I Know What Scares You

by Brian Dunning
October 29, 2024

Today we've got seven scary Halloween tales for you — and also from you, as all of these were sent in by listeners. I asked you to send your creepiest personal experiences, and I'm going to give my thoughts on each of them. Will I be able to solve them? Maybe, probably not; but more importantly, can any of them even be solved? Or must it be that some of these can only be explained as genuine examples of the supernatural? Let's find out if I know what scares you.

First we're going to hear a creepy campfire tale — literally — from James:

It was dusk when we found a shabby campsite and we rapidly set up. Too tired to eat supper, we turned in. Weirdly, we didn't talk, and there was only silence. No moon, no breeze in the trees, and someone was watching. We got up early. I asked my partner if he wanted to have breakfast. He only said "I want to get out of here." This apparently happens on Fishdance Lake, Boundary Waters canoe area.

That's in Minnesota. Anyway the sensation of being watched is an evolved trait that we all have to some degree, this extreme vigilance, and it's enhanced during the acute stress response, aka fight or flight. Is there something about that particular place that provokes anxiety? A suspiciously still evening could do that. Weird clouds, weird rustling noises, literally anything that's unusual, even if it's just unusually still, could provoke anxiety and put us into a state of hypervigilance. Even your buddy being anxious could trigger it in you, so it's not unexpected for every member of a party to experience the same feeling. This sensation has been called scopaesthesia, the feeling of being watched.

Hi, Brian, this is Brandon from Houston, Texas. One year during graduate school, my best friend and I decided that we wanted to use a Ouija board for Halloween. For extra creepy factor, I decided to purchase a handmade one from Etsy. Blessed by a "real witch". Despite being packaged incredibly professionally, it arrived cracked down the middle. I took photos and sent them to the seller to ask for a replacement, but she refused, telling me that this was a terrible omen and advising me to never use a Ouija board in my life.

Well, I'm going to cast an evil spell on you if you don't donate immediately to Skeptoid Media (which you can do right now at skeptoid.com/gopremium 😉).

The interesting thing to me is whether we'd find that she said the same thing to everyone with a return. Returns are a hassle to deal with for a small seller. It could also be that she was out of stock and it was easier to just give you your money back. Or it could be that she has a delusional disorder or is schizophrenic and believes that she somehow gets witchy messages from beyond. Or, since it was so well made, she could just have a really protective attitude toward her work, fears you might be careless, and doesn't want another one of her babies to get broken.

Also, now I want an ornate handmade Ouija board.

Hi, Brian. Jeremy from Rochester, New York. Probably 10 to 15 years ago in August, I was out watching the Perseid meteor shower, and there was an orange light that flew overhead, completely silent. It got to a certain point into the sky and split into two. The one on the left hand side or the northern side made an arc and flew north. The one on the right hand side made a 90 degree angle and flew north, and looked like it was chasing after it. I have a degree in physics. I have a minor in math. I know how things move and the properties of inertia. And that one really stumped me.

So, respectfully, I've got to start with "10 to 15 years ago." We have an enormous body of research that tells us the story you remember now bears very little resemblance to what you would have said the day after it happened. And degrees in math or physics or anything else don't have any impact on that. So really all we have here is an anecdote with very low reliability.

The second thing I look at is that your story is about weird lights in the sky on a Perseid meteor shower night. Well, yeah. Meteors break up and do crazy things. They explode and go off in directions. Sometimes one goes behind a cloud and disappears just as another comes out from behind the same cloud going in a different direction.

Finally, Skeptoid #576 was all about exactly this type of story, called "Lights in the Sky." It's the most common of all UFO report types. That entire episode was all about the pitfalls and errors in perception for this exact type of report. Check it out if you want the full deep dive.

I'm sorry if this sounds harsh or dismissive, but we need to have a standard for evidence. Respectfully, right now I have no reason to believe anything unusual happened in the sky that night. I've heard descriptions like this of videos that turned out to be of owls. I'm not saying yours was an owl, I'm just illustrating that we don't have enough information to eliminate anything.

Here's one from listener Jana:

When I was four years old, I woke up one Saturday morning facing the wall of my bedroom. And there, between the bed and the wall, there was a claw sticking up from behind the bed, and it was a hand curled into a claw shape. I jumped off the bed and ran in the next room, told my brothers who were watching cartoons to go look. They went. They saw nothing. 60 years later, I realized that was my dad.

