So my fear of horses started with the Jersey Devil...
Being outside at night is kind of a strange thing. It's always a little scary, with few exceptions; walking the VT campus with my friends beside me would be one example, but any well-lit area with a comfortable social atmosphere would do the trick, I think. It may seem like a strange topic to dwell on, but it's long been my job to take out the garbage in my house, and six years of doing so between midnight and 4 am has made me a bit of a connoisseur of brief late-night excursions.
I'm speaking more of feelings and sensations, not legitimate worries or potential threats. Perhaps this is something specific to myself; if told so I wouldn't disagree, given my apparently terminal paranoia and, at times, annoyingly overactive imagination. My home in Virginia, for instance, combined the mystic qualities of an admittedly sparse wooded area with the unfortunate suburban realities of thugs and hoodlums. In my defense there was a large park
nearby, a cemetery in the neighborhood, and the development was directly off the main road, but whether these were concious factors or not I couldn't say. They were also fairly negligible, as it was a pretty good neighborhood if I do say so myself, and it was well lit and certainly felt safe enough. I'd say my imaginings served just one purpose: scaring the shit out of me for absolutely no reason. Another piece in a long string of evidence which reveals that I do, indeed, hate myself.
Then there was Florida, where I resided for two years at two different locations (both in the same neighborhood, strangely enough). Let me state right now that I far prefer the terrifying yet unlikely prospect of being devoured by supernatural animals in place of the all too realistic threat of being mugged. Of course, the latter happening directly outside of my house was a long shot by anyone's reckoning, but as I've said, my paranoia needs only the basest of elements to conjure surprisingly visceral horrors. This still wasn't too bad, and you should realize that the area was far from a slum or trailer park, considering it was brand new (each house had been sitting for about two months if I recall correctly) and it housed all of us in seperate bedrooms.
Texas was nothing to speak about really; it was an apartment complex, which I always felt a little dodgy about, but I often saw women and elderly walking alone at night. I concluded that they were either confident enough about the area's safety, or in a very unorthodox gang; either way I wrote off the area as fairly secure, although that niggling bit of doubt still arose whenever I went out (it always does).
Now I am back in New York, for those of you whom I don't feel are relevant enough to keep abreast of my movements, and the area I live in is something quite different from where I have been before. It's about a mile into the neighborhood, I guess, but the area is so old that "neighborhood" probably isn't the right word to describe it. Or perhaps it is, and the meaning has been corrupted by modern usage to imply something slightly different. This is not a planned community, nor even a loose collection of houses connected by a straight street. About a mile from the main road, the businesses stop all at once and the road begins to twist, up and over and downwards and on and on, avoiding anything resembling a straight line. Sharp turns to steep descents are in abundance and in general the entire area is quite chaotic. The property sizes and houses contained within them are random; some are absolutely huge pieces of land taken up by four story behemoths, and others (like this) are half-acre specks with a ramshackle pile of boards thrown on top of them. Of course, given the age of the average home here, even the initially small houses have been added onto several times, giving them a patchwork, Frankenstein appearance. About a mile (perhaps more, perhaps less; it's very difficult to gauge distance in the area) into this suburban MADNESS is my home, at least for the time being, and to be honest I've never quite encountered an experience the likes of going outside here late at night. It's entirely creepy, but in a very satisfying way that I, as a horror fan, am very much appreciative of.
There's little to no sense of real danger, at least not from other people. The neighbors are quiet and keep to themselves, even the more "urban" among them (although when they drive their beaten up cars the rap music can get quite loud). During the summer I would routinely see groups of children, I'd say from 8-12 years old, walking along the streets late at night alone. Usually they'd have towels and other swimming paraphernalia, along with ice cream or what have you, and it was actually a very strong reminder of my own childhood and how things have fallen into the shitter pretty much everywhere since then. It was nice to see, and lent the area a kind of charming "stuck in time" feel.
