Categories
Nightmares

Nightmare #48 – Video Corpse

(Male, early 20’s) I dreamed I was inside of a video game, which I guess isn’t really that strange because I play a lot of video games. It was a first-person-shooter / capture-the-flag style game which means you run around a lot shooting at people and trying to get the other team’s flag. So in the dream, I get shot and I “die” which means I have to restart at a certain place and run back into where the action is.

The first weird thing that happens is that when I passed the place where I “died” I can see that there is a body there and that it’s me. My corpse is lying on the ground right where it must have fallen when I was shot. I thought that was weird because usually you just disappear when you’re shot. But I still was able to move around and play the game so I continued running around, shooting at people, trying to capture the other team’s flag.

Then I run past the place where I died a second time and my corpse is STILL there. But what’s really strange is that there are these other figures – figures who aren’t players in the game – who are picking up my body and are carrying it away. I look around and all over the battle field there are more of these figures who are carrying away the other player’s corpses. This made me feel really strange and right then, I woke up.

Categories
Nightmares

Nightmare #47 – Illegal Entry

(Male, middle aged) This isn’t exactly a nightmare but it was sure thrilling, maybe less like a horror movie and more like an action adventure.

…When we were nearly through the store, we noticed that we had triggered the burglar alarm…

My wife and I were taking our grand daughter for a ride in a stroller. It was one of those huge, old-fashioned strollers with ruffles and big tires. It was a Sunday. We had walked around town all after noon and by the time we started back it was getting dark and we were getting tired. For some reason, we thought it would be easier if we took a short cut THROUGH an antique shop. The first trouble was that the antique shop was closed since it was late on a Sunday. We tried the door anyway and found that it had been left unlocked so we opened it and pushed the carriage inside. We discovered immediately another trouble with this plan which was the aisles of the shop were crammed too tightly with merchandise. My wife and I had to move things from the front of the stroller to the back in order to have enough room to inch it along. The process seemed to take hours – what a short cut! It was dark outside. We were so tired. When we were nearly through the store, we noticed that we had triggered the burglar alarm. We tried to work fast to get through the store. Just as the stroller was nearly out, however, we started hearing police sirens. We pushed the stroller the last bit of the way and an antique ceramic plate got caught in the ruffles. I caught it just before it would have shattered on the cement. My heart was pounding in my chest. My feet and back ached. I just wanted to get home. Just wanted to put my feet up. As we got the stroller out of the door and onto the sidewalk, this huge armored (!) police car screamed around the corner. It pulled up beside us and a couple very young policemen rushed out and started running around the building. My wife and I smiled and started pushing the carriage toward home.

Categories
Nightmares

Nightmare #46 – Vampire Dolls

(Male) I was supposed to water a plant a church that was closed for vacation but I didn’t have anything to carry the water in and also the door to the area where the water was seemed to be locked. I poured out my pop and filled it with water from a fish pond and started carrying it toward the church door. I’d made sure to leave the church door open so I could get back in. Just then this extremely small woman came out of the church – I mean she was probably 18″ tall. (Now I think about it, she resembled my grandmother a little bit. Then again she also resembled that psychic woman from the movie Poltergeist the one who says “this house is clean.” Only smaller. Maybe a third that actress’ height.) She deliberately lets the church door slam closed even though it’s obvious that I’m rushing to get in. Though I know that she’s a church lady, we still have some pretty harsh words. At the end of our argument, though she says “Well, come along now” then she starts to walk away. Then she turns and says “You’re supposed to follow me.” So I followed her. The woman is a little bit lame so she holds onto me a bit to walk. As we’re walking, she indicates when we should walk a little faster or when we should slow down or stop. We are able to cross at all the green lights and we avoid getting hit when someone bursts through a door. It’s like she can very precisely see into the future which was really rather creepy. We get to this hotel, climb up to the second floor and pause in front of a particular room. There are lights shining from underneath the door. She indicates that we should wait. When the lights turn off, the woman says “Now.” I didn’t know what she meant. She said “You’ll know what to do.”

