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Yes,PhikapDave! I was born in Southfield,but raised in Livonia. I was a huge Sir Graves Ghastly fan. I remember writing to him, and he sent me an autographed photo! Did you know he was a former radio announcer from Ohio? He is still alive,happily retired,and living in Cleveland. I went to Livonia Mall,one Halloween,and he was supposed to be the judge for a costume contest. He never showed up.  :( His real name is Lawson Demming. Here is his website. http://sirgravesghastly.com/  I,like you, was scared of him at first. I remember the first time I watched him,I was around 5 years old. He was hosting "The Wolf Man" starring Lon Chaney Jr. Just hearing him announce the movie title, and doing his evil laugh,made me run for cover behind the couch!  :D Sincerely,Steve.
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Hey Stevie B...I was born in Detroit and moved to Oak Park when I was 12. Thanks for the link, too! I assumed that Sir Graves had passed away. Good to know that he's still around. He sent me an autographed photo, too. In fact, it's the one on the front page of his Web site. I remember you could send in scary drawings and he'd show the pictures on TV. That's when he sent me the B&W photo. Thanks again!

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My Dad!  ;)  Haha.. just kidding. Not really.
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You too, eh?  I recall a Bill Hicks joke that applies,
"When a kid would come up to me and say, 'My dad can beat up your dad,' I'd say, 'When?'"
You know what else used to scare me in the '70s? Pink Floyd records, especially all those weird, scary noises on "Umma Gumma."  When my big sister would put that record on, I'd scream, "That isn't music!," and run from the room.  Today I'm glad to have "Umma Gumma" in my CD collection!  "Dark Side of the Moon," "Wish You Were Here," and "Animals" creeped me out too.  Another record my sis had that I found totally eerie was Tangerine Dream's "Phaedra."  Those alien, throbbing, intertwining synth rhythms were too much!

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Hi Secret Squirrel! I don't remember seeing "Salvage 1" but I do remember watching "In Search Of" hosted by Leonard Nimoy. The theme music was creepy, ...End Quote

"Salvage-1" had Andy Griffith and only ran for a year.   :(

The episodes of "In Search Of..." that I remember was one on the Sasquatch, a couple of ghost ones, but the scariest one I can remember was one about two hunters in Florida who lit a circle of bonfires to keep some scaly creature that was screaming at them from the edge of the treeline, from getting any closer to them.  The encounter lasted all night and of course, they re-enacted it.  Not exactly what an 8 year old who wanders in the local forest wants to see on tv at night.  :o

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The episodes of "In Search Of..." that I remember was one on the Sasquatch, a couple of ghost ones, but the scariest one I can remember was one about two hunters in Florida who lit a circle of bonfires to keep some scaly creature that was screaming at them from the edge of the treeline, from getting any closer to them.  The encounter lasted all night and of course, they re-enacted it.  Not exactly what an 8 year old who wanders in the local forest wants to see on tv at night.  :o
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The scaly creature of the Florida panhandle has been sited many times over the years.  No documentary evidence, of course, just a bunch of scared campers!

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Well when I was 14 in 1978 I lived behind a graveyard. The condominiums we lived in where at the top of the hill overlooking the graveyard, with the back where the doors that opened to the patio facing the graveyard.

Anyway, 1978 also happens to be the year Dawn of the Dead was released, and after going to see it with my dad....well let's just say I didn't sleep to well for a few months...or maybe years  ;) .

