- Ever since we were young and left alone
in our rooms at night,
the darkness has held a deep sense of foreboding for us all.
As we grow up, that fear lessens.
But in the quiet of night when the world should be sleeping,
even as adults there's something in the back of our minds
which tells us to be wary of what's hiding in that dark.
(ominous music)
Here are 10 reasons to be scared of the dark.
Number 10 is spindly legs.
There are a number of human fears
which seem to be built into us.
Of course fear of the dark is one of them,
but another is fear of creeping insects, arachnids,
and millipedes with their thousands of legs.
But when both of these fears are combined,
they can keep you up at night.
One reason for this is that insects do not fear us
during the day when we can swat them, so why would they
fear us when we lie asleep at night motionless?
The truth is that they're quiet happy to crawl into our beds
and then all over our sleeping bodies.
Worse still, they can crawl up onto our faces
and into our mouths.
There are even recorded instances of cockroaches
getting stuck in a sleeping person's throat
and even spiders crawling into the ear canal
of an unsuspecting victim and laying eggs.
Number nine are shadow people.
When we're children, most of our fears surrounding nighttime
are unfounded, especially when our parents
are sleeping safely in a nearby room.
However, this is not so for those who see
shadow people in the darkness.
Books have been written about this strange phenomena.
Thousands of people from around the world
have experienced the same terrifying thing,
they see walking humanoid shapes at night.
They're like three-dimensional shadows,
partially transparent with no facial features.
For the victims of these nightly visitations,
the impression is given that the shadow people
are observing them for some unknown reason.
And when parents come running to answer
their child's screams, the menacing shadow disappears
through floors, walls, or even rises up ominously
through the ceiling above.
Number eight is nyctophobia.
There are some people who have every reason
to fear the oncoming night.
These individuals suffer from a condition
known as nyctophobia.
But this goes way beyond casual unease as the sun sets.
It's actually accompanied by outright terror and depression.
In some people, as it gets dark they begin to feel sick
and lose the power to think rationally and even speak.
What a person suffering from nyctophobia experiences
differs on a case by case basis.
However, one shared symptom is that their minds populate
any dark space with a horrifying dangerous presence.
The fear this danger brings on is so paralyzing
that some patients have to be heavily sedated
whenever the sun dips in the sky.
The most frightening thing about nyctophobia
is that it starts off with a subtle fear of the dark
like most people have before transforming into pure terror.
Number seven is the forever winter.
Whenever we feel frightened by the dark,
the one thing that we can hold onto is that it will pass
and the sun will rise, but what if it didn't?
One reason to be frightened of the dark is that one day
it could rule the Earth and never give way to light.
There are three ways that this could actually happen.
If a large asteroid or comet collided with the Earth,
then it would throw up so much debris into the sky that
the sun would be blocked out for decades if not centuries.
Another eternal darkness could come about if a supervolcano
erupted on Earth, spewing out debris in a similar manner.
And if this sounds preposterous, this has actually
happened before and in fact we're overdue for such an event.
And lastly if nuclear war occurred,
the explosions could create so much dust and debris
that the world would fall into a nuclear winter,
trapped in darkness and cold,
wiping out all life as we know it.
Number six are unseen footsteps.
If you follow paranormal investigation shows
like Ghost Adventures, you'll notice a trend.
Paranormal activity becomes far more prominent
when the lights go out.
Parapsychologists who research poltergeists, hauntings,
and other ghost-related phenomena argue that darkness
is key to manifesting such entities.
The most common of these experiences, though, is the sound
of footsteps walking across floorboards at night.
When followed, no one can find any person there
who's making the sound.
One of the most frightening paranormal experiences
a person can have is when, lying in the darkness,
they hear the slow, creaking footsteps of a ghostly entity
not moving aimlessly around the house but walking towards
the person lying in bed before a cold, icy hand
touches them on the face.
Number five are sleepwalkers.
Sleepwalking is a curious phenomenon which results in
a person moving around in their sleep without realizing,
usually when it's dark.
In some instances, this can be amusing,
but in others it can be outright terrifying.
For the sleepwalker, there's always the danger
that they could fall down a flight of stairs
or badly injure themselves or others.
For those witnessing the sleepwalking, in some instances
the sleepwalker can actually grow violent.
In its most extreme forms,
police have actually encountered homicidal sleepwalking.
Brian Thomas, for example, tried to wake his wife after
he had a bad dream but then realized he had acted out his
nightmare with fatal consequences for his beloved partner.
Most worrying, sleepwalking can strike at any age
and can turn the peaceful silence of nighttime
into a dangerous, threatening environment.
Number four are hungry monsters.
One of the theories behind our apprehension of the darkness
is that it's a genetic memory passed down
over the course of hundreds of thousands of years.
In many chapters of human history, the night was
genuinely terrifying because large predatory animals
could attack and eat a person and their family.
If not animals, then we would have been attacked
by competing human groups, with some believing
controversially that the Netherlands were actually nocturnal
and may be the origin of our monster mythologies.
But that's all in the past, though, right?
Not quite.
First of all, many of us possess Neanderthal genes
which may explain predatory behavior.
And second of all, in many places there are still
terrifying creatures, such bears, lions, snakes, and wolves
all capable of breaking into a house and feasting
on those inside in the darkness.
Number three is sleep paralysis.
Imagine waking up in the dark to realize
that you cannot move.
You are completely helpless.
But then you hear something next to you,
and it moves slowly towards you and then sits on your chest,
trying to stop you from breathing.
When you open your eyes, you see what it is,
an old hag grinning at you.
That's the experience of many
who suffer from sleep paralysis.
The opposite of sleepwalking, this occurs when we wake up
and become conscious, but the mechanisms in our body
which keeps us still while we dream are in effect.
There are some believe that the old hag, as she's called,
is a hallucination brought on by this waking dream state,
but others posit a much more frightening explanation
that the old hag is real.
A malevolent spirit entity which paralyzes people
in their sleep and tries to squeeze the life out of them.
Number two are intruders.
We've all heard the stories, people waking up to find
that someone has broken into their home.
If they're lucky, the intruder runs off.
Hopefully they're just there to steal something
and not cause anyone harm.
But in some circumstances, however,
they are there for more than just simple theft.
We entertain ourselves with true crime documentaries
about people like Ted Bundy who committed vile crimes
at night, and yet we persuade ourselves, not me,
this could never happen to me.
I'm sure Ted Bundy's victims thought the same
and so, too, would the countless others who slept safely
in their beds only to awake to a nightmarish intruder.
So keep telling yourself that you're safe in bed,
but please lock your doors and make sure the windows are
shut because you never know who's out there peering in.
And number one is the thing inside your closet.
When thinking back to being a kid,
what's the one experience at night most can relate to?
The monster in the closet.
You'd stare at the closet door, imagining that something was
about to open it from the inside and rush out to attack you.
Or maybe the monster was under your bed
and you'd put off having to go to the bathroom
for fear that a hand would reach out and grab your feet.
We're so certain that these nighttime fears
were in our heads, that they weren't real,
but some researchers believe that because
children's brains haven't fully developed
that they haven't yet been conditioned by normal life yet
and that therefore they can see things that adults cannot.
Perhaps then those fears of the monsters under your bed
or the thing inside your closet at night
wasn't so imaginary at all.
In fact, perhaps whatever it was is still there,
waiting to emerge.