Years before girls were swooning over Twilight and seriously debating werewolves vs. vampires, this mentally unstable psycho delightful and charming young woman was living as a real-life vampire. Like “cut her friends with a razor blade and suck their blood” vampire.

You may have noticed this month that we at CC are huge fans of Halloween. But as much as we love spooky costumes and scary movies, there are some things that are so mind-numbingly frightening that they chill us to our very souls. Things that are sure to strike fear into the heart of anyone who has one.

Click through if you dare…

AHHHHHHH!

Happy Halloween, CollegeCandies! Dress up, drink up and have a spook-tacular time this weekend!

But All Hallow’s Eve isn’t just about costumes and candy—there’s been a lot of seriously scary stuff happening this week. And yes, technically it was the last week of September and only the first few days of October… but just go with my metaphor. Among the frightening things we’ve written about in the past seven days:

- Spencer and Heidi are buying a house together, probably so that they’ll have a place to raise a litter of devil-spawn with flesh-colored beards and fake boobs.

- Speaking of fake boobs, girls from “Rock of Love Bus” make $1,500 just for showing up at parties.

- The length of the school year might get extended. I’m shuddering just thinking about it.

- In my three-plus years of college, I’ve probably had every single one of these awful professors.

- The scary smart kids at Caltech and MIT, who might accidentally kill us all with a wacky prank gone wrong…

- … unless they all get Type Geek Diabetes first.

- Tufts outlawing having sex while your roommate’s in your room, which isn’t scary in itself but will lead to some seriously horrifying conversations between Tufts students and their parents.

- Guys who do nothing but eat chicken nuggets while watching football, playing poker, and quoting “Old School.”

- Going through the nail-biting experience of wondering if he, like, likes you likes you.

- Everything about this post, which makes me want to vomit in terror.

- And most frightening of all: you only have three more days to win a laptop from CC!

Sesame Street is no longer safe for kids.In a hilarious New York Times article, Virginia Heffernan jokes about the very real warning on the DVD for volumes 1 and 2 of Sesame Street: “These early ‘Sesame Street’ episodes are intended for grown-ups, and may not suit the needs of today’s preschool child.”

After subjecting herself and friends to an “all-ages” screening of the 1970’s version of the kids show, Heffernan bemoaned the “damage” the show’s gritty early years caused her psyche.

“The show rolled, and the sweet trauma came flooding back. What they did to us was hard-core. Man, was that scene rough. The masonry on the dingy brownstone at 123 Sesame Street, where the closeted Ernie and Bert shared a dismal basement apartment, was deteriorating. Cookie Monster was on a fast track to diabetes. Oscar’s depression was untreated. Prozacky Elmo didn’t exist.”

Even though I was nothing but a faraway dream in the 70’s, I remember tuning into Sesame Street during my early years, somewhere around 1986. While I’m pretty sure Elmo had been ‘born’ by then, the images my pre-school eyes witnessed were not the saccharin filled pictures that flood PBS today.

Heffernan’s Sesame Street may have been gritty, but mine was terrifying.

First of all, does anyone remember the segments that featured a giant, fang-bearing blue wolf? (if not, check out the horror here) Whenever this wolf came on the screen, my brother and I would scream and run from the living room. I was petrified, and to this day my bro swears he used to have night terrors that revolved around “a big blue snout pushing open [his] closet door”.

Second, the Cookie Monster of my youth was not the put-together guy he is now. That growly voice, those googly eyes that just wouldn’t stop rolling, and an insatiable appetite, combined to make the perfect mixture for nightmares. I mean, if there was a monster living under my bed, I was pretty sure it looked and acted like Cookie Monster—except cookies were replaced with the desire for human flesh.

Thirdly, and most scarringly, was the segment I came to tearfully call “the scary aliens”. To this day, the palpable, body-numbing fear of seeing this segment is still one of the strongest childhood memories I have. Looking back, it makes perfect sense why trippy muppets that were all mouth and no body scared the bejeezus out of me. They flew around, had loud and uncontrolled voices, and stared at things with giant, unfocused eyes. Coked-out monsters who could hover. Frightening.

