Vaguely creepy, but not quite horrifying things (aka help me)

The belltower at the church chimes 13.

The TV just won't turn off, even if it's unplugged.

The radio always plays the same song, no matter what station it's tuned to or what time it is, and it's only one or two lines of that song.

The same car passes him three times in the space of fifteen minutes, going the same direction each time.

His image in the mirror seems somewhat "delayed"; or it does things slightly earlier than he does them.

Doppelgangers are always creepy.

There's a crow that follows him all over town one day.

He gets onto an escalator on Floor Five, and ends up on... Floor Five.

Just some ideas off the top of my head.

I like Pope's ideas.
And....

Weird and somewhat creepy images that keep appearing in different places.

People disappearing when you look away

Shadows in the night

People in your room at night. (Making more scary than you want)

Birds saying things

No reflection in the mirror

Birds dying in the air and landing at your feet as you walk down the street.

Nonsense nightmares

Ravens
Those are the first things that came to mind.

If you want to start with things that are really low-key, not supernatural at all....

1. He'd fallen asleep while writing in his diary. Upon waking up and reading it, he finds that he'd written some strange and disturbing things. (But he shrugs and assumes it was because he was half asleep.)
2. There's interference on his radio. It sounds a little like someone crying. (But surely it must just be static.)
3. His cat has left a dead mouse outside his bedroom door as a little gift.
4. He runs his fingers through his hair, and dislodges a centipede.
5. He opens a packet of Corn Flakes™ and finds Frosties™ inside!

OK, one of those was not entirely a serious suggestion.

- The pupils of pictures/paintings following the character around more than usual.
- Statues, cuddly toys etc swivelling to face them when they're not looking
- When casually reading a book, he reads a rather creepy passage without warning. He re-reads it and the passage isn't there.
- The phone rings, then stops ringing as soon as he touches it, before he can answer. Whenever he moves away, it begins ringing again.
- He puts his hand on a doorknob (or something significant) and it feels like it's red hot, but after he drops it there's no burn.
- Everything he drinks tastes like blood

Just a few more ideas

-I can't remember the specific name of it, but things laying around as if people were there using them moments before and the place is empty (i.e. TV turned on with a buttmark in a chair with the chair still warm, shower turned on and clothes set out, ect.)
-shadows in the reflection of mirrors and behind shower curtains but nothing is there
-Being somewhere, knowing exactly whats going on and then suddenly a day or two later with no idea how you got where you are and what happened
-People with red eyes, wither momentarily or it stays that way with nobody besides you able to see it.
-A statue that whenever you turn away from it gets closer to you and more disfigured. (i.e. An angel with a cherubic face becomes when you turn around to an angel with a look of disgust on its face becomes when you turn around becomes an unearthly creature with a forked tounge and ect.)

Yes I stole the last one from John Bellairs

Okay, just reading these suggestions have given me the creeps.

I hope no one minds if I borrow a few as springboards in my novel. I also needed some subtle scary things. ^^;

But to be fair, I'll also leave some suggestions.

- A cat yowling (one of the most hair-raising sounds I've ever heard.)
- A computer/TV screen that has a flicker of a ghostly face whenever turned on
- Lights flickering
- Make the sky oddly unnatural. This morning, the clouds were grey-lilac and the sun's rays gave everything a hazy glow. It was a very surreal bus ride to school.
- Creaky stairs (much better when he's the only one in the room/building.)
- Noticing that the streets are all completely empty
- Sleep paralysis/nightmares/numb limbs
- All the clocks have the same time...and it never changes
- His friends keep 'remembering' strange things
- Only he can hear the horror movie-esque music

Sometimes it helps if you know what kind of horror your going to be putting in the novel, then working out what kind of creepy effect this would cause. Like I am haunted by bill colectors, and they work by phone.

I actually had a bird drop dead out of a tree just as I walked past, and I can tell you, it freaked me out. I was jittery for the rest of the day.

Maybe you could have the protagonist do something over and over again, to no avail. Something like putting a coaster under his cup of coffee, only to find that it's gone when he looks at it again.

Or he tries to tell the people around him something, but they seem not to hear him. They hear everything else he says, but not that one thing.

