What REALLY freaks you out in/about the dark?

So, lots of people are afraid of the dark. And I know about the psychological theory behind it. And I know it's really scary when you are trying to sleep, you know you're alone at home (not even a pet there), but you... still hear someone breathing... and it's not you.

And strange creaky noises, especially in old (wooden) houses etc.

I'm writing a horror story with shadow-creatures, but I want my humans to freak out even when they're not being attacked. (I know, I know, how kind of me.) Cue strange sounds and their imagination playing with them. Oh, and it takes place in a centuries-old castle.

So, what makes you freak out in the dark? And what do you think you're afraid of when you're in the dark? Anything related to darkness and your imagination playing with you (?) are all welcomed ideas here. Let your imagination run WILD! I already brainstromed some ideas, but I'm not sure if they're... you know, creepy enough. And used up quite a lot of them already. I need to keep up the suspense!
Please help me, this is my first horror story :o

Thank you very much in advance!!! Have a frightening story!

The fact the I watch old The Twilight Zone episodes. I will never think of the dark the same way again after watching the episode The Invaders. If you haven't seen it, you should see it like, right now. Especially if you're writing a horror story. For the next 2 months you will NOT SET FOOT in an attic. (Specifically, an attic in a creepy old house where an old widow lady lives)

I am actually afriad of the dark, at twenty-seven. My hubby is thankfully more amusd by it then annoyed even when I have bouts of turning on every light in hte house and refusing to go to sleep until the sun comes up. I don't know why and I haven't actually researched the psychology behind it, its just always been a part of me. :)

That said, what freaks me out about the dark, even when someone is there with me, is that I am so vulnerable. My weak little human eyes can't see much in our house. When I wake up in the middle of the night and everything is pitch black there's a sudden panic as to why I can't see. I strain, searching all around for a pinpoint of light and once I find it I start imagining things in the darkness around me. The light, from say the power cord on my computer, blinds you to everything else, like staring into a flashlight. It's not a concrete 'monster' for me, but more that I feel like the darkness around me is hungry.

Once I'm coherently awake I start listening for sounds, and the slightest creak in the house makes my adult mind substitute burglar where my child mind used to scream monster. Cue the lights going on all around me. It has to be full lights though I could never have a nightlight. Some author when I was much younger wrote a YA horror novel that had a premise in one of the stories about a boy who was afraid of the dark and got a nightlight only to discover that the monsters he could see with it were far worse then being in the dark and NOT seeing them. It disturbed me.

Shadow creatures are always such fine to write! I hope your story is going well and that any of that helped.

You can milk a lot out of the fear of someone appearing next to your bed at night or watching you while you sleep. It's fun to twist things around to the opposite of what your character is expecting, too. Like if for some reason your character is afraid of a beastie appearing at the foot of their bed, have the beastie appear on the ceiling or floor instead. It's also fun to trump our typical safe places--for example, we all feel a ridiculous security if we pull the covers over our head, but what if the scary monster is actually under the covers with us? Likewise, having scary things happen during the day can be even more disturbing than scary things during the night. I think you could do a lot with just producing random spots of pitch darkness during the day (since you're dealing with shadow creatures). It can be surprisingly scary to just be bopping along in a perfectly sunlit corridor one second then find yourself suddenly blinded by complete blackness after the blink of an eye.

Also, one of the tricks that scares me most in horror stories/films is a character realizing they were being watched after the fact. For example, maybe the character sleeps alone in the dark one night, perfectly content and unafraid, but then they wake up to find that the furniture has been rearranged in their sleep. Someone was in the room with them AND THEY DIDN'T KNOW IT. Sometimes that can be scarier than any direct beastie confrontation.

And mirrors. Bathrooms. Those are always scary in the dark. ALWAYS.

I'm just sort of rambling here listing tropes, but good luck! xD

Darkness fiddles with your sense of space. Have you ever tried closing your eyes and trying to feel your way around a room? When you open your eyes again, everything seems much smaller and neater than you would have expected from your experience while sightless. Taking away sight takes away a lot of what a sighted person knows about the world and replaces it with a gaping, hollow void. (At least in my experience.)