No, the creepiness this place exudes is shrouded completely in the fear of the unknown, and the feeling of isolation. Take someone who's lived in the suburbs their entire life and put them down out here and I'd almost be forgiving if they thought some backwater hillbillies had created a society in the middle of the woods; the canopy stretches far, sometimes unbroken for several hundred feet in any direction. The location of my house at the bottom between two steep hills helps, and lends every sound a ghost of an echo, which can be very spooky and also awesome. The street lamps are few and far between, and many are either dead or dying, or shrouded in trees. If I had to point out one particular aspect of the place, though, it would be the silence. Past 8 or 9 PM, the entire area is absolutely dead silent. It's so far off the main road that cars rarely go by, and too far from any other roads for their sounds or lights to penetrate. The sloped edges of the properties on each side of the road (the road being approximately the lowest point in the area) means that the smallest sound, from closing a door to talking with a friend, can be heard for hundreds of feet in both directions. As such, you'd think that there would be nonstop noise, but it's the opposite: there's no noise at all. During the day, sure, there are the regular sounds of people coming and going, cars driving by, yard work being done, but once the sun goes down and the temperature gets low (hovering at 35 degrees right now, in fact), there is absolutely no hint of anything alive. It's like a sound void, the slightest action creating a seemingly inordinate amount of sound before it's sucked into the middle of the street and extinguished. Dragging the garbage cans out to the curb (over our gravel driveway) practically qualifies as terrifying in itself. Aside from worrying about disturbing sleeping neighbors (if that is possible, and from the noise I hear myself making, it might be), it seems almost ... I'm going to say sacrilegious to break the silence, and if that seems extreme and hyperbolic of me, it probably is. But the illusion of total solitude, complete darkness, and absolute silence that lays over the place is very powerful, and projects a very strange atmosphere. Something I haven't encountered anywhere else before, something which is kind of dangerously exciting in a way much like a good horror movie or book, providing fantasy scares.
Obviously there's no such thing as forest spirits, or werewolves, or undead bears, or monstrous carnivorous birds, or sentient, malicious darkness, or any of the other myriad of horrors your imagination may come up with when you're alone by yourself in the middle of the woods at night, but that's what makes it fun. And it's very much what makes this whole area kind of fun. If I was in a house five miles away from the neighbors on the edge of some pine barrens it would be completely different and I really would sleep with a gun under my pillow and go outside with floodlights and hounds, but this gives the illusion of terrifying solitude without the actuality. And that's kind of cool.
I'm speaking more of feelings and sensations, not legitimate worries or potential threats. Perhaps this is something specific to myself; if told so I wouldn't disagree, given my apparently terminal paranoia and, at times, annoyingly overactive imagination. My home in Virginia, for instance, combined the mystic qualities of an admittedly sparse wooded area with the unfortunate suburban realities of thugs and hoodlums. In my defense there was a large park
nearby, a cemetery in the neighborhood, and the development was directly off the main road, but whether these were concious factors or not I couldn't say. They were also fairly negligible, as it was a pretty good neighborhood if I do say so myself, and it was well lit and certainly felt safe enough. I'd say my imaginings served just one purpose: scaring the shit out of me for absolutely no reason. Another piece in a long string of evidence which reveals that I do, indeed, hate myself.
Then there was Florida, where I resided for two years at two different locations (both in the same neighborhood, strangely enough). Let me state right now that I far prefer the terrifying yet unlikely prospect of being devoured by supernatural animals in place of the all too realistic threat of being mugged. Of course, the latter happening directly outside of my house was a long shot by anyone's reckoning, but as I've said, my paranoia needs only the basest of elements to conjure surprisingly visceral horrors. This still wasn't too bad, and you should realize that the area was far from a slum or trailer park, considering it was brand new (each house had been sitting for about two months if I recall correctly) and it housed all of us in seperate bedrooms.
Texas was nothing to speak about really; it was an apartment complex, which I always felt a little dodgy about, but I often saw women and elderly walking alone at night. I concluded that they were either confident enough about the area's safety, or in a very unorthodox gang; either way I wrote off the area as fairly secure, although that niggling bit of doubt still arose whenever I went out (it always does).
