He Warned You
“When I was about 10, my family and I took a rare vacation to Atlanta and stayed in a budget hotel. Dad checked in, got the key, and we all filed into the room from the car.
As soon as we get in the room, Dad tells us kids, “Now, kids, there’s a woman downstairs checking in who has elephantiasis of the face.”
He proceeded to describe in vivid detail about how distorted her face was. “I’m telling you this so you won’t freak out if you see her. She can’t help it, and I don’t want you to hurt her feelings.” Which, I suppose, is a good way of getting in front of an awkward situation, but it had the effect of sending my 10-year-old mind reeling as to what she would look like.
Naturally, I was sent to go get something from the car. Which I did. I got back to our room, knocked to be let back in, and nothing happened. I knocked again, frantically this time. Nothing happened. I started to panic, thinking that I had the wrong room.
I started running up and down the balcony, calling out for my folks at the doors. I came to the end, which led to the stairs leading down, and saw the woman my dad described sitting on the ground. She smiled and waved.
Now, I’d already had this construct in my head about how this woman looked. In retrospect, she didn’t look THAT disfigured. But to a 10-year-old mind that was already on the edge and panicky over having lost an entire family in an unfamiliar place, I froze and screamed at the top of my lungs Macaulay Culkin style. My older brother finally poked his head out of one of the rooms, saw the scene, and hurriedly grabbed me and pulled me back in the room.
Not so much creepy in retrospect as I probably just ended up making a disabled person feel worse. But for a dumb kid like me, it might as well have been The Shining.”
Story credit: Reddit / Arch_Radish