  We investigate the properties of a class of near-extreme static black hole
solutions called naked black holes. These black holes, which occur in string
theory, have small curvature invariants but large tidal forces outside their
event horizons. We show that these large tidal forces are due to a
concentration of dilaton stress-energy near the horizon. We study infalling
test strings and find that they are highly excited by the large tidal forces,
but remain small. Perhaps most importantly, it turns out that a small amount of
infalling matter will cause the curvature invariants to become large outside
the horizon. Nevertheless, an exact calculation shows that both the matter
trajectories and the classical black hole background are not significantly
altered.
