Challenge: Haunted House

(This post is part of the Wednesday Weekly Blogging Challenge. You can find links to other writers' answers over at Long and Short Reviews. I have not been following along as reliably this year as I did in previous years, but I'm still participating! Mostly.)

Prompt: Would I stay in a Haunted House? Why or Why Not?

I would. It's not something I would seek out, but I absolutely, 100% would. About the only reason I wouldn't stay in a haunted house is if I had some reason to believe that an actual, living human being was planning to murder me there. That would probably put me off. 

So yeah, if I needed a place to stay and something was the best available choice except that it was supposed to be haunted, I'd settle in. No problem. If someone offered me a cash reward to camp out overnight in an abandoned sanitarium, I'd probably sign up. I'd take precautions against possible intrusions by living humans, but I wouldn't be worried about the ghosts. (In fact, if you watch a random selection of Urbex -- Urban Exploration -- videos on YouTube, you'll run into several where somebody exploring an "abandoned" building found that it was haunted by people who actually lived there and weren't too keen on random tresspassers with cameras. It's a whole thing.) 

Now for the second half of the prompt. Why? Well, mainly because I exist in this weird liminal space between I don't believe ghosts exist and even if they somehow do, they don't actually seem to be that much of a danger or we'd know more about it by now. After the Victorian Spiritualism craze and decades of ghost-hunters, there'd be some kind of overarching hypothesis, some quanitified collection of events and measurements. But mostly I come back to If ghosts were really a thing, we'd know a lot more about them by now. Like, you want to convince me that they're mysterious and hard to gather data about? Okay, but we know about things that are absolutely wild in terms of being hard to study. We know about the bacteria that live around the edges of volcanic vents so deep in the ocean that there's neither light nor oxygen to speak of. We've found ways to study particles that are incomprehensibly small and even some that only exist in momentary bursts. If ghosts were a real-world phenomenon, surely by now we'd at least be comparing data over competing theories of how they worked.

Challenge: Ghost Story

(This post is part of the Wednesday Weekly Blogging Challenge. You can find links to other writers' answers over at Long and Short Reviews.)

Prompt: Scariest real-life ghost story

I don't... actually really have one of these. Not as such. I've had sleep paralysis, of the Shadow People variety, but really only once; and of course as a kid I could scare myself silly thinking about the nightmare things that could be in my room at night. But that's really it. 

So the closest thing to a ghost story I've got is an incident I like to call... 

THE BATHROOM OF TERROR

This actually happened. This is described pretty much exactly the way it actually happened. So follow the link, and share the experience...

Apocalyptic Nightmares

In the realm of creepy dreams, this one came from Friday night (or, well, Saturday morning, really). It started with some sort of party, which I don't remember very well except that one of my very old friends was there. Then it shaded over into something more apocalyptic, featuring:

- A long, dark stretch of water drainage (or sewer?) tunnel, with mostly-still-intact metal catwalks above the water line. As I was moving down the catwalks, I heard a child's voice crying out for help. The child turned out to be just a head and torso; the arms and legs were gone somehow. I knew it was too damaged to survived, and since there was nothing I could do I went on. I had just jumped across a missing section of catwalk when I heard something come up behind me and eat the child.

- Another child was outside with his father when something meteorite-ish crashed into the father, killing him instantly and mostly-killing the boy. The boy reappeared from time to time throughout the rest of the dream, wielding a length of chain that acted like some sort of monofilament whip to cut people into pieces. Sometimes the child was indoors and on foot; sometimes he was outside on a bicycle. He seemed to be haunting a particular area.

Right at the end of the dream, the ghost-boy caught me and my girlfriend outside. (In real life, of course, I have a Beautiful Wife, but she didn't appear in this. Also, I'm not sure, but the girlfriend may have been played by Michelle Yeoh.) We alternated between trying to avoid him as he whizzed by on his bike, using old cars and the placement of curbs for shelter; and trying to get down into the storm drains, where he wouldn't follow us and couldn't hit us with the whip. Finally, I got close enough that I had to step in closer to him to avoid the whip; the chain, I don't know, shortened and became less sharp, and I was able to grab it. Girlfriend caught the ghost boy when he tumbled off his bike, but then he slipped into a small drain himself. I was able to coax him out (despite the really, really eerie ghost-boy laughter), and catch hold of his arm - at which point I made him stop and sit with me. I think there was a vague idea of either sort-of-adopting him, or maybe letting him haunt some part of myself; either way, taming him by giving him a home and/or family. I don't know how that turned out, though, because I woke up about then.

- Somewhere in the middle there, I was helping lead one group of survivors to shelter. (From aliens? From zombies? From collapsing cities? I'm not sure.) We'd gotten everyone into an old wooden campground building, just up the road from a similar building where another group had taken shelter. I called for some volunteers to go back with me for supplies, since the chips and hotdogs at the campground headquarters weren't going to last very long. (My brother was one of the volunteers. If you know him in real life, this is no surprise. There were also two children and one other adult.)

