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Which Fortean Phenomena Scares You The Most?

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evilsprout

Gone But Not Forgotten
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Am I the only person slightly scared of Mothman?! He still gives me the creeps, but I think that's a throwback to the days when I was a kid and I used to get all those "earths great mysteries and ghosts" type books from the library. I swear that at five and six you're not quite old enough to cope with such Fortean weirdness!

I remember even Jef the talking Mongoose (or Jef the strange girl doing crap ventriloquism for her bored parents on a remote island!) scared me. I also remember a kids book featuring a lurid picture of a hairy, grinning vampire coming out from under somebody's bed. (I think it was called the Usbourne Book of Vampres and Werewolves if anyone remembers it?).

Now if anything's gonna scare a kid...
 
i know what you're talking about...
When I was about 6-7 my Dad started to watch the X-files....
That scared the hell outta me...
Of course, as soon as he stopped watching it, i started.
You know, i blame Chris Carter for ALL of my current problems.
 
Oh yeah. Mothman - scary. Jeff the talking mongoose (or whatever the hell it was) - scary. Grey aliens - somehow not scary, well not scary to me. Maybe it's because they're so damn skinny.

Cujo
 
When I was a nipper I remember being absolutely terrified the first time I saw the Cottingley Goblin photo. Not now though. I can look at that picture no problem....I'm tough I am.

As for mothman, no worries.......big bug zapper. That'll stop his shenanigans.

:(
 
Cujo said:
Grey aliens - somehow not scary
Click to expand...

I know exactly what you mean... I think it may be because they're on telly so much you kinda presume that they're ficticious now... we've seen so many crap animatronic puppet Greys on cheapo sci fi shows!

It's also hard to be scared of anything they sell inflatable versions of in "everything for a pound" shops.
 
The grays have been a major popular icon of the '90s, there've been soft toy versions! Perhaps it's part of their conspiracy to infiltrate our society.

I'll be interested to see what this movie is going to do for the mothman's public profile.

-Justin.
 
Evilsprout said:
Now I would buy an inflatable Mothman!
Click to expand...

Oooh, me too!

Damn! You've got me yearning for a non existant inflatable Mothman that I probably couldn't afford even if it existed. Curse you, Evilsprout. Curse you and your vile commercialism. :p
 
I find the thought of any more Richard Gere movies absolutely terrifying. Must . . . change . . . pants . . .now! Let's see how Hollywood can distort and ruin a fun legend. Mothman falls in love with Minnie Driver but their love is taboo. Turns out he's just misunderstood.

I always thought Gef the talking mongoose was kind of funny, but just because he was said to have a "salty" vocabulary. As freaky as a talking mongoose might be, the minute he started swearing a blue streak I'd begin giggling uncontrollably.
 
Gef, the talking mongoose of Doalish Cashen, is one of those
things that is thrown at Forteans,
"Sure, you don't believe in that, do you?"

Even people with implicit faith in aliens find Gef a bit much.

Well he's a problem. Every modern retelling tends to stress the
isolation of the farm and the loneliness of the girl Voirrey Irving.
The common sense view is to suppose at best she was having a
laugh or at worst she was some kind of multiple personality.

It could be that the whole family was what we would call
dysfunctional but all three claimed to have seen the creature,
described as yellow with a long bushy tail and a hedgehog face.
Voirrey also took some photographs of him which I have not seen.
They are said to lack clarity. :(

The fact that the creature was said to have a voice somewhat like
a young girl and never spoke except when Voirrey was in the room
would seem the clincher.

What boggles my mind is that Gef was around for four years, from
1931 to 1935. He therefore does last through Voirrey's adolescence.
But the joke would surely have worn thin before even four days were
up. Oh well, they used to make their own amusements in those days.
:rolleyes:
 
Yeah it'd be interesting to see if the Irvings bought a telly just before he shut up!
 
I draw no conclusions from this, but don't a large number of polt cases start with small animal noises and glimpses of rat like creatures?