Wow, you guys, these are incredible suggestions. Thanks so much! I, too, am getting creeped out just reading them. I could always use more, but thank you.

That's me suitably creeped out as well after reading some of these suggestions. But a few of my own off the top of my head if you're still after some suggestions.

-Toys suddenly making a noise either with the battery out of them or no one anywhere near them to trigger them off (like press a certain part of it and it makes a noise type stuffed toys, teddies for example or toys that are triggered when someone walks past)
-Something suddenly touching your shoulder or brushing past and there's nothing there (in the dark it's worse)
-Thinking there's something in the room with you when there's no one else there (which is extremely creepy when you're convinced you can hear them there)
-Things moving from one place to another or disappearing and turning up in odd places
-Things falling from shelves that have no reason or way to fall
-Images in mirrors or reflections that aren't there
-Objects looking different in the dark eg. in my case there used to be a pile of books on a couple of shelves in my parents' bedroom that looked like a really creepy doll when the lights were turned out.
-Silence and when I say that, I mean dead silence that you just suddenly notice, kind of goes along with the suggestion about the streets being empty all of a sudden.

And that's all I can think of off-hand. Plus it's late for me so my brain's not quite working as it should :p.

I, for reasons I have since forgotten, once came up with a bunch of these kinds of things, so here are a few of varying degrees of creepiness.

~Trying to print a document, but when the page comes out of the printer what's written on it is not what was written on the computer.
~An unscheduled solar eclipse.
~Clouds that have strange, unsettling shapes.
~Writing with a pen that should have blue or black ink, but suddenly starts writing in red that looks suspiciously like blood.
~A moon that waxes full and then stays that way night after night.
~Combing your hair and seeing hairs in your brush that are not your hair color, as if they came from someone else.
~An alarm clock that wakes you up every morning at the same time, but not the time you set it for.
~A digital alarm clock flashing impossible numbers or words that it shouldn't.
~Animals acting strangely or contrary to their nature: a group of dogs sitting in a circle of their own accord; a bunch of mice swarming/attacking a cat; and so on.
~Not leaving any footprints somewhere you should.
~Catching glimpses of places as they would have existed in another time.
~Taking a photograph of something/somewhere/someone and having something else that wasn't actually there show up on the picture.
~Catching snatches of radio programs that haven't been on the air in decades.
~Birds by the hundreds or thousands gathering on rooftops and telephone lines in the same area the main character's at.
~Echoes where there shouldn't be any.
~Plants in the same general area seeming to be in the middle of different seasons (fall, spring, winter, etc.)
~Strange, improbable patterns in spiderwebs.
~Catching people standing stock still and staring up at the sky or down at the ground for no apparent reason.
~Hearing different people humming or whistling the same tune throughout the day.

Hope these are useful to someone!

+ Have little notes spread everywhere in the house reminding your character to do something....notes s/he doesn't remember sticking.
+ Mirrors. Mirrors in all their wonderful forms are potentially terrifying: a room with all the lights on seems dark in the mirror, mirror looks like it's breathing....
+Character gets in bed and it remains cold as if s/he wasn't there to warm it up.
+Sth you throw away keeps appearing on the desk.
+Belltower strikes eleven every half hour, and even though hours and hours pass, it's always eleven o'clock.
+Clocks move backwards.
+Candles refuse to be lit.
+Water in shower looks oddly dense. Like a sort of muddy consistency.
+Character unable to remember their name for a few minutes.
+Waking up alone, in the dark, somewhere in the middle of the room -or, for all you know, you might be in the kitchen or the hall. You can't see anything, you don't know where light switches are, you don't know if you're going to hit a wall if you move.
+Likewise, waking up in the middle of the night, in bed, and turning to where the light switch should be -only to discover that there's a wall on that side, and where there should be the wall you are falling off the bed. Did that actually make sense?
+A coffee shop stays open until early hours, full of silent people staring into space And then, next morning, everyone swears the coffee shop closed at it's usual time, and all those people where at home in bed.
+Lighting in painting changes.
+Someone smiles and character sees his/her teeth are full of blood, and he doesn't know.
+Every room in the place looks as if it's changed direction: if it was north-oriented, now it *looks* south-oriented, etc. Nothing you'd really notice, except that the room looks weird.

