As any Halo fan will tell you, every Halo game has a lot more to it than just gunfights with aliens. One of the deepest aspects to Halo is its Easter Eggs, and the series has played host to several widely known Easter Eggs, both legendary and infamous. However, there is a specific category of Easter Egg that particularly peaks my interest, and that is creepy Easter Eggs that are there to freak players out. Bungie didn’t hold back when it comes to secrets to hunt down in the Halo campaigns, and thanks to their love of all things mysterious and (at times) bizarre, Halo boasts a wide variety of really weird things to find if you take the time to look hard enough.

10 – Hidden Marine on 343 Guilty Spark

If you thought the insane screaming Marine that you find inside the Forerunner structure was bad enough, you are not prepared for this guy. He can be found using a glitch whereby spamming the grenade button at the start of the mission 343 Guilty Spark will prompt Chief to forget to get out of the Pelican, allowing you to ride it outside the level boundaries until it lands in an indent. You can then dismount and after about a minute of walking you will come across this poor soul, with his head planted firmly against a tree. If you aren’t paying attention and then you turn around and see him it can be quite startling. In the classic graphics its even spookier, as the trees are not there and he instead slowly appears out of the shadows as you approach, standing and staring but saying absolutely nothing.

9 – Standoff Dish Operator

This Easter Egg is so tiny that its almost impossible to notice unless you’re looking for it. But on the map Standoff in Halo 3, if you zoom in really close to the Radio Telescope that is closest to you with a Sniper Rifle or Beam Rifle scope, you can find this man – he cannot be killed, or interacted with in any way, and he is apparently a joke inserted by the programmer who rendered the model for the dish, the Halo wiki rather simply and rather spookily states: “This man is Travis Brady”, whoever he is. The reason why he is particularly creepy is that he just stands there – no matter how long you stand there looking at him, he will stand and stare right back at you. And he doesn’t even have a scope to see you properly, but he knows you’re there.
Interestingly enough, this map has another real person’s face utilised for the skybox texture as the man in the moon, so clearly the designers had quite a bit of fun designing Standoff.

8 – Megg Easter Egg

Megg is an Easter Egg that involves performing a very specific set of steps on the first mission of Halo: Combat Evolved on Legendary, including jumping on and off a yellow barrel and murdering Captain Keyes. Once you find the Easter Egg however, you will be filled with pride at knowing that you sacrificed humanity’s best hope for survival to get a look at a letter ‘M’ made out of blood splatters and bullet holes. Seriously though, why is this here? It seems very incongruous, and quite creepy if you think about it – perhaps there is a violent murder loose about the Pillar of Autumn, and the letter ‘M’ is his calling card? Who knows…

This Easter Egg is referenced in a similarly complicated trial in Cairo Station, the first mission of Halo 2, as if the player manages to complete the mission without taking a single hit on Legendary, they will unlock a hidden announcement from Lord Hood which mentions the elusive Megg.

7 – Skulls

Although the concept of Skulls as objectives or gameplay modifiers is now firmly ingrained into the consciousness of the Halo lexicon thanks to Oddball and the inclusion of the Skulls as Easter Eggs, with many players simply seeing the skulls as game modifiers that are implemented in a fun and intriguing way, but if you think about it, the Skulls are creepy in their own way. They are just lying there, scattered around UNSC bases and Forerunner installations and even the African Savannah and the depths of High Charity, but why? Whose skulls are these? Am I thinking to deeply into this?

6 – Why Am I Here? Easter Egg

It is always fun to find those hidden messages that programmers leave in seemingly random terrain shapes, but this message suggests a deeper meaning that could simply be a Red vs Blue reference but could also be a sign that one of the people working on Halo 2 really didn’t want to be at his desk that day. Considering the nightmare development that Halo 2 had, I don’t blame him, but in-universe this message represents the possible last words of a former occupant of Beaver Creek, who was trapped there and scrawled his last message before his body was consumed by nature.

