Nightmare fuel

In this week’s installment of ‘Holy crap what is that thing I think I saw it once in a nightmare’, we bring you the frilled shark. Trust me when I say you have not seen anything this creepy in your lifetime.

The frilled shark is called a “living fossil” because it’s so old and primitive, and very rarely seen. As you can see in that shudder-inducing video, it has a body akin to that of a large eel, and it attacks much in the same way a snake does – by bending back and then lunging forward. This thing pretty much doesn’t even look like a shark, but the Chlamydoselachus anguineus, one of the two remaining species of the Chlamydoselachidae family, most definitely is.

Here’s a fun fact for all my Kiwi followers – this little beauty has been found around New Zealand, though usually it sticks to depths of a couple hundred metres, even being found once as deep as 1,570m.

It’s been suggested that this species of shark – or a relative – could be behind reports of sea serpents back in the day. Growing up to about two metres, it doesn’t seem big enough, but then what do I know about sea serpents? Nothing, my friends. I know nothing.

So now that you have the mental image of that thing swim-slithering towards you like a weird, snake-eel-shark hybrid, please enjoy the rest of your day.

Whaaaaa?

The dashboard on my blog gives me a lot of interesting information about how many people view my posts, what country the views are coming from, what links in my blog people have clicked, and the types of searches people have put in that brought them to my blog.

That last one is where things get a little weird. At the moment one of the searches showing up on my dashboard is “underage sex with little brother”. I don’t know who would be searching that, and I really don’t know how that brought them to my blog.

I’m uncomfortable.

Talk to strangers

Y’know, the internet gets a bad rap a lot of the time. Time and time again I’ve heard the same advice: don’t talk to strangers on the internet. Don’t tell them any personal details. In this day and age, internet usage is so widespread and social media has wormed it’s way into every last nook and cranny that it almost seems laughable to assume we wouldn’t talk to strangers on the internet.

I talk to strangers all the time. Sure, I don’t tell them my address and contact details, but I certainly share personal information that would have gotten any 11 year old child a verbal beatdown from a concerned parent. The truth is, that type of internet safety, the type where we keep all our information under lock and key, is dying out. We’re a lot more open, online.

It’s not always a bad thing, either. Some of you who know me may be aware that I have become a teensy bit addicted to a subreddit called Let’s Not Meet, where people share creepy stories about people they’ve met who gave off the serial killer vibe, or maybe stories about finding someone in their house sniffing their underwear in the middle of the night. All the stories that I shouldn’t be reading when my flatmate is away and I’m home alone for the night.

Let’s Not Meet has opened my eyes to how the internet and its users can really band together to help eachother out. One woman had written a post detailing how each morning she’d wake up and find a chair moved outside her house, where whoever moved it would be able to stand and see through her bedroom window. People in the comments had immediately started advising the woman on what she should do. One person pointed out something particularly chilling that hadn’t occurred to me: whoever was moving the chair to spy on her wanted her to know he/she was there, otherwise they would have tried harder to conceal the fact they’d been moving said chair. This person wanted her to be afraid.

Suggestions in the comments ranged from calling the police to inviting friends over to stay with her, to discreetly installing security cameras to catch the creep in the act. The one constant point throughout the comments was that she should be careful, and trust her instincts that something was up.

Everyone’s advice must have made an impact on her, because she posted an update on the situation, saying that one day she got her father in law to come around and have a look around the outside of the house for her. You know what he found? A butter knife outside the bedroom window down the other end of her house, and scratches around the window frame. Again, another wise commenter pointed out that if someone wanted to break into her house, that window would be a good one to go for because it was furthest away from her bedroom, and it would be easier to climb in without being heard.

It’s a good thing she listened to those strangers on the internet.

Sentient appliances

My flatmate and I thought it was strange the other day when our clothes dryer, a hulking metal behemoth, made a random thumping noise as we walked past. Feeling a little bit nervous, I glanced at Sacha and pulled the dryer door open, only to see a pile of washing nobody had cleared out yet. We exchanged confused looks, mumbled about how we always seem to end up in haunted houses, and promptly forgot about it.