OT: WOW I can't believe someone else remembers Salvage One !!!! YAY!!!! I LOVED that .
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The cemetery in our little town looked pretty creepy at night.  It had a huge granite crypt built into an earthen mound right in front and facing the main road.  My sister and her friends used to get "stoned" (most apropos) in the cemetery.  There was a huge monolith of a headstone belonging to a Mr. Nutter where they congregated.  In fact, "going to Nutter" was code for...
A superstition I heard as a kid was that you mustn't breathe when you walk by a cemetery because it disturbs the spirits.  I never believed it, even at seven.
Another creepy thing, some people in town bought plots for themselves in the cemetery.  Some even invested in headstones and had them implanted while they were alive.  A few even had their names carved.  So you'd see
John Doe 1916-1973         Jane Doe 1918-
What a way to remind yourself how finite your life is.  Yep, the grave is right down the road, just waiting for ya! :o

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When I was a college student,we moved to a bigger house in Livonia,Michigan in 1986. There was a creepy looking ravine behind a fence,in our backyard.There was also an old graveyard that was within walking distance of our house.This place was a historical site. There were people buried in that graveyard from the late 1700's. I was staying up late one night, doing my usual thing of watching tv,when all of a sudden,I saw a shadow walk across one of the window wells. The shadow stopped, and stood in front of the semi-transparent plastic board, in front of the window well. I know I was not seeing things, because our cat at the time,stood next to me, and stared at the shadow with me. His ears swiveled around, as if he heard something,and he walked closer to the window well. By the time the cat got closer to the window,the mysterious shadow darted away,very quickly. To this day I wonder what that shadow was? A person? An animal from the ravine?   ??? I know that our neighbors next door had a walk in basement,and would often have late night parties. Maybe this was one of their guests who was coming over to their house,and got the address mixed up? My mom had a creepy experience in that same basement, around the same time. One morning,she was praying in our basement, as she rode her exercise bike. She still does this to this day. It was the second anniversary of the death of her father. After she finished praying,she felt a hand touch, and rub her right hand side shoulder!  :-[ To this day she describes the event as "touching,but eerie". I had a college class that day,and my sister and our dad were both at work. Who touched her shoulder? A ghost? An angel? The spirit of my grandfather? Jesus Christ himself? This mystery within our family will never be solved. Sincerely,Steve.
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Whoah, what an experience! I imagine it must have been pretty freaky, but it all sounds very interesting. Thanks for sharing your story with us.

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One movie that I remember as being really scary is "Don't Be Afraid of the Dark".  It's a about a woman who is terrorized by a couple of demon-like creatures.  I think at the end of the movie the drag her down into the basement.  I know it was a made for T.V. movie, so it probably isn't as scary as I remember it.  I'd love to see it again.

One of the T.V. stations had something called "CREATURE FEATURE", the opening scared me to death.  It was a six fingered hand that came up out of the ground...I would run and hide when it came on.
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"Sally set us free!  She set us free!""

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I found a the Chiller Theatre website. It has an online clip of the Chiller 6 fingered hand.

http://www.dvddrive-in.com/Chiller/chiller.htm

Jane
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Too bad they don't have shows like that anymore. Those fingers used to freak me out!

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Maybe they finally admitted the whole thing was a partial hoax after their novel was no longer in print?  ???  I always liked the acting talents of Herbert Lom. Did you ever see him in the Hammer 1962 version of "The Phantom of the Opera"? Thanks for the memories! Sincerely,Steve.
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No, I haven't seen that one.  
What portion of the Lutze's story do they claim IS true?  I think the real "Amityville Horror" was inflicted on the citizens of that Amytiville neighborhood who had to deal with mobs of cars packing the neighborhood as out-of-towners came to rubberneck the house!  
It's ironic when I think of how sh*t-scared my sister was by the Amityville book, only to find out years later that the whole thing was bogus.

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No, I haven't seen that one.  
What portion of the Lutze's story do they claim IS true?  I think the real "Amityville Horror" was inflicted on the citizens of that Amytiville neighborhood who had to deal with mobs of cars packing the neighborhood as out-of-towners came to rubberneck the house!  
It's ironic when I think of how sh*t-scared my sister was by the Amityville book, only to find out years later that the whole thing was bogus.
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Here is a link that some people may find interesting.http://chatanuga.org/Amityville.html Hopefully it will answer your questions, Maxwell. This may sound like a silly post, but I just thought of another thing that frightened me as a kid. I was a big fan of the the tv show,"Mork and Mindy",but certain episodes of the show scared me. I recall one episode where some villain from another planet came to Earth to kill Mork. I remember this "bad guy" had a machine that would drain Mork's energy. Whenever he pushed buttons on his machine, Mork would walk in slow motion, and say "I must re-charge!" in a slow,low pitched,voice. For some reason that episode creeped me out. :o I guess when we are 10 years old,we are VERY impressionable! LOL!  :) Thanks for the memories! Sincerely,Steve.

