on creepy things

During my O- and A- levels, I had a strange study ritual. While most people revised with quiet music in the background, I studied in a dark room with crime podcasts playing in my headphones. Stories about disappearances, serial killers, strange investigations—voices calmly narrating events that were anything but calm.

It was probably not the healthiest study environment. In hindsight, writing essays while listening to murder investigations was a strange study habit. Some nights I would finish revising and suddenly become convinced that someone was lurking outside my window, standing still under the yellowish glow of a lamppost across the road, with some form of malicious intent. I’d shut all the blinds and curtains tight, double-check the locks, and lie awake imagining footsteps inching closer in the dark. Even now, my windows stay firmly closed at night, partly out of habit.

And yet, I kept listening. 

And somehow, it was exhilarating. There’s a kind of tension, a slow unravelling of clues, the sense that every little detail might matter. Listening to them made ordinary life feel almost cinematic. Sitting there with my notes and textbooks, the room seemed to take on the atmosphere of a thriller. Fear, in a strange way, was something I thrived on.

Crime stories have always had this kind of pull. Whether it’s podcasts, documentaries, or endless internet threads discussing unsolved mysteries, people can’t seem to look away. Part of it might be voyeuristic curiosity—the chance to glimpse the extreme edges of human behaviour, the parts of society most of us never encounter in everyday life. These stories reveal a darker side of society that usually stays hidden beneath everyday life.

But there is also something about the structure of crime stories themselves. Many unfold like puzzles. Information is revealed slowly, piece by piece, encouraging the audience to connect the dots. Listening can feel almost participatory, as if you are solving the mystery alongside the investigators. Maybe that’s why I was so hooked on Sherlock. I watched it obsessively for a while.

And then there is the deeper rabbit hole of horror culture itself. Online communities often talk about the “horror iceberg,” a diagram that maps horror media from the familiar at the surface to the deeply obscure and disturbing at its depths. At the top are things most people recognize, including mainstream horror films, famous ghost stories, popular true crime cases. But as you descend, the material becomes stranger and darker: obscure internet legends, experimental horror films, unsettling urban myths. The iceberg captures something fundamental about horror fandom—the urge to keep digging further into the unknown.

Perhaps this is because horror, in all its forms, is tied to curiosity. We are drawn to what we don’t understand. The creepy, the uncanny, the unexplained—they linger in the mind because they refuse to resolve neatly. As my own late-night listening habits proved, fear experienced at a safe distance can be thrilling. It sharpens the senses and turns an ordinary evening into something tense and dramatic. In that sense, creepy stories are a kind of controlled danger.

Looking back, those late nights of studying with crime podcasts playing in the background were oddly formative. They made the world feel darker, yes—but also more vivid. Maybe that’s the real reason creepy things fascinate us so much. They remind us that beneath the quiet surface of everyday life, there are stories far stranger, and far more unsettling, than we usually imagine. 

And sometimes, all it takes is a pair of headphones in a dark room for the imagination to bring those possibilities vividly to life.