A day or two later I was sure I had the answer. The dryer had again made a thumping noise as I walked past, but this time it was accompanied with a creak of the floor. I suggested that there must be certain places on the floor we were stepping on that reverberated underneath the dryer, causing it to let our a mournful creak of its own. It made sense, because our house is noisier than a gaggle of pre-teen girls at a Twilight premiere, and our dryer is as old as the hills.

I thought it made sense. But as I type this, I am lying in my bed with my cat curled up on my feet, and the dryer has made a thumping noise three times now without a single soul walking past that laundry.

My flatmate is away tonight. I am afraid.

Persistent ghosts

I rarely use the lock on my bedroom door.

There’s usually no need. I only live with one other person, and we both know to knock before entering – it’s simply a common courtesy. And not just knock and then barge in, but knock and leave an adequate amount of time for the occupant to shriek “don’t come in!” if they are busy prancing around naked or whatever suits the moment.

Last night was one of the few times I used the lock, because – I’ll be honest – I was a little bit scared.

It was around quarter past twelve at night, and I was reading creepy stories on the internet as I am bound to do from time to time. I’ve made a rule that I’m not allowed to read them when Sacha’s away, because I go just a little loopy on my own and start thinking every creak signals my impending doom. She was here this time though, so I figured it would be alright. It still put me slightly on edge though.

Sacha had come into my room to speak to me about ten minutes earlier because the washing machine was throwing a miniature tantrum about some late night washing she’d put on. She closed my door as she left, and a small while later, as I lay in my bed reading by the light of a single lamp, the door suddenly creaked open.

It was just a crack, and I figured that Sacha must not have made the door click when she closed it behind her. It was one of those annoying doors that have to be pushed that extra bit to make sure they latch shut properly. I decided I’d ignore it – I could close it in a moment when I turned off my laptop. But as I lay there in my bed, it continued to creak and inch open, then stop, and continue. There was probably a breeze in our house somewhere, but it was enough to creep me out, so I got out of bed and pushed the door shut until I heard that click that told me it was definitely latched.

The fact that I knew it was closed properly made it relatively alarming for me when the door suddenly creaked open again a further ten minutes later. Again, only a crack. I’ve never known the door to open itself after clicking shut, so this time when I got up to push it shut again, I turned the lock for good measure.

That was a pretty anticlimactic story, but it made me nervous nevertheless.

Sacrifices

A couple of years ago I was driving from Hamilton to Tauranga with my friend, Brendon. It was evening, and the moon was up, hanging in front of us looking huge, and coloured a funny shade of pink.

“Ah, the red moon,” Brendon said in a strange voice. “A virgin must be sacrificed tonight,” he added, turning to look at me with a terrifying expression on his face.

Later in the night, as we got closer to Tauranga, the moon had gone back to its usual colour. Again, he turned to me and said “An innocent has been sacrificed. You are safe for another moon.”

That was a weird car trip.

Survival instincts

I’ve never really understood Reddit, but the other day I stumbled across a subreddit called Let’s not meet, where users share their creepy firsthand experiences of people they’ve met on the street or something along those lines. They’re not paranormal stories, but they’re stories of messed up people instead.

One of my favourites is The Smiling Man, one that was adapted into a short, four minute film called 2 am. The stories people post up are supposed to be true, and for the most part I believe they are. To be honest, some of them are too strange to be fake, if that makes any sense.

Anyway, one of the ones I’ve just finished reading was about a guy who’d been walking along at night and realised a man nearby was about to kidnap a woman walking by them. The woman was oblivious to the knife the kidnapper was holding as he walked along side her, but as the teller of the tale looked back and saw what he was certain was about to be a kidnapping, the knife-holding man shook his head at him as if to say “just walk away”.

Here’s the part I love about this story. This guy didn’t know what to do. He wasn’t armed, there weren’t any other people around except for a man in a car down the street, who apparently honked his horn and shook his head at him the same way. Like they were both in on it. So our protagonist’s first instinct was to try and do what you’d apparently do to scare off a bear, and stand up really tall, waving his arms and screaming. And it worked, he says.

It’s like a cat fluffing its body up when its frightened. I can’t get over how great that is.

