The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim/Nightmare Fuel

• The introduction, where the Imperials force you to lay your head down for the axe and come face-to-face with a warm and fresh head that they couldn't bother to throw away.
  • The worst part is they didn't even make the effort to kick the guy's body away afterwards. You're basically on top of a headless corpse, preparing to be executed. You even may realize you were thought to be with the Stormcloaks for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
• "The House of Horrors" is a very aptly named quest. It starts simple enough: you're exploring Markarth one day when a Vigilant of Stendarr named Tyrannus approaches you for assistance with investigating a house where Daedra worshipping has been reported to be taking place. Easy, right. Wrong. DEAD WRONG. As you and Tyrannus go deeper in the house, furniture starts to move by itself, shifting around in patterns which begins to put Tyrannus on edge. It gets worse and worse until you get deep into the house where Tyrannus realizes that the house is home to no ordinary Daedra and tries to flee with you. All the while, a seriously creepy monotone voice seems to echo from the house itself, ordering you kill Tyrannus due to him being perceived as weak, with him snapping out of terror and trying to kill you after realizing you're locked in. Once you've killed Tyrannus, you're order to go down to the house's basement and claim a prize. When you go to grab a rather wicked looking maze, you get trapped by none other than the King of Rape himself, Molag-Bal and held at his mercy! He agrees to let you live however if you find a Boethiah worshipper who has been defiling his altar, and gets you to lure him into getting trapped, and are commanded to beat him with the terrifying mace until he submits. You basically beat him to death while the man pleads with you, which is already nightmarish in itself, but with the added bonus of Molag-Bal keeping him from dying causing you to have to beat his health down all over again! All in all, it's safe to say that Molag-Bal has successfully graduated from a Jerkass in Oblivion to a borderline Complete Monster here.
• The Frostbite Spiders. Few things are more terrifying than entering a room covered in spider web, and having a truck-sized spider drop from the ceiling.
  • In an early quest, you have to save a guy trapped in a web by one these spiders. If you run out of the room, the spider can't reach you, and goes for the trapped man. And you hear him screaming for help. Of course, he kind of deserves it, as if you cut him free he'll just laugh at you, taunt you about not sharing the treasure, and run away.
  • Redbelly Mine. The good news: The mine has three deposits where you can mine precious ebony. The bad news: A bunch of spiders have moved in and called the place home. And even though you clear them out in one mission, they respawn. Have fun.
  • Usually in spider nests you can find "Dessicated Corpses". Now you probably know how spiders feed, and the faces on the corpses imply they were still alive while this happened...
  • One bandit filled dungeon has what can only be described as a walking middle finger towards all arachnophobes: you're in a Nordic ruin that is infested with bandits as described earlier. There's a door you can go through that when you open, you suddenly find yourself face-to-face with a hideous, bloated, over-sized spider that had no foreshadowing or buildup whatsoever. Dick move, Bethesda! Dick move...
• In the Dark Brotherhood quest "Whispers In The Dark", you hide in the Night Mother's coffin to overhear Cicero's conversation with her. You listen to his ramblings in complete darkness, your body pressed up against the desiccated body inches from your face... which suddenly glows red and starts whispering to you!
  • If that's not enough, you fall out of the coffin after the Night Mother talks to you. Cicero flips out and almost tries to kill you before he's calmed down. Yikes.
    • This one's slightly meta, but no less creepy. During the sacking of the sanctuary, you have to climb into the coffin again to avoid the fire. As it's thrown through the glass door and into the grotto, it begins to sink, and the Night Mother whispers "Sleep..." a common bug makes it very likely for your game to crash right at that moment, making those words quite chilling indeed.
• SOUL GEMS. It's revealed during Azura's quest that the souls trapped in them are still conscious. Let that sink in for a second. That black soul gem you just filled? That bandit inside is screaming forever. Or at least until you take his still sentient soul and use it to recharge your staff... though in the case of the Thalmor or other such terrible people, they completely deserve it.
