On the Genesis of Terror

Let's talk about terror.

I'm not talking about scary movie terror, or roller coaster terror.  I'm talking about feet on the ground, pants-wetting, abject terror, the kind that comes from seeing something that by all rights you shouldn't be seeing, and especially not where you're seeing it, and all you can do is stand there, paralysed, and there's nothing you can do about it, and you've resigned yourself to meeting your maker (an entity you are having a harder and harder time believing in by this point, for the record).

I went to a Lutheran church in the northern part of my county when I was younger.  It was an OLD church, in that right now its 240 years old, and the existing church building is 145 years old.  That kind of old.  Old enough that it had not 1 but two cemeteries...one on the same side of the road as the church, which we called the 'new' cemetery, and one across the street from the church, which was simply the 'old' cemetery.  The new one was on a hill, and nice and bright, and was where we had our Sunrise Easter services, and all that stuff.

But the old one...

*chills, even now*

I haven't been up there in probably 20 years, so I don't know anymore, but...when I was little, it was for me the most atavistic of cemeteries.  It looked like it was a thousand years old, the headstones were askew and worn down, and in places there was sinkage where (one assumes) a coffin broke down and the ground went through subsidence.  I swear there were messes of spider webs like hanging moss.  Trees surrounded the burial ground, which meant bats.  It was every horror movie cliché rolled into one plot, and being a good little girl with a massive imagination and a desperate fear of anything dealing with the sheer concept of death, you couldn't get me within 100 yards of the place.  I'd walk so I couldn't see it, even if that meant backwards or sideways.

Ridiculous?

Maybe, but you didn't see the place like I saw it.

So it came to pass that one year, we had to go in there to find the oldest gravestone in order to learn more about the history of the church.  And I refused.  Absolutely, utterly refused.  I got laughed at about it, but I didn't care.  I knew what going in there meant, and I was having no part of it.  Unfortunately, word of my abject refusal to cooperate got to two of the Sunday school teachers, who happened to me my mother and my uncle.

I took part.

Begrudgingly.

So there we were...seven or eight of us, with our teacher, and all that number save one running from grave to grave trying to find an older stone.  That last person?  Well, by technicality, she was IN the cemetery, but she was basically holding on to the fence and refusing to go any further, because surely going deeper into that maw of madness would be my undoing.  My teacher shook his head and went to see how the rest of the class was doing, and left me there.

Alone.

In the most evil place I had ever been.

And as I stood there, looking at everyone having fun (how?)...I saw mist coalescing around one of the taller spire type monuments that hadn't fallen over.  I tried to scream, but all that comes out was a weak, pathetic whistle.  I tried to run, but my feet were stuck to the ground, and thus, in my head, I knew something had reached up through the ground and grabbed me.  And so I did the only other thing I could do.  I'm not proud of it, but it was the only thing left, and even that was out of my control.

Now, looking back, I can see how it was more likely that the mist was coming out of the ground everywhere because the sun was rising above the trees, and the temperature differential was causing ground fog.  But try telling that to me in her later single digits age-wise...and she'll tell you in no uncertain terms that she knew what she saw, that it was in fact a spectre or wight or something, and its minions had captured her with the intent to feed.

That was the first time I've ever felt something like that.

Nothing ever came close, intensity wise.

And 99% of it was all in my mind.

That's the worst part, and it's why I am at once sickly attracted to, and absolutely frightened of, psychological horror movies...because I know how easy it is for the mind to play with reality even in the absence of chemical assistance.