The real problem with Halloween is that it's really not for kids anymore. Maybe it never was meant to be. But, for someone my age (Generation X, it's a simple moniker, but effective), Halloween used to mean that you got to dress up in a cheap costume, have a laugh with your friends, and either A) go door to door throughout your neighborhood to get some candy or B) go out and beat up on some younger kids to get their candy. Ah, childhood.
Anyway, with the solidification of such urban myths as razors in apples or needles in your candybar, plus our ever-present, Amber-alert state of readiness resulting in children being decreasing allowed outside, Halloween is slowing becoming less and less about children having candy and fun, and more about adults getting professional quality zombie makeup or squeezing into their slutty superhero costumes and making it all about them. Which is a drag. For two reasons.
First, there are valuable lessons that can be taught through the traditional Halloween experience. There was a sense of community that that experience was built on ("Let's go to THAT house, they always have great candy!" or "Here comes Bobby, he always steals our candy, RUN!") and I can't help but think that as kids are less and less exposed to their community, they become less and less able to think about how diverse, interesting and valuable their community is. More importantly, though, they think less and less about how their actions affect their community.
And, second, Halloween just isn't that scary these days. Or creepy. Or strange. Or anything out of the ordinary. Think about how desensitized we've become, especially to things like zombies and vampires. Precisely because they aren't the things of children's nightmares anymore. Instead, they are the things of prime time television and young adult literature.
So, for this penultimate entry before Halloween proper, CSOTD is going to forgo the cool songs, and try to get your properly creeped out for tomorrow. And I'm going to do that not with folklore or fiction, but with real sounds from the real world. Like this.
Numbers stations are the creepiest sounds around, fact. From that Wikipedia article, "A numbers station (or number station) is a type of shortwave radio station characterized by their unusual broadcasts, which consist of spoken words, but mostly numbers, often created by artificially generated voices reading streams of numbers, words, letters, tunes or Morse code. They are transmitted in a wide variety of languages and the voices are usually female, although sometimes men's or children's voices are used."
Thought to be operated by government agencies to communicate with spies in the field, though nobody is truly sure, these disembodied voices, the seemingly meaningless but hypnotic repetition of beeps and tones, these are bad enough now, but then place yourself somewhere alone, at night, twisting the shortwave radio dial and then come to one of these, you would truly go from bland normality to uncertainty, distress and most certainly fear. Listen to this:
Yankee Hotel Foxtrot
The Cornet Project on Soundcloud has a fantastic collection of recordings from various Numbers Stations, and if you really want to be truly, genuinely creeped out, I would recommend you give them a listen.
You know what else is truly disturbing? Santa Clause. Old Father Christmas has always given me the heebie-geebies, especially when I learned as a kid that he was watching me when I was sleeping, and he knew when I was awake. Sinister! But, however creepy he is in normal guise, here is a 1922 recording of ol' Saint Nick, played by Harry E. Humphrey, made by Thomas Edison himself in order to sell his phonograph device. With a laugh that would make any serial-killer queasy, it's no wonder kids wouldn't sleep on Christmas Eve. Santa Clause hides in your phonograph. Kill it with fire.
Human beings think we have a monopoly on creepy, but friends we have nothing, no card to play, compared to nature. Take wind, for instance. Either gently but eerily moving through the strings of a harp:
The Wind Plays The Harp.
Or whipping up like the screams of the very Apocalypse itself:
The Sounds of Hurricane Ike as heard in the upper floors of a hotel.
The one single, truly creepy sound from nature, has been labeled simply The Bloop. And honestly, it is not that much to listen to on it's own:
Bloop
The Bloop sound was repeatedly recorded during the summer of 1997 on the Equatorial Pacific Ocean autonomous hydrophone array over an area of 5000 km. The sound rises rapidly in frequency over about one minute and was of sufficient amplitude to be heard on multiple sensors, at a range of over 5,000 km. It yields a general location near 50 Deg S; 100 Deg W (far off the west coast of southern South America). The origin of the sound is unknown but too loud to be any know biological or living source. While the audio profile of the Bloop does resemble that of a living creature, the source is a mystery both because it is different from known sounds and because it was several times louder than the loudest recorded animal, the blue whale.
In short, the loudest sound ever recorded on Earth probably comes from a creature many times larger than the largest known animal to have ever existed. Ponder that for a while. And, here's a couple more unidentified sounds recorded from the unmapped, unexplored areas of the deep:
Slow Down
Train
Julia
To this date, none of those recorded sounds have any explanation whatsoever.
And, if you think the sounds of this small planet are creepy, what would you make of sounds coming from other planets? From The University of Iowa Department of Physics and Astronomy website: "Saturn is a source of intense radio emissions. The radio waves are closely related to the auroras near the poles of the planet. These auroras are similar to Earth's northern and southern lights. The Cassini spacecraft began detecting these radio emissions in April 2002 when Cassini was 2.5 astronomical units from the planet using the Cassini Radio and Plasma Wave Science (RPWS) instrument. The RPWS has now provided the first high resolution observations of these emissions that show an amazing array of variations in frequency and time." Enjoy:
So, are you truly weirded out yet? Scared? Disturbed? No?
Good, neither am I. In fact, I Feel Fantastic.
Hey, Hey, Hey.
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