really, but my jaw clenched and is still clenched from that memory.)
Here I was reading this thread and thinking I don't have any really scary stories to share, but that's mostly because I consider this story a religious story, a lesson, rather than a horror story per se, even though how much it freaked me out.
Anyhoo...this is a rewriting, not a copy and paste, to put me into the right state of mind.

In Muslim/ Middle Eastern cultures it's very common when someone who has passed away is mentioned, that a "God have mercy on him" follows directly after the mention.
I HAVE heard some people refrain from saying it when there was really, really  bad blood between them.
However, this guy was the only guy I ever heard someone say, after asking me if I knew that he had passed and I said yes, "May God NOT have mercy on him."
I had a working relationship with the guy, and on several projects I'd feel like the numbers weren't adding up, financially or that whatever day rate he was quoting me for the workers wasn't correct. Even projects that seemed lucrative ended up breaking even on the long run.
He invited me up to his apartment for coffee once and I was actually surprised at how well furnished his apartment was. I didn't say anything but he did; that his cousin who workEd in Saudi Arabia and had a lucrative job helped him out or lent him the money or something. I had met this cousin, and after this guy passed away the same cousin called me up saying how things are difficult for him in Saudi Arabia and if I could lend him money.
I ignored a lot of signs dealing with this guy and holding to my value of that I will only deal with people based on what I have witnessed and can confirm myself.
After he passed away I met a mutual acquaintance who brought him up and then asked if I had..."noticed anything" while working with this guy, in regards to his character. I just gave a frank no, but couldn't stop my gaze from dropping because I knew what he was asking.
The short of it, is that this guy, as amicable (and skilled!) as he was, apparently had dealt with a lot of people who ended up coming up financially short, some more than others, some much more.

This is the set up so that you understand what kind of character this guy was.

When he died, I got a call from his other cousin who at the time also lived in the same country. He had a heart attack, late 30s if I recall correctly from a two-pack a day smoking habit.

I figured that them not being from the country, that there might not be a lot of people for the burial, so out of courtesy and personal obligation, I went.

This was beyond "not a lot of people". Out of all of those years of him living in that country you'd figure friends or work acquaintances would show up.
None did.
I arrived there to find the cousin and the two very young sons. The cemetery caretaker(s?) and that's it. I have never witnessed in my life such a sparse number.
Recalling the story, I don't even recall us performing the Muslim prayer that is done as last rites, I think they did it before I got there.
Whatever.
We get to the grave site and as bodies are usually put into the graves by hand, and the two kids were just too young, I jumped in myself (I was much younger) and received the shroud-covered body.
This is what a shroud covered body looks like:
[npr.brightspotcdn.com image 850x849]
I would like to bring to your attention two points that will be relevant 1) you can see the string holding the two pieces of cloth in place 2) you can tell which way the body is facing from the arm placements.

So I lower the body into the grave, and start placing the cross pieces over the body that close off the "slot" where the body is placed on its right side, with the grave perpendicular to the direction of Mecca so that the body faces Mecca.
This is how a body in the grave is placed:
[i.ytimg.com image 480x360]
Again, notice the arms.
After placing the body, I loosened up the strings as per procedure, and after the first few cross pieces were put in place the cousin reminded me to uncover the face, again, as per procedure. Mind you, the first few cross pieces already cover the top of the grave, to give privacy to the face and shield the people there from seeing a dead face.
So I lean over and start loosening up the cloths at the face, they start separating...and I see a bald head. The guy was bald, so I figure that his chin is tucked in low and I need to uncover lower...still more bald head..."Did we lower him backwards into the grave??" I ask myself in panic, I look down and I can clearly see where the arms are, in the correct location, but all I keep uncovering as I go lower is baldness...like his head was twisted the other way around, like God didn't want him facing Mecca. The cousin senses me being distraught and asks if everything is OK, he can't see what I'm seeing because he was standing outside of the grave...and I reply with "I can't uncover his face" in as much a level voice as I can, so he says to let him try, him probably thinking that I couldn't loosen up the strings or cloth or something. I climb out of the grave and he goes in, he fumbles around for a bit, and comes out and I ask him, in as level a voice as I can muster "were you able to uncover the face?" While I tried my best to keep my voice level I'm sure there was a bit of panic in my voice.
Yes, was his simple reply, and I left it at that.

I felt so unclean. I don't ever recall actually feeling so unclean. I didn't/couldn't wait until I got home.
I stopped at the first mosque I could find, feeling sick to my stomach, walked into the bathrooms that had floor level toilets, stripped my clothes and hung them on the door and just frantically washed myself with the handheld bidet/hose.

To this day, and probably to the end of my life, I fear God's punishment more for what I might do to other people than what sins I might do to myself.


I grew up hearing the expression "that guy's so crooked they'll have to screw him into the ground when he dies." Your story made me think of that.
 
Leftbehindandgladofit
2020-10-31 7:12:48 PM  

Resident Muslim: Leftbehindandgladofit:

Thank you.

Moving onto family.
Grandma on my mother's side had two of my cousins living with her to keep her company. Their mother didn't mind as she were just two houses down from her mother's place and the eldest was still with her.
These cousins' room had a lot of weird stuff happening, TV turning on, radio coming on on full volume.
Once one of those cousins and myself were walking into that room and something scurried along the wall and behind the bed.
It was about the size of a cat. But all it was was blackness, blackness with an undefined edge. Think horror movie style blackness when a shadow would break away from a dark area and move on its own.
Our reaction wasn't "what was that?!" it was, both of us turning to the other and exclaiming "did you see that?!"
I went around the bed to peer into that small wall space between the bed and the wall, to see what was that that just moved so quickly.
There was nothing there. The side table was against the wall and the bed against the side table. The bed itself had a frame that went all the way down to the carpet, so nothing could have climbed under it.
So weird.

Moving onto gramma from my father's side. While first gramma was religious, this gramma was more spiritual. Tough.
Think Granny Weatherwax.

