LOL wow someone’s upset that not everyone believes that creaky floorboards mean you have an angry ghost.

Ghosts don’t scare me... humans do!

Here’s the problem with that line of thinking.

Argh, great response to a surprisingly hostile post. Good god, what’s wrong with some people??

I hate to be blunt, but you’re just mentally ill.

I too hate to be “that guy”, but I’m disappointed with the encouragement of bullshit stories associating the homeless/ mentally ill with demonic possession.

I read a couple but they didn’t do anything for me. I remember when Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark was big when I was a kid. Those were scary then but now they beyond lame. But you’re right, people like Ted Bundy are who are really scary. But the scariest part is everyone thought Bundy was an upstanding guy.

I think i believe in ghosts even less after reading these. “My entire family is psychic, hawaii is a hotbed of psychic activity. Here’s the ultimate proof: Once, a crazy man on a bus said “oh you can see me”, after i stared at him for 30 minutes. I freaked out, screamed at him and threw up.”

I hate to be “that guy,” but come the fuck on. Let’s be scared of things like Ted Bundy, the Tara Calico story, the German Machuca story, Israel Keyes, that there are Lyle Steviks waiting to happen all around us, etc.

How exactly was it shitty and patronizing?

Sorry, but the only one with aggressive tones here has been you. Halloween ghost stories are meant to be fun distractions, nothing more. At least half of those stories are deliberately exaggerated or completely fabricated for our entertainment, and that’s perfectly OK; no-one in their right mind expects a Halloween…

Her comment didn’t seem patronizing to me. She was stating her opinion. And it DOES have to do with logic: for some people, learning about human anatomy, decomposition of dead bodies etc. kills any fear of things “coming back to life.” This is true for me. I find serial killers terrifying though.

100%.

The obviously bullshit made up stories kind of ruin the better ones. Like the guy with the ghost in his loft in New York. It’s like he just watched a ghost movie and picked his favorite elements. Objects inexplicably and repeatedly moving on their own? Check. “The dog can sense evil” cliche? Check. A face appearing in…

Why be offended by the suggestion that a scary story may have an un-scary explanation? Sleep paralysis is a very real, well researched phenomenon and it has caused all sorts of delusions of ghosts, aliens and demons that have made their victims’ lives hell. Just finding that there is a perfectly rational, natural…

Is it patronizing to say there are no fairies or leprechauns or tooth fairies? I was clear that sleep paralysis is real. Sleepwalking is real. Houses can make strange and unsettling sounds. People experience real things and attribute them to things that are not real.

Hell is other people.

Coming here to say exactly that. I know ghost stories make for fun family lore, and I get that folks experience sleep paralysis or have homes that make strange sounds. It’s probably very fun to make up a story and enter it in this contest. But since we live in a world of logic, there’s nothing actually *frightening*…

I love that this year, a number of the scariest stories centered on non-ghost incidents. The modeling gig... the poisoned uncle... a woman buried alive... a madman in the basement... Sometimes the spookiest stories are the ones about other humans.