I entered the hotel room which was extremely plain, more like a movie set from the 40’s than a contemporary hotel. There were a couple twin sized beds with metal frames and on the beds there were what appeared to be lifeless human forms. When I looked closer, I realized they were made of wood. They were like those featureless wooden models that artists use – only 5′ tall! And they were vampires. Wooden vampires. There was blood smeared on their faces. The old lady said I’d know what to do. I figured I was supposed to kill them while they weren’t moving. Beside the vampires, there were wooden knitting needles like they had been knitting just before bed. I tried stabbing one of the needles into their wooden chests but the tip of the needle just shattered away.

I awoke surrounded by sleeping monsters wondering how exactly I was supposed to kill wooden vampires.

Categories
Nightmares

Nightmare #45 – The Deformed DVD

(Male, 40’s) I was watching a DVD of a television show. Actually I was trying to watch a DVD of a television show, some kind of situation comedy or something, but the disc kept skipping. In real life my DVD player often skips or stops playing all together but this DVD kept skipping from this brightly lit sit-com stage to this really dark footage that was clearly out of place with the TV show. The TV isn’t hooked up to cable so it’s not coming from there. It must be somewhere hidden on the disc. The footage is a medium shot of a human form wrapped head to toe in dark grey burlap and then bound with thick ropes. The person is still alive because they’re flailing, slapping the concrete floor like a dolphin on dry land. And another thing is that the burlap is soaking wet. It’s shiny and it makes a slapping sound as the figure moves. For some reason, I know enough of the story line to know that this person has just been pulled out of a torpedo tube, “rescued” into the submarine… but then again no one seems in much of a hurry to undo the ropes and unwind the burlap. Some rescue. There’s no one in the footage though, just this figure struggling alone. The image will fuzz in and out to the sit com with a lot of static. This footage interrupts the sit-com so much it’s really starting to disturb me so I get up and I take the disc out so I can clean it, maybe make it go away. The disc itself is deformed, like it had been melted and then smeared down a plate or something. I don’t even know how it could have fit in the DVD tray.

Categories
Art

Dark Gallery #4 – Model: “Angel Fink”

Red Witch “Angel Fink”One of the Grim Gnome’s hobbies is to assemble and paint models of classic horror figures. This one is a little obscure and so deserves a little commentary. Her name is Angel Fink and she was designed by Big Daddy Roth. Roth was one of the key figures in the hot rod movement and he came up with the Rat Fink characters. Angel Fink, I gather, mixed up the special blend of fuel for the hot rods.

I just thought she was a rather cool, stylized “witch.” I made a little cauldron for her out of Super-Sculpy and sprayed a little of that expanding foam stuff inside the cauldron so it looks like she’s presiding over a boiling batch of goo. To contrast the red of her gown, I painted the goo a nice, sickeningly fluorescent green.

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Other Haunts

Casket Merchant – Multi-Use Caskets

Does it sort of bother you that someday you’ll likely have to buy a casket that will be used pretty much for one day and pretty much for one purpose? Then check out the wares at Casket Furniture.

(http://www.casketfurniture.com/ )

The models there run from fun to functional. All seem handsome and well-crafted. And if you’re a do-it-yourself-er, they also offer plans. If I hadn’t already made plans to have my body composted and fed to my Rosa Rugosa, I’d be eyeing that “Eternaltainment Center” model.

Categories
Art

Dark Gallery #3 – Giving Up the Ghost

Giving up the Ghost

OK one more illustration from my daughter. This one really blows me away. It’s a depiction of the moment of death, the moment when someone literally “gives up the ghost.” Her ghost here looks a lot like the ghost I posted in Gallery #1 but the context of it coming out of somebody’s wide open mouth makes it amazing. At least to me. I’m her father, of course.

 

Around the time when my daughter drew these sketches, we had a neighbor who was an artist. He saved scraps of art supplies for my daughter to play with. He claimed to see spirits and his contention was that my daughter also could see “them.” Of course when I asked her about this now she says “I have no idea what he was talking about.”