I'm usually okay with darkness, liking especially if I know a place/space well enough to navigate by dark (a little triumph over my nearsightedness?) but sometimes, if I'm in my room with even the light on and watched some creepy or scary film the strip of darkness under the door across the room is suddenly too freaky. Or if you have an animal that ducks down and stares intently at something off in the darkness, therefore confirming the possibility of something *actually* being there and no just your imagination.

What really tends to frighten me the most is the piercing silence that often accompanies the dark! If I hear the house settling or the wind howling outside, that's actually quite comforting to me. But I find that steady uninterrupted stream of eerie silence to be terribly unsettling! It makes me feel isolated from the rest of the world; like time is frozen and I'm the only living thing left on the planet, and I'm responsible for all of it now, you know? Haha, I guess that's pretty weird, but I hope you can do something with it! [:

Something getting closer and closer slowly. Specially if you close your eyes, hoping you are imagining it, and it gets closer every time you open them and/or blink.

There was a scene in the show Supernatural where a girl comes home after a night of partying to find her roommate already asleep. She undresses in the dark and just tosses her clothes in an empty closet, then goes to bed. The next moring she wakes up, her roommate is dead and bloody in the bed one over, and on the wall was written "aren't you glad you didn't turn on the light?"
Just that he was there, right there near her and she couldn't see him... slept there and he was in the room for who knows how long... one of the scariest moments in th show, even though it's scary in retrospect.

The movie Boogeyman also did one thing right with darkness. The monster in that movie could only be in darkness, so the main character kept the lights on all the time. At one point they were in a room with lights and no shadows and everything was white, but in the very corner, somehow, a ceiling tile got moved back just a few inches. Nobody noticed but that main character, and he stared at it, and all the other noises stopped mattering, and it just zoomed in painfully slowly on that sliver of darkness, so you were staring at it for minutes, just waiting for something to movie, because if you could finally see what was in the darkness it wouldn't be so scary. And as I was staring I could see things, something in there movie just a tiny bit, but I don't know if I imagined it. I thought it could be a hand, trying to pull the tile back further, make the dark section bigger, but it was so very pitch black, and then the scene changed.

When I'm in the dark and my imagination kicks in, I start visualizing in my mind creatures and people and who knows what standing in my room. Any shape can be a ghost or a monster or velociraptor, whatever I'm afraid of at the time. Even if it looks perfectly safe, I start picturing it in my head. I can immagine faces on the other side of the window the longer I stare at them, or picture small crawling things in the darkness of the closet. Or catching a glimpse of someone walking outside in the back yard. Since I can't really see what's going on my mind fills in the worst things.

And my cats sometimes, will do that thing where they just look at a random spot with interest, and I don't see anything at all. Is something invisible there? As long as they stay in the room I'm fine, but if they run ff I'll robably leave the room too, just in case.

And it has to be silent. That's the scarriest part. That weird freaky things can go undetected. Like, if I hear voices outside that shouldn't be there, I know it's people and I can usually handle that. But if someone is outside moving completely silent, purposfully sneaking, it might be Michael Myers or a ghost for all I know.

Hope all that rambling helps a little bit, haha.

What really frightens me about the dark is all of the shadows/silhouettes of objects surrounding me.
Now, I have at least 30+ plushies lying around in my bedroom, so this idea might work better if your characters like to hoard.

So, I am an RA in CT and we have been without power for a week. Everyday we have to sweep the building to make sure no one is being stupid and still trying to stay in the building (God only knows why you would want to. it's freezing and the rooms are begining to smell because of the rotten food in fridges. Anyways, I digress). Therefore i've had some fun new experiences in creepy dark hallways that seem to go on forever. That said, one really creepy thing is when you expect the hallway to come to an end but it doesn't. Sometimes you're just a foot away from the door but it still scares the heck out of you. Cue frantic arms seeking solidity.
The other creepy thing is when your flashlight begins to die. You smack it and smack it but it simply flickers out. You stand there going, "What the f*** do I do now?" Lucky for me that's where the cell phone came in to provide some dim, not very helpful light but light none the less. So, perhaps this situation happens to your characters but their cell dies as well. Or even creepier would be that they see the scary monster now because of the cell phone light.
Creepy random noises is another thing. You expect silence, which can be creepy in and of itself, and then you hear a door slam or often for us, the toliet or water running. They may seem harmless but when you're not expecting them they make you fly out of your skin.
Hope this helps!
Jackie

For me, it's always about what might show up. I can get so wound up that for something freaky to happen would actually be a relief; I'd just lay there, staring at the crack by the door where a little bit of light comes in.