Two stories from lore and two told to me by those close.
1) Paternal grandma's brother was walking back home on the beach when he saw his sister sitting there, at an odd time.
He reached out to gently place his hand on her head and ask her what she was doing at such an odd time when his fingers just sank into her head.
He squeezed his eyes shut.
When he reopened them, the apparition was gone.
2) my grandma had a lady that did work for them that had her toddler kid with her. Grandma is sitting around when she see the toddler moving about and she calls to him and sits him on one knee. As she was playing with the kid, she looks up and sees the mother walking towards her...with her child by her side. ...


You are entirely welcome.
Upon my paternal grandmother's death this is how her two sons and daughter looked after the funeral.


Fark user imageView Full Size
 
a particular individual [TotalFark]
2020-10-31 7:16:26 PM  

FNG: Wow, a few years ago this thread had 608 comments, even the fake "timmy doesn't live here anymore" hasn't shown up.


"Danny Doesn't Live There Anymore" is all true, up to the part where it isn't. Danny Nero shot my brother. Rick showed me the house. The attic was full of toys and clothes. Rick wouldn't stick around so I could rummage through the toys. We went back to his house, where he did his homework. He told me if I wanted to go back, then I should. "Keep telling yourself "there's no such thing as ghosts."" But I never went back. So, yeah, it's fake because it's fiction. But that experience stuck with me. A few years ago, I had a dream that I discovered a cave high up on a cliff, and it was filled with old treasures, but I knew the Devil lived there, and I had better not investigate. It was much later that I connected it to Danny's house.
 
Leftbehindandgladofit
2020-10-31 7:16:56 PM  

Resident Muslim: Leftbehindandgladofit:

Thank you.

Moving onto family.
Grandma on my mother's side had two of my cousins living with her to keep her company. Their mother didn't mind as she were just two houses down from her mother's place and the eldest was still with her.
These cousins' room had a lot of weird stuff happening, TV turning on, radio coming on on full volume.
Once one of those cousins and myself were walking into that room and something scurried along the wall and behind the bed.
It was about the size of a cat. But all it was was blackness, blackness with an undefined edge. Think horror movie style blackness when a shadow would break away from a dark area and move on its own.
Our reaction wasn't "what was that?!" it was, both of us turning to the other and exclaiming "did you see that?!"
I went around the bed to peer into that small wall space between the bed and the wall, to see what was that that just moved so quickly.
There was nothing there. The side table was against the wall and the bed against the side table. The bed itself had a frame that went all the way down to the carpet, so nothing could have climbed under it.
So weird.

Moving onto gramma from my father's side. While first gramma was religious, this gramma was more spiritual. Tough.
Think Granny Weatherwax.

Two stories from lore and two told to me by those close.
1) Paternal grandma's brother was walking back home on the beach when he saw his sister sitting there, at an odd time.
He reached out to gently place his hand on her head and ask her what she was doing at such an odd time when his fingers just sank into her head.
He squeezed his eyes shut.
When he reopened them, the apparition was gone.
2) my grandma had a lady that did work for them that had her toddler kid with her. Grandma is sitting around when she see the toddler moving about and she calls to him and sits him on one knee. As she was playing with the kid, she looks up and sees the mother walking towards her...with her child by her side. ...


In the picture shown, there is none of the pain that she caused all three of them. She cared for her cats far more than she did for her children or her husband. She was a vain and horrible woman, and she deserves to be where she is. In the ground. I do pray for one thing- that she stay there, and not come back to us.
 
Herb Utsmelz [TotalFark] [OhFark]
2020-10-31 7:34:00 PM  
I heard Alfred Hitchcock tell this one. Long but worth it.


A salesman was traveling through the desert in his car when the rear axle broke. Stranded in the middle of nowhere, nearly 150 miles from the nearest town, he got out of his car and scanned the horizon. There in the distance was a house on an oasis. He trudged over.
Arriving at the house, the salesman knocked on the door. A dapper gentleman answered, and the salesman explained his predicament. The dapper gentleman informed the salesman that the nearest town was 150 miles behind him, and he'd best stay a night or two at the oasis while the butler towed the car in for repairs. Finding it a wonderful idea, and frankly having no other choice, the salesman accepted the gracious offer.
The dapper gentleman took the man upstairs and showed him to the guest room. He invited him to wash up and come downstairs for a cocktail.
The salesman came downstairs as invited, and was greeted by the dapper gentleman and two attractive women. The dapper gentleman handed the salesman a cocktail, and explained that the two women were his wife and daughter.
"Wow," the salesman said. "You're both very attractive. So attractive, in fact, that I can't even tell which one's the mother. I'd even guess you were sisters."
After a few cocktails and dinner, the man retired to his room for the evening. At about midnight, as he was dozing off in the dark, he heard the bedroom door open. He reached for the table lamp and began to turn it on when he heard a woman's voice at the door. "No, don't turn the light on. Keep it off."
"Which one are you?" the salesman asked. "The wife or the daughter?"
"I'd rather not say."
A few seconds later, the salesman heard the woman approaching the bed, yet was still unable to identify her face. The woman explained that she's been living out here in the middle of the desert, a lonely existence, and her heart throbbed to see such a handsome stranger drop in for a visit. The woman took a seat at the edge of the bed, caressing the man's hand. Before long, she was under the covers, and the inevitable ensued.
At about four a.m., as dawn began to break, the woman stood up in the dark and said she had to go before it got light. She disappeared through the bedroom door.
The next morning, downstairs, the salesman enjoyed coffee and breakfast with the dapper gentleman, the wife, and the daughter. Still curious as to who was in his room the night before, the man pried, questioning, making eye contact with the two women. Yet since their voices were so similar, he was unable to determine who the visitor was.
That evening, at about midnight, the man was once again lying in his dark room. The visitor came to the door once more.
"It's me again."
"Which one are you?" the salesman asked.
"I'd rather not say."
Accepting the answer, the man obliged as the woman crawled in to join him. Again, they enjoyed a warm evening together. And again, at four a.m., the shadowy woman got out of bed and disappeared out the bedroom door.
The next morning, downstairs at breakfast, the curious salesman made even more eye contact with the women, looking for a sign, determined to identify which of them had been visiting him the two previous nights. Yet still, because they looked so similar, he was unable to pin it down.
After breakfast, the butler arrived with the car. The salesman grabbed his things, and walked outside with the dapper gentleman, thanking him for his hospitality and grace.
As the salesman got into his car, he asked the dapper gentleman the obvious question.
"Why is it that you and your family live all the way out here in the middle of nowhere, one hundred and fifty miles from the nearest town?"
The dapper gentleman explained.
"It's because of my daughter."
"Your daughter?" the salesman asked. "Why would she choose to live in isolation? She seemed fine to me."
The dapper gentleman noticed the salesman's misunderstanding.
"Oh, no, not Margaret," the dapper gentleman said. "I'm talking about my younger daughter, Elizabeth. We keep her out in the barn."
"The barn?"
"Yes, the barn," the dapper gentleman said. "She's a leper."
 