  • More Azura's quest HONF: In the room where you find the damaged Azura's Star, there is also the lifeless skeletons of its previous owner and several disciples sprawled in disarray. Check the shadows on the wall...
  • It later turns out the owner is still alive, in the Star...but he needs other souls to stay that way. By the way, his followers have been kidnapping random travellers or citizens from nearby towns and discuss which of their junior members are more expendable. Suffice to say that when you're dropped into the gem, the owner is relieved because he was getting hungry...
• Frostflow Lighthouse is quite the terrifying place, and it's already apparent that something's wrong with the place when you find two recently slaughtered horses outside the lighthouse. Just entering the house confirms it: a woman is found slaughtered, the entire living quarters are trashed, and a corpse of a rather terrifying large arthropod called a Chaurus is lying nearby. And from the lighthouses' basement? You can hear more of them scurrying, scuttling beneath as they wait for more prey to sink their pincers in... and as you go deeper, you find tons of them hanging around, with an absolutely enormous one serving as the area's boss.
  • Your "Reward" for slaying that beast? Habd's (The owner of the lighthouse) Remains, which are taken right out of the creature's corpse. They seem to be the only undigested parts of Habd still there.
    • If you take the remains up to the top of the lighthouse and use the flame, you cremate him and get a permanent +10% to healing from Restoration spells. So it's not as bad as it seems, reward-wise.
  • If you've already encountered Chauruses (Chauri?) at this point, Frostflow is terrifying for another reason: Holy shit, they're coming to the surface.
    • Coming, nothing, they're already up there. You can find the occasional solitary Chaurus sometimes in Hjaalmarch and Haafingar, usually at night, ripping into the local wildlife. Possibly to take back to their nests...
    • And it doesn't help that the larger Chauruses look suspiciously like another kind of Reaper, only shrunk (barely) to melee-combat size.
• The Charruses' masters, the Falmer, are basically fantasy-morlocks and fit the trope up to the story of their creation. Added to that, they hate every being living on the surface and want to wipe them out. Also, don't forget that those things were once mer...
  • And you know how they got that way? After trying and failing to wipe out the Nords, the humans turned things around and started to slay them to a man, woman and child. In desperation, the Falmer went to the xenophobic, supremacist Dwemer. At first, the Snow Elves and the Dwemer got along. But then the Dwemer suddenly pulled a Face Heel Turn and forced the Snow Elves into slavery. Left in pens, force-fed poisonous fungi and tortured and killed in truly diabolical ways. They rose up and were in the middle of fighting the Dwemer - perhaps winning - when the Dwemer vanished. A blind race of degenerate slaves defeated the most technologically advanced race in Tamriel's history. A CMOA for the Falmer...until they started to go after everyone else.
  • On one of the trade roads, you can find a wrecked cart and the corpse of its driver. Nothing new, right? After all, Skyrim's full of bandits and rebels and whatnot. Except what's sticking out of the driver is a Falmer Arrow. They're here, on the surface, hunting people. And if you've spent a lot of time in old Dwemer ruins and gotten a sense of just how enormous the underworld is, and how many Falmer could be lurking down there, breeding like roaches, the whole civil war consuming Skyrim starts to feel very irrelevant.
  • Black Soul Gems are needed to absorb the souls of sentient beings. Falmer souls do not need Black soul gems. These things literally are not sentient anymore. The Dwemer turned them into feral beasts, who possibly can never be reasoned with.
• The entire backstory of the Thalmor, from their Nazi parallels to the fact that these people were somehow able to hunt down and sadistically murder EVERY SINGLE BLADE, which are made up of the best spies and assassins in Tamriel under employ of the Empire, in Valenwood and Alinor before using their heads as a warning to the Empire before royally kicking the Empire's ass in a devastating war.
  • Reading the dossier on Ulfric Stormcloak in the Thalmor Embassy and realizing that the leader of the Rebellion, one of the most powerful men in the land, and the potential High King of Skyrim could be a patsy for them. And you could could be responsible for indirectly handing Skyrim to them! That he's exceeding their expectations, even to the point he's scaring them, could be either good or even worse.