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The Big One.  The Atom Bomb.  :o

Back in the early 1970's (might have been the late 60's), my Dad woke up thw whole family.  We looked out the front window and the sky was orange, with a huge cloud rising.

Dad hustled us all down into the storm cellar, and told us to brace for the "shock wave" that was going to hit, because apparently the Red Menace (the Russians) had lobbed a nuke in our general direction.  :-/

After about 5 minutes he realized that a nuke could not have been dropped, so we went back to sleep.  ;D

Well, it turns out that a few years before, some "rocket scientists" had decided to build two pipelines, one for Natural Gas, and one for pure Oxygen, side by side about 10 miles from our house.

Well, something had gone wrong along the pipeline, and KABOOM!  That explained the big mushroom cloud and the red sky.  The next day, Dad, my brothers, and I went to see the site of the explosion.  Man, there was this HUGE crater and all the trees were burnt.   8)
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Wow! That's a scary story.  Seeing something like that would scare the heck out of anybody.  Between the bueaucratic incompetence of public utilities and the amoral negligence of private corporations, one wonders what might happen!  Wasn't it a couple of years ago in the Dakotas that some train derailed and clouded an entire town in poisonous fumes?
Anyway, we forget how real the threat of atomic war was before Gorbachev.
In the early '70s, the Cuban Missile Crisis was just ten years behind us.  In October, 1962, "we were just one word away from nuclear war," as Kevin Phillips puts it.  That kind of nervousness set the tone for the next twenty years.  A lot of people had recurring nightmares about a nuclear holocaust.  I used to think about how close an atomic bomb might detonate to our town and what horrors it might cause.  Heavy stuff for a kid's consciousness.

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Here is a link that some people may find interesting.http://chatanuga.org/Amityville.html Hopefully it will answer your questions, Maxwell. This may sound like a silly post, but I just thought of another thing that frightened me as a kid. I was a big fan of the the tv show,"Mork and Mindy",but certain episodes of the show scared me. I recall one episode where some villain from another planet came to Earth to kill Mork. I remember this "bad guy" had a machine that would drain Mork's energy. Whenever he pushed buttons on his machine, Mork would walk in slow motion, and say "I must re-charge!" in a slow,low pitched,voice. For some reason that episode creeped me out. :o I guess when we are 10 years old,we are VERY impressionable! LOL!  :) Thanks for the memories! Sincerely,Steve.
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Thanks for the link, I'll check it out.  
You don't have to tell me about being impressionable at age 10.  Here's a weird thing I just remembered that creeped me out at that age.  We were coming out of an event at a local town hall.  I looked into a public function room next door, and saw a bizarre sight.  I gather it was being used as a training room for funeral director students.  They had these dummies and they were practicing placing them into these plastic coffin replicas.  The dummies were child-sized and they were some weird orange color, like Ernie on Sesame Street.  I couldn't quite figure what they were doing in there, and the whole scene just gave me the willies!
:o

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Back in the early 1970's (might have been the late 60's), my Dad woke up thw whole family.  We looked out the front window and the sky was orange, with a huge cloud rising.

Well, it turns out that a few years before, some "rocket scientists" had decided to build two pipelines, one for Natural Gas, and one for pure Oxygen, side by side about 10 miles from our house.