Definitely Not Someone's Alt
2020-10-31 7:50:38 PM  

GRCooper: Definitely Not Someone's Alt: I hope we get more 1st person stories that at least have the premise of being real. The 3rd person ones make my eyes glaze over.

I was hoping to get through the day without having to relive the experience, but you had to ruin it.

When I was 7, Dad went insane.

We were getting ready for Thanksgiving, and the pressure was getting to him. Mom had all of the other dishes cooked, and all dad had to do was the ham. Nothing difficult, but he was in no mental state for it. We had a lot of guests coming and dad felt everything had to be perfect. Not just great - perfect.

So, trying to please him and be a good helper, I took the ham out of the oven when the timer went off. I dropped it. I looked up to the face of my dad, twisted in horror. He just stood there, holding a brush and a bowl of honey glaze.

As he held me down afterwards, he just kept muttering "this has to be done before the third person gets here" while slathering glaze over my eyes. Then he plucked them out and I can still hear the soft, wet 'pop' they made as dad ate them.

To this day, every Thanksgiving, dad talks about how delicious my glazed eyes were.


Sorry, ruining things seems to be a really bad habit of mine. Everyone is always like "gosh darn it, DNSA, why'd you have to ruin everything with your negative opinions."

Anyway, that was moderately creative. Go you!
 
Raoul Eaton [TotalFark]
2020-10-31 8:25:53 PM  

a particular individual: FNG: Wow, a few years ago this thread had 608 comments, even the fake "timmy doesn't live here anymore" hasn't shown up.

"Danny Doesn't Live There Anymore" is all true, up to the part where it isn't. Danny Nero shot my brother. Rick showed me the house. The attic was full of toys and clothes. Rick wouldn't stick around so I could rummage through the toys. We went back to his house, where he did his homework. He told me if I wanted to go back, then I should. "Keep telling yourself "there's no such thing as ghosts."" But I never went back. So, yeah, it's fake because it's fiction. But that experience stuck with me. A few years ago, I had a dream that I discovered a cave high up on a cliff, and it was filled with old treasures, but I knew the Devil lived there, and I had better not investigate. It was much later that I connected it to Danny's house.


That is the best disturbing creepy story I have ever read, and I've been an avid reader for 58 years.  It creeps me out more than H.P. Lovecraft, even after reading it multiple times over the years.  Damn is it well written.  I hope you register the copyright and see if someone will buy the film rights.
 
a particular individual [TotalFark]
2020-10-31 8:50:46 PM  

Raoul Eaton: a particular individual: FNG: Wow, a few years ago this thread had 608 comments, even the fake "timmy doesn't live here anymore" hasn't shown up.

"Danny Doesn't Live There Anymore" is all true, up to the part where it isn't. Danny Nero shot my brother. Rick showed me the house. The attic was full of toys and clothes. Rick wouldn't stick around so I could rummage through the toys. We went back to his house, where he did his homework. He told me if I wanted to go back, then I should. "Keep telling yourself "there's no such thing as ghosts."" But I never went back. So, yeah, it's fake because it's fiction. But that experience stuck with me. A few years ago, I had a dream that I discovered a cave high up on a cliff, and it was filled with old treasures, but I knew the Devil lived there, and I had better not investigate. It was much later that I connected it to Danny's house.

That is the best disturbing creepy story I have ever read, and I've been an avid reader for 58 years.  It creeps me out more than H.P. Lovecraft, even after reading it multiple times over the years.  Damn is it well written.  I hope you register the copyright and see if someone will buy the film rights.


Wow. Thanks. That is high praise.

I wrote it just for the Fark thread, weeks before Halloween. After Halloween, I kept tinkering with it. Every night, I'd read it in bed with a pencil and make corrections. Strunk and White taught me a lot.

I started another one last February or so. Never finished it, partly because it was getting too long. It's also all true, up to a point. Here's the first half. The second half, if I ever write it, will be much scarier. And the whole thing will be less wordy. This is a first draft of half a story. Yes, it's already too long.

Fark user imageView Full Size


Triton's Trumpet, Charon's Eye

I can see two tiny pictures of myself
And there's one in each of your eyes. 
And they're doin' everything I do.
Every time I light a cigarette, they light up theirs.
I take a drink and I look in and they're drinkin' too.
It's drivin' me crazy. It's drivin' me nuts.

--Laurie Anderson, "Sharkey's Night"

They flutter behind you, your possible pasts
Some bright-eyed and crazy, some frightened and lost
A warning to anyone still in command
Of their possible future to take care

--Pink Floyd, "Your Possible Pasts"

I see the shell, and know it's in my future. This causes me to contain the smallest of laughs, because owning such a frivolous curio is out of the question. $65 is an absurd sum to pay for a mere ornament. Anyway, I'm shopping for Dad, not myself. Christmas is three days away and I still haven't found what I'm looking for: a silver coffee scoop to replace the one that went missing this summer. Focus, Adam. 'Tis the season.

The shell should be mine, that much is indisputable. I must have it. But I won't. I can't have everything, and some things are better to want than to have. The laugh is how I know that somehow, I will own it. I laughed the same way when I learned that Pink Floyd was releasing a trove of deep tracks in an absurdly priced box set. I couldn't justify paying $435 for such an extravagance, but by the end of that summer, it was mine. Sure, I had to sell my collection of bootleg Pink Floyd vinyl, an enviable collection in itself, but almost everything in my collection was in that box, with Floyd's imprimatur and studio-quality sound. I laughed when I imagined owning it, and then I owned it. Somehow, I would own this shell. Hell, when I sold my vinyl I wound up not only with the box set, but also another box set (Wish You Were Here) and a check for $500. Maybe the shell will bring good fortune, too.