Hope it helps.....I'm looking for creepy little ordinary things too, and your suggestions have really helped!

I second the delayed/different reaction in mirrors bit. I think I might steal that one for myself, actually ;)

other things to try:

- a window or a few windows that show different scenes outside whenever he walks by them. Like if there's a window that looks out to a garden, it could randomly show the view of a tree from the second floor, then a desert landscape, etc. Said window(s) can't be opened, even if they could before they went wonky, and if he looks inside the window from the outside he sees different rooms.
-plants that grow/die/mutate at random. Say there's an ivy covered tree he walks past every day. one day it could be engulfing the whole tree, the next day it could be barely growing, and a few hours later it's choking the tree again and has sprouted flowers.
-have him leave a book/pencil/random object in a room. At some point he realizes it's missing and goes back to get it, but when he gets to the room the object is not in the room, but back in his pocket or backpack or whatever. (that one wasn't very clear...oh well)
-rooms that move around. Not big ones like bedrooms or school libraries, but closets that trade places or classrooms that move one door over.

I'm going to get just a little geeky here, so bear with me. *wink*

Some of my favorite horror/thriller scenes I've ever seen were from Bioshock (throwing vegetables at me is now permitted). The best, I think, was when you, the character, were walking down a flooded hallway and see a shadow cast on the wall ahead of you. A man was hunched over an operating table of some sort, and there was a chorus of hellish sounds. Then, once you got close enough, the lights went out. When they came back on, all the shadows were gone. Then you got into the room and saw...

Something. *grin*

Definitely work on things where there's something going on, you can see it, but when you get to where it's happening, even if it only happened a second earlier, the perpetrator is nowhere to be found, just the grisly evidence of his passing.

I hope to work in a similar scene in my novel.

The character hears a loved one say something creepy or sinister, asks them to repeat themselves, then they say something completely mundane like nothing ever happened.

That is an AWESOME suggestion! I SO plan on using it!

Just some ideas off the top of my head.

*Spiders webs that at first glance have occult designs, but at second glance are just the usual patterns
*Echoing voices down a hall when no one is there to make them
*Shadows that shouldn't be there appearing at the corner of his eye, but gone when he focuses on them
*Voices whispering his name just as he's just falling asleep
*TV/Radio that turns itself on/off at random.
*Animals that stare at him as he's going past. Cat's are particularly creepy with this.
*A black cat that seems to follow him around simply to walk across his path

-Have the moon blink. (I've always wanted to use this, but never had an occasion to do so.)

-Early on the story, have the character meet someone of seemingly no consequence and make sure that the character meets him with friends. Later in the story, when that character becomes relevant, the MC is the only person who can remember meeting him.

-Have the character pour himself a glass of fruit punch at a party, but when he tastes it, it tastes remarkably like blood. He is the only person to notice.

-Have a character rent movies through a Blockbuster Online/Netflix kind of company, and have them order something innocuous like, say, The Shawshank Redemption, but when it arrives, the disc is unmarked, and all it shows is a video of a woman tied up in a chair, crying in grainy black and white. It stays like this for a few minutes, until a shadow appears on the floor, and a man steps into the room, suddenly the woman screams and then it cuts out. The DVD will only play once.

-If it's cold, have the character breathe onto a window in an attempt to fog it up to doodle in it for a second, only for the fog to reveal a doodle already, a very intricate one, of a man being ravaged by dogs or hung by the neck. Conversely, it could be a message to the character, something vaguely menacing and incomprehensible at the same time.

Hey, Bioshock is a supremely creepy game, so don't worry about drawing inspiration from it. I, personally, would love to turn my novel's world into an art deco madhouse solely because of that game, but it just won't fit (dammit!). And, not to derail the thread at all, but if you like Bioshock, you should try and find yourself a copy of System Shock 2 for the PC. It came out a number of years ago, by the same team that made Bioshock (back when they worked for a different company), and as much as I love Bioshock, System Shock 2 is still, without a doubt, the scariest game I have ever played.

Wow, the suggestions on here are amazing so far. I definitely want to use some of them someday.