• Hagravens. Witches who, through some unexplained ritual, transformed themselves into half-woman/half-raven monstrosities who are as powerful as they are horrifying. Implied to be the witch-equivalent of lich-dom, to boot.
  • At one point in the Companions questline, you venture into a small cave populated with a few Hagravens, so you remove the head of one and take it with you. A careless player can often find themselves jumping if they carelessly browse their inventory and stumble upon the grotesque visage of a dead Hagraven.
• During the finale in Sovngarde, when you first enter Alduin's soul-devouring mist, the obvious answer is to use Clear Skies to get rid of it, right? Well, sure, you do that...and get a glimpse of ALDUIN SITTING RIGHT IN FRONT OF YOU, hidden by the mists, just WAITING for you to walk into him before he takes wing and flies off. Of course he doesn't try to attack you, but it's just a bit unsettling to realize that if he wanted to, he could have snapped you up for his dinner and you'd likely be stuck in surprise.
• The quest, The Taste of Death. It starts out innocent enough, the local priest of Arkay (read: undertaker priest) had to close down the Hall of the Dead in Markarth because it seems something has been eating the bodies. He hires you to go look into it. Once you go in you find it has been a woman named Eola. The woman says that you and her are the same and she hires you to clear out a shrine to Namira. You do so. Somewhat disturbing, but nothing scary, right? Well she then tells you to go get the priest who hired you before and bring him back to "sanctify" the shrine. You get him to follow you back and it seems a bunch of other people have shown up, and they seem to be HALF THE POPULATION OF MARKARTH. Some of them you may have even helped out! The shopkeeper who took over her husband's shop? The local butcher? Yep. Cannibals. Then the woman hypnotizes the priest and has you kill him and take the first bite. So, let's see, you killed a priest, became a cannibal, ate the priest, and found out some of the friendly citizens you've been doing quests for are cannibals as well. Markarth just got a lot darker, all of a sudden.
  • Of course, once you realize what's going on, you can kill the cannibals before they hypnotize the priest. If you do so, the person you saved will give you a nice monetary reward. It may not beat the daedric artifact you get otherwise, but at least you won't be a cannibal.
    • Of course playing as a beast race kind of makes this a little murky, but that's a different matter.
      • Considering that you may be playing a race that used to greet people with "the prey approaches" and you may have already been eating people as a werewolf and/or to find out the alchemy effects of human flesh, her assertion that you've blocked out your memories of eating sentient creatures can go from disturbing to silly.
• Speaking of Markarth, the whole situation with the Forsworn Conspiracy is horrifying. Especially Braig's story, which would terrify any parent. It made the Bounty-free rampage throughout Markarth later all the more statisfying, especially being able to kill Thonnar Silver-Blood.
• The Ratway Warrens. Highlights include an insane deaf woman who sits in darkness endlessly repeating a list, a cannibal chef who wants to make a meal of you, and a PTSD suffering ex-Imperial Officer who mentions some horrors that the Thalmor did.

"Their fires lit up the night. All across Lake Rumare, like stars come to earth. It was beautiful, really."

• • Made worse when the Thalmor show up in the Ratway and he absolutely freaks the fuck out at the sight of them.

"No,you cant be here! You're all dead! I already killed you over and over!"

• One that's thankfully easy to miss is found in one of the Dragon Priests' tombs. Said priest was a crazy bastard even by the standards of insane dragon worshippers. He had his followers commit mass suicide so their ghosts could continue to defend the place. The truly disturbing part? He apparently sacrificed children to make this work. You can find an open grave full of small wrapped bodies in the tomb. On the plus side, it makes killing this particular Dragon Priest that much more cathartic.