I put it out of my mind, but I could see it when I closed my eyes. Forget it. Not mine.
I never did find the coffee scoop. In the end, I settled on a stainless steel scoop from a shop that sells high-end kitchen supplies. Tasteful, but not fancy. It would have to do.

My brother, Mark, flew in from Chicago the next day. He comes every Christmas, heads home before the new year. This year he's staying till the second of January.

Let's get this on the table: I'm a cliche. I'm 55 years old, unemployed, and I live in my parents' basement. Again, not still. A few years ago, my graphic design business tanked and the best option at the time was to bite the bullet and accept Mom & Dad's offer of my old room back. It wasn't the first time I moved back home for financial reasons. It's probably the last, though. It looks like I'm here to stay. I haven't held a job since 2015, unless you count helping out around the house as a job, and Dad's credit card as a wage. I'm a recovering alcoholic, I have a mild case of Asperger's, and a personality that can charitably be described as challenging. At my age, my employment opportunities are limited to jobs I don't want and probably couldn't keep anyway. I used to be good at getting jobs. Keeping them was always the problem, but that's how I got good at getting them. Bear with me. This is relevant to the story, or I wouldn't waste your time with it.

In my basement domain, I have a bedroom where I do most of my sleeping, and a living area where I keep my computer and entertainment system, which is all the same thing. The 40-inch TV doubles as computer monitor. When I'm not walking Larry the hound or watching a movie, I'm probably sitting in my recliner surfing the internet, most likely at Fark.com or one of the news sites it links to. This is my "command center," though I don't really call it that. I stole that from Kevin Smith's character in Live Free Or Die Hard. It is a nice setup, though. And when I quit drinking, I finally saw what a wreck I had made of the rest of the basement, so I threw out loads of crap I no longer gave a single shiat for. Things that used to be important had turned to clutter. I dragged my records and turntable to the command center and started working in earnest on my Wall.

My Wall is my museum of mostly naturalist knick-knacks, like exotic seed pods and seashells. I love seashells. I love the sea, too, and spending my life land-locked has probably contributed to this. I couldn't care less about ships or beach scenes, but the creatures the oceans have concocted fascinate me. As a child I had a fixation on rubber monsters, and bugs, and bones, and anything natural that made me go "wow." I taught myself to read with the help of an insect book when I was 5. When I was 21 I gave away the rubber monsters--an ice-chest full--to the kids on the special-ed school bus where I was The Enforcer for the driver. But I still collect bones and feathers and pine cones and seashells. Until this Christmas, my favorite was my chambered nautilus, which holds a prominent spot right above my TV. The wall also holds a couple of starfish, an urchin, a coral, and various other specimens of marine life. It's almost a coincidence that I have so many shells. I never set out to make them a theme. I never bothered to look up their names. I just like their shapes, their implausible elegance, their other-ness.

I just realized I have only one skull in my menagerie, which used to include a dog skull, a beaver skull, a fox skull, a gopher skull, giant snapping turtle skull, even a rhesus monkey skull. I had a frog skeleton, now long-gone. (I wanted a human skull, still do, but alas...*) Today all I have is a partial dog or wolf skull that a friend found in the mud many years ago when Lake Helena was drained for a summer. The cranium is gone along with the bridge of the nose; the missing parts have been replaced with seashells: a cowry in the brainpan, a trio of long, conical snails for the snout, a fossil nautilus for the nose, mussel-shell ears, and a pair of whelks (one left-handed!) to give it wild, spiral eyes. I call it "Nautical Dog." Maybe some day I'll build the rest of the skeleton from coral and other seashells.

Fun Fact: The words "shell" and "skull" are related etymologically, but not to "skeleton." I have a thing for word origins. If you know me, you know that. But I digress.

My Wall: I had been working on it, arranging and rearranging things on it, finding long-lost shells and whatnot as I cleaned up a decade of alcoholic squalor. As boxes in the back of the basement emptied, my Wall filled. It was becoming a minor hobby. My interest in seashells was rekindling. Mark came on the 23rd, and we went Christmas-shopping for Mom and Dad on Christmas Eve. We were walking to the antiques store where I had found the shell a couple of days prior.

"So, I found something that I want, but can't have," I told Mark.
"What's that?"
"A seashell. You'll see it. It's huge." I held my hands about 16 inches apart to show him. "But it's too expensive. I've decided to just make it something I want. Sometimes wanting something is better than having it."
"How much?"
I paused. "65 bucks." I knew damned well 65 bucks is pocket change to him, especially around Christmas.
"Well, we'll have to get it for you." I knew he would say this. That's why I told him. It was true, what I said. I really had decided to relegate the shell to desire. I was comfortable wanting something unattainable. But I also knew that if I said I want it, Mark would say I could have it. Mark is a good brother. Mark has money. Mark lives in a condo in downtown Chicago where he owns a lucrative market-research company, and he's feeling generous. "I had a bad year," he told me. "I only took home 350 thousand." He made sure I knew he was humble-bragging. I didn't mind. He's entitled.

And that's how I got the shell. The day before Christmas, I already had the best gift of what would turn out to be my best haul of Christmas loot since I was a kid. We did our shopping, went home, and as soon as I was inside, I said

"Look what Mark got me." I eagerly ripped off the wrapping to show Mom & Dad the shell. They reacted as I expected: "Wow!" I held it out to them, turning it in my hands. A cone the size of a cartoon turkey drumstick, its gaping mouth bright coral-pink, on the outside cream with chocolate horseshoe hashmarks spiralling in parallel tracks around its circumference. Above the mouth an elegant "fin" with scalloped edge. The shell is beautiful by itself, but its size magnifies its beauty, making it almost comically eye-catching. To demonstrate its dimensions I inserted my left hand well past the wrist. Later I would measure it. It's 15-1/2 inches from tip to tip, and 19 inches around.

"You certainly needed that," said Mom.
"Right? I don't even know what I'll do with it. It's too big to fit on the wall. It's gonna need its own place"
"You'll find a place for it," Dad said, grinning. Mark stood there looking pleased. 
We went about the Christmas routine, putting up the tree, noshing on the cornucopia of our holiday kitchen. I kept the shell in sight, admiring its brobdingnagian proportions. Mine!

