header_BWscarystories

Bands share the scariest thing that's ever happened to them

Doors that slam on people, ghosts that cross the road, boxes that disappear and… clowns: Are you scared yet?

Read more: 10 songs that will actually scare the hell out of you, ranked

These are all things that members of Dance Gavin Dance, Wage War, Moose Blood, Bad Omens and the Plot In You lived through. They shared their scariest stories with APTV Correspondent Tori Kravitz during Self Help Fest in Orlando and you can read them in full below.

Ready for it? Turn off the lights and prepare to get creeped out.

Josh Childress, the Plot In You

I was going to hang out with friends and, on my way there, there was an accident and someone had died at the accident. When I came back, I almost crashed my car because I thought a person was walking across the road, but there was no one walking across the road… in that same spot. Spooky!”

Dance Gavin Dance

Matt Mingus:

“My old house in downtown Sacramento was built in 1908. I lived there for five years, but, when I first moved in, I lived by myself and every morning at 3 a.m. on the dot, I’d wake up. I’d be up and ready to wake up. And I talked to my buddy Joe who used to live there long before I did, and he said the same exact thing happened to him. It turns out the guy who originally build the house and lived there for 40-plus years was a hard worker and he’d wake up at 3 a.m. to work in the shop, in the basement. He was always doing stuff, so my buddy Joe had a theory that it was his ghost, his spirit, trying to wake us up. Not very spooky, but a little weird.”

Jon Mess:

“I've had a sleep paralysis experience where I woke up and my dead grandma was praying at the foot of my bed.”

Will Swan:

“My old house was really weird. The lady who lived there [before] used to dance naked in the backyard. My neighbors said she was a witch; she painted weird stuff on the windows, just doesn’t make any sense. The weirdest thing that happened to me there is my closet doors started shaking when I was trying to go to bed, and there was absolutely no reason for that to happen. But I was, like, 'Alright, I’m going to just jam a bunch of stuff in between the doors and make sure that there’s just no way for them to budge at all.' And then I go lay down in bed, and, as soon as I hit the bed, they start shaking again, and I was, like, 'Fuck this, I’m going to bed,' so I just slept through it. And a bunch of other weird stuff happened, like, Jon’s girlfriend was afraid of my bathroom because its door would just slam on people. I moved out of the house, thankfully.”

Wage War

Cody Quistad:

The scariest thing that’s ever happened to me was when we were recording one of our first demos ever. The whole band, Josh Woodard from A Day To Remember and a couple other friends decided that we were going to get into this insane asylum that was closed down. It was a children’s insane asylum, and apparently people kept dying on the elevator or something. We walked through the whole house, and it was very scary. We had a potographer friend there who was snapping random pictures to look for orbs and we looked at some of his snaps, and there was a legitimate baby face inside the picture. That was about the scariest thing ever because, looking back, that was there for a reason.”

Briton Bond:

My first job was at Walmart. There was a woman who died of a heart attack in the back room and apparently this Walmart was built on an Indian burial ground. I went into this little room that I only had the key, and I put a box on the ground that had this green tape on it. So, I go up this ladder and start stocking and, when I come back down, the box is completely gone. Like, 'What is going on?' I went to the security woman and apparently the camera stopped working while I was in there. I don’t know, take that as you want it.”

Mark Osborne, Moose Blood


​[Photo by: Rachel Dowd]

“When I was a kid, I used to play with a paper boat that I used to put in the puddle and let it flow down the road, and it went to the drain and there was this clown in the drain. So, I just said, “What are you doing down there?” and then he chopped my arm off.” [Laughs.]

Bad Omens

Noah Sebastian:

“There is an abandoned asylum in a part of Maryland, I forgot what part of Maryland, but it’s called Forest Haven Asylum, and I snuck in there once with a few friends and a photographer friend of mine. It’s not really a ghost story there was no scary ghost hunting experience, it was daytime. But it was definitely the most unsettling place I’ve ever been [to] because it got shut down because of hundreds of cases of abuse and patient mistreatment and just suspicious deaths that happened there. There were even some that weren’t documented, so, there were crazy supernatural events that happened that were even beyond when they started documenting them. So, we went there one day and it was just totally terrifying; even in daylight it was terrifying. It was just abandoned, and there were this old medical documents. I actually took one, and I’m pretty sure it’s haunting me everywhere I go with it. I had someone’s social security number, their diagnosis, their nurse’s name; it was just a really unsettling place, and I don’t think I want to go back there.”

Joakim Karlsson:

“[In the] first apartment I had in Sweden, I remember I used to go to bed really late, like 2 or 3. [Once] I had just turned off my computer, which I boost my whole TV system with, and I walked from my living room towards my bedroom when everything was off, all the lights were off, and I just heard like [a whisper], 'AAH,' behind my ear. So, I just throw myself around and throw my fists up, and I almost lost balance; and then one second later, I just felt every hair on my body going up, and I was, like, ‘What the fuck?’ And I do remember, which was kinda silly, waiting around my apartment after that, just a few seconds after that, with my fists up in my kitchen just, like, 'Go away, motherfucker,' and then I just turned on all the lights in my apartment, went in my bedroom, shut the door and then I just fell asleep.”