Okay, so I haven't talked about this in a very long time. This happened to me when I was ten or eleven.
My dad had bought us a Scooby-Doo VHS tape of an episode which I can't fully recall. All I can remember that it was about a little girl's ghost haunting a whole town. Our parents didn't go out very much, since my brother suffers from asthma and they were very protective of him, but one night they had this important party thing and decided to call a babysitter.
I remember getting upset and telling them that I was old enough to take care of my brother, but they didn't listen. They left us with this freckly 15-year old neighbor girl called Amanda or something. Before leaving, Dad gave us the tape, which got us pretty excited, as it would be the first time Dad let us use the VHS player. After they left, we all noticed that the tape was kind of weird; the art on the cover looked hand-made somehow. Scooby looked REALLY terrified and the ghost girl was really creepy. I remember Amanda calling my dad a weirdo for buying such a thing for us, but I assume he just picked up the first tape he saw.
I also remember that Amanda didn't want to play the tape, but after my brother and I insisted for almost an hour, we finally sat in front of the TV to watch the thing. The episode itself was kind of boring; there were almost no jokes and it wasn't that scary, but I do remember being surprised that the ghost from the cover didn't look at all like the one in the video. I don't really remember the plot of the episode; I guess it was pretty much the usual, and Amanda would repeat 'stupid show' every five minutes.
Close to the end, when they got the ghost and were about to unmask her, something weird happened. All of the Scooby-Doo gang stopped talking and looked at the camera with a really sad and serious look on their faces. They stared at us for a very long time in silence; even the background music had stopped. The only person not looking at us was the ghost girl, but she suddenly lifted her head and stared at the camera with her terrible eyes wide open. The final credits came abruptly after that. We all stared at the TV without saying a word until the tape finally stopped. We were shocked.
My brother looked at us and said something like, "Shit...I can't believe Shaggy died. This is so fucked up." We both looked at him, confused, and Amanda asked what he was talking about. He insisted that it was stupid to kill a character and then bring him back to life in the next episode. She got really nervous and told him that Shaggy didn't get killed, that the ghost girl disappeared right after they caught her and the episode finished with the whole gang scared to death. Nothing made any sense; I couldn't understand a thing. When I told them what I saw, Amanda freaked out. She said at least ten times that it wasn't funny and left our house, pissed off and, I assume, scared to her bones like we were.
After discussing for at least half an hour, we decided to put the tape in and watch it again. We turned all the lights on and pushed rewind. The thing is, when we got to the part when they get the girl, the episode suddenly ends. Nothing happens. They get the girl and there is no unmasking, no killing, and no staring. It just ends there. We stopped the tape and ran to our room. My brother had an asthma attack and I stayed by his bed crying and praying he wouldn't die. Eventually, we fell asleep. The next morning, my brother started acting like nothing happened. After insisting for about two days, he told me he never wanted to talk about it again, and that was it.
Damn. I think I actually never told anyone about this. It feels good to share it.
{{video|"The Old VHS Tape"}}