My (meager) contributions:

- Little children singing nursery rhymes, especially when the words are changed slightly so they become vaguely menacing or hold some hidden meaning for the main character.

- Every single book he pulls off the shelf contains nothing but his name, over and over.

- Hundreds of starlings lining the rooftops and power lines, all of them quiet, all of them watching him.

- For no particular reason, every writing implement he tries to use fails to work -- pens, pencils, markers, crayons, keyboards, etc. They work for everyone else.

- The edges of things look off-kilter. Pictures hung on the wall look crooked, door frames don't appear to be set right, floors seem to slope in strange ways. If he tries to adjust them, they all still look wrong, and no one else seems to notice.

OK, one of those was not entirely a serious suggestion.

Yeah, it was pretty obvious you were joking about the centipede. I mean, c'mon.

Sugar coated cereals are ALWAYS scary!

And what about a special `toy' in the box? Heh heh . . . .

I absolutely love the idea about children's nursery rhymes. They can be so inherently creepy anyway as several are in minor keys, making them seem a little...off already. But very faint, breathy singing? CHILLS!

You might want to work through this expansive thread:

http://forums.penny-arcade.com/showthread.php?t=10124&highlight=creepies...

- The phone rings, and when you pick it up, the line is dead (not just they hung up, but completely dead)

- TV or computer turns itself off randomly, and won't turn back on. Might be written off as a technical glitch at first, but still...that creepy image/face that the monitor's static seemed to form momentarily as it went out didn't seem like a glitch to me...

- Open a CD case or movie box, and the CD/DVD/VHS is missing, and you know for a fact that you put it back last time you used it.

- Open a door, and try to close it behind you, but it won't budge from the open position

- Your foot suddenly hurts, like you stepped on something, but the floor is totally clean

- An alarm goes off elsewhere, but no matter where you go, the noise doesn't get any louder or quieter, and you can't find the source at all

Wow. I read number 1 and was a little creeped out. But, then I read number 2 and really got chills when I thought about it a little more...
If you want to freak ME out put those two things in there!
Number 2 reminds me of that movie PULSE.

A kid is sitting doing his homework at the end of a table facing out a back window. He looks up and just for a second sees a hand knock on the edge of the window and then dissapear. He goes to see if anyone is there and (of course) he can see no one.
This happens to him more than once and in different houses.

Yep this one actually happened to me. It was really creepy but i'm not sure how well it would do in a book.

I have a few. Although they're most likely overused in movies, books, etc., I still find them disturbing.

- Your main character finds long tangled hair in shower drains around the house (or actually, in every drain if that's even creepier) Your MC has short hair and the only person the MC knew who had long hair is a recently deceased loved one. (For some reason, long hair just freaks me out. Like the Grudge. or the Ring.)

- The main character reaches their hand in a bag to grab some chips/snack/food but instead found bloody fingers.

- MC taking a shower and squeezes the shampoo bottle. Nothing comes out. MC twists the top open and cockroaches and other creepy crawlies fall out.

Hope those provided some amusement.

Man, I love some of the ideas here. Makes me wish I were doing horror again this year, instead of Lit Fic.

A few contributions:

-- An unidentified sound that wakes a character up at around the same time each night, one that comes from outside his house or apartment. The sound lasts for a few minutes, then stops. This goes on for days, and leaves the character staring up at their ceiling in the dark for sometime after.

-- A character has a conversation over the phone with someone they know, but later, the other person swears it never happened. Phone calls in general are kind of creepy, in my opinion-- I mean, who knows what you're going to hear when you pick up the phone?

-- Dark water spots on ceiling tiles that grow and change shape by the day, even on days when it hasn't rained.

-- Doors that won't open when you turn the knob, or doors that are found open when they've been left shut. Kind of classic horror movie fare, but always unsettling.

-- This one may just be me, but certain smells are scary as hell, especially in places that you don't expect them. If you're sitting at home watching TV and suddenly catch a whiff of rotting meat, it's going to weird you out, especially if the smell appears and disappears over a series of days. Doesn't have to be an unpleasant smell, either-- the smell of cookies baking can be creepy if there's no explanation for it.