Later that evening I had an idea. I went to the basement and returned with a small battery-powered, goose-neck, LED desk lamp I had picked up at the dollar store. The goose-neck fit neatly into the fold above the mouth, the lamp well into the second turn of the spiral. The base hung off the corner of the mouth. I pressed the button on the base and the shell lit up in  a golden glow, pink light spilling from the mouth.

"Well, this needs to be a thing," I said. "I can take off the base and wire it to a USB cord. You won't even be able to see it." Everyone agreed it had to be done.

I don't consider myself a sculptor, but I do make what I call sculptures. Most recently I had made "Lantern," three cubes of different size, each with an LED-illuminated center. The largest, a 6-inch angle-iron cube, contains a paper Japanese lantern that glows blue. The next, a 4-inch photo cube, contains a tonn shell, paper-thin and the size of a golf ball, ridged like the lantern, with a red LED inside. The smallest is only a couple of inches, black plastic, with a triangular bivalve shell hiding a yellow LED. It sits on the bureau in my bedroom, where I admire its angular simplicity. When the lights are off, the things the cubes are all white. When it's turned on, the primary colors appear. It's a so-called triptych like some of my other arrangements. I like to arrange similar things in sets of three in ways that complement each other.

I have another sculpture, called "Thing 1." It's made of three fragments of broken, eroded seashells, smooth as river stones, glued together to form a creature that resembles a snail becoming a rosebud rearing up from the table. An inch of a starfish arm protrudes from the tip of the "rose," completing the arc of its body, like an antenna or proboscis. I like this piece quite a bit, but I mention it only because it's made of seashells, and I was telling you about my sculptures. I'll get back to the story now.

Fun Fact: the words sculpture and scalpel are related etymologically. Sorry. The story.

I arrange things and think of these arrangements as sculptures. Nautical Dog is one. My Wall contains several groups of three. Now I'm experimenting with lights. Putting the LED lamp into the shell was not just a logical progression; it was inevitable. I had bought the lamp for an as-yet-unknown sculpture. I had been going to the dollar store scavenging for parts, especially LEDs for Lantern. This shell would be not just an ornament, but a sculpture. I was going to do something with it. That night, when the family were all in bed, I showed it off on Total Fark. People admired it, called it a neat thing. Then it got too late even for Total Fark. I sat there gazing at the glowing shell. Its pink maw needed something in it. Nothing seemed like a good idea. You need to be able to see inside. Whatever goes in there needs to be simple. My mind kept returning to the same bad idea: the Fushigi ball I had unearthed when I was cleaning up the basement. A Fushigi ball is about the size of a baseball, a quarter-inch of clear acrylic around a reflective core the color of hematite. It's for contact juggling, which is fun to watch, but I had no interest in learning. Mom had given it to me 20 years ago for Christmas, for some reason, and it had remained in its box since. I planned to get rid of it this spring with a lot of other crap. Have a garage sale and make a few bucks to clear out the basement. My mind kept returning to it, and kept rejecting it. It would look tacky. It would serve no purpose. It would look like someone had stuck a plastic ball into a seashell.
I tried other things: a smaller seashell, Thing 1, the seashell rose-snail sculpture. That actually looked pretty cool, the Thing slithering out. It looked cool, but I wanted to keep them separate. Finally, having tried everything else, I fetched the Fushigi ball and placed it into the mouth.

Ho. Lee. shiat. It's not a mouth. It's an eye. It's a huge, glowing eye with a cornea and an iris and a pupil. The pink behind it added a feverish quality to its unblinking gaze. Not only was the Fushigi ball a good thing to put in there, as far as I was concerned it was the only thing that belonged in there. Nothing in the house could be as appropriate or look as cool as this. The lines above it look exactly like eyelashes. Oh my God, it's perfect. I emitted a small laugh, as I had when I lied to myself that I wouldn't own the shell. This was going to actually be something significant, as far as these things go. Something I could display, that would make others go "wow." The Fushigi ball was the best bad idea I had ever had.

I heard Mom get up, as she does late at night. She made her way down the hall and down the stairs to the basement. Sometimes she has restless legs and needs to walk it off. When she reached the landing I said "Check this out" and directed her to the eye shell thing.
"Wow." She ooohed like she does when she sees something both interesting and scary, like a video of a tornado or a ball of sea snakes. "Creeeepy."

"Creepy but beautiful," I said. "Take a look up close." She stooped over it and studied the detail. "See how it reflects the inside of the shell, and the lip? It's like you're inside looking out. The pupil is what's outside the shell; the iris is the opening. The way the light refracts through the outside makes it look like the cornea. Look how there's a second reflection on the surface of the plastic. So much is going on in there."

"It's really very convincing," she said. "And the opening of the shell is a perfect eye shape. Amazing."
We commented on it some more and she agreed it was worth pursuing. She went back to bed, I stared at my new sculpture-in-progress, and finally had to turn in. It was 2:00 on Christmas morning. I slept well and awoke around 9:00. Before we even started opening the presents I brought up the shell-eye thing and showed Mark and Dad. Yep, they had to admit, it's pretty cool.

"I need a stand for it. Something elegant. It can't just lie there; something needs to prop up the end. Something natural, something I can put on the floor, that'll elevate the shell. But it can't compete with the shell."
"Like what?" Dad asked.
"Deer antlers, maybe." I thought I knew where to get some for free. Where to buy some, if not. But it's Christmas; let's do the Christmas thing and I'll think about it. That evening, when the family were watching TV, I sat at the kitchen table with my soldering iron and wire cutters and attached a USB cable to the lamp, eliminating the base with the batteries. A wedge of eraser jammed into the fold at the corner of the eye kept the lamp firmly in place. I could adjust its position, and it would hold. Perfect.

At some point, I decided to learn about the shell. I always do this when I get a new frog or carnivorous plant or whatever. I like to know what I'm dealing with. Google quickly turned up pictures of Charonia tritonis. Triton's trumpet. Common around the southern Indo-Pacific oceans. One of the largest gastropods on Earth. The shells are used as actual trumpets in many cultures. They're highly collectible. Ones like mine were available on Ebay for around $300. I WAS NOT looking up the value of my Christmas gift. OK? That information came with the information I was really after. Still: What a steal for $65. That made me like it even more. It was valuable--Mark never would have bought it for me at $300--but also a great deal. Mark would appreciate this fact, and did.

