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Stairs & Our Attitudes Toward Them

Spookdaddy said:
We must have another related thread somewhere, because I'm pretty sure that I've pointed this out before.

In spatial terms a staircase represents a steep, narrow incline tightly enclosed between sheer drops, or sheer walls, or a combination of the two. (In terms of scale, there is clearly a huge range of circumstances - but I believe the underlying effect is universal.)

In terms of the vast majority of human existence this kind of space would contain all kinds of hazardous potential, and even though we now use such spaces every day, and without thought, it's no real surprise to me that, when the conditions are right (or wrong), they might retain an underlying atmosphere of environmental dread.
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You should write that book : Indoor Hiking, A Guide to Long Distance Walking During Lockdown.
 
David Plankton said:
You should write that book : Indoor Hiking, A Guide to Long Distance Walking During Lockdown.
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Three days in. Conditions - cold but dry. Stuck in loft - trap shut behind me, and am trying to conserve torch battery. The bats are getting restless, and bolder by the hour. Running low on water and Tunnocks Caramel Wafers. Not faced such danger since I climbed north face of bookshelf. I may be some time...
 
More like House of Never Leaves...

I've always been scared of stairs. I put it down to the fact that you can't see around the corners. So there could be anything waiting for you just around the corner at the top (or bottom) of the stairs. Most other spaces you can see a significant distance as you enter or leave. I also feel the same about the space 'behind doors' (if a door is pushed open not quite all the way and you have to walk past that slightly ajar door - does anyone else imagine that the door is going to be pushed rapidly closed in your face?)
 
EnolaGaia said:
Something just occurred to me, so I'd like to ask ...

In my experience closet or storage spaces beneath staircases were

- found only in the oldest houses occupied by my family, and hence rare / strange;
- used for storing items nobody would seek for years or even decades (i.e., held the oddest items); and
- the closets most likely to be declared off-limits to us kids.

Has anyone had experience with a more "regularly used" closet or storage space beneath a staircase?
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Yeah The Cupboard Under the Stairs is the norm in the UK across all era of housing. Didn't Harry Potter live in one?
Our cupboard has coats, shoes, bags, things like garden chair cushions. Also ours cat carry box. The other day for some unknown cat reason, the door was opened, as it is several times a day, but the cat thought door/cat case/ vets- and ran off and hid!
The scariest thing in that cupboard is the original 70s vinyl flooring under all the crap.
 
Did you know it had more than one verse?

"Yesterday, upon the stair,
I met a man who wasn't there!
He wasn't there again today,
Oh how I wish he'd go away!"

When I came home last night at three,
The man was waiting there for me
But when I looked around the hall,
I couldn't see him there at all!
Go away, go away, don't you come back any more!
Go away, go away, and please don't slam the door...

Last night I saw upon the stair,
A little man who wasn't there,
He wasn't there again today
Oh, how I wish he'd go away...
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I'm a bit baffled by this scared of stairs stuff. Maybe, when I was a kid, 'because it was dark upstairs'. But stairs are stairs?
I'm wary in public stairwells eg the multi story car park, but that's a fear of rapists/muggers/ murderers hiding round the corner, rather than anything supernatural.
Now lifts and escalators on the other hand....
Stuff like https://forums.forteana.org/index.php?threads/carnage-on-the-escalators.1126/page-5 doesn't help.
Brr.
 
Bad Bungle said:
Must be a myth, but I've heard of people viewing a new house for example and they see a flight of stairs going up to the next level but can't find the stairs going down
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If they walk up the stairs and look back, they can see the stairs going down, surely?
 
Did anyone else do this as a child?
You go to the loo, flush it and then run like hell down the stairs before the noise of the flush can reach it's loudest. It was a feeling of being chased by something that you had summoned. I would sometimes leap the entire flight in two or three jumps, even in broad daylight.
 
David Plankton said:
Did anyone else do this as a child?
You go to the loo, flush it and then run like hell down the stairs before the noise of the flush can reach it's loudest. It was a feeling of being chased by something that you had summoned. I would sometimes leap the entire flight in two or three jumps, even in broad daylight.
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Nope.
 