It made me think – if somebody tried to kidnap me, I always wondered if I could manage to creep them out enough to just scare them into letting me go. Granted, the kind of people who would kidnap someone are probably creepier than I am, but if I acted completely insane or, I dunno, said I wanted to eat their brains, do you think they might just get a little bit freaked out?

I’d like to think they would. The alternative isn’t too great.

Burning

An update on my post about creepy experiences: I have been informed by my flatmate I am invariably the creep-bringer, rather than the creep-receiver. This may be the reason nothing freaky happens to me.

Still, it occurred to us while we discussed it this morning that our old flat in general was pretty creepy.

One of the first nights we spent in that house, Sacha was woken up in the night by a burning feeling on her leg. Trying to ignore it, she went back to sleep, only to be woken again when it really started to hurt. When she turned the light on, there were lines appearing across her leg. White lines down, red lines across. Like scratches. I can’t quite remember the details but I think she said they were appearing as she watched.

Appropriately aghast, she tried to call her parents, and continuously received the not in service tone, which has never happened before. I think she eventually got through, and spent a while praying on the phone with them until everything settled down.

I, of course, slept through everything, because as we have deduced, I miss all the action.

The  next day, some faint white lines left over on her leg were the only testament to her weird, mildly supernatural, leg-burning experience.

As I have also mentioned previously, we are relatively certain our flat at the time was haunted. We’d sometimes hear thumps in other parts of the house when nobody was there, and probably the weirdest part was that the coffee machine would inexplicably be ready with coffee for our other flatmate in the morning, even though nobody had set it.

We figured our ghost was a friendly, dead barrista.

 

The not-so-creepy life of a creepy girl

There haven’t been many legitimately creepy occurrences in my life before, for which I’m (a little irrationally) disgruntled.

Since discovering a subreddit where people share their creepy first hand experiences, I’ve been psyching myself out all night reading about people getting followed home by vans, or spotting people outside their bedroom windows, even one about their niece being snatched from the park – you know, the whole shebang.

I don’t really have any stories like that, despite being labelled ‘the creepiest girl in class’ by all my classmates. In a loving way, I’d like to think. Any creepy stories I do have tend to have silly explanations, or can be put down to overactive nerves. Still, here’s a few things that have freaked me out over the years for one reason or another.

1. One night when I was younger and still living at home, I woke up to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night (my boyfriend calls me Melissa pees-a-lot Wishart. It is my curse). As I wandered down the end of the house, I stopped in the laundry, and stared in mild alarm, because the back door was wide open. All I could see outside was pitch black, and the wind was ferocious. I timidly reached out and pulled the door closed and locked it. That’s it. That’s the end of that creepy story. See what I mean? My stories are boring.

2. After reading a scary ghost book before going to bed, I was already jumpy, so waking up to a rattling noise coming from the back door (the SAME ONE) and hearing  an enraged yowling sound was not in the least bit calming. Turns out the cat just wanted in and couldn’t figure out how to work the cat door. Still . . . could have been creepy if I didn’t have a cat.

3. This one is a little bit creepier than the others. Earlier in the year, my two flatmates and I had just moved into a new house. The living room had a big window across the front that looked out onto the street. It was nighttime and completely black outside, and I was sitting on the couch with my back to it, talking to the others, when we heard something slam against the front door, right beside the window. For some bizarre reason, my immediate reaction was to drop straight onto the floor and make distressed noises for a while. When my flatmate finally opened the door to look outside, nobody and nothing was there. In hindsight, it may have been a perfectly aimed and relatively forceful gust of wind, but we may never know.

That’s about it. I probably have more that I’ve forgotten about, possibly due to all their mediocrity.

I need me some scary experiences already.

A taste for the finer things

I wandered into the rumpus room of my grandparents house yesterday to play on their baby grand piano while I’m here visiting. I noticed, with a grimace, that there was a big, brown spider dead (thankfully) behind the piano chair. Possessing no desire to move it or in fact touch it in any way, I sat down and ignored it.

I could not say the same for my cat, Tonka.

As he waltzed into the room behind me, he was immediately drawn to the small, food-sized bug in the corner. As I sat down to play I distinctly heard a crunching noise, and shuddered.

It was only when I came back into the room later in the evening that I realised Tonka had left all this behind: 

Someone obviously isn’t a fan of the legs.