Fun Fact: The genus of the snail, Charonia, is named after Charon, the mythological ferryman on the river Styx. According to Wikipedia, "The name Charon is most often explained as a proper noun from χάρων (charon), a poetic form of χαρωπός (charopós), "of keen gaze", referring either to fierce, flashing, or feverish eyes, or to eyes of a bluish-gray color. The word may be a euphemism for death."

So there's that.

The more I thought about it, the more antlers seemed like the best option for the stand. Next day I went on an errand. The free antlers weren't there anymore. Dammit. Plan B. Pacific Steel & Recycling, formerly Pacific Hide & Fur. It turned out they still had a few antlers left from the old days. Guy said I was the first one he'd seen come in for antlers in the seven years he'd been there. We chatted while I rummaged through the three shopping carts full of them, and when I had selected three antlers I thought I could use, I paid a pittance for two pounds and headed home.

The stand almost flew together. Once I found the most stable position for the large antler, it was easy to arrange the other two, using hose clamps to hold them in place as I situated the shell on them. Within 15 minutes, I had epoxy putty in place. I walked Larry the hound and came back an hour later and took the hose clamps off; the epoxy had cured enough that they weren't necessary. And while the stand did support the eye shell thing, I didn't like it. The antlers looked too much like the legs of some alien crustacean. Instead of gracefully elevating the shell, they gave it repose. I had wanted the shell to be its own separate thing; now it was half of something else. The eye peered up like it was clocking whoever approached it. I mean, I wanted creepy, but elegant creepy. This was just creepy-creepy.

Do something else. I wanted to see if I could get more light farther back in the cone of the shell. Toward this end, I bought some transparent plastic beads at the Good Samaritan and poured them into the shell so they fell into the pointy end. Indeed, they refracted some more light into the shell's depths, illumimating another turn of the spiral. That was worth the trip to the store. I still had my doubts about the stand, though. What do Mark and Dad think?

"Did-a-check?" said Mark. Dad and I laughed. 
"Dud-a-chum?" said Dad. They were referring to the lobstrosities in Stephen King's The Drawing of the Three. The crustacean monsters that come out at sunset and scuttle over the beach, imploring "Did-a-chick? Dad-a-chack? Dud-a-chum?" The things that took off two of Roland's fingers right at the beginning of the book. And while those things were clearly described as resembling lobsters, and this looked like nothing more than a hermit crab gone terribly wrong, close enough. The comparison was apt.
"Dad-a-chick?" I said. 
Mark and Dad went back upstairs. I stood there staring at it for awhile, trying to decide what do do. I gazed deeply into its eye. Dud-a-chum? 
"I don't like it," I told Mom. It's not at all what I was going for. It wasn't supposed to look like a crab."
"What are you going to do?" asked Mom.
"I guess I tear it apart and rebuild it. Maybe get a couple more antlers." I put it off, decided instead to play with the plaster casting kit I got for Christmas. Maybe I can make a cast of my hand, and use that as a stand. Like that M. C. Escher drawing of the artist holding a reflective sphere. That might look cool. It might look trite. One way to find out. I went to the shell and lifted it from the stand and held it just so. Memorizing that position, I mixed up the alginate mold-making stuff, and stuck my hand into it, holding it as I had before. In about 10 minutes I worked my hand out of the mold and mixed up the plaster and poured it in. Directions said to take it out of the mold in an hour. I took Larry the hound for a walk and came back in less than an hour. In that time, I had gotten excited about the hand-stand. I could see it in my mind. When I get excited, I get impatient. I wanted to see my hand holding that shell. The plaster was hard, but still damp. I scratched it with my fingernail. It should be hard enough. I tapped it. Sounded solid. Screw it, I can do this. Most of the mold came off easily. Looking good. This is going to be really cool. But as I tried to extract the last two fingers, the index and middle, they snapped off. shiat. I removed the rest of the alginate and sized up the results: A good cast, fine detail. Not bad for a first try. Maybe I can glue back the fingers. Then I realized they were the same ones the lobstrosities had taken from Roland on the beach.

Dud-a-chum?

I set the damaged hand aside, cleaned up the mess, and returned to the matter of the antler stand. How easy will it be to tear it apart from the epoxy putty? That stuff is pretty strong. And how many more antlers would it take to make the stand I imagined? Is it even possible with antlers? Maybe I just write it off and go with the hand.
That problem fixed itself. After some time away, I kind of liked the mutant hermit crab look. Whatever my previous feelings, the pieces fit together well. The antler prongs followed the shell's contours without interfering with it. The legs were pleasingly spaced and sized. And it creates a context. It's no longer abstract; it's downright representational. Fine, let the stand be part of the sculpture. My intuition when I assembled it had been good; it was my original premise that was flawed. Yes, this will do nicely. I stared at it, looking deeper and deeper into the hematite pupil, past the reflections on the surface and into the spherical world inside. Ded-a-check. I'd do something else with the hand. I went to the work room, opened the drawer below the counter and took out a bottle of Super Glue and attached the fingers to the hand. The glue held without a seam. Dad-a-chack. It looked like my hand would fare better than Roland's. I had a moment of deja-vu. I could have sworn I had just done this. Weird. I went back to look at the sculpture some more. To look into its eye, past the reflections on the surface and into the spherical world it contained. As I stared into it, my eyes played a trick on me; the curvature seemed to reconcile, to straighten and gain color. My vision swam and I felt a sensation of flipping, as if I were trading places with my reflection, looking out from the shell into the basement at myself looking into the shell. I blinked and my vision was steady. I was outside looking in again. I turned to go upstairs and let my mind clear. On the way, I glanced into the workroom where the plaster cast of my hand lay, minus the index and middle fingers, which were lying beside it on the counter.

What the what now?

