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The 'Evil Smile'

catseye

Old lady trouser-smell with yesterday's knickers
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I am interested in the 'archetypes' as mentioned by Hermes (quite a while ago now) in the Stocksbridge By-Pass thread. I took quite an interest in Road Ghosts a while back and something in Hermes account triggered my memory. It was to do with the 'evil smile' often reported on the face of Road Ghosts (I seem to remember one account where a motorist thought he hit an elderly woman, who pressed her face against the windscreen with an 'evil smile').

The 'evil smile' seems also to occur in dreams. If you lucid dream and, during a dream challenge another character that they can't be real because you are 'only dreaming', does anyone else get the 'evil smile'? I have a couple of accounts from other dreamers (one lucid, one not) about encountering characters that gave a smile that looked evil. I have had a couple of these myself, one during a lucid dream and one not.

So is the 'evil smile' something that exists inside our head? A reaction that we have imagined? And, if so, what does that say about the expression being seen on the face of things perceived to be ghosts?
 
I suppose the first thing to address is what range of expressions qualify as the 'evil smile' at issue. For example - do any of the following possibilities determine an 'evil smile'?

- smirk / no smirk
- bared teeth / closed lips
- arched eyebrow / no arching
- direct vs. indirect gaze directedness
- etc.
 
evil-smile-gif-17.gif


This. This is an evil smile.
:evil:
 
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I think the degree of evil is in the eyes. Someone who smiles with their mouth whilst their eyes are staring - that's an evil grin. I think you know it when you see it.
 
I got that from a woman I met once. It was a blind date as we had set up over the web. I had gotten her address and I went to her house. I rang the bell and this woman let me in and she says she's upstairs. I went up then I saw her. The way she smiled at me and she just looked dead inside those eyes. I thought is she going to kill me? I then reached in my pocket. Pressed my alert and left, my friend pulled around the corner and i got in with him and he drove off.
 
I got that from a woman I met once. It was a blind date as we had set up over the web. I had gotten her address and I went to her house. I rang the bell and this woman let me in and she says she's upstairs. I went up then I saw her. The way she smiled at me and she just looked dead inside those eyes. I thought is she going to kill me? I then reached in my pocket. Pressed my alert and left, my friend pulled around the corner and i got in with him and he drove off.
That's why people should always meet in neutral territory, in a public place.
 
Manson was the king of the evil smile. Also Gacy, Hitler.. Lotsa Nazis.
 
Every time I see this thread title, I get Nickelback stuck in my head.

And then the above picture is enough to make anyone terrified.
 
I seem to remember reading in Sean Tudor's excellent Blue Bell Hill book about someone driving along (Blue Bell Hill I think) and seeing a woman stood by the road and being worried that she was about to step out in front of the car, which she promptly did. Since the driver was expecting it, he/she swerved and avoided the impact, but the woman looked at the car with an evil smile as the driver went past.... Probably not entirely accurate in the details, but that one really creeped me out.
 
Disaster Girl....Top meme...

View attachment 35442

YIKES! Now that's a fucking horrid evil smile...smirk? grin? sneer?
Rhoda Penmark from The Bad Seed, except this girl's, what--four or five? I must say, this photograph has given me a sudden turn.
I wouldn't be surprised if she'd set the fire herself.
 
John Keel wrote about the Grinning Man, and recounted a number of incidents that sound very similar to those above.
 
I seem to remember reading in Sean Tudor's excellent Blue Bell Hill book about someone driving along (Blue Bell Hill I think) and seeing a woman stood by the road and being worried that she was about to step out in front of the car, which she promptly did. Since the driver was expecting it, he/she swerved and avoided the impact, but the woman looked at the car with an evil smile as the driver went past.... Probably not entirely accurate in the details, but that one really creeped me out.
This is one of the stories that has kind of inspired me - I think the old woman pushed her face against the windscreen in one version and did the 'evil smile'. It made me wonder whether the incident was the result of a micro-sleep and a dream, as the 'evil smile' seems to occur so frequently in dreams.
 
I fished out the account I was thinking of, p.342 of The Ghosts of Blue Bell Hill & Other Road Ghosts by Sean Tudor:

Gillian Barry encountered a young female on the dual carriageway of the A229 at around 1am in January 1992. Gillian was driving home towards Maidstone on the downhill stretch between Blue Bell Hill Village and the Lower Bell when she was startled to see a figure ahead on the central reservation to her right, standing side-on to the road. As she closed on her, the girl turned to face her. She looked about nineteen or twenty years of age, with dark hair and pale features. Most notably, despite the very cold night, she was wearing only a black knee-length dress - 'that's it', said Gillian - no jacket or coat, just a quite modern-looking black dress.

Instinctively, Gillian braked hard as she passed close by the girl, partly in a flash of concern for the girl's plight, and pulled up in the middle of the road, thinking she had just missed her (an otherwise dangerous manoeuvre for this busy road, but there was no other traffic around). She immediately checked in her rear-view mirror - only to see the girl looking in her direction, with a malevolent smile on her face that kind of said 'Got you'.

Shaken, Gillian took her eyes of the mirror for a second. When she looked back the girl had vanished. There was nowhere she could have gone. Only at that moment, when met with the girl's strange expression and her disappearance did she realise the girl wasn't real and probably a ghost. 'It really did shake me up', she said. When she arrived home she was still shaking.
 
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