5 – Cortana on High Ground

This Easter Egg is prevalent throughout several missions of Halo 3, but is most prominent on the multiplayer map High Ground. If one stares long enough at the live security camera footage of a hangar in Crows Nest that can be found on all portable UNSC computers in Halo 3, eventually an image of Cortana staring blankly at the player will appear for a few seconds. Creepily, if one uses theatre mode to observe a control panel in a game that is in progress, you can see that Cortana does this every so often whether players are looking or not. That means that every time you play Halo 3 near a UNSC computer, Cortana can periodically drop in to take a look at what you’re up to…

4 – Microsoft SAM Easter Egg

This is a funny but still rather creepy Easter Egg that can be found in The Covenant in Halo 3. To find this Easter Egg, one must start the level on Normal or higher from the beginning and take a Hornet to the end of the outer rail of the Citadel on the left hand side. Going to the right hand side will trigger the song ‘Siege of Madrigal’ to play, a whole different Egg entirely. When you reach the end of the prong, wait about 2 or 3 minutes and eventually, out of nowhere, the voice of Microsoft SAM will breathe down your neck, saying:

Sam: "OMG (Oh My God) this game needs more guitar wank. Am I right?"

Sam: "Happy Easter Marty."

Sam: "I am a monument to all Marty's sins lololol."

Sam: "J and C Paul, you are so totally fired."

3 – Halo: Reach Radio Conversations

Throughout Halo: Reach, in both campaign and multiplayer, the player constantly encounters these tiny radios that often loop nothing but static – although some of them contain hidden messages or conversations. Most of them are fairly routine, some are calls for help, some are military personnel giving orders, and some are even just casual conversations about zombie plans. What makes this Easter Egg really creepy, though, is the thought that in several hours from when the game is set, every voice you hear on the radio represents the voice of someone who dies on Reach…

2 – The Halo 3 Cavemen

As strange as it may seem, Halo 3 has a resident population of cavemen. Each of the diminutive monkey people has the face of Marcus R. Lehto, the former Creative Arts Director of Bungie Studios who left in 2012. This Egg is as confusing as it is disturbing – where did the monkey men come from? Why do they have a bear? Why is the largest member of the family holding the bear, and why is it bigger than the smallest child? Most importantly, in the final cutscene of Halo 3: ODST, why does Edward Buck pick an insect off one of these creatures and eat it before your very eyes?

1 – Reversed Messages in the Soundtrack

We have already published an entire list on how good Halo’s soundtrack is, but one aspect of it that wasn’t mentioned in that list was the Hidden Messages that can be found within certain songs of the soundtrack. Halo 2 has ‘Destroyer’s Invocation’, the first movement of the ‘Mausoleum Suite’ ,which has a very deep and underlying guttural vocal melody that is totally indecipherable unless played backwards. If you are able to listen to the song backwards, the voice is revealed to be possibly that of Mendicant Bias, an A.I. trapped within High Charity. Regardless, the voice says as follows:

“…I have walked among men and angels for three thousand years.

Time has no end… no beginning… no purpose.

I wander the earth, seeking forgiveness for my horrible crimes against God and man.

I live to see death and destruction, evil… over the light, but the light cannot be extinguished.

I live in a prison of my own demise.

I am lost…in time.”

Halo 3 has ‘Black Tower’, there is another reversed message that appears to frequently reference T.S. Elliot’s The Hollow Men, which is interesting since several aspects of Halo 3’s marketing campaign also referenced that poem. The backwards messages appear to say:“Eyes from Death’s dream kingdom, Appear as sunlight on a broken column. There in Death’s other kingdom walking alone, Trembling lips form prayers to broken stone.In death’s dream kingdom. These do not appear: There, the eyes are sunlight on a broken column, Waking alone at the hour when we are, Trembling with tenderness, Lips that would kiss, Form prayers to broken stone.”

Finally, ‘Dread Intrusion’ from Halo 3 has perhaps the most interesting reversed message of them all, since this message seems to attempt to give us an insight into what goes on inside the minds of the Flood as they further their onslaught:“Side by side, we march as one, Humans and Elites will die, The Earth will fall if we strike together, So forth shall all of life.”

So what are your thoughts?

What did you think of this list? Do you agree? If you can think of any other spooky Halo Easter Eggs, feel free to leave them in the comments, and look down below for more Halo related content!

Doctor Who has a reputation for terrifying children and adults alike for decades, and holds a special place in the hearts of many as a show that can dish out a surprisingly diverse array of horrific creatures for a BBC family-orientated TV show. But for all the creepy creatures that have graced our screens since Doctor Who first aired in 1963 there are but a select few that continue to scare me even to this day. And what better time to showcase these frightful fiends than the spookiest day of the year! So let’s get started:

Number 5 – The Weeping Angels

No list of scariest Doctor Who monsters would be complete without Moffat’s Lonely Assassins, who’s debut episode Blink is now considered to be one of the scariest (and also one of the best) episodes of Doctor Who of all time. Had that been their only appearance, the Weeping Angels might have ranked a bit higher on this list, since their frightful abilities and ominous presence made them the perfect standalone villain for a particularly unorthodox episode. Their only drawback is that with frequent reappearances the fear factor of the Angels has been reduced somewhat, particularly due to the fact that their abilities seemed to change from appearance to appearance. Moffaaaat!

