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The Thing from Over the Hill (Scary Stories / Books From Childhood)

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When I was younger, a long time ago, I read the book Alien Animals - particuarly the "When it comes it will come from over the hill" bit - it scared the living crap out of me, I was16 at the time and haddn't been that scared in ages.

At the risk of setting off another wave of imagined stair creaks and squelching sounds, does anyone else know any more about this incident and has any one else read fortean material like that and managed to scare themselves awake for hours..?

Jolly
 
Umm... "She'll be coming round the mountain," perhaps?

I'll get me coat...
 
Mr_Jolly said:
At the risk of setting off another wave of imagined stair creaks and squelching sounds, does anyone else know any more about this incident and has any one else read fortean material like that and managed to scare themselves awake for hours..?

Jolly
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Someone mentioned in another thread about 'teleportation'. When I was in my teens I read about some poor soul who was transported from his home town to somewhere totally alien to him. I can't remember the exact places, but it was something like Reading to the middle of Brazil. He couldn't speak the languate or anything. I used to spend ages worrying about this. What would happen if I suddenly stepped through some portal and was transported from my comfortable, if rather boring, home town to somewhere horrible, where I didn't understand the natives, somewhere like Doncaster! (only joking, any Doncastrians out there, HONEST!)
 
My annals of piffle - actually Phenomena, A Book of Wonders,
by Michell & Rickard, 1977 - give several accounts of transportation
connected with South America:

1: 25th October, 1593, a soldier appears in the main square of
Mexico City, claiming that moments before he had been on sentry
duty at the Governor's Palace in Manila. The Governor, he claimed
had just been assassinated. Months later, a ship arrived bearing
news of the event.

2: The Venerable Mary of Jesus of Agreda never left her Spanish
convent but she was said to have converted many Mexican Indians
around the year 1622.

3: In May 1968, Doctor Geraldo Vidal and his wife were driving near
Bahía Blanca, Argentina. The next thing they knew, they were in
Mexico. Forty-eight hours had passed and their car was scorched
on the outside.

4: Jose António da Silva turned up on the 9th May, 1969 near Vitória,
Brazil, shocked and dishevelled, having been near Bebdouro, some
five hundred miles away, four and a half days earlier. His story of
being abducted by four-foot high creatures seems plausible to me.

Of Doncaster, the annals are curiously and tactfully silent. :p
 
The scariest pehenominon for me is Spontainious Human Combustion. The idea that you could just start burning for no reason.

Of course when you think taht the world could end at any moment it doesn't seem so important.:D

Cujo
 
There are the cases of course, of teleporting animals (from field to field, or paddock to paddock) - said to have occurred in a few cases in west Wales in 1977, and at least one case at West Malling Kent a few years back - this time involving horses.

Puts a whole new complexion on the distribution of similar animal species about the planet - mystery hominids, ABCs, even recognised creatures with otherwise quite widely separated habitats.

Maybe whoever/whatever is slicing and sampling them is also carelessly dropping them off around the globe?
 
Hermes said:
Maybe whoever/whatever is slicing and sampling them is also carelessly dropping them off around the globe?
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Maybe they're the alien equivalent of those jerks who fling coke cans and other rubbish out of moving car windows?:mad:
 
I know nothing else about the 'thing from over the hill', except that it scared the nightlights out of me too. The footsteps on the stairs always did it for me.

It did occur to me though that 'over the hill' is a phrase with connotations, i.e. aging, etc. Was this some kind of fear manifestation, kind of like the Id beast in 'Forbidden Planet'? Or was the whole thing just a journalistic concoction?

I believe that the venerable Richard Cavendish referred to the case on the basis that it could be taken as being a demonic manifestation, but apart from that, nothing. Surely *someone* must know who the unfortunate souls were? I sense an opportunity for some Fortean research for a hardy soul who ain't afraid to be out after dark.
 
I was scared shitless by Ghostwatch, aged about twelve.

Oh, and Tulpas... kinda like the Stay Puft man thing in Ghostbusters... "Empty your minds - don't think of anything!"
 