OK, OK, I just read that back and I too thought 'um, that would be rats then, Dan'. But you know what I mean; obviously non-physical things. The Bell Witch started like this, if you believe everything you read, which (of course) I do, every time. :)
 
In response to a few different topics in this thread:

1. Gef freaked me out when I was a little kid, too. But now, I think the story's kind of funny, in that it's so completely impossible and non-sensical (where did a mongoose learn to talk? Why didn't it speak to anyone but the daughter? How did it get in their attic?, etc).

2. The movie based on The Mothman Prophecies is going to be crap. The director thinks the UFO sightings and whatnot are too science fiction, so he's trying to minimalize those - never mind that they were a major part of the story. :rolleyes:

3. As far as anything still going on in Point Pleasant, I'm fairly certain there hasn't been any activity there since the bridge collapsed. At least, nothing major.

4. No inflatable or plush Mothman yet, but Mezco toys is releasing an action figure line based on cryptozoology - of which Mothman is a part. Unfortunately, they don't seem to have done any research whatsoever into the topic. Their Mothman action figure looks like a bug, while all the reports said it looked like a bird. And it doesn't even look like a moth - it looks like a praying mantis with fly wings! And it's accessory is a half-eaten dog. While I'll admit there was a story involving a dog in the legend, Mothman didn't eat it, he broke its neck (at least, that's what I assumed; the dog was found in one piece, at least, and I never read anything about it having been bleeding).

And, hey...why hasn't anyone in this thead mentioned one of the most interesting parts of John Keel's Point Pleasant experience - Indrid Cold?
 
Just a quickie, but in Indian legend the mongoose is believed to be capable of learning to speak. I assume that covers profanities.
 
Voirrey's immediate source for Gef is likely to have been
Kipling who was much read at the time. Probably his best-known
mongoose was called Rikitikitavi (Sp?).

The case produced a full length study at the time, The Haunting
of Cashen's Gap, 1936 by Harry Price and R. S. Lambert.

Price, usually referred to as a Magician and Psychic Researcher,
was also a newspaperman who knew how to play a case to
the max. It certainly worked with Borley Rectory - the name he
gave it The Most Haunted House in England has stuck and is
now all over the Web. :rolleyes:
 
I am a massive fan of Moth Man and Owl Man, I'm not sure why,
probably the reason is due to the enduring images seen as a child.

I remember going to my local bookshop in Torquay (which now has no bookshops at all, a telling sign in the demise of a town) and getting a few books on the unexplained. I think they were wittily titled 'The Unexplained' and 'Strange Mysteries'.
These books fascinated and scared me in equal measure. The kind of things you read in the day but hide in the night. (something I still do to this day, I'm only 30).

In these books I discovered Mothman and Owlman with wonderful
eyewitness sketches.

I also read about strange twins, these guys gave me the fear big time, Poto and Cabenga, the twins who invented their own language (and, obviously, their own names) and those other, older, mad looking ones whos names I forget. I didn't like these two 'cos they looked, at the time. like they would hurt children.

I was really unnerved by the Cottingley Faeries, I don't like the idea of little people very much.

But the one thing that really frightened me was the Vampire of Croglin Hall, I recently read the story again on the 'net and it was rubbish but I remember being very frightened at the time.

My friend had a book that told of an eyewitness to an alien craft landing and seeing dozens of these aliens running 'round in the woods. The eyewitness drawing of these creatures really shocked me, to the point that I am getting goosebumps just writing this.
I really think that it's these images that stick in your mind as a child and carry through into your adult life.

So, in summing up I reckon that's the reason for all these fascinations. I think part of me still looks for that strange exhilleration I got as a child, reading forteana and being spooked.


If anyone is interested, I am currently mounting an expedition to catch the Mothman.

I've bought a net and a gigantic bulb!
 
What phenomena gives you the Creeps? Which story makes it difficult to go to sleep? And please, do give us the whole story and why it freaks you out.
(And if this thread belongs somewhere else or duplicates another, please move it or merge it as needed. )
 
What timing.

I just got done reading a thread on cattle/human mutilations and that has scared me more than any other Fortean phenomena I've ever read about.
 
Next time you're in the mood to get freaked try the IHTM thread about Shadow People, but not when your home alone at night...
 
Without going into detail, I've seen some wierd stuff, heard some spooky bits, read lots of chilling articles but if there's one thing that gets to me its SHC!