  • In that same tomb, you find a letter to one of the cultists from said priest. The cultist had an understandable problem with the aforementioned children-sacrificing thing, and the priest had responded by saying that he would take her words into consideration and deliver a reply shortly. The letter is found in the hands of a skeleton, still sitting in a chair, with multiple arrows through the ribcage. The priest was apparently a Bad Boss in addition to being a Complete Monster.
• The Silver Hand group that targets werewolves like the Companions' inner Circle becomes a lot scarier when you notice the leather-making and tanning equipment in their base. Even worse if you agreed to become a werewolf yourself.
• Every step in the murder mystery of Morthal. Especially the part when you play hide-and-seek with a child's ghost. The moment you find her at her grave she recoils in shock because a freaking vampire lady shows up right behind you.
  • And even worse: that child's ghost? In life, evidence implies that her own father killed her and her mother by burning their house to the ground for the sake of wanting to be with a beautiful woman named Alva, and he shows a disturbing lack of concern over their fates. Fortunately, he was enthralled the whole time by Alva who turns out to be a vampire, and she had another vampire named Laelette burn the house. Fittingly, should he survive the quest he's forever disturbed by what happened to him. It's amazing he can still function in day-to-day life after this.
• The Dwemer Ruins, especially the one you visit as part of the main questline and if you never have run into the Falmer before. You go into it finding the remains of what was some sort of expedition investigating the ruin. The campsite is bloodied with a few bones and corpses about. The expedition members are all dead save one insane Kajhit who is raving over the dead body of his brother, talking to him as though he's still alive. As far as you know, these are just the consequences of running into Dwemer automatons unprepared. But as you get deeper, you start noticing things that are out of place. Then you find camps, with burning fires. It's then that I realized something else is here, and it's not mechanical. Then the Falmer show up. They seem to have been eating human flesh and torturing members of the expedition. But they stop showing up once you get in deeper. There is a reason for that. Twelve feet of cold, mechanical reason, blasting steam and swinging a hammer the size of an anvil.
  • The part with the insane Khajit is made worse since it's heavily implied that the Dwemer automatons and the Falmer didn't kill his brother. He killed him because he thought his brother was hiding more skooma from him. It's a more mundane fear -- a junkie murdered his own brother because he wanted another fix.
  • A small stone platform, in the middle of an amphitheater. Rings set in the corners for attaching chains. A lever, activating a whirring blade that rips back and forth across the platform. This is how the Dwemer treated their kin. This is how the Dwemer entertained themselves.
  • The automatons the Dwemer used are also frightening. Not just for the mundane reason that they are scary to face. But the fact that they are seemingly powered by Soul Gems. As we all know, whatever is in a soul gem is implied to be self-aware until the gem is used. Bad enough when you are carried around in a pocket for a few days/months to be used in someone's enchanted weapon. But imagine, if you will, being trapped in a metal contraption, doing the same repetative task again and again for thousands of years. Said task may be killing people who get close to you. I really, really hope that powering an automaton used whatever soul was in there, like an enchanted weapon. Because if not...
    • Don't worry too much; Dwemer Automatons don't drop Black Soul Gems.
      • Not really much better when you realize that killing a Falmer won't fill a Black Soul Gem. The Dwemer turned a sentient race into animals in order to power their cool toys.
      • Dwemer Spiders are said to be built to repair other fallen Dwemer constructs, ranging from the mighty Centurion to other humble Spiders. This includes replacing their Soul Gems when a destroyed automaton is brought back. Not only did the Dwemer devolve a race just to power their toys, they've also invented a machine that can steal souls long after they themselves were extinct.
  • Alftand and Blackreach deserve a special mention. Seeing your standard hack-and-slash fantasy game turn into Survival Horror within minutes is a rather jarring experience. There are almost no potions and absolutely zero consumable food, so you're basically heading in with what you have. Both are populated with Dwarven Spiders, Dwarven Spheres, Falmer, chauri (in both regular and Reaper variants!), Dwarven Centurions, and the occasional insane explorer... all of which are highly, highly aggressive, deal massive damage for their size, and often poison you. But it's not the monsters that are scary. Fighting them is almost a relief, since you at least have a tangible foe to engage. It's the creeping through endless cobwebbed Dwemer ruins, seeing Chaurus eggs and human flesh on the ground, getting hit by traps that deal insane damage, hearing the distant clacking and roaring of machinery (you hope), knowing that you're actively seeking an almost entirely incomprehensible artifact that exists out of time and has driven men blind or mad from merely looking at it... yeah. Basically, it's Dead Space in Tamriel.