Categories
Nightmares

Nightmare #44 – Wedding Horror

(Female, 60’s) In my dream, we were getting ready for my second daughter’s wedding. It was going to be a huge wedding — at least as big an affair as my first daughter’s wedding the year before. I wanted everything to be just perfect. Finally it was the day before the wedding and I went for the final fitting on my dress, a really lovely mother’s of the bride dress. The rest of the bridal party was also trying on their dresses for the last time before the wedding. I was in the dressing room putting on my dress. As I slipped it over my head, the dress stuck because it was suddenly way too small. I’ve always had a tendency to be overweight, but I could not believe that the dress would not fit me! I must have gained 20 pounds from when the dress had been fitted. I couldn’t get it on by myself and I couldn’t get it off. I was completely stuck! I had to call for help, and I started to cry because there was absolutely no way that I could wear that dress to the wedding! I didn’t know what I was going to do! And when the door opened everyone saw me stuck in the dress.

(When I woke up, I was in such a panic. I had to try on my dress immediately and, fortunately, the real-life dress was the right size!)

Categories
Art

Dark Gallery #2 – Scared Hair

Hair On End

OK another one of my brilliant daughter’s illustrations. This one is obviously someone who is so scared their hair is standing on end.

Maybe. That’s pretty long hair.

Maybe it’s like Medusa, some one who we’re supposed to be afraid of. Either way, I thought it deserved its own post.

Categories
Art

Dark Gallery #1 — Nepotism?

ghostmummyVampire-girlSkeleton in Crayon Black Lagoon CreatureFrankenstein’s-Monster

Why deny it? – the favoritism is OBVIOUS in my selections for the first entries to the Night Gallery. (Click on the thumbnails above to see larger versions. They’re EVEN BETTER than the small versions) These illustrations were done by my daughter several years ago on a rainy afternoon. Her artistic impulses needed just a little prodding so I suggested that she draw pictures of my Aurora monster models. Without so much as a second thought she sketched wonderful renditions of a human skeleton, Frankenstein’s monster, the Creature from the Black lagoon and many, many others. (She also sketched a “portrait” of her brother that consisted of a Playstation and a set of controllers.)

Where ever does she get her wit and talent?

Categories
Nightmares

Nightmare #43 – A Murderous Creature

(Female, teen) So maybe a lot of this comes from an episode of Alias I watched just before going to sleep but I still woke up too scared to roll over in bed. I was a spy on a mission. I was to go to somebody’s house and talk to a man who was involved with computers. When I rang the doorbell, the man’s wife and son came to the door and I met them first. The little boy went off to play and the wife showed me in to where the husband was. We talked for awhile about computers then I left.

…The creature sort of looked human…

But I could still see inside the house. I could see the room where the kid was playing. All of a sudden, a creature came into the room. The creature sort of looked human except it was bald and extremely muscular. But the muscles didn’t look like real muscles rather more like tumors just underneath the skin. It had tumors on its face as well. One eye was swollen completely shut and it had bright red bloody lips. The creature stepped right up to the boy and effortlessly ripped his arm off. Then it ripped off the boy’s other arm and then both his legs. Finally the creature opened the child’s rib cage. The boy was dead. It had only taken a couple seconds.

The dad rushed into the room and the creature attacked him too. It ripped off the man’s arms. Just as the creature started attacking the man’s face, I woke up.

Categories
Nightmares

Nightmare #42 – Vacation Warnings

(Male, middle aged) An epic length nightmare here and it sort of developed out of another dream. My family was on vacation, my wife and I and my daughter and my mother. We had spent a couple nights in this hotel in a big city but we hadn’t really been having too much fun. I think we just realized it was our last day.

…I heard a faint whispery voice from inside the hole. It warned “Get out…”

The hotel had a lot of strange services, in addition to what you’d expect like a pool and a gym. For instance, the hotel had a lab, like a chemistry lab that you could use to do experiments. I was in the lab with a couple other men who wore white lab coats. They were showing off things but I really wasn’t that interested. Although it was a pretty well kept hotel, there was a pretty serious crack in the wall of the lab down by the floor, a crack probably 6 inches wide. The two guys saw I was interested in this and handed me a telescoping meter stick for me to see how deep the crack was. I got down on my hands and knees and inserted the ruler and it registered over 25 feet which I thought was impossible. But as I was down there, I heard a faint whispery voice from inside the hole. It warned “Get out of the buildings. Even the cars.” Almost immediately a low insistent rumble started and I thought it was an earthquake. I ran to the hotel room where my family was and told them we had to get outside. It seemed to take forever since everyone felt they had to take a couple choice belongings with them and the hotel room was a mess, belongings strewn a foot thick over the whole floor.

