In for "Don't starve" please, and I buy my way in with what I think is a pretty good story:
Every summer, my wife takes my two boys on a road trip. We live in California, so it usually involves trips around the western United States. Grand Canyon, Oregon, Utah, Yellowstone... places like that. I work a lot, so don't get to go on these trips, and I miss them terribly while they're gone. My boys are aged 5 and 6 right now, so they are still quite small. Their itinerary is well-set in advance, however, so I always know where they are, and can reach my wife easily. It's great fun for them. It helps their bonding a bit and they always have grand adventures.
Two years ago, the return leg of the trip involved driving back down from Northern California. The final stop was a stay in Bakersfield, about ~200 or so miles from where we live. I spoke to my wife around 9:30 PM that night. When she let me go, she told me they were just pulling into the hotel, so she had to get checked in and get our sleeping kids into the room. They meant to be there earlier, but had been running late (very common, as they always find interesting things to stop and do), so now she had to get sleeping kiddoes taken care of. They would be up early the next day, so would be back home before lunch. This was great news for me, as they had been gone for a week, and I was anxious to see them. The next day was a Saturday, so I would be home to greet them.
I went to bed shortly thereafter, and went to sleep.
I woke up groggily from a dream in which my three-year-old was crying. I looked around - it was 1:30 in the morning or so... I was still alone, and all was quiet and dark. Just a dream... I drifted back down... almost to sleep...
And heard it again.
Have you ever seen someone take an adrenaline injection straight to the heart? I went from 0 to 100 MPH in about 0.3 seconds. I shot out of bed straight into the air. I'm not certain, but I think I might have literally flown down the hall into my son's room....
...Where I found him... standing in the middle of the room... quiet as a mouse, staring into space blankly. I said his name. No response.
Knowing that he was asleep in a hotel room hundreds of miles away, and yet clearly standing before me with no expression on his face at all... my mind flooded with an almost Lovecraftian horror of the unknown. What? How? What? My first thought - very seriously - was that he was dead on the side of the road somewhere and this was his ghost. I knelt down and pulled him into my arms, said comforting things to him, stroked his hair... all while my brain was trying to divide by zero.
Then my wife came stumbling into the room and helped me put him into bed. Yeah, it turns out the whole "pulling into the hotel" thing was a bald-faced lie and she was going to "surprise me" by driving all night and being there when I woke up. She put the kids into bed and went to lie down on the sofa to sleep so as not to ruin the surprise.
Somehow, I managed to avoid reaching out and strangling her Bart Simpson-style. Took me quite a while to go back to sleep, what with all the adrenaline slamming through my system.
Yep. That was the last time I felt real terror.