    • It gets to the point that you feel like you were playing Resident Evil. Low on supplies, stuff all over that can kill you in one hit, ancient ruins with deathtraps and monstrosities, as well as clever puzzles that can help you along (notice all those convenient oil slicks or the gate that you can close after opening it to trap the Centurion behind it and you safe from it?).
    • And to add to the horror, clearing Alftand can take upwards of five hours, even if you know what you're doing. Sticking around in Blackreach – basically an enormous dungeon half the size of a Hold with dozens of sublevels and buildings – will add another few hours onto that figure. It gets to the point where the "oh my gods am I ever going to get out of here" feeling that the Dovahkiin must surely be experiencing begins to affect you.
    • And don't forget one thing in Blackreach. That orange orb hanging high in the middle of the place? If your curiousity gets the better of you and you use a shout on it, out of nowhere comes a Dragon!
• Due to the coding on some Dragon Shrines, it's possible for their designated spawning dragon to appear alongside a randomly generated one. It's a case where you as a gamer will get this, especially if you're low level and have no follower with you, since two dragons can kill you almost instantaneously unless you're retardedly leveled in defense or healing. This is also different from casual multiple enemy-encounters, as dragons will actively team up to kill you. Woe befall you if you ran out of stamina and didn't save for a long time.
• Slightly meta. Some bandits will collapse and ask mercy when down to low health. Critical hit animations cannot be interrupted once they start. It's entirely possible for the Dragonborn to grab a young woman, half naked women as she screams for mercy and brutally murder her while the player watches helplessly.
  • Of course the bandits never really mean it when they surrender...
  • However this can become nightmarish when fighting alongside friendlies, especially in large fights like during the Civil War questline - it's very easy to accidentally hit a friendly in the melee and initiate a brutal killcam finisher.
• Remember the first time you entered Aventus's house in Windhelm, not knowing anything about his chanting and his Satanic-esque ritual to summon a member of the Dark Brotherhood using the skeleton of his dead mother? Don't tell me you didn't get fucking shivers when you first walked in the door.
  • Well, it kinda helps if you learn about the Black Sacrament via the loading screen tips...
• One of the earliest Companion quests is to sort out a trouble-causing Falmer group in Shimmermist Cave. So I got right to the end, and found the leader. He was in the middle of the room, so I decided to back him up into a corner by using Fus Ro Dah. He slammed into the dark wall... only for the wall to walk forwards and reveal itself to be a huge centurion.
• Sometimes, while you're fighting them, draugr will laugh at you.
• The Dovahkiin is, in his/her own way, pure nightmare fuel. Just imagine that you're sitting in your camp, on watch for a caravan or some roaming monster or a military patrol that might fall upon the home you've carved out. Its the dead of night. Then, coming up the trail, you see a single person, alone. They're wearing nice armor and a nice weapon, but they're by themselves. Easy prey for a dozen bandits, right? That armor and sword will make for a great haul! And even better, they're walking right toward your camp! You call your buddies, and they ready the ambush, and just as you leap out to strike, you hear "FUS RO DAH!" The next few minutes is a horrifying blur as you and your companions throw everything you have at this lone warrior, while lightning and fire and demonic beasts and even a freaking dragon comes swooping in and around you. You companions are being torn apart, blasted to ashes, or decapitated one by one, and this unstoppable warrior just keeps coming, periodically shouting at the top of his/her lungs and moving impossibly fast, striking with terrifying precision, hurling armored warriors through the air like feathers, or just making people keel over and die. And at the end of it all, your camp is in flames, everyone is dead, and this nameless avatar of mayhem is standing before you, and you know, deep in your heart, that you are going to die. That's what eventually happens to every bandit camp the Dragonborn raids.
