Things that scared you as a kid

Oh, to go back to being a child with childish fears. It’s nothing compared to what we’re facing now. A mysterious virus that is going to wipe us all out within the next 12 months.

When I was a little kid I was terrified every night of dark, hulking, menacing shapes by the foot of my bed. I didn’t dare move for fear they’d suddenly come to life, slither and ATTACK swallowing me whole. I was truly terrified. I was like pinned to my bed. I knew they were demons come to steal me to hell. VERY Catholic upbringing.

When I got a little older I started to realize the terrifying shapes were just clothes hung from my bedposts illuminated by the hall light.

I was also petrified of windows after dark. My bitch of a superstitious grandmother from the old country would gleefully tell me stories of ghouls and undead creatures who clung from window sills peering into windows. Couldn’t help myself so I’d imagine their faces peering in at me. Horrible long nails dug into the sills clinging to the outside of the building. You could never be safe. There they were on the other side of a thin pain of glass. Dark, uncovered windows at night still make me extremely uneasy. She also once burned my fingers on a hot gas stove to “teach me” to be afraid of the stove. Fucking Nonnie. May she rest in unpeace.

"Paul McCartney: The Complete Story, Told for the First and Last Time," was a TV special about the clues regarding the rumours of Paul's death. I slept downstairs at my parents house. I still remember the nightmare I had. I was lying in a coffin and a man was closing the lid on me and I was still alive (I bet I'd been watching "Dark Shadows" a lot, too).

Anyway, my screams woke up my sleeping parents upstairs who woke me up before the lid closed on me.

Hearing this coming from the living room as I was trying to get to sleep:

The sound of a table saw spinning up. It fucking TERRIFIED me. I still cringe every time I have to use one. There's just something about that sound that gets to me.

Chainsaws scare me, R5.

Low-frequency buzzers. Hate 'em. They just sound evil.

This creeped me out.

Whenever I would look at my clock in the middle of the night and it would say 3:15 a.m. I would freak out! I would be absolutely terrified for at least 30 minutes and could not fall back asleep. Can anyone here guess why?

This music.......

Unsolved Mysteries

That bunny attack scene in Monty Python and the Holy Grail. I walked in while my dad was watching it and had nightmares about killer rabbits for several nights afterward.

I will never stay in a hotel room #237!

R9 You only had to worry at that hour if you lived at 112 Ocean Ave in Amityville

Garbage disposals, which still scare me to this day, thanks to Stephen King. I read my mom's copy of Firestarter when I was in 6th grade, and a character commits suicide by sticking his arm down one. I could have blown off that chapter as an adult, but it stuck in my kid brain and traumatized me for life. Every time I hear someone using one, I cringe and try to leave the area.

Seeing Judy Garland as an adult.

You got it R14!

I was flipping through my parents' TV Guide one day and came across an ad for Whatever Happened to Baby Jane. I didn't know what the heck the movie was about; I just knew that Bette Davis scared the crap out of me. I tossed the magazine aside and avoided it for the rest of the week.

The movie Jaws really made me scared to swim. Even in a pool! I thought a shark was lurking on the bottom and was going to chomp on my feet!

Old men who smelled like patchouli.

Bathtub drains- I was not only convinced that my 5 year old self could be sucked down the tub drain, I was also sure that there was a giant drain in the bottom of every lake. My neighbor's daughters assured me that I was correct and that they'd throw me in their lake if I bothered them.

OP That video was so CREEPY! All of those mutilated robots/mannequins! EEEK!

I was also terrified of the clown doll in the original Poltergeist movie!!!!

R21 LOL, same here. I insisted on getting out of the tub before my mom unplugged the drain, terrified I'd be sucked down the drain with the water. Sometimes, she'd forget and I'd start screaming!

When I went to a public pool, I saw a used bandaid floating in one end of the pool. I can still remember the smell over 30 years later. I jumped out of the pool and went to my mom and after that I would never go into a public pool.

Also, Large Marge scared the shit out of me.

Oops

Same here, R23. My stepmother lost her temper when I started screaming and told me how stupid I was to think I could even fit through it. I still didn't believe her but at least I stopped screaming about it.

My sister was also afraid of Large Marge, r24, so of course my brother would rewind that part and torment her with it every time we watched it.

R26 How mean!

R27 Large Marge WAS scary! I was a teen when that movie came out, but it still startled me!

Yes, she was, r26. I'm all over this thread because I had many childhood fears, and living with her did not ease them. She wasn't deliberately mean, but was more a combo of rural toughness combined with what my sister and I suspect is undiagnosed autism. Her bio son is the Large Marge tormenting brother in r27.

When I was four or five, I used to watch Concentration with my stay at home mom. She noticed that I would often leave the room during the show. She later figured out I was scared of the “eyeball” drawing that stood for the word “I”in the rebus because it was staring at me.

Also scared of the paddles used to revive people on Emergency and the Fembots on Bionic Woman.

The United Artists' theme from the 1970s. I know-- I'm weird.

I was afraid of hippies! They used to hang out at the park at the end of our street and torment us kids. They would throw beer bottles at us to get us to leave because they wanted to get high. I would not go to the park if I knew they were down there.

The Green Ghost game.

But it was a good kind of scared.

My father

The closet. I still don't like them.

I’ve never seen that one, r32. I would probably be scared of that, too.

The one I hated was A Current Affair. The loud bwanng at the end scared me most.

This son of a bitch from the Shining. I’m not exaggerating when I say that for over