And some don't even wear their skins...

D's list of songs that give her chills included a song that has always given me chills-- but not the good kind. Rather, the bad, scary, pleaseturnitoffpleaseturnitoffpleasepleaseplease kind of chills.

It's not a very long list, because I am a grownup now. But there are certain songs that I can't listen to because they actually frighten me in a little-kid-riding-the-Haunted-Mansion-for-the-first-time way.

They are:

1. A Day in the Life - As I've mentioned, I was listening to this home alone once, as a teenager, and the loudscarycacophany part came on, and I was frozen in terror. I had to hide under the covers with my hands over my ears because I was too scared to cross the room to turn it off.

2. Hotel California - I downloaded a very stupid text-based game back in the early-mid nineties. Some free piece of crap from AOL's download library. Anyway, it was based on this song, and there's a scene where you go into a room and a bunch of people are gathered around a dining table, stabbing and stabbing at a big, dead beast with their steely knives. But they just can't kill it.

The song freaks me out because each line calls up a different mental image of the creepiness of that game. And, remember, it was text-based; all of the images came from my own mind.

3. I Think I Love You - What is that chorus? That chorus is so haunted house. It's so Halloween. Bom-bom-bom-bom-bom? What is that? Is he TRYING to spook me? Honestly, I've never been able to make it through the song so I can't tell if it's SUPPOSED to sound that creepy. Or maybe it's just something about David Cassidy. I can't take it. It scares me.

4. What a Wonderful World - There's nothing inherently bad about this song. It's quite a good song, abstractly. But it's been used ironically in so many films and television shows, played over footage of horrific violence, mushroom clouds, devestation and destruction, that I get a Pavlovian sense of hopelessness and despair whenever I hear it. Which is pretty much whenever I walk into a restaurant at lunchtime.

Oddly enough, the theme from Disney's The Haunted Mansion (the ride, not the movie, which I have never seen) isn't remotely scary. It's great. So there's my recommendation: "Grimming Grinning Ghosts" from the real ride soundtrack of The Haunted Mansion, featuring the late, great Thurl "Tony the Tiger" Ravenscroft.