Post scary realities to give your fellow Valorians nightmares. If you're feeling really brave, read these at night. To start off, yesterday I found a huge and extremely poisonous spider in my shower. I tried killing it, but it disappeared and I don't know for sure if it died or not. But here's the scary part. It's the middle of winter and there have been freezing temperatures outside for weeks now. How did the spider get in? It must have been in my apartment for at least a couple of weeks without me even realizing. So if a poisonous spider could be in my apartment that long without me noticing it, how do you know there aren't any in your own home right now?
I don't know how scary this would actually be, but here we go. My house has an attic, as well as a basement. Now, with the way our house is built, in order to get to the attic, you need to pull down a "rope" I guess to pull a set of steps down from the ceiling. The basement just has a regular set of steps you can use to get to it. Now, if you were the person in charge of determining where each of these steps would be placed inside the house, where would you put them? If you answered something along the lines of "spacing them out from each other while managing to place them in strategic spots", then you obviously weren't the one to design this part of the house. Rather, someone thought it would be a good idea to put the pull-down ladder to the attic right over top of the basement stairs. Now keep in mind, the attic steps are wooden, and have been in use for a while now. They also have the tendency creak whenever somebody's on them. So, it isn't very reassuring when I have to climb on them if my parents want me to help them get stuff down or something. Imagine it, though. You have to climb on some old wooden ladder to get to your attic for whatever reason. It wouldn't seem so bad if it wasn't for the fact it was placed over another descending set of steps, which cause there to be much more room between you and the ground the more you climb your way to the attic. When you pull the ladder down from the ceiling, its "feet" or on the very edge of the top of the pther stairs, and when you start to get on the ladder, it creaks and shakes a little, showing its age. Its a little nerve-wracking, but whatever, right? So, you start to climb up it. However, you are well aware of your surroundings and what they're like. It makes you hyper-aware of the shaking and creaking, and the ever-growing distance between you and the hard wooden stairs below you. You yourself are shaking. You try to keep going, but the thought keeps trying to push its way into your mind. You try to fight it, yet it still takes its place within the well of your dark, unnerving thoughts... ...Imagine if this ladder broke in half, and sent you plummeting downwards, right into the hard, uneven face of the basement stairs.
This happened when I was really, really young, maybe like 3 or 4, when my family first moved into our current house. We hadn't furnished it at the time so there were no beds, so my older brother and I had to sleep on an air mattress. It was late, I'd say around 3 in the morning when I woke up, and my brother had been awake for a while now, too. We were just kinda laying there and staring at the ceiling when we looked ahead, down the hallway, and saw a black cat. Now mind you, it was pitch dark out, and we could visibly see this cat- it was literally darker than night itself. The freakiest part about it, though, was that it had glowing red eyes. It stared at my brother and I for a few moments before dashing into the kitchen. I followed it, turned on the light, and it was gone. At first my brother and I didn't think much of it, but as we grew older and discussed, we realized it was really freaky. There were no openings for a cat to get through (my family is pretty paranoid so we make sure to lock the house up tightly before we all head to bed), and we never even owned a cat. In the years following my brother and I would see it on different occasions, but we haven't seen it in a long time. As it turns out, the one who built my home was a man who owned a black cat. Freaky stuff.