When we got outside the streets were crowded with many other people who had heard the rumbling too. But this was part of the country that never had an earthquake so after a couple minutes people got skeptical and restless. Just then, a building in the distance collapsed literally like a house of cards, the walls and the floors perfectly flattening on top of each other. Another building much closer began to swell like it was a square balloon filled with water. Then, like an over-filled water balloon, the building burst showering the street with papers and furniture. The parking lot across the street was filled with cars and all of a sudden they flattened out, like they were cutouts of sheet metal painted to look like cars. Then they started rumbling forward, stacking on top of each other. I think some people were crushed underneath these advancing stacks of shelled out cars. The rumbling stopped but people were leaving the city without looking back. My family for some reason wanted to look back. They went back into the dark and abandoned hotel where we were staying and started packing. I could hear a series of loud thunks out in the hallway and tried to get them to hurry. I looked out in the hallway. There were a small gang of skin heads, systematically kicking down the hotel room doors and looting what was inside. I finally got my family to leave just before the skinheads got to our room.

Then eventually things went back to normal. For some reason we stayed in town and didn’t head home. The hotel had comped us several nights stay. When we went back to our room, all of our belongings had been picked up, the clothing put on hangers in the closet, the items on shelves and in drawers. No maid could have been so meticulous. We decided to take a subway ride and on the subway, I hear the voice again. “At the next subway stop, don’t look.” I told my family to close their eyes no matter what happened. We were just pulling into a station. I cupped my elbow around my eyes but still peeked out every now and then, especially when the screaming started. Evidently some thing had descended to the subway platform just as the doors closed. She was dressed in flowing brown clothes from what I could tell – sort of “Stevie Nicks” if Stevie Nicks was a monster who could float and kill people just by looking at them. Yup. Everyone who looked at it directly had their heads explode. Probably eight to twelve people in the subway car I was in succumbed. The train pulled away from the station and people were still screaming and crying.

The next warning came in musical cues and in the dream I was tone deaf. I had convinced someone else about these warnings and for some reason he was able to hear them too. He was a musician and was able to translate the cues for me. There was a small mark on the floor shaped like an apple that I was supposed to touch. Then there was a patch of light shining on the wall that I was supposed to touch. I guess we did everything we had to because nothing bad happened.

We were leaving the city by train when I heard the voice again. I asked my wife if she had a mirror. She had a small slightly convex one for some reason. My plan was that if the monster showed herself again that I would reflect her image back at her and thereby destroy her. No such luck. The warning mentioned something about cola. There was a six pack of cola that we’d brought with us. I touched the cans and two of them were extremely hot and starting to swell. I could imagine them exploding like bombs sending shards of aluminum throughout the train car. I opened the train window and popped open the cans to relieve the pressure and then emptied the contents and threw away the empties. The next warning came immediately afterward, something about deep fried food. I just then realized that the train car behind us was an old fashioned caboose that had been set up as a kitchen. I stepped inside. It was like something from another time. Wooden paneling and flooring. All the appliances were cast iron – the stove, the skillets… and at the end of the caboose, a huge frying vat filled with oil. Bubbles were starting to surge up from the bottom like it was boiling hot. I turned to my daughter who has some experience in food service and asked what she’d do with used deep fryer oil. “I’d wrap it in tin foil.” I looked back at the fryer, filled with over ten gallons of scalding hot grease and realized that wouldn’t be a solution. I just had picked up the handle of the frying baskets when I woke up.

Categories
Fears & Phobias

Phobia #2 – Closing Time Terror

(Male) This isn’t exactly a phobia but you also ask for “odd aversions.” And I REALLY can’t stand being in a store or really any place for roughly the hour before they close.