I don’t tune into Sesame Street anymore (I’ve got more mature things to watch. Like SpongeBob), but considering the “nobody-loses-and-we’re-all-so-special” society we live in today, I’m pretty sure the psychedelic, freaky episodes of my youth have been done away with.

Too bad the memories will never die.

What about you? Did you parents accidentally scare you for life by plunking you in front of good, quality children’s television? Let’s commiserate.

Okay, I think we can all agree that Carrot Top, even when he first popped up in Hollywood, was no Justin Timberlake. He wasn’t even a Screech.

But he also wasn’t appearing in my nightmares, either, waking me up in a cold, cold sweat, like he is now.

I know we here at College Candy have mentioned the ginger-kid “comic” before (and that was one too many times) but seriously, DOUBLE-YOU-TEE-EFF?!

What the CRAP is this?!?!? There are so many things going wrong with this man, that I’m about to fall over and have a brain aneurysm:

1. The hair. We get it. Big, poofy, curly orange hair. It’s your thing, it’s your gimmick. It’s bad.

2. The eyebrows. The dyed black eyebrows. Orange eyebrows would have been better than this.

3. The mesh tank top. Mesh tank tops should never be worn, under any circumstances. Especially this circumstance.

4. The…muscles? Do these things even qualify as biceps? They are mutant-like and asymmetrical.

5. The “Carrot Top” patch on his jeans. Blegh.

The weirdest thing (and weirder than the obvious plastic surgery) is that there are celebrities everywhere that actually resemble Carrot Top, and I’m not the first one to notice:

Danny Bonaduce!

Shawn White!

Joan Rivers!

After checking him out on IMDB, it seems like Scott Thompson has little on his professional horizon. He was, however, slammed pretty bad at Flavor Flav’s VH1 Roast. Kinda feel bad, but if he’s gonna go out in public looking like a gargoyle, he’s got it coming.

Oh yeah, there’s one more thing about Carrot Top I forgot to mention…

He’s Fergalicious!

She won’t look at pictures of him, runs from the room if he happens to come on TV, and refuses to even say his name.

She won’t explain her fear, just whisperes that “him and a ventriloquist doll are two the scariest things you could ever see at the foot of your bed in the middle of the night.”

While my phobia is not as rampart as hers, I completely understand the fear.

The dude was weird looking even before he started on the ‘roids, but now that he’s jacked, he barely resembles a human.

Something is seriously wrong with his face, but it’s hard to tell what.

Did he get weird plastic surgery? Did the steroids melt his features a little?

Is he transitioning into a giant, muscular woman?

I hear he’s big in Vegas, which can only mean one of two things; A) people who are drunk and have lost all their money to slot machines go see him in an attempt to put themselves out of their misery, or B) they like freaks.

Are you one of those Carrot Top loving individuals? Or does he terrify you into peeing yourself?

“The first step to meeting men is eye contact. Just one little lingering look can start an entire adventure…”

Yes, well, sure. Eye contact is always the perfect way to let a guy know that you’re interested.

If you can do it.

Now, maybe this seemingly simple task is almost impossible for me because I don’t wear my glasses when I’m out, therefore making it sort of hard to tell if a guy over three feet away is actually looking back—but I think there’s more too it. I think eye contact is actually much scarier than those dating websites would have us believe.

Writing about doing it is easy. I can type about it till I’m blue in the face, advising everyone to totally lock eyes with a boy on the subway, in a bar, walking down the street…it let’s them know you’re interested! It’s a good way to flirt!

But for some reason, putting it into practice is hard. I’m not the shiest person you’ve ever met, but if I think a guy’s cute, it’s really difficult to look him square in the face and smile. I’d much rather look at whatever’s directly above and to the left of him; that way, I can take little peeks without him knowing.

I’m fully aware that this habit of looking-when-he’s-not is counterintuitive and lame, but staring at a hot boy makes me anxious. Why? Maybe because I’m afraid of the reaction he’ll give back. Maybe I’m afraid of seeming too forward? Maybe I’m just chicken shit.

But it totally freaks me out.

Are there other people out there who find flirty glances nerve wracking? Should I just grow a pair and get with the program? Is the fear of eye contact a secret, underground epidemic?

In the meanwhile, I’ll keep staring at the top of hot guys’ heads everywhere.