I guess I gotta post this fond memory of childhood.
When I was about 7 years old, we all went up to Maine and stayed at my grandma's place which was an old colonial style with a fireplace in just about every room.
Now, my mom is an avid reader and was reading Alien (prolly the last horror-ish book she ever read) and it was very late, like 1:00 am-ish. Most of the house was asleep, including my dad right beside her.
As she reached the part in the book where the alien was making scratching noises in the corridor, she heard a scratching noise from the fireplace. At first, she dismissed it as her mind playing tricks, but then she heard it a second time. After the third time, she decided to wake up my dad.
Armed with nothing but a flashlight and his tighty-whities, he examined the fireplace. Finding nothing, he turned to tell her to go to bed. As he did there was a weird growling noise now accompanying the scratching, growing to a cachaphonous cresendo. Out of no where, the alien dropped from the flu, causing my mom to shriek for a record breaking 20 minutes, my dad to expell "stuff" and the whole house to wake up.
After 30 minutes, Rusty (my grandpa's dalmation) cornered the bandit-looking alien and engaged in a fight to the death. The "alien" (now identified as a raccoon) broke loose from the "fight to the finish" and lept onto the bed, tore across my mom's lap and right into the waiting path of my uncle's 10-guage loaded with rock salt. (Did you know that makes a serious mess out of a hardwood floor???)
I was told that the bed was thrown out due to the acid that the alien had lost as he attempted his escape over the mattress, but we all know what the yellowish liquid that burrowed into the fabric really was.