Well if you hadn't spoiled the story, I would have said "It was probably your dad pranking you." And I did email back to clarify, and that was indeed just Dad being a goof — as is every dad's sworn duty. I know; I had to take the oath myself.

Now, if you hadn't said that you later realized it was your dad, I'd probably start with the same thing I told Jeremy about his lights in the sky: you're remembering something from 60 years ago, which means the memory has likely become unrecognizable. It could have been a different person, or a claw-shaped toy sitting there. Or, of course, a monster who had nothing better to do than lie behind your bed with his hand up in the air for as long as it took you to finally wake up.

Here's a shocking experience from listener Michael:

Nine years old. I was in Atlanta for a wedding. I had to get up and go to the bathroom. On the way back, I looked into another room and another face looked back at me. It was my own face and I didn't recognize it. Scared the hell out of me.

Don't worry, Michael, mirrors won't hurt you — although they do, apparently, know what scares you.

Hi Brian, this is Alison. My roommate was very into the paranormal, and one night she had some friends who did ghost investigations come to our apartment to look at what she told them was a cold spot. With the lights turned off, they brought out a strange looking camera with a big screen and looked around the room with it. When they looked at the cold spot, it clearly showed a computer-generated stick figure hunched over and wavering. They tried talking to it but nothing happened. Do you know what was going on?

It just so happens that I can tell you exactly what was going on. For a while, these devices were sold by makers of ghost hunting equipment for exorbitant prices — illegally, since they were repackaged Microsoft Kinect video game controllers running copyrighted Microsoft software. The Kinect was a game controller that was just a camera near your TV which would detect your body movements and let you play full body movement games like dancing or sports. It incorporated a structured light scanner, the same as your iPhone uses to recognize your face.

These things have one job: To find a person in the room and match a virtual stick figure to whatever they're doing. Microsoft engineers knew that people might be standing behind a couch sometimes, or be wearing something big and loose that obscures their arms, or any number of random things. So the software has to interpolate and estimate. It imposes its virtual stick figure on whatever in the room most closely approximates a human being. I don't know what was in the room where the cold spot was — a chair, a potted plant, a closet door, or nothing at all — but whatever it was, it was the closest thing to a human shape in the camera's field of view, and so that's where it drew its stick figure. What you saw on the screen was the Kinect's best interpretation of where a person was in the room, given inadequate data; not a ghost.

Now let's find out what terrifying thing happened to Michael (a different Michael):

One day when I finished work, I was walking towards the train. There was a man standing next to a black SUV. He had a bottle of energy drink. He was offering it to me because he said it was a sample. He asked me to drink it and I didn't drink. I pretended to drink it and I walked towards the train. I kept pretending to drink it because he was very insistent. When I got off the train several kilometers later, there was another man standing next to a black SUV. He said he desperately needed a bottle of energy drink to give to his son, who was at Sports Day. I gave him my bottle, a full bottle of energy drink and he wondered why I hadn't drunk it. He insisted that I drink it, but I said no and just gave it to him.

So this one is, to me, the scariest Halloween story of all. I was with someone once who we believe had been given a roofie or some other date rape drug. Luckily we were with her so nothing happened to her, and we got her home safely, and alerted her family. I don't know, but the story you describe may have been some attempt to rob you or kidnap you, or maybe worse. The plan may have been to give you the drug, and the guy at the next stop would have helped you over into his SUV and robbed you or whatever, and they easily would have gotten away with it. When you didn't drink it, the partner at the next stop got the sports drink back from you so they could try again on some other promising-looking mark. That's just a speculation, but stuff like that does happen, probably more often than guys going around begging passersby for their sports drinks for his son's Sports Day.

So, to all of you who are suspecting that the title of this episode was deceptive, yes you are correct. I have no idea what scares any of you. I might have some reasonable guesses in many cases, but probably all my guesses are wrong; and the main reason is that we just don't have enough information. It wasn't reliably recorded at the time. But making reasonable guesses, even when they're wrong, still has value: it reminds us that there are reasonable explanations for creepy events that don't seem to have them. Of course, this doesn't mean those events aren't still scary. If they weren't, we wouldn't have this episode. And we probably wouldn't have Halloween at all.

By Brian Dunning
Follow @BrianDunning