I approached the hand. Picked up a finger. Examined the base. No glue. Nor on the other finger. I opened the drawer below the counter and took out the bottle of Super Glue and attached the fingers to the hand. The glue held without a seam. I convinced myself that I had pictured the act so vividly in my mind that it seemed real. A little reverie brought on by too much creativity. Sure. Whatever makes you feel good. Let's get a cup of coffee.
The thing about obsession is it doesn't seem like an obsession to the one who contracts it. It just seems like an interest, a strong interest for sure, but one anyone would share if they only took the time to appreciate its vector. I've had my periodic obsessions: Pink Floyd, the book S. by Doug Dorst (there should be a warning label: "Persons on the spectrum should not read this book."), a poem about clouds but not really, that I wrote back in June. All fine obsessions. The poem hit me especially hard. When I was done, I went through a sort of post-partum depression. I felt like I needed to cry, but had no reason to. Then a good friend died, and I was able to cry and release the accumulated emotional waste that had built up in my system. And now I was becoming obsessed with the shell eye thing sculpture. I can see that now. My eyes are open.

That evening, the day after Christmas, I took some photos of it and posted a thread on Total Fark Discussion, titled "Lookit what I made." It went over well. In fact, the thread got so many thumbs-up votes that it was mentioned in the end-of-the-year Fark NotNewsletter.

"A particular individual made a new friend," it said. And, because I am a shameless, self-promoting attention whore, I posted photos of it every chance I got. Total Farkers reading this are nodding right now. They saw me do the same thing when I got Larry the hound, and when I wrote that cloud poem, and now with that damned eye shell thing.

Fun Fact: I installed a word-substitution plug-in on my Web browser. When I view Fark, "Submit a Link" has been replaced with "Embarrass Yourself." This is supposed to make me think twice before I post something. It rarely does. Total Farkers are nodding their heads again.

It needed a name. Driving home one day, thinking about how it's a trumpet and it's an eye, I remembered a French term for a kind of 3D art that's so convincing it "deceives the eye." Trompe l'oeil. What's French for trumpet? Turns out, it's trompette. I tried on "Trompette L'oeil," and didn't really dig it. Too many syllables. But isn't "trompe" also just a word for trumpet? Yes, it is. And so it is that the official title for this particular work of art is Trompe L'oeil (Trumpet Eye).

Fun Fact: The French word "trompe," "to deceive," comes from the word "trompe," meaning "trumpet." According to some etymologies, snake-oil salesmen (or the French variant of  them) would set up their wagons and blow a trumpet to get the attention of the rubes they were about to con. And this is where we get the English words "trump" and "trumpery." I'm just throwing that out there. Make of it what you will.

*Poor Yorick
 
CAT-LIKE TYPING DETECTED
2020-10-31 9:55:07 PM  

hiredgoonz: https://www.fark.com/comments/1060500​4​/124003900


??

You posted a link to your 2019 post of a link to the original 2012 post of what I reposted this year..?

I'm confuzzled..
 
Honest Geologist [TotalFark] [OhFark]
2020-10-31 9:58:15 PM  
I've got one to add. Happened less than an hour ago.

I remember a few years ago I posted in here about how creepy baby monitors have the potential to be. You know, you're downstairs with the baby and you hear the baby on the monitor upstairs or something like that.

We never had that. Bleed-in from the couple with a baby next door, sure, faint crying when we knew our own child was fast asleep. And strange crackles late at night sometimes, interference from who knows what.

Tonight, the creaky sound of a door opening.

We figured the oldest had gone for a pee. I went up and checked. Nope, fast asleep. Heart rate went up. Checked all the doors, nothing out of place. Went and had a look outside anyway. Nothing out there but the moon. Haven't heard it again. Hope I don't. A little unsettling on Halloween after reading this thread.
 
Free Radical
2020-10-31 9:59:39 PM  
OK, my turn. This is a true story that I haven't thought about for years. Creeps me out every time I do, though, so now y'all get to be creeped out too.

When I was a kid, my best friend at the time was my next-door neighbor. We were around the same age and did almost everything together. The house next door to his was occupied by an ordinary enough family; mother, father, mother-in-law, and a single daughter. The daughter was in her twenties, I believe.

To cut a long story short, the daughter had a history of mental illness in her twenties. She would hear 'voices,' was paranoid, felt 'watched,' and all that. Typical schizophrenic symptoms as she was diagnosed if I remember correctly. When my neighbor and I were preteens, she used to babysit us at different times, and neither of us ever remember any issues. The only real memory I have of her is that since her name was 'Anna,' we used to call her 'Anna Banana.' But only behind her back, never to her face. Our little secret. Real original stuff, right? Anyway, the summer of my 15th birthday, she apparently got off her medication (that was what her parents said) and had an episode that ended badly. She went to the local Catholic Church and killed herself in the parking lot. Shot herself in the head with her father's gun. It was a tragedy that affected the entire neighborhood as nothing like this had ever happened before.

Around six months later, her parents divorced, and the husband moved out. Another six months passed, and my friend and I were asked to help the mother clear out her (Anna's) room. We didn't think much of it and were happy to help.

Here's where it gets rather weird...
We were clearing out stuff from her room's closet, putting clothes and random belongings into boxes. I was clearing out the right side of the closet when I found her phone. It was not connected, the cord was wrapped around the base of the phone, or at least that's how I remember it. Anyway, I picked it up, and as I was moving it to put it into the box, the damn thing started to ring.

It rang three times, and it was all that I could do just to stand there and not run for the door. My friend actually started laughing at me because I must have been pretty wide-eyed. I snapped out of it and gave the phone to him. It had stopped ringing, and we were just about to have a good laugh about when he put the receiver up to his ear.

"Hellooooooo..?" he said in a somewhat sarcastic tone. It was actually pretty funny. Kids being kids. He squinted like he heard something, but it must have been faint as I didn't hear a thing. I thought he was pulling my chain and was about to punch him in the arm when he turned and looked at me.
His eyes grew wide, and his mouth started to gape, slowly, really slowly like he heard something he couldn't turn away from. I'll never forget it. At first, I thought he was screwing with me, but the look on his face betrayed the thought. He looked terrified. I stood there staring at him for what felt like minutes (was probably more like a second and a half) and wanted to bolt. I didn't, though, until I saw a single tear well up and roll down his left cheek. At the sight of that, I ran. I left him on the phone and ran like a coward away from that damned house. I didn't look back. I ran to my room, dove on the bed, pulled up the covers, and friggin' shook for the good part of an hour.