  • It's even worse if the Dragonborn is using Black Soul Gems.
  • It's made even more horrifying if you and your follower have a full set of daedric armor and weapons. These are so frightening they actually have the in-game ability of boosting your intimidate chance just by wearing them. Imagine in all those situations the individual is replaced by twins clad head to toe in the armor of fabled demons (that's what the daedra have been refered to in lore), their faces completely obscured by the demonic helmets they wear. One of them can fling warriors off of cliffs with a mere shout, and summon dragons to his aid. Depending on your follower, the second demon either hurls fireballs, ice bolts, or lightning strikes at you from a distance, or is a unstoppable glacier of hurt wielding a sword that can possibly suck out your soul. And both can summon legions of animals, mystic beings and even other demons to fight for them. The amount of pants shitting that the guards must feel must be astounding.
• Dragonrend. You're essentially taking mortality, something dragons by their nature can't possibly understand and forcing them to comprehend it. For some perspective, imagine if some Eldritch Abomination forced you to experience the universe as it experiences it. Suddenly you're overwhelmed by sensations and concepts that are so alien to you that not only can you not describe it but your language completely lacks the words to describe it. Then, before you can make sense of what's happening, it's gone. That's what happens to a dragon when you use Dragonrend.
  • Oh, it's not over that quickly. Dragonrend is repeatable, which means you can use it over and over to keep a dragon pinned to the ground, essentially torturing it to death.
  • It isn't quite that bad: dragons do have words to describe the concepts of Dragonrend (both Alduin and Paarthurnax calls you Joor). What dragons can't do is understand the concepts to the point of being able to use it as a Shout, especially not as it applies to themselves. So they're still being forced to experience the universe as an Eldritch Abomination does, they can just recognise the words used to do so.
    • But remember: Alduin and Paarthurnax are both ancient, high-level dragons. They know the word. And yet they still can't fully comprehend it. Imagine being the rank-and-file dragon and suddenly having that shouted at you? Not to mention the historical connotations. This was the word that caused their mighty empire to call. This is the word most of these dragons heard last before they died. Now they are hearing it again.
• Dragon Armor. No, seriously, think about it: Dragons are intelligent, sentient creatures, and are fully capable of feeling fear, disgust, and hatred. A dragon seeing you wearing that stuff would experience roughly the same kind of feelings that you would feel if you were confronted by a demon dressed head to toe in armor made from freshly killed PEOPLE. Wearing that stuff in front of a dragon is like someone wearing your best friend's face, that he ripped off after he killed him.
  • It gets a little less horrifying when most fantasy-type armors tend to have at least one variant where it's completely based on human skulls and bones, and they tend to be badass.
  • With regards to Dragon Armor being Nightmare Fuel to dragons, one who isn't fazed by it is Alduin, who simply remaks "The Dovah are weak!" when he sees you wearing it (Dragon Plate Armor, which requires both Dragon Scales and Dragon Bones) while you fight him at the Throat of the World. Apparently any dragon killed by mortals and turned into pieces of armor like that are deemed unworthy by Alduin.
• I was walking towards Riften for a quest, when I randomly discovered a guard tower, with all the guards dead. There was no explanation, just a few dead guards and some blood. Their was a chest, but it was still locked, and had a couple of garnets in, so whoever killed them wasn't looking for their treasure, so it wasn't bandits. I never got an explanation, and I had to fast travel to Riften, just because I was a low-level character and was scared of whatever had killed them.
  • The note at the top of the tower implies that it might have been an Imperial raiding party that hit and ran from the site not minutes before you got there.
• The Maze of Shalidor. It is in an non-important place in the labyrinthian, and is not connected to any quests. It is basicly a maze where you have to perform one spell from each school of magic. And how's that scary? Well, when you have made all spells, the underground cave, and there is a portal. You step into portal, and are transported to a weird purple circle, where you have to fight a dremora. The real horror, is that there is never any explanation why that thing happened.