Well, something had gone wrong along the pipeline, and KABOOM!  That explained the big mushroom cloud and the red sky.  The next day, Dad, my brothers, and I went to see the site of the explosion.  Man, there was this HUGE crater and all the trees were burnt.   8)
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Something very similar happened to me many years ago.  In 1991 I booked off work at midnight and caught the last bus ride home.  It was just me and the driver and at one point we saw to the north of us a very distinctive orange red glow and mushroom cloud just like in all those A-bomb newsreels.  We couldn't believe what we were seeing.  The driver even radioed the dispatcher and asked if anything was happening on CNN.  :)  It turns out a compresser station on a natural gas pipeline exploded 150 kilometers away!  Massive damage done.  I'll never forget it, it was impressive.. and I was totally shocked at how far away it was.

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It was the summer of 1978 . My great-grandmother used to live in a small house behind my grandparents house . She died in '71 . All us kids would play back there on the porch while the adults would talk on the front porch of  my grandparents house . Well ' as my cousins , my brothers and myself came around the corner of my grandpas house we looked up on the porch and seen our great-grandmother setting in her old rocking chair on the porch ,mind you now that she's been dead for years . Scared the living daylights out of us . We ran back around and told our parents what we seen , they went around there and of course didn't see anything . I don't know if they where putting something over on us ,  but they where all on the front porch when we got there . And to this day no one will fess up to it . That was the last time any of us would go back there , unless it was on a bet . Most of the time we would chicken out before we would get half way there .
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As long as it wasn't a red-eyed pig named Jodie. :o

So I read that guys Amityville info, and he's pretty well debunked the whole thing.  Other than the Lutzes being creeped out by recent events, there was no paranormal activity affirmed by any reputable source.
No should discount the power of suggestion.  The fact that a guy murdered his whole family in the house is going to make the place FEEL terrifying.  There's no need to search for paranormal activity to explain such a feeling.  We humans are not cold logic machines.  We pick up on the essences of things that occured before.  That's why people are so intrigued by abandoned mental hospitals.  Any place where the dark side of humanity reigned will trigger our fear, sorrow, and terror.  
I believe in the paranormal, but I'm very skeptical.  There are phenomena we haven't scientifically confirmed.  However, we need to resist extrapolating endogenous feelings into exogenous realities.  Such illogic is why the Amityville Horror fraud was so easily perpetuated.  A lot of people got hurt in the ensuing hysteria.

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Thanks for sharing those childhood scary TV logo memories,Sammy. Just out of curiousity,if you watched an old Universal movie from the 1930's or the 1940's,did the logos of those eras have a similar effect on you? The one from the 30's showed a little airplane flying around the Earth (it was supposed to be Lucky Lindy flying over the Atlantic Ocean) and the 40's version had a transparent globe spinning around a field of stars.  :DSincerely,Steve.
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I was afraid of airplanes and flying until I was 15 years old,when I had to fly to Virginia to look at a boarding school there. Now I love airplanes,flying,and airshows. Go figure.

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As I mentioned in previous postings,movie trailers used to scare me just as much as the actual fillms. I remember seeing a trailer in 1979 for "The Amityville Horror", in the theater,and I felt like ducking behind my seat! LOL! I also remember the same year seeing a commercial on tv promoting "Alien". When I heard that sinister narrator's voice say "In space,nobody can hear you scream!",and then you hear an eerie,distant voice screaming in the backround,I changed the channel VERY quickly!  :oThanks for the memories! Sincerely,Steve.
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The Exorcist,both the book and later the movie,gave me the willies! Especially Regan talking in that menacing tone of voice!

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The Vietnam war.
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There was one scene from Vietnam that really freaked me out-the little girl running down the road after a napalm(?) attack. Her clothes were burned right off her. I heard she suffered tremendously but lived. And the soldier shooting a Vietnamese guy in the head on a Saigon street! I think Vietnam was a war we should have NEVER gotten involved with!!