If I wanted to make this aversion sound logical and defensible I’d say that I used to work in a shop where I just HATED everyone who walked through the door during that last hour or so because all I really wanted to do was go home and not help people.

But there’s something else working here too, like a childhood fear of abandonment. I still have this strange fear that I’ll get locked in someplace and that instead of security guards, there’ll be Dobermans. I must have seen a movie with this as the premise sometime when I was a kid and it scarred me for life. Y’know a guy locked in a department store who has to survive until the store opens the next day.

Stores that are open 24/7 are a Godsend!

Categories
Other Haunts

Slow Wave – illustrated dreams (in a much lighter vein)

If you need a break from the relentless onslaught of nightmares, phobias and horror presented here, check out Slow Wave.  For over ten years, artist Jesse Reklaw has been posting illustrated dreams.  (Ten years — that’s like a millennium in internet years!) The illustrations are charming and the storylines follow the weird sensibilities of dream logic.  Printed comics and original artwork are also offered for sale at the site.

 www.slowwave.com

Categories
Nightmares

Nightmare #41 – Night Boat to Nowhere

(Male, 40’s) I was on a personal pilgrimage to see the Southern Cross (a constellation that only can be seen in the southern hemisphere) and I was in some strange port of call. There were tiny, winding streets. I couldn’t speak the language and furthermore, I couldn’t even identify what KIND of language it was. There were small open-air shops selling all sorts of things, all packed one against the other. I was hungry but I couldn’t even discern what was food. I was also dragging along an immense suitcase made of soft brown leather. The suitcase had straps like an old-fashioned suitcases. It wasn’t very heavy but it was quite awkward to get through the crowded streets.

…Very soon I started to think it was the wrong ship. In fact, it felt dangerously wrong…

Finally after a long wait, I boarded a ship. Very soon I started to think it was the wrong ship. In fact, it felt dangerously wrong. First of all, no one other than the crew were allowed below deck so the deck was crowded with people all carrying luggage. But then it became evident that there there was a particular family on deck that everyone else seemed to be consolidated against. The family — a mother, father, two children and a grandmother — didn’t seem to notice the glares, the staring, the random shoving and malicious elbows. No one else other than this family were being jostled so consistently, so violently. I also noticed that others in this crowd were taking notice of me, concerned that I might be a witness to what was about to happen. The ship moved very very slowly. We had barely left port. It had turned night but I didn’t dare take my eyes off the crowd to look up at the stars. The ocean was an inky black. The crowd pushed the grandmother to the ground. Still the family didn’t realize they were in danger. I couldn’t warn them because I didn’t know the language and even if I could, I’d just be putting myself in danger too. But I was already in danger and it wouldn’t get any better once we reached the open sea. So before we had entirely left the bay, I grabbed my suitcase, which I somehow knew would float, and I jumped overboard into the black, black water.

Categories
"What We Fear"

Cat Urine Rat Courage

Rat’s naturally fear cat urine. Makes sense, right? Except there’s a brain parasite that makes rats not only lose their fear of feline piss but seek it out. The parasite works quite precisely, eliminating and reversing only the fear of cats while leaving other innate fears intact.

Rats, Cat Urine and Brain Parasites

And this reminds me for some reason of a guy I knew in college (Hi Scott!) who never liked the “No Fear” motto because he thought it was a cop-out. The real challenge he thought was to feel the fear all the way and to use it, to “surf” on the crest of the fear. And there seems something right about that at least as far as it goes.

Fear, I suppose, is somewhat like pain in that both pain and fear are ways our bodies tell us to be careful. Pain and fear are like that annoying warning beep that so many appliances have. We generally think that it’s OK nowadays to use anesthetics to remove pain, especially after we’ve recognized that there is an underlying condition that is causing the pain. Incidentally, this wasn’t always the case. Anesthesis used to be virtually forbidden on moral grounds. Would it be prudent, though to pop an anti-fear pill occasionally if we could synthesize such a thing? Perhaps to reduce stress, if stress is indeed an aberrant “flight or fight” residue inappropriate for the modern era. The army, police, fire departments would likely be very interested as well.

