Real life scary stories

The NPR show This American Life is requesting listeners to call in with "real life scary stories" to be played on their special Halloween broadcast. I've been wracking my brain to come up with one. I've thought of a few scary instances like skydiving for the first and ONLY time, or when my cousin dangled me over the staircase railing 'till I "learned not to cry". But due to the total absence of the supernatural in my experiences I have no real scary stories to speak of.

There is one story I have of being so frightened that there might as well have been a supernatural component involved. I was in the fourth or fifth grade, home sick from school. Both my parents worked, so I had the house to myself. It was awesome. I got up just when my mom was leaving for work. She left, and I made some pancakes and hit the basement couch for a good eight hours of unencumbered television bliss.

I watched cartoons 'till eleven when The Price is Right came on. When it was over I found myself hard pressed to find anything other than talk shows or deranged soap operas to watch. So I got down from the couch and began switching channels with the giant knob on the tv. I eventually found something that looked grainy, like saturday morning kung-fu only with white teenagers. The teenagers were sneaking around a farm in the middle of the night and, before I knew it, one of them was slaughtering a pig with what appeared to be a sledge hammer. I was horrified but couldn't look away. They were killing the pig to get it's blood in order to dump it later on Sissy Spacek at their highschool prom. I proceeded to watch the rest of the 70's horror classic Carrie, regretting every minute of it like a fat man devouring his child's birthday cake.

By the time it was over I was almost too scared to breath. I turned the TV off and suddenly the basement looked absolutely cavernous. I was convinced that Carrie's mother was waiting for me on the stairs, making the sign of the crucifix over and over with a carving knife. It's an uncanny feeling to be scared out of your wits on a bright and sunny tuesday afternoon.

In fits and spurts of sheer courage I managed to make it upstairs from the basement. I changed out of my pajamas, put on regular clothes, and hightailed it up town to the pizza parlor. Even though I had a temprature and even though I had no business doing it, I had to get out of that big, empty house and around people that I knew didn't want to kill me.

If there was a supernatural aspect to that day it was that television censors in the mid-eighties could allow a movie like Carrie to show in the middle of the afternoon with only the bad language taken out. I have since been exposed to Eminem's lyrics, as well as Janet's nipple, but none of it has come near to warping my mind like the first time I saw this-

Thanks for nothing, Standards and Practices.