  • It is explained in a book. Shalidor made it as a test for potential archmages. Thats why it requires knowledge of all spell schools and enough power to defeat a powerful Daedra to survive it.
• Expanding upon earlier points, whats truly terrifying is what the Dragonborn must look like to the Dragons themselves! This nigh-unstoppable Humanoid Abomination travelling across the land, drenched in the blood of dozens of your fallen brethren who's skin they are now using as armour. They're as fast as you are, strong as you are and should you fall to their hand, your very soul itself will be devoured and consumed by this monster, who will become even stronger. And whats worse, is as far as you know, they are never going to stop until every last one of you is dead! Is it any wonder why the Dragons often attack you on sight?
  • Also, you essentially killed their god, and the only known person who could ressurect them if they were killed by non-Dovahkiin.
    • It must be even worse fo those among the Dragons who know about the Dovahkiin. Since the character has the soul of a dragon, what they see is one of their own hunting them down.
• Listening to Ulfric Stormcloak talk about how he thinks Nords who served in the legions in the war against the Aldmeri Dominion are "strangers with familiar faces". Then he goes on about how Skyrim needs to be purged of those who became weak thanks to Imperial milk. This sounds eerily similar to rhetoric used by Kim Jong Il to justify the isolation of North Korea, as well as to rhetoric used by Adolf Hitler to explain the outcome of World War 1. And then you have to walk up to him and try to give him an axe, knowing that he can probably do FUS! at you.
• Hermaeus Mora has always been really creepy, what with the way all of His artistic renditions have depicted Him as a formless Eldritch Abomination. But in Skyrim, you don't even get that when you meet Him face to face, as it were; what you get instead is this swirling black vortex that appears out of nowhere while you weren't looking, blocks your only exit, and speaks to you in an affable and beguiling voice. Mora's been watching you, and He intends on making you His new emissary, whether you want it or not.
• While you may be expecting it, getting a visit from the courier after you Kill Grelod the Kind and getting this ^{[dead link]} ...Yeah.
• Going into Labyrinthian to get the Staff of Magnus is extremely scary and slightly sad. Seeing what had happened to the group Savos Aren had with him can really get to you.
  • One of the very first things you encounter in the dungeon is a huge skeleton dragon. It just gets worse from there.
  • And don't forget the ultimate boss there, Morokei the Dragon Priest, one of the first of the 8 you will meet. It's even worse that unlike other Dragon Priests, he'll talk to you, mistaking you for Savos Aren. Worst of all, he knows about what happened to Savos' friends, and will sadistically, creepily taunt you with that knowledge as you head deeper inside the ruins.
• More on the Dovakhiin as HONF, when he's "the sneaky type". Picture this: you're a member of a brigand band, a mage group, or even a vampire coven. You've secured for you and your pals a safe place, an abandoned fortress from where you can truly feel safe from the war, the dragons and whatnot. It's nighttime, and you're having a nice dinner inside the fortress. Suddenly, one of your friends barge in, panicked: he says that the fortress is under attack: sentinels are not answering and he swears an arrow missed him as he was doing his watch. You follow him outside: no one. No arrows, no battalion of Stormcloaks or Imperials laying siege, just the fact that the sentinels do not answer your calls. But whatever, I mean, you're BANDITS, not exactly the most trustworthy kind: surely they've dozed off after boozing too much. You go back inside to get some sleep, while your friend -reassured by your advices- resumes his watch. Just as you close the door, a thundering noise erupts and when you open it again, your friend is flying down the cliff. You run inside the fortress and wake up everyone, saying that something's defenitively wrong. And the nightmare begins: members of your group starts dropping like flies everywhere. Some just disappear, some are found stabbed or decapitated, others are still sitting on their chairs, an arrow sticking out of their ear. And still no signs of the attacker. Each time someone hear a noise, he's the next to die. Nothing seems to stop him: locked doors, traps, guards... Even your boss is found dead, stripped from all his gear, three arrows to the head. As the bodycount rises, you're left with a handful of friends, and decide to make a run for it. That's when one of them is struck by an arrow. You flee, but no matter how well they hide or how far they run, the attacker seems to always find a way to track them down and kill them. Eventually, you're all alone, scared and possibly wounded, hiding in the most remote place of the fortress. Suddenly, you hear a childish insult just behind you: as soon as you've turned around, a gloved hand grabs your head and you feel a blade slitting your throat. You die after several hours of merciless manhunt, never knowing what was after you and why he did that.