Eventually, I snapped out of it, and the next day I went to check on him. He was OK, but neither of us talked about the incident for weeks. I finally brought it up to him, and he wouldn't talk about it. I accused him of pulling my leg over the whole thing, and he wouldn't deny or confirm it. He would not say a damned thing about it. He would change the subject or just flat out tell me to shut up.

Flash forward 15 years.
I caught up with him at his father's funeral. We hadn't seen each other in many years and had a lot of catching up to do so we decided to go to the local bar and have a few beers. We talked about old girlfriends, our families, yadda, yadda, yadda. Towards the end of the night, after more than enough beers, I remembered the phone call...

I brought it up to him; "So you remember the time we cleared out Anna's room?" His face went relatively blank. He knew what was coming next. "Yeah," he says. I seized the opening; "Dude, I gotta know, were you messing with me that day or did you really hear something?" He didn't respond but instead stared into space, seemingly remembering the incident. "C-mon, man, I gotta know. It has freaked me out for years. So fess up, you played the greatest prank ever on me, right?" "No.," he said in the most serious voice I've ever heard him use. "You wanna know what she said to me? Are you sure because I haven't told anyone this, not my Mom, not my Dad, not my f*cking wife!" "Holy shiat!" I said, "you're serious!" "Dude, tell what the hell happened that day! I need to know!" His voice got deadly serious, and he finally told me.

"It was Anna on the line and she told me."

"I'm in my mom's room, inside the closet. Come see me and bring your friend."

He then said that she started screaming two words over and over at him; "ANNNA BANANA! ANNA BANANA! ANNA BANANA!"
To this day, I don't know if he really heard that or just continues to pull my leg. All I do know is that the damned phone rang. I heard it ring and I'll never forget his face when he answered it.
 
CAT-LIKE TYPING DETECTED
2020-10-31 10:13:16 PM  

CAT-LIKE TYPING DETECTED: hiredgoonz: https://www.fark.com/comments/10605004​/124003900

??
You posted a link to your 2019 post of a link to the original 2012 post of what I reposted this year..?
I'm confuzzled..



Oh, i get it now..you were trying to link to Tharkin's follow-up, but linked too high in the thread..  KK..

Here's the reply (replies) from last year's Halloween thread:

===   ===   ===

Today at work I got a Facebook message from a name I didn't recognize. It read simply " Were you Tharkin on Fark?" Well yes, I was, and still am I guess though I probably haven't posted in most of a decade. That feeling of "oh no, what did I do?" was probably the spookiest thing that's happened to me today (so far!)

Turns out she was following up on a story I posted in this very thread like 7 or 8 years ago. Pretty cool!  I'm about to take the kids out for trick or treat, but I'll check in later to read up on everyone's spooky stories this year.

----     ----     ----

a particular individual:  Hey! I actually got worried about you after your Halloween story. You said you were going back the next day, and that was it. I even posted a thread asking after you.

Your story reminded me a lot of Stephen King, especially Dream Catcher. Which was a terrible book. But your story creeped me the fark out.

Sorry for the worry!  I did go back shortly afterward.  In fact by now I've spent quite a bit of time in the general area.  I shot a deer some years ago not too far from where I saw the guy looking up at the trees and I've spent a night in a tent with my wife and kids in a clearing nearby.  I wish I had some cool follow-up story to tell, but the truth is I've never experienced anything weird there again.  That night was definitely bizarre though.  I'll pretty much chalk the animal behavior up to the storm.  Weird weather does weird things to animals, although I've never seen that particular behavior since.  The feathers?  I dunno.  It'd be easy enough to believe that someone out for a walk in the woods was just messing around if that area hadn't been such a dense thicket.  Not many people really go up there anyway outside of snowmobiling later in the winter.  It really seems like something that had to be done with intent by a person, but who knows?  Maybe it wasn't so thick in the springtime, or something.  It's weird but I guess it's not unfathomable. The guy though...I do wish I knew what was up with that guy.

hiredgoonz:

So you unintentionally created a fark Halloween thread legend...

/much respect

Hah, I was genuinely surprised to hear that anyone but me still remembered that story at all.  It's really been a thing all this time?  That's pretty cool.
 
Resident Muslim [OhFark]
2020-10-31 10:48:02 PM  

Leftbehindandgladofit: Resident Muslim: Leftbehindandgladofit:

Thank you.

Moving onto family.
Grandma on my mother's side had two of my cousins living with her to keep her company. Their mother didn't mind as she were just two houses down from her mother's place and the eldest was still with her.
These cousins' room had a lot of weird stuff happening, TV turning on, radio coming on on full volume.
Once one of those cousins and myself were walking into that room and something scurried along the wall and behind the bed.
It was about the size of a cat. But all it was was blackness, blackness with an undefined edge. Think horror movie style blackness when a shadow would break away from a dark area and move on its own.
Our reaction wasn't "what was that?!" it was, both of us turning to the other and exclaiming "did you see that?!"
I went around the bed to peer into that small wall space between the bed and the wall, to see what was that that just moved so quickly.
There was nothing there. The side table was against the wall and the bed against the side table. The bed itself had a frame that went all the way down to the carpet, so nothing could have climbed under it.
So weird.

Moving onto gramma from my father's side. While first gramma was religious, this gramma was more spiritual. Tough.
Think Granny Weatherwax.

Two stories from lore and two told to me by those close.
1) Paternal grandma's brother was walking back home on the beach when he saw his sister sitting there, at an odd time.
He reached out to gently place his hand on her head and ask her what she was doing at such an odd time when his fingers just sank into her head.
He squeezed his eyes shut.
When he reopened them, the apparition was gone.
2) my grandma had a lady that did work for them that had her toddler kid with her. Grandma is sitting around when she see the toddler moving about and she calls to him and sits him on one knee. As she was playing with the kid, she looks up and sees the mother walking towards her...with her child by her side. ...

You are entirely welcome.
Upon my paternal grandmother's death this is how her two sons and daughter looked after the funeral.


[Fark user image image 850x1100]


:)

Is that a cursed Tiki statue in the background?!
:D
 
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