Thursday, October 21, 2021

Do you want to hear something REALLY scary?

Last month I bookmarked this tweet by Theo Paijmans (who has an amazeballs book collection he often discusses) because I thought it would be a good Mild Fear 2021 post. It was a simple question. These were some of the responses. (With a trigger warning that some of these are legitimately unexplained and disturbing. I've mostly just provided Wikipedia links for background information. But many of the recordings referred to can be found via online searches. If you intend to track them down and listen, maybe do it during daylight hours.)


My response, meanwhile, went in a much more literal and innocent direction. Reading Theo's question, I though immediately of those vinyl albums we listened to as kids in the 1970s. You know the type...
Those albums were great. Thunderstorms. Doors creaking open. Rattling chains. Glass breaking. Plodding footsteps. Ominous wind. Rats (or something else) scurrying across a floor. A screeching cat. And, of course, creepy laughter. 

Before these record albums existed, these were the kind of sound effects that made old-time radio shows so effective. These recordings play right into the great rule of horror: What you can only hear is so much scarier than what you actually see. The mind imagines terrors far greater than any visual that can be created through special effects or CGI.

Who else remembers listening to these spine-tingling albums as a kid?

1 comment:

  1. I never had these records, but really wanted them, particularly this one that was advertised in the back of comic books: http://www.heyrube.com/images/haunting_1000.jpg.

    The scariest recording I can think of (at least scary to me at the time) was on one of Leonard Nemoy's "In Search of" episodes where a team of ghost hunters made recordings from tombstones in a cemetery. I recall one EVP that said, "I'm scared." The idea of a ghost being scared really bothered me as a kid. Thanks, Leonard.

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