JackSkellington said:
I was scared shitless by Ghostwatch, aged about twelve.

Oh, and Tulpas... kinda like the Stay Puft man thing in Ghostbusters... "Empty your minds - don't think of anything!"
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The Staypuft Man terrified me - and I was an "adult" when I saw Ghostbusters. It's quite a frightening concept, everyday images which are normally benign, friendly even, showing an unsupected evil side. :eek:

Carole
 
S'scuse my ignance but what exactly is meant by the phrase "the thing from over the hill?
 
Basically it's a story thats in the book Alien Animals and another book that I have somewhere here - basically a woman is talking with friends and for no apparent reason she says the words "when it comes it will come from over the hill" - she doesn't know why. a few months later in the middle f the night she wakes up startled - yelling "The thing from over the hill is upon us" at that point the front door is heard and SOMETHING is walking up the stairs, making a squelching sound. The sound reaches the top of the stairs and a hideous monster enters their room and walks through it to vanish at the window.

Frightened the crap out of me when I read the story, it's not something I've seen elsewhere.

Jolly
 
You know, if you were that woman, there would be endless opportunities to scare one's family. 'Look out! Here it comes again! No, sorry, my mistake', etc.

As I said above, it's a good story and one which unnerves me; but it seems to be very vague and, as I recall, no-one ever really gave the source for it. To me it sounds like an exagerated version of a genuine event at some point, but without a time frame and location, it's more or less a FOAF tale.

Ahem. That said, any wandering elementals reading this should be warned that I keep the Ace of Winchesters under the bed to deal with such forces. Also (to quote Bob Burden) 'a Louisville Slugger specially modified to work on ghosts'.

Actually, that's going to be my next signature.
 
Originally posted by Mr_Jolly

at that point the front door is heard and SOMETHING is walking up the stairs, making a squelching sound. The sound reaches the top of the stairs and a hideous monster enters their room and walks through it to vanish at the window.
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My wife informs me that it's a fair description of me on my arrival home after a night out with the lads.:cross eye
 
i live in doncaster and have done for 21 yrs and still calnt tell what some of them are on about
hehehehe
casio
 
Actually the Ramon Briggs story Fungus The Bogeyman used to scare me. Particually the last page. Can anyone remeFnordmber that book? Looking back on it it's actually pretty funny.


AZ
 
I live near a place called Dronfield... And I only just saw it... maybe there's some truth in there.
 
Yes Aben Zin, I do remember Fungus:p

And for younger readers there was the: "Fungus The Bogeyman Plop Up Book".

Most kids never got to see it, the adults liked it too much:)
 
I remember being scared of "The Monkeys Paw" when I was a kid.

I remember for weeks after I would think about what I would wish for if given the chance then try to word the wish so nothing bad would happen. Like wishing for money and having a rich relative die and leave you an inheritance.

Pretty tame nowadays but when your a child everything is scarier.
 
Yeah I remember "The monkeys paw", a really dark story and thought provoking, makes you think about the dangers of trying to defy nature.:eek!!!!:
 
I don't know if anyone else read it but I was terrified by a story called "The Lonesome Place" when I was a kid. The story was about some children who are so scared of an empty and unlit part of the road they have to walk when they're going to the shops or school that their fears create the monster that they were convinced lived there. I had a long walk through the woods to the school bus stop and I was sure I would have the same effect, even if there was no monster there currently.
 
Hang on, I think I remember that one. Didn't it finish up that the kids were all grown up, then one of them read about a murder in said lonesome place? And that they'd have to go back to sort the creature out?

A bit like 'It'. But about 5000 times shorter, not that there's anything wrong with 'It'...
 
Yes, thats the one. Quite a lot like "It", actually.

Oddly enough, I read the first two thirds of "It" when I was on holiday, borrowing it from the guest house we were staying at. When we went home I expected that I wouldn't get the chance to finish it for ages, as I was far too apathetic to buy my own copy. Imagine my surprise when a slightly battered copy turned up, lying on the bridleway my parents live down. It was freaky because that is exactly the kind of co-incidence that happens throughout the book. I was quite freaked out for a while there.