We'd made it just a few steps up the road when there was some sort of attack or explosion in front of us; a great sizzling orange energy-dome that started expanding towards us in steps. It was, of course, burning and/or crushing everything in its path. We ran. We ran, in fact back through our camp building - yelling for everyone to run with us - and on down the hill to the other group's camp building. The effect stopped just after smashing in the wall of the second group's building. I don't know how many of our group got out, but I didn't think it was very many.

I'm also pretty sure that that's how the girlfriend and I wound up going back to get supplies later. We were definitely circling around that effect, and the supplies were in the ghost-boy's territory. I'm not sure just how much time had passed between that disaster and the supply run, though.

So, yeah: creepy dreams. Or outright nightmares, if you prefer. I blame the nyquil and the incipient sinus infection.

Be nice to your friends or their ghosts will eat you

Creepy, creepy dream last night.

Basically, there was this nightmare ghost that came around at night, and it killed people. This might or might not have been a result of the earlier part of the dream, where we broke into this creepy old library. (There's nothing quite like shelves upon shelves of dusty old books and movies set up inside something that looks like an abandoned bomb shelter to make you wonder what the hell you just stepped into... and, yes, you can have that reaction even when you're dreaming.)

So anyway, there's a point that I sometimes hit in certain horror movies, where I'm tired of the suspense and I just want to go confront the monster and get it over with -- even if it kills me. Which was basically how I ended up grabbing the nightmare-ghost as it was creeping up under my blanket. (Yes, I was sleeping in my dreams. Apparently I'm ready for a starring role in Inception II.) And pulling the ghost up to where I could see it. And demanding to know what it was doing and what it wanted.

It turned out to be the ghost of the younger sister of one of my old college friends. Not anybody in particular, not anybody from real life; but in this dream-identity I'd spend a lot of time partying with this girl. And her younger sister, who was now a ghost, was the one who always got ignored and left behind. And her hands were all scarred because when she'd bring people beer bottles (in a pathetic bid for attention) she'd have to use her teeth on top of her fingers to get them open.

So I opened a couple of bottles for her, and that kind of settled her down. At least, she quit being scary, and she didn't kill anybody else. I was never entirely sure if she was going to come back, but she never did.

Now that I'm awake, I can be more flippant about the whole thing and point out that returning from beyond the grave to murder people seems a little extreme as a reaction to being ignored; I mean, it's not the sort of thing that leads people to say, "Oh, she's not a bad kid, this is just a cry for help." But in the dream, that was pretty much how it worked, and it was pretty NFBSKing creepy.

They don't always sparkle...

It's that magical time of the year: we're coming up on Halloween. Well, maybe not yet. It's still August. Still... never too early to get a head start, right? Especially if something dark and hungry might be chasing you.

So, to put you in the mood for ghoulies and ghosties and long-legged beasties, and things that go bump in the night, I offer you a selection of odd, offbeat, and obscure books that you really ought to know about.

The Vampire Tapestry
Suzy McKee Charnas
This remains one of my favorite vampire books: the story of anthropologist Edward Weyland, who manages to be both monstrous and truly vampiric without being in any way supernatural. An absolutely fascinating - and as far as I know, completely unique - take on vampire lore.

Of Tangible Ghosts
L. E. Modesitt, Jr.
An alternate-history world in which the spirits of the dead have a real, tangible presence, Of Tangible Ghosts offers a fascinating look at how such routine hauntings might affect all aspects of life.

Agyar
Steven Brust
Another in the "Wow, that was not what I was expecting" category - and almost anything I could say about it would be a spoiler. Do yourself a favor: don't check the reviews. Don't read the back the cover. Just get the book, open it up, and start reading.

The Golden
Lucius Shepard
A murder mystery among vampires - this sort of genre blend has become very popular these days, but this is one of the first (and, to my mind, one of the best) examples of it.

Some of Your Blood
Theodore Sturgeon
I don't even know how to classify this one. A mystery? A novel of psychology? A startlingly macabre little horror story? (It's fairly short, more a novella than a novel in length, but that doesn't detract from its impact.) This is another book that's better read than described.

How about you? What's the scariest thing you ever read? What's the most interesting approach to a classic monster that you've encountered? Do you have any obscure recommendations (books, film, whatever) to help us get ready for All Hallow's Eve?

Movie Ghosts

If there's one thing that I've learned from watching horror movies (lots and lots of horror movies), it's that adult ghosts really aren't that scary. Threatening, maybe, and often dangerous, but not that scary.

The ghosts of children, on the other hand, tend to be creepy as hell.