Things That Go Bump in the Decade

This being the only Friday the 13th of 2025, I couldn't pass up the opportunity to muse a little about the spooky stuff I grew up with during my childhood in the 1970s, things that no doubt informed my continued fascination with the uncanny even today.

Back then, the world still seemed full of mysteries – or at least it was easy to imagine that it was. Stories of haunted houses, UFOs, Bigfoot, the Loch Ness Monster, and all manner of cryptids and bizarre phenomena were staples of popular culture. They filled the pages of supermarket tabloids, popped up in solemnly narrated TV specials, and circulated in schoolyard whispers. Even if few people truly believed in them, almost everyone enjoyed talking about them. The possibility alone was enough.

Looking back, it’s striking how pervasive the weird was in everyday life. I vividly recall garish paperbacks detailing “true” encounters with the unknown, cartoons and comics riffing on paranormal themes, and, of course, the ever-present influence of movies and television shows like In Search Of..., Project U.F.O., Kolchak: The Night Stalker, and The Amityville Horror, among many, many more. These stories occupied a curious space in the cultural imagination – not quite believed, not quite disbelieved either, and all the more compelling for it. They invited speculation, encouraged imagination, and cultivated a sense of wonder tinged with dread.

Even as a kid, I never bought into most of it. I didn’t spend my nights scanning the skies for flying saucers or lurking in the woods hoping to glimpse Sasquatch. But I wanted to believe, at least a little. The world felt more interesting, more alive, with those possibilities lurking just beyond the edges of certainty. What if there was something out there? That question alone was enough to fire my imagination.

And fire it did. By the time I discovered Dungeons & Dragons and, through it, other roleplaying games, I was already primed for them. After all, I’d spent years immersed in tales of mysterious creatures, unexplained lights, and restless spirits. RPGs gave me a new framework to explore those ideas, one where I wasn’t just reading or hearing the stories but helping to create them. I could conjure new monsters, new haunted places, new eerie events, and imagine how I or others might respond if the strange and uncanny ever crossed into our reality.

Today, that world of half-believed wonder seems distant, if not entirely gone. The Internet, with its unblinking capacity to record, debunk, and explain, has driven much of the weird to the cultural margins. Cell phone cameras are everywhere and the lack of blurry, ambiguous evidence speaks louder than all the old rumors ever did. Of course, being middle-aged hasn’t helped my credulity either. I’m more skeptical now, more prone to roll my eyes than widen them, but I still feel a twinge of wistfulness. There was a magic in those stories – the giddy unease, the delighted fear, the sense that the world might be stranger than it appeared and that something astonishing might be hiding in plain sight.

I don’t miss the bad haircuts or the shag carpeting, but I do miss that feeling, that delicious tension between belief and disbelief, the sense of possibility that once seemed to shimmer in the air. Maybe that’s why, even after more than forty years, I’m still rolling dice and spinning yarns of my own. I’m chasing that feeling, the thrill of stepping into the unknown, of turning the corner and finding that the world is bigger, weirder, and more mysterious than we’d dared to imagine.

On a superstitious day like today, I try to remember what it felt like to believe – not entirely, but just enough to wonder.