It was almost disappointing when I told my brother and he told me he had borrowed a copy for me from one of his friends and must have left it on the roof of his car.
 
Misty Magazine?

Ah, when I was a child I read a story by -- I think -- Mary Stewart about a girl who comes indoors from playing only to find her family completely oblivious to her presence.

It turns out that she has become invisible to everyone but an EVIL DOUBLE who has replaced her and is slowly either ruining or taking over her life (it was a long time ago..). I don't even remember how it ended, but it scared the living crap out of me when I was eight.

Also, does anyone remember a comic for girls in the early 80s called Misty Magazine ? It was fairly macabre; one series I remember was about a girl with amnesia following a traffic accident, and whose story culminated many issues later with the discovery that her parents were in fact scientists and she was the reanimated amalgam of several dead body parts.

As I said, fairly macabre; I had nightmares for a week and was forbidden to read it again. Anyone remember it?
 
scary things ....

.... when I was a kid in the late 70's early 80's I remember being scared witless by the video cover for a film called Basket Case (not to be mistaken with the Green Day song which isn't in scary at all but rather good!!) .. I never saw the flim then or since but I seem to remember it being about a man who kept his deformed twin in a Basket, (could do this because it was only upper half of a body or something), only letting it out to feed ..on people? although some of this might be mixed up by my kiddy mind being twisted in fear but that was the gist, anyone remember/seen it?

another thing that frightened me was spontaneous combustion, I remember getting panicky every time I had a hot flush or got too warm thinking I was about to burst into flames and all that would be found was my big toe!!
 
What scared me when I was about ten (I think) was a comic. It was a tie in with some toys (maybe even a cartoon?) called Supernaturals. The comic had a few stories about the Supernaturals along with some other rather macabre stips. One of which was a sub-Childsplay effort about a posessed puppet. Just the artwork on that stip totally freaked me out and I had to it away when I got home!

'The Thing from over the Hill is upon us' and 'When it comes, it will come from over the hill' are, to me, very evocative phrases - seeming to come from somewhere very dark in the unconscious mind. That story has something genuinely eerie about it, even though it's the events are the sort of thing you'd expect in a second-rate Lovecraft pastiche. I suppose 'over the hill' is a good significator of 'the unknown'...

Btw, which Cavendish book mentions this story?

D
 
Reading or re-reading some of the things on this thread makes
me think that our early experiences of Fear are very like our
earliest memories of Sex or Love. The feeling is already there
but attaches itself to some bizarre object.

Oh Noggin the Nog, how terrifying and yet how curiously attractive
you were, in a Nordic sort of way! :p
 
"Whistle and I'll Come to you (my Lad)" M R James has a certain sphincter loosening effect

"The Tell -Tale Heart" Poe(?)

Or the time I went up to Alderly Edge and lit a Pentagram in thermite mixture. I had skid marks on my skidmarks for that one
 
intaglio said:
"Whistle and I'll Come to you (my Lad)" M R James has a certain sphincter loosening effect

"The Tell -Tale Heart" Poe(?)

Or the time I went up to Alderly Edge and lit a Pentagram in thermite mixture. I had skid marks on my skidmarks for that one
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I like 'Canon Alberic's Scrapbook' (M.R. James) better.

'The Tell-Tale Heart' is Poe, and I agree, it's one of his best

Cujo
 
Re: Misty Magazine and Basket Case

garrick92 said:
I think "Misty" either died a natural death when photo-story magazines like 'Girl' and co came along, or it was removed from the market for being scary (which it wasn't).
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Thank chuff -- I was beginning to think I'd imagined this. I found it quite scary, but then I was about 6 or 7 at the time. There was one bit in that particular story where the girl has her palm read by a hokey circus fortune-teller, who makes the sign of the Evil Eye and tells her that according to her lifeline, she is already dead. Think that's what got me!

Re: Basket Case, it was on FilmFour just the other night! I taped it, but I think I may have taped over it. And as far as I remember, I think it was a comedy...
 
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