In Search of a Thirst-Quenching Fear

I'd like to be more afraid if I wasn't so scared.

Please come check out Ugly Flamingos at Q.E.D. Astoria on May 1 at 9pm. We have an amazing lineup of comedians and musicians. Tickets are $15. Please consider subscribing to our email list.

It’s 1979, and you’re on a road trip with your friends through the Southwest. As you make your way to the Grand Canyon, you realize it’s a perfect opportunity for a photo-op. You pull over the car, a few people run to the other side of the road to unload their bladders. You grab your camera as one of your other friends runs toward the cliff to pose for the photo. There’s some brush to the side of the cliff that you don’t really pay much mind to. It’s a quiet stretch of road. No one else has pulled off here, and no other cars come by during your brief period stopped here. He strikes his pose, and you snap your camera. He runs back. You all take in the view for a few minutes and stretch your legs. After the very brief break, you all pile back in the bar and continue on the trip.

A few weeks after the trip, you’ve mostly forgotten about the mundane stop at the Grand Canyon, as you pick up your photos from the trip. As you flip through the newly developed photos, you look at the shot from the Grand Canyon, and you stare just a minute too long, and you notice that there’s a shape that looks like a person in the bushes behind your friend. You pull the photo in close, and realize that there was indeed someone in the bush. There’s a pale face under a black hood, staring straight into the camera. You try to think back to the day, but you genuinely cannot remember anyone else being there.

The more you think about the photo, the more eerie it seems. The stranger’s pale face becomes more distorted in your mind. There’s something sinister about the fact that he’s simply lurking in the bushes, not saying anything as this group of people stopped off on the side of the road. Even as he looks directly into the camera, it looks more like the shock of someone who has just been caught, even though you didn’t see him at all.

One of my favorite photos on the internet was uploaded on December 22, 2012. The photo was uploaded after someone responded to a thread asking for dark and creepy true stories. While I wrote my own dramatization, this is basically what the person said in the post. I first saw this photo in a video uploaded three years later by the popular YouTuber Top5s.

In Top5s’ commentary about the photo, the narrator notes that some people responded to comments by suggesting that perhaps the man in the bushes was intending to push the man on the cliff, but he realized that other people were there. Other people suggested that maybe he was planning on jumping himself and didn’t, because he saw the people coming. Others suggested that perhaps he was actually the Grim Reaper.

The picture has resurfaced on Reddit a few times, and some people have suggested that it’s a hoax. Others have pointed out that it’s likely some camper or other wayward soul who was simply wandering in the cold. They also note that he looks more frightened than threatening.

I suppose my favorite part of the photo is that there’s no answer to it, and there never will be. It seems unlikely that the man in the bushes will ever come forward, and we only have the original story to go off of. The original person who posted it on Reddit has not posted from the same account in over a decade. Since there are no other details, we simply have this eerie photo of a possibly malicious man (or the Grim Reaper) hiding in the bushes. If you want him to be a bad actor, he can be. If you want him to be Death himself, he can be. If you want him to be some scared kid, he can be. Sometimes when I look at the picture, I still have some sense of uneasiness that unlocks an exciting type of fear in me: creepiness.

I’m no psychologist, but I think it’s fair to say that all forms of fear are just anxiety, but I do think that there are different types of fear: jump scares, existential, medical, the list goes on. I’ve always been drawn to creepiness when I’m seeking a thrill.

I’ve always enjoyed hearing alien encounters, ghost stories, and creepy accounts of finding people in unexpected places. The uneasiness that those types of stories, videos, or photos can unlock in me is arousing in a way. There’s a sense of controlled fear that is pretty much benign. I can thrill myself by finding creepy stories, videos, photos, etc. on the internet, in books, or in documentaries.

Despite this type of fear being my favorite, lately, I’ve found myself having a hard time satiate my desire for it. There is a part of me that wonders if this is simply a fact of getting older. Am I less sensitive to these types of fear? I suppose that that’s a positive sign of growth, but it’s also disappointing if I can’t unlock that uneasy feeling on demand. There’s also some sense of fear that maybe I’ve seen all the satisfying creepy content that there is, and there simply isn’t enough of it being produced for me to keep up.

Granted, I don’t check Top5s on the daily anymore. I no longer scroll through Creepy Catalog on a regular basis (though it seems like it’s mostly based around film content now). Occasionally, something eerie will climb up in my TikTok algorithm, but for the most part, I’ve found that I’m not naturally stumbling across videos or articles that will give me goosebumps, and ultimately, I think it’s that my fear receptors are firing on all cylinders at all times.

Over the past year, I’ve lived in a constant state of fear. After getting laid off from Hollywood Life in February 2024, there’s been a growing amount of economic fear about how I’m going to continue to support myself and my fiancée, especially as the job market continues to get worse and worse. I have less interest in someone finding a strange set of footprints in the snow than I do determining how I am going to make ends meet to survive. All the free time that maybe I’d read some strange account of someone buying an old house is now spent mindlessly scrolling LinkedIn and hoping that something breaks.

That fear also carries into watching what is happening with the United States government. As tariffs pull the economy down or people are being deported or whatever the flavor of the week is, the existential threats are so much more frightening than anything that could send shivers down my spine. I’d much rather hear about someone finding some satanic ritual going on in the woods rather than the ones that I feel like I’m constantly seeing in headlines. While horror is implicitly political, I’m left to wonder if that beautiful type of fear is a commodity that can only be found during more peaceful times.

Unfortunately, I don’t have a solution to these problems. I don’t know if there’s anything short of asking people to seek out the paranormal or unsettling. I suppose this is an unexpected luxury that I’m continuing to chase. Fear is a privilege that you can enjoy when you learn the dosage. Like any other substance, overdoing it will just make things worse, and you’ll end up broken, bitter, and defeated. Like so many other experiences and purchases, I am saving my desire for this creep factor for a more comfortable period in my life, and I hope that I can find it.