Yes, yes, synthesizing an anti-fear pill isn’t that simple. The research seems to show some nasty relationship to schizophrenia. And of course the study shows that specific fears could be pinpointed, not a broad attenuation of all fear. But aside from those quibbles, I come back to a couple key questions:

Would we want to be fearless?

And even if we wanted to have no fears, would that really be a desirable state?

Categories
Nightmares

Nightmare #40 – Demonic Garage

(Male) This is going to sound funny I’m sure as I tell it but as a dream it was pretty intense. I was going out to the garage of my parent’s house. Which is strange in itself because they haven’t lived in this particular house for probably 15 years but it was the place where I grew up. I opened the big garage door and I was rather amazed that the place was, relatively speaking, pretty clean and tidy. There were still all sorts of strange things hanging from hooks on the walls and there were boxes stacked on top of each other off to the side. But there was clearly enough room to get a car in there and that was definitely not the normal condition of the place.

I mean, you could have gotten a car in there except that set up right in the middle of the garage was a ping pong table. I stepped inside to investigate but it was extremely dark inside. Luckily there were probably a half dozen bare light bulbs hanging down over the table. I yanked on their pull cords one by one and they each turn on but each bulb is really dim and doesn’t illuminate much. It almost seems darker with the lights turned on than when they were off. I stepped outside the garage to find someone to play ping pong with and when I step back in, all the lights are off. I tried pulling the cords again and they were all dead, all burned out. And at that point I’m standing right inside this entirely pitch black space looking out at the dark grey twilight of the big garage door and I hear, behind me, all around me, this low rumbling growl. It feels sort of like I’ve stepped into the mouth of some enormous monster thinking it was a cave. I realize in a flash – and this didn’t seem that strange within the dream, oddly enough – “Oh, the old garage must be possessed.” Not haunted but possessed for some reason. So I get down on my knees and start performing, get this, an exorcism ritual – like I’d know how to do one of those, right? – And in the dream, I’ve got this really commanding and authoritative voice. And I somehow know exactly what to say. The garage starts to shake around me, dust and leaves falling on me from the rafters but I keep concentrating, keep talking and then suddenly a great surging wind gathers up around me and blows out the garage door. That’s when I woke up so I never did get to play ping pong.

Categories
Nightmares

Nightmare #39 – The Subject of Secret Research

(Male, 30’s) I can’t remember the whole dream but after that ending, I woke up feeling quite shook up. The whole dream seemed to be about some kind of research project that had escaped and we were first of all, trying to find it and then second trying to destroy it before it killed all of us. The military was involved, probably in the “killing it before it killed us” part. The dream was a long, grueling exercise focused on brute survival mostly. The corridors we ran down were dark and narrow and made of cement. Finally, we heard something beneath us, moving underneath the cement floor. We cut a hole through the cement which was probably a good foot thick and found the soil underneath had eroded away. Probably 20 feet down were the shiny black tentacles of the monster we’d created. We’d found it. But just then the military guys started shooting the scientists, like it less important to destroy the monster and was more important to make sure that word of the monster didn’t get out. I was the last one to be killed. I didn’t want to beg; I didn’t know what kind of argument I could make for my life. I put my finger to the side of my head like I was miming shooting myself. That’s when I woke up.

Categories
Blogroll Other Haunts

Pseudopod – a horror podcast

If you are cursed with a commute to your 40-hour cage, you might consider listening to the offerings of Pseudopod, the web’s original horror podcast.  There is something wonderful about hearing a scary story, something that recalls a ghost story told around a campfire. The voicing talent at Pseudopod delightfully mixes irony with sincerity which allows the creepiness of the stories to come through. HOWEVER, the Pseudopodians are very clear that NOTHING on their site is appropriate for children, so if you’re a child, ah, stay away. Otherwise, check it out.

Pseudopod

Categories
Other Haunts

The Harrow – a horror e-zine

 My suspicion is that folks who enjoy reading other people’s nightmares might also enjoy reading other kinds of scary writing.  The Harrow is a particularly tasteful horror e-zine that publishes new fiction monthly. I’ve haven’t been reading it for a long time but the writing that I have seems quite fresh and high-quality. Worth checking out.

The Harrow