Now I am back in New York, for those of you whom I don't feel are relevant enough to keep abreast of my movements, and the area I live in is something quite different from where I have been before. It's about a mile into the neighborhood, I guess, but the area is so old that "neighborhood" probably isn't the right word to describe it. Or perhaps it is, and the meaning has been corrupted by modern usage to imply something slightly different. This is not a planned community, nor even a loose collection of houses connected by a straight street. About a mile from the main road, the businesses stop all at once and the road begins to twist, up and over and downwards and on and on, avoiding anything resembling a straight line. Sharp turns to steep descents are in abundance and in general the entire area is quite chaotic. The property sizes and houses contained within them are random; some are absolutely huge pieces of land taken up by four story behemoths, and others (like this) are half-acre specks with a ramshackle pile of boards thrown on top of them. Of course, given the age of the average home here, even the initially small houses have been added onto several times, giving them a patchwork, Frankenstein appearance. About a mile (perhaps more, perhaps less; it's very difficult to gauge distance in the area) into this suburban MADNESS is my home, at least for the time being, and to be honest I've never quite encountered an experience the likes of going outside here late at night. It's entirely creepy, but in a very satisfying way that I, as a horror fan, am very much appreciative of.
There's little to no sense of real danger, at least not from other people. The neighbors are quiet and keep to themselves, even the more "urban" among them (although when they drive their beaten up cars the rap music can get quite loud). During the summer I would routinely see groups of children, I'd say from 8-12 years old, walking along the streets late at night alone. Usually they'd have towels and other swimming paraphernalia, along with ice cream or what have you, and it was actually a very strong reminder of my own childhood and how things have fallen into the shitter pretty much everywhere since then. It was nice to see, and lent the area a kind of charming "stuck in time" feel.
No, the creepiness this place exudes is shrouded completely in the fear of the unknown, and the feeling of isolation. Take someone who's lived in the suburbs their entire life and put them down out here and I'd almost be forgiving if they thought some backwater hillbillies had created a society in the middle of the woods; the canopy stretches far, sometimes unbroken for several hundred feet in any direction. The location of my house at the bottom between two steep hills helps, and lends every sound a ghost of an echo, which can be very spooky and also awesome. The street lamps are few and far between, and many are either dead or dying, or shrouded in trees. If I had to point out one particular aspect of the place, though, it would be the silence. Past 8 or 9 PM, the entire area is absolutely dead silent. It's so far off the main road that cars rarely go by, and too far from any other roads for their sounds or lights to penetrate. The sloped edges of the properties on each side of the road (the road being approximately the lowest point in the area) means that the smallest sound, from closing a door to talking with a friend, can be heard for hundreds of feet in both directions. As such, you'd think that there would be nonstop noise, but it's the opposite: there's no noise at all. During the day, sure, there are the regular sounds of people coming and going, cars driving by, yard work being done, but once the sun goes down and the temperature gets low (hovering at 35 degrees right now, in fact), there is absolutely no hint of anything alive. It's like a sound void, the slightest action creating a seemingly inordinate amount of sound before it's sucked into the middle of the street and extinguished. Dragging the garbage cans out to the curb (over our gravel driveway) practically qualifies as terrifying in itself. Aside from worrying about disturbing sleeping neighbors (if that is possible, and from the noise I hear myself making, it might be), it seems almost ... I'm going to say sacrilegious to break the silence, and if that seems extreme and hyperbolic of me, it probably is. But the illusion of total solitude, complete darkness, and absolute silence that lays over the place is very powerful, and projects a very strange atmosphere. Something I haven't encountered anywhere else before, something which is kind of dangerously exciting in a way much like a good horror movie or book, providing fantasy scares.
Obviously there's no such thing as forest spirits, or werewolves, or undead bears, or monstrous carnivorous birds, or sentient, malicious darkness, or any of the other myriad of horrors your imagination may come up with when you're alone by yourself in the middle of the woods at night, but that's what makes it fun. And it's very much what makes this whole area kind of fun. If I was in a house five miles away from the neighbors on the edge of some pine barrens it would be completely different and I really would sleep with a gun under my pillow and go outside with floodlights and hounds, but this gives the illusion of terrifying solitude without the actuality. And that's kind of cool.