David Plankton said:
Did anyone else do this as a child?
You go to the loo, flush it and then run like hell down the stairs before the noise of the flush can reach it's loudest. It was a feeling of being chased by something that you had summoned. I would sometimes leap the entire flight in two or three jumps, even in broad daylight.
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That was part of a Peter Cook and Dudley Moore sketch, where Dud says if he doesn't get to the bottom of the stairs before the toilet stops flushing, "I will die!"
 
What about this?
5c3ed1e752dc7faa56be1f445cbbce90.jpg
 
Ladyloafer said:
What about this? ...
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We have a separate thread for mysterious standalone / isolated staircases found in forests and other remote places outdoors:

The Stairs In The Forest & Other Strange Tales
https://forums.forteana.org/index.php?threads/the-stairs-in-the-forest-other-strange-tales.60422/

Having said that ...

In parks and nature areas such isolated stairs or stairways are sometimes erected as elevated observation points. Many years ago I took walks in a nature / wildlife preserve that had multiple such structures (staircases with no more than a landing at the top) as viewing platforms.
 
EnolaGaia said:
We have a separate thread for mysterious standalone / isolated staircases found in forests and other remote places outdoors:

The Stairs In The Forest & Other Strange Tales
https://forums.forteana.org/index.php?threads/the-stairs-in-the-forest-other-strange-tales.60422/

Having said that ...

In parks and nature areas such isolated stairs or stairways are sometimes erected as elevated observation points. Many years ago I took walks in a nature / wildlife preserve that had multiple such structures (staircases with no more than a landing at the top) as viewing platforms.
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Cool, thanks. I'll have a look at that tomorrow. I've no information about the pic I posted, it just randomly appeared as I was browsing pinterest.
 
David Plankton said:
Did anyone else do this as a child?
You go to the loo, flush it and then run like hell down the stairs before the noise of the flush can reach it's loudest. It was a feeling of being chased by something that you had summoned. I would sometimes leap the entire flight in two or three jumps, even in broad daylight.
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Yes. This thread reminded me of that too!

I know that a lot of people do not like to pass another person on a staircase. It must be difficult to get through life that way. How did they get through high school for a start?
 
When I was very young my family lived on a farm - the stairs in our house were horrible, with very tall risers and very narrow treads (not uncommon in old houses, but it would be illegal to install such stairs these days). My solution to getting down was to lie flat and slide, at high speed. I had no real memory of this - although I carry a couple of eyebrow scars from a slight miscalculation - until My mum got some old film converted to video; I understand now why my dad's nickname for me was 'Bullet' - also why my head is so bloody hard.

I wonder if the practical process of overcoming this hurdle is why, although in abstract I 'get' why stairs can be scary, I don't recall them ever being much of a bother to me. There was however a narrow corridor with a bathroom half way along, in a house we moved to later in my childhood, that most definitely gave me the sweats.
 
Spookdaddy said:
When I was very young my family lived on a farm - the stairs in our house were horrible, with very tall risers and very narrow treads (not uncommon in old houses, but it would be illegal to install such stairs these days).
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I think that a lot of old houses had a deliberately uneven steps did they not, in order to catch out potential criminals creeping into your house at night? I wonder if death-by-staircase was more common back then and that fear has passed down as a sort of folk memory?
 
Min Bannister said:
...I wonder if death-by-staircase was more common back then and that fear has passed down as a sort of folk memory?
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Definitely - and not just back then. My old lodger was a paramedic - in his experience staircases in pre-war housing stock (I think that's maybe when regulations became standardised) were a very common cause of serious domestic accidents; especially, but not exclusively, among the elderly. (My aunt lived in a late Victorian terrace - I could barely get a third of my booted foot on the treads; I reckon I'd slip off about every fourth step unless I was really concentrating.)
 
Spookdaddy said:
Definitely - and not just back then. My old lodger was a paramedic - in his experience staircases in pre-war housing stock (I think that's maybe when regulations became standardised) were a very common cause of serious domestic accidents; especially, but not exclusively, among the elderly. (My aunt lived in a late Victorian terrace - I could barely get a third of my booted foot on the treads; I reckon I'd slip off about every fourth step unless I was really concentrating.)
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We were trained as home visit care workers to always walk in front and so above of oldies when going upstairs with them for two reasons: In theory, if a person loses their footing on stairs, they're going to shift their body wait to reach out for you instinctively so they'll fall forwards instead and also if you're behind them, they're going to fall on you so that's everyone screwed ..
 
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