Number 4 – The Silents

I promise this will be the last Moffat monster. Maybe. Despite their confusing arc that baffled fans for the majority of Matt Smith’s run, the Silents (Silence? Silents?) have to make this list simply because I have vivid memories of the aftermath of seeing The Impossible Astronaut – The Silents made an impact on me, that much is certain. I was staying at a family friend’s house at the time, and the unfamiliar environment I was in coupled with the Silent’s unique memory-altering traits meant that I was doubting myself for days, and constantly doing double-takes to see if I had actually caught a glimpse of one of the creepy-looking creatures in a mirror or down a dark corridor. So the Silents did exactly what a scary Doctor Who monster should do – they left a lasting impression.

Number 3 – The Mondasian Cybermen

This may be a slightly odd entry given that this is a monster from the 1960s, but I have always found the Mondasian Cybermen creepy as heck. Even though its pretty obvious that the costumes are made of cloth and plastic, there’s just something about the faces of these original Cybermen that makes them scarier than all of the other variants – personally I find the soulless, staring blank eyes and the perpetually expressionless mouth to be sinister enough, but when they talk, they don’t even move their mouths – it just opens. And then there’s the way they actually talk – their monotonous voices are just a little less robotic than later versions of the Cybermen, and yet the way they put emphasis on the wrong words in every sentence really makes it seem as though these creatures are no longer human. They may toe the line between scary and ludicrous, but after some suspension of disbelief they are perfectly chilling.

Number 2 – The Empty Child

I couldn’t do it, I know that’s the third Moffat monster on this list, but what can I say? The man knows how to scare people, and there aren’t many Doctor Who episodes scarier than the 2005 two-parter The Empty Child and The Doctor Dances. In fact I often consider these two episodes to be the scariest episodes of Doctor Who of all time – this may seem confusing since the child himself is only second on the list, but I’ll explain later. Undoubtedly the creepiest thing about the Empty Child is the purported innocence with which he goes about on his killing spree – not only does he appear as a desperate child crying out for his mother, he also possesses the ability to manipulate seemingly innocent household objects to broadcast his cries for help, creating a truly chilling scene in which the Doctor is accosted on all sides by the child’s whimpering calls – all whilst the Empty Child’s silhouette lingers at the window. This, coupled with the iconic World War II setting, makes The Empty Child and The Doctor Dances truly spooky.

Honourable Mention: The Clockwork Robots

These guys are creepy, there’s no denying that. Again, another Moffat villain, but the Clockwork Robots, scary though they are, seem to me to be a slight re-invention of a classic Doctor Who monster that, to me, could be the scariest monster of all time, and that is…

Number 1 – The Autons

Well I did say could be the scariest, and I mean that literally – the Autons could well be the scariest monster Doctor Who has produced, it’s just that they’ve never really been used effectively in that way in the handful of episodes in which they have appeared, either in NuWho or Classic Who. And yes, there are a few token scenes in Doctor Who in which the Autons do have some pretty chilling moments – the horrendous plastic doll assassin created by the Master in Terror of the Autons springs immediately to mind, as does a brief scene in Rose. Interestingly enough, this scene in Rose is almost exactly what I would want from an episode that used the Autons properly, since they are doing what they do best – being disguised as plastic shop dummies and doing generally creepy things. For me, nothing is creepier than a mannequin and the Autons are basically just mannequins that are alive, evil, and are very good at staying still when you’re looking. In a way the Autons need to be almost like a cross between the Clockwork Robots and the Weeping Angels – able to blend in to their environment, stand stock-still to avoid detection, and then striking with robotic and merciless efficiency. If an episode of Doctor Who could write the Autons in this way and truly seize their creepy potential, then it could well be one of the creepiest episodes of the show to date.

So there we have it, the spookiest of the spookiest that the pantheon of Doctor Who monsters has to offer – and yes, there are dozens of other scary creatures that didn’t make this list, either because I don’t find them as scary as other people do or because I find other monsters scarier. Indeed, there are many Doctor Who monsters that do not appear that scary on the surface but, if you think about it, are actually quite horrifying. The good news there is that there is no shortage of scary episodes to enjoy on Halloween!