jay_walk

Told you "tot" is an inherently creepy word. Especially in the music version of Erlkönig (I don't think it was the Schubert one) which ends with the last word lower & slower. I had this thing (which is brilliant) memorized in 5th grade and spent more time thinking about it than a child ought to. (When I was still younger the deep keys on the piano would scare me, so that was very effective with the ending there.)

(This here: another one of those non-hyper non-enthusiastic overly-reflective posts. Next up is hopefully a change of topic to the aesthetic of the USSR's spaceflight stuff.)

I certainly like this a whole lot better than the rest of Goethe. Fever-hallucinations are always an interesting subject, and the erl-king is nice because nobody is even sure whether it means he's a tree or an elf or what. Alders (Erlen), although they look a lot like small not-white birches, seem dark and poetic for the beautiful name. As for german elves, they are creepy. In my understanding there's mine-spirits (Kobold) which shapeshift, trick people, and kill people in mountains (a fair lot of folkloric mountain giants in this category too), Alps (nightmares) which will kill you in your sleep, things like Sirens in the Rhine, of course, and I don't even know what's supposed to be in our forests, I imagine it's nightmares and vague treeish death entities. There was also, in the middle ages, the devil going about in various goat-footed forms, which didn't worry me much, because it's sort of silly anyone would be deceived by that. Werewolfs and revenants too, but those are rather solid and the thought of them sneaking up on me in the middle of a city isn't anxiety inducing. What is is various little malevolent spirits, ghosts, distorted things like greys, headless people, death harbingers, doppelgängers, -standing behind me right now-. Well obviously I got over it by reading about them alone in the middle of the night until I got used to it.
Childhood anxieties: what if I get sick overnight and never wake up? What if an Alb sits on my chest in my sleep and I never wake up? The scientific explanations do not at all help: what if my sleep paralysis malfunctions and I can't breathe and never wake up? What if I just happen not to wake up for no reason? ("Morgen früh, wenn Gott will, wirst du wieder erweckt"- what if God just doesn't feel like it one day?) I don't want to sleep in any sort of burial-posture (and there are many, from neatly with arms folded to curled up) like I'm already dead, I don't want to be called an angel like I'm already dead... it might make me die. (sympathetic magic). Odd anxieties for a child, on the positive side that means I am over being afraid of that kind of a thing by now.
By the way, there's creepy renditions of German folkloric entities in the Inkworld Trilogy- white women to accompany the dying (I'm generally not that enthusiastic about those books for some reason though).

And right now there is something social going on in school which I ought to be attending, probably. I am the most clueless disorganized person ever, and right now I'd rather write my opinion on churches in Rome.
Right, and headless people. Saints who hold their dissattched heads are called cephalophores. Something about that word is creepy.