eerie

adj

1. Inspiring fear, especially in a mysterious or shadowy way; strange, weird.

   “The eerie sounds seemed to come from the graveyard after midnight.”

   “An eerie feeling came over me.”

   “Dan was beginning to feel very depressed when suddenly the eerie howl of a dingo rang out[.]”

   “I was working in the lab late one night / When my eyes beheld an eerie sight / For my monster, from his slab, began to rise / And suddenly, to my surprise / He did the Mash / He did the Monster Mash.”

   “The whole city is immersed in a dystopian-looking smog: urban streets in sepia, emptier than usual, bathed in an eerie quiet.”

2. (Scotland)Frightened, timid.

   “She began to feel eerie.”

   “'It is my business to read the hearts o' men,' said the other. 'And who may ye be?' said Heriotside, growing eerie.”

noun

1. An eerie creature or thing.

   “Other of these terrible Eeries began now to congregate beneath the canoe, taking courage by the example of their cowardly companion, all alike curious about this charming visitant in the upper world.”

   “I tell you it's weirdsville down there, a spaced-out botanical Twilight Zone of creepies, crawlies, eeries, and ghastlies.”

   “Just a couple of eeries looking to get squamous, to swipe a little snatch of wholesome fun from the funktacular funerary fundament belonging to the Big Boss, a hit big enough to drop our brains out the bottoms of our various appendages and forget the essential, unalterable, sanity-shearing truth of our watery and unfleeling cosmos: R'lyeh sucks.”

   “If circumstances were even slightly different, I would allow my eeries to descend upon you and do as they pleased. After what your two friends caused here the last time, you're lucky I'm managing to hold them back at all.”

2. (alt-of, alternative)Alternative spelling of eyrie.

   “I'm not sure, indeed, that we didn't scare the eagles from their eeries; at all events we thought we did.”

   “They hang suspended over precipices, these rocky eeries of grim birds of prey that bequeath their appetite for murder and loot to their brood.”

   “Of the heavenly azure, and of the eeries suspended on the highest rocks they had indeed heard something, but they had never seen them, and in spite of their wishes it was no longer the old keen home-sickness of the old eagles.”

   “What was it that had driven them forth from their wooded mountain eeries to wait and watch for that one short moment, when the figure of an old man clad in a plain black military tunic would become visible at the saloon-window of a crawling train, to watch a wrinkled hand wave a fleeting greeting?”

   “But his army reached Buñola at the head of the pass, and at once, like a whirlwind, the Moors swept down from their eeries and gave battle.”