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As I mentioned in previous postings,movie trailers used to scare me just as much as the actual fillms. I remember seeing a trailer in 1979 for "The Amityville Horror", in the theater,and I felt like ducking behind my seat! LOL! I also remember the same year seeing a commercial on tv promoting "Alien". When I heard that sinister narrator's voice say "In space,nobody can hear you scream!",and then you hear an eerie,distant voice screaming in the backround,I changed the channel VERY quickly!  :oThanks for the memories! Sincerely,Steve.
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A movie called "The Car" scared the pants off me! The car they used(it was a black sedan I think)looked super ominous. Imagine Herbie the Love Bug having an evil side. And the darn thing had that certain honk when it was going to kill!

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There was one scene from Vietnam that really freaked me out-the little girl running down the road after a napalm(?) attack. Her clothes were burned right off her. I heard she suffered tremendously but lived. And the soldier shooting a Vietnamese guy in the head on a Saigon street! I think Vietnam was a war we should have NEVER gotten involved with!!

I know the photo you're refering to---it's almost the considered the official icon of the Vietnam War. Wondering what that girl is doing now.
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A movie called "The Car" scared the pants off me! The car they used(it was a black sedan I think)looked super ominous. Imagine Herbie the Love Bug having an evil side. And the darn thing had that certain honk when it was going to kill!
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Yeah! Seeing that movie back then (especially as a kid) was scary! I still like that movie today. It's definetly a classic!  :)  

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My younger brothers were scared to death of a sewing dummy my mother kept out in the laundry room. The laundry room was seperate from the house, in the rear of the house. We called her the "wash lady". If my brothers got out of line..."I'm calling the wash lady on you". "Please, no, no no, not the wash lady, I'll behave, please!"
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LOL!  That's eerie.  The tool shed at the end of the hay field across from our house had one of those sewing dummies.  I don't know why a sewing dummy was in a tool shed.  I do know the brother of the old farmer who owned the field, a fellow we called "Uncle Dave" (and the shed "Uncle Dave's shack"), used to sit out in that shed and smoke for hours.  I was afraid to consider what Uncle Dave's relationship with the sewing dummy might be!  
It was kinda creepy to see that weird humanoid figure through the shed window at night!

I suppose your brothers spend a lot of time with their analysts trying to explain why they can't go into Macy's with their wives.  Dummies everywhere! No no no, not the wash lady again!

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My younger brothers were scared to death of a sewing dummy my mother kept out in the laundry room. The laundry room was seperate from the house, in the rear of the house. We called her the "wash lady". If my brothers got out of line..."I'm calling the wash lady on you". "Please, no, no no, not the wash lady, I'll behave, please!"
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TARANTULAS freaked me out until I took applied biology in high school and met a Texas Brown tarantula named Pearl. I really think Hollywood movies tend to make certain creatures more evil than they really are,and the public buys the myth,hook line and sinker!!

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DISCO!

It's always freaked me out!
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Disco scared you? Wow,that's a first.... ???


Howard

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TARANTULAS freaked me out until I took applied biology in high school and met a Texas Brown tarantula named Pearl. I really think Hollywood movies tend to make certain creatures more evil than they really are,and the public buys the myth,hook line and sinker!!
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I've always been grateful to live in New England where we have a minimum of huge bugs and poisonous snakes.  On the other hand, that may be why they make me so nervous--lack of familiarity.
We did have huge barn spiders in our barn when I was growing up, and I'm not phobic about spiders.  One rarely sees ANY kind of snake in this region, and I'm terrified of snakes.

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I've always been grateful to live in New England where we have a minimum of huge bugs and poisonous snakes.  On the other hand, that may be why they make me so nervous--lack of familiarity.
We did have huge barn spiders in our barn when I was growing up, and I'm not phobic about spiders.  One rarely sees ANY kind of snake in this region, and I'm terrified of snakes.

A '70s thing that scared me in the '70s was that Flash and the Pan record.  I found the strange tunes and distorted voice terribly unnerving.  I already mention the various states of dread I had about Pink Floyd!