Lethal, sudden and unpredictable! Okay, so it's unlikely ... but so is being hit by lightning and people still die of it!

Oh yeah ... and marmalade! Chunky not smooth, seville oranges are behind the whole sick affair! I aint turning my back on the preserves industry again!

What d'you mean "put these cuffs on?" I've got cuffs on my shirt ...
 
I have to say SHC too.

Seeing that famous photo' of the elderly woman's stockinged leg and slipper, totally untouched, whilst the rest of her lay in a pile of greasy ashes :cross eye add that to a child who has a vivid imagination and is scared of practically everything.
 
SHC for me too- I bought the Jennie Randles/Peter Hough book and went round for days after I read it with a feeling I was just about to burn...

Also sleep phenomena can be pretty scarey- mainly cause you wake up alone and in the dark, not the best place to be scared:D
 
The black eyed kids scared the sugar out of me ...

SHC is pretty nerve wracking I saw a horrible, HORRIBLE, photo of what was left of a man who'd died that way, his skull was near a wooden beam and he'd aparently bitten the beam in the throes of the flames - so hard they had to prise his skull off the beam with a crowbar :cross eye which suggests SHC isn't sudden or painless (unless he was set on fire byother means)
 
Anything to do with technology. Faces and hands appearing on TV screens when they're switched off, computers spewing out strange languages, strange phone calls (those letters in FT where kids would call a number and get the message 'Come quick Susies dying' or whatever really unnerve me).

I don't like normality when it suddenly becomes strange, ghosts, monsters, SHC etc. don't bother me at all.
 
I get spooked/startled very easily, although I'm probably sceptical about most things - begging to be convinced really! Walking alone at night in the dark doesn't bother me for supernatural reasons: it's the guy with the bevvie in him looking for a laugh. Which isn't to say that I don't sleep with the light on after reading Poe! There's something about the mother/daughter thing in Morella that gets me going /every time/.

I find the thing that actually has me waking up in cold sweats and having to go and make a cup of hot choccie (while clutching the cat over one shoulder so she can keep a look out for things creeping up from behind) is the human element in it all...

that guy who walked out on someone having been sitting at his computer self harming "to show committment" to Akasha. Akasha???? oh puleeeze.....

It's the way my species (me included) seem to fall for the most obvious fakes.... to the great harm of themselves and others.

Probably not putting this very well :-(

Kath
 
I'll have to think about it more, but off the top of my head I'd say polts. Because they *really* exist and there's the idea that a human is causing it without being responsible for it. See the Bell Witch of Tennessee for an extreme exapmle.

Course the real answer is a tie between Vampire Leopards and Beckjord marrying into my immediate family. :eek!!!!: :eek!!!!: :eek!!!!:
 
Next time you're in the mood to get freaked try the IHTM thread about Shadow People, but not when your home alone at night...
Click to expand...

Never one to follow good advice, I just read the thread, alone. :eek!!!!: That "lolloping" shadow story...I'd never heard of this phenomenon before, now I'm scared!

Any kind of "demonic entity" freaks me out, black eyed kids, dog headed men - it's the way that people seem to see them while they are going about their normal business, I wonder just how many of these things are around.
 
Zombies. Real life 'zombies' seem a bit sad but their relentlessness and flesh consuming can get scary (DotD, NotLD) but as an added bonus they can also be hilarious ;)

[edit Sleep paralysis/night terrors was pretty nasty and I'd rather not experience that again]

I'm not scared of giant squid because then They'd have won :monster:

Emps
 
molga parrot said:
Any kind of "demonic entity" freaks me out, black eyed kids, dog headed men - it's the way that people seem to see them while they are going about their normal business, I wonder just how many of these things are around.
Click to expand...
Things like that don't scare me. Actually, I get kind of a kick out of those stories. Not necessarily because I don't believe them, but its just that the "demons" never actually harm anybody. They just seem to enjoy scaring them. I can relate to that - I share their mischievous sense of fun.:madeyes:
 
I must say it's shc for me too... the thought that presumably you couldn't put yourself out even by jumping in a lake is so......it seems to me we have so much energy in our bodies that could all be released, but then no-one has spontaneously exploded as far as I know.. at least that would be quick!!
Ghosts? no probs!
 
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