• Astrid's body at the end of "Death Incarnate" She's burned all over and practically skeletal, and everyone, especially she, knows that she's committed and unforgivable sin (by Sithis's standards, at least) and she has only seconds to live. Alas, Poor Villain, indeed.
• Just imagine yourself as a fresh, greenhorn player and you spend a night breaking-and-entering multiple houses in Windhelm when you stumble across the Butcher's lair, starting the Blood on the Ice quest. You plan to just sneak around town, gank some books and jewelry, maybe pickpocket a few sleeping NPCs, and then laugh your way to the bank. Instead you found a seemingly abandoned house practically painted in blood, and spend the next several minutes creeping around, wondering who the hell lived here and--oh god--what if they're in here with me right now and I just don't know it yet? Fun times.
  • Though once you go through and complete the Blood on Ice quest, the nightmarish information gets straightened out: the Butcher was Calixto Corrium, whom you'll eventually kill and thus put an end to the murders in the process, and the house in question once belonged to Friga Shatter-Shield, who is implied to be one of his victims.
• One of the alchemical ingredients is Human Flesh. To identify the properties of ingredients, you have to eat them. Yeah.
• More Fridge Horror comes up at a couple of unmarked sites on the map, one in the far south in Falkreath and another by a lake in the Reach, where you come across the corpses of women who have been bent over fallen tree trunks. In the former, blood is splattered around her feet, and a group of bandits are nearby. In the other, the naked body has been left there, with a note nearby from the girl in question saying she isn't worried about Forsworn in the area. Both sites are chilling because of the obvious implications.
• One day a messenger delivers to you a letter, which you casually open, only to see a large black handprint and two simple words: We Know.
• Everything else aside, the most horrifying prospect for a Skyrim player? Overwriting your save file.
• A meta example: one of the generic lines people can say to you is "Watch the skies, traveller". Of course, they're talking about dragons, but if you're a Creepypasta fan, well...
• There's this little cottage that you can find up near a mountain. Outside of it are about 4 skeevers. This is a bit odd considering that skeevers are normally found in caves and other underground places. You head inside of the cottage and get attacked by 2-3 more skeevers. After dealing with them, you take a look around. One of the first things you should notice is that the corners are covered in webs, indicating that the place hasn't been attended to in a long time, which means that the skeevers could've came in later. There's not much in the place to take, other than some food and ingredients. You turn your attention to the bed and see the dead body of the owner laying on it. What killed him? Never explained.
  • I assumed it was the Skeevers.
• In the College of Winterhold, there's one mage named Arniel conducting his own secret research on the disappearance of the Dwemer. Through the course of four quests you help him gather materials, including a soul gem intended as a stand-in for the Heart Of Lorkhan that you destroyed in Morrowind, and Keening, the dagger you used to destroy the Heart. Finally, everything's prepared, and Arneil strikes the Not!Heart with Keening. Nothing happens. He applies a little more force in his next strike. Nothing. Fed up, he unleashes the full fury of a mage who thinks all his preparations are for naught. AND HE FREAKING DISAPPEARS. But that's not the worst part. You somehow gain the ability to summon his ghost. All he can utter is a pained groan when summoned. At least, for this troper that's all he could say.
  • Well, when you actually summon him to fight he'll mutter threats to the enemies wishing death and destruction upon them. I guess that's not really any better.

---

Back to The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim