Being a show that is about ghosts, demons, aliens and even a werewolf, this is BOUND to have some pants wettingly terrifying moments!
General
Season 1
- The very first episode of Season 1 has two fairly effective jump scares, the first being the white face in the window in the "Emily" case and the second being the no-face girl turning her face around to reveal the hole in her face. What makes them so effective is that you expect them to happen.
- "The Poltergeist" (S1 E3) features a ghost that tries to burn down a house, in a planned and methodical way, as part of revenge on an entire family because its patriarch broke a small cat statue.
- The spirit kills two litters of kittens born to the daughter's cats, making them progressively sicker and weaker until they die, one by one, while the family can only watch helplessly. For any viewer who is a pet owner (or just an animal lover), the thought of sweet, innocent baby cats suffering a slow, drawn-out, inexplicable death from an invisible killer that you cannot stop (or even begin to comprehend) is not only a Tear Jerker, but the stuff of nightmares.
- Think the ghosts, unseen aliens, and demons are the only scary things out there? Season 1 Episode 3's "Watched in the Wilderness" will prove you dead wrong. The witness soon realizes the Bigfoot he sighted earlier is actually hunting him. Cue a grueling chase for hours across an increasingly darkening forest as the sun starts to set, with the primate-monster shattering trees in its path with its bare hands to get at its target. By the end, a former Marine and trained, armed police officer is left a shaking, screaming wreck by the experience.
- What makes it worse is the fact that the Sasquatch is otherwise completely mundane. No supernatural powers, no fantastic abilities; just a very smart, very powerful, and very dangerous predator who's great enough in all those categories to see humans as prey. The officer gets away by the skin of his teeth, and immediately tells his superior, who informs him he's hardly the first sighting.
- "The Haunting of Mansfield Mansion" (S1 E4) features a couple and their infant son. Bubba, moving into a house, like the usual story starts off. After putting their baby to sleep in the nursery, the couple goes to make dinner; the baby monitor starts playing a very shrill tune of "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star", despite them not owning any toys that play that song. All of a sudden, the monitor screams "BUBBA!", and the baby begins crying hysterically.
Season 2
- Season 2 had an episode centering around the terrifying Dybbuk creature, which seems to be capable of anything from inducing strokes to attacking people in their dreams, and most commonly it is somehow bound to boxes. And of course the episode ends on a cliffhanger, showing the Dybbuk Box shaking in its confined area.
- The "werewolf" episode ("The Cabin"), which starts with a woman in her home at night looking out the window to see a poorly illuminated, creepy old man face with glowing yellow eyes staring back at her. At the end of the episode, her husband and some friends also find a shack out in the woods. The back room has its walls and floor plated in metal, which has claw marks carved into it, and chains on the wall that were clearly used to restrain something.
Season 3
- One of the scariest... things in the entire show is the demon from "The Long Island Terror". It all starts after a family of three — a mom and two daughters — moving into an old house (sound familiar?) because they lost their father/husband in a fire and were trying to escape from the media. Needless to say, they soon regretted it. It all started when they found a bunch of weird symbols - that some of the viewers recognize as being pagan symbols and pentagrams, clear signs of demonic activity - and then things just start going downhill... And the episode ends on a cliffhanger note, with the demon staring — or rather glaring — at the family as they have a snowball fight, giving the impression that he is still out there...
- Season 3 Episode 4 is basically From Bad to Worse, the episode. First a ghostly figure with no eyes, just empty voids, usually what the episode builds up to, and we're starting with it. Then banging inside the walls, the cash register being possessed to basically explode. Then the things getting thrown around with the blatant intent to harm people, a ghost intent on horrifying the living daylights out of people for its own sake, the strange candle incident and the sudden, out of nowhere chasing of the owner and banging on the door...yeesh.
- Season 3 Episode 5: You're probably used to "faith prevails" endings, where cleansings and spirituality chase the evil being out, right? Well, in this case, the cleansing...just pisses it off. It manages to collapse a whole section of ceiling on the husband, freaks out a boy with its disturbing form, and even harasses the girls in a terrifyingly rapey way. In many ways, the Demon is the worst of Randall Flagg, even (inferred to) burning down the house afterward.
- The second werewolf-themed episode, titled "The Wolf Pack" (S3 E9) has a family intrude upon a den of some sort. When night falls, the family finds themselves being trapped in their home, terrorized by not one werewolf, but an entire pack of them.
- "The Visitors" (S3 E17) is similar to Episode 5, with a man being tormented by tiny imps after accidentally walking in on an exorcism, apparently getting the evil transferred to him. The ending says he got two exorcisms to fix his problems. Neither worked, and he has yet to free himself.
- The Angel of Death, which is portrayed as a big, black, gooey monster with a skull for a face. Bonus points for the I.T. technician and orderly who experienced it and weren't even sick along with the old man Derrell whom was attacked by it but it was unseen by the others in the room.
- If one is familiar with Marvel comics, one would notice the Angel heavily resembles The Void in form, nature, and proclivities - enjoying sadistically tormenting people instead of "just" taking their lives, the gaseous / ooze-like form, the skull face...it all elevates the Angel from merely a part of the order of things to a truly horrid creature.
- Season 3 Episode Eighteen: The Harpy. From disguising itself as a little girl spirit, well enough to fool a psychic, to its various mutilations, how it "plays" with the bear dolls, and its strongly implied attacks on the baby, to how horribly it menaces and slashes into the husband, there's no real reason for it to do half of what it did. There is no explanation offered for the spirit living in that house, and none given at the end. How it slashed into the bags in the ceiling resulting in "I want to play" slipping into "PLAY PLAY PLAY PLAY" was the last note nightmare to end one of the most horrifying episodes recently.