I'm apparently not afraid of the dark anymore. I managed to decide last weekend while I was back in the small town where my dad is buried that 3 hours after sundown was a perfectly reasonable time to visit his grave. I was three rows of graves deep into the cemetery poking my way through the almost pitch black towards where I knew he must be, before I realized what an utterly creepy thing I'd just done. By the way, did you know that they make grave ornaments shaped like dim blinking white crosses that either play music or pic up a radio station? There was something like that down the row, and that was pretty creepy at first.

I have pretty decent night vision, so I wasn't really afraid, but I did have a thought that really creeped me out. It was the idea of looking around and seeing nothing, then suddenly looking up and seeing something right beside me. Either an ethereal floating figure or a solid villain, or anything in between. The idea that something would just seem to materialize out of the darkness, in spite of my vigilance.

That and the movie Gremlins. I slept with the light on from age 6 to 16 because of that movie.

What scares me in the dark is not knowing.

The sheer possibility of there being something I couldn't see if it came to me, that's what scares me. The being taken by surprise, the possibility of not fighting back.

Oh, and my cat. The hellish creature is the best at making me jump, passing through my legs in the dark, or jumping OUT OF NOWHERE in my bed, waking me up.

I once threw her off the bed instinctively for that, haha.

A lot of fear is just being keyed up and expecting something to happen. So the humans could freak out just because they're so tightly wound. Passing a mirror in the dark doesn't hurt either. And glowing eyes....like when there's a raccoon outside and you can only see the eyes but not the rest of it.

I think any fear I experience in the dark is tied to my mild case of claustrophobia. Complete darkness has always felt suffocating to me, like a moving entity that's coming at me looking to encase me.

Another thing that bothers me is I would only see a threat in the dark at the last possible second where my actions would affect the outcome of the attack. Case in point, when I lived with some friends they had a lovely back porch that I would occasionally utilize for my nicotine seshes. My boyfriend said very creepily one night that coyotes are out there (it was a fairly rural housing development) and you have to look for the glint of their eyes in the dark with what little light there is. Just picturing that the coyotes would have to be close enough for me to see their eye glint before I'd notice them freaked me right out. That and because my friend is in a wheelchair there's a long ramp that wraps around the house coming from the front and obviously you can't see whatever's coming at you enter the ramp as well. Then you're just stuck in that narrow space with it. Again, a little tinge of claustrophobia, heh.

the thick Black, Nothing,with something, concealment for those who wish to be concealed, Dark and nothing. no not nothing. eyes watching you, staring into you very soul and weakening it, taking you're life into small moments rapidly growing fewer. hands, reaching grabbing you, trying, stealing souls, breaths. The thick Black, Nothing with something.

That is my fav poem about The Dark. It Haunts me occasionally. I...I...I wrote it. Im not afraid of the dark anymore.

you are free to use it if you like but please tell me so if you do.

I don't usually mind the dark at all, but I'm deathly afraid of mirrors in the dark. Even if it's still a little light, I have to keep my eyes closed tight and flip all the light switches before I can look into a room with a mirror or reflective surface....

The thing that scares me when I'm in my bed in a dark room is the idea of things happening with me not knowing of them. And I mean things in my room.

The worst thing I imagine (almost every night) is seeing that little light at the other side of your room (my computer mouse charging up), but then the little light disappears, meaning that there is something between me and the light.
Weird thing that happened last night: it did stop shining! But that was because it was fully charged. :)

wow, i like the story line with the shadow creatures, and eating people. that kinda sounds like an episode of doctor who that i saw..... almost exactly like the episode.... do u watch doctor who?
hum.... things that scare me..... oh! i have trees outside my bedroom window and when the wind blows they hit the glass and sound like someone knocking. the branches also make shadows that look like people sometime.
i also have a tendency to set things at odd angels. so when i turn off the light and try to go to sleep the thing falls and makes a loud sound, my mind always jumps to an assassin coming to kill me. the worst time that happened it sounded like a gunshot. it was kinda funny, i screamed.
i also hate it when one of my parents comes home late. when they come up the stairs they do it slowly as to not wake me up, but i do anyway, and i think its an assassin coming to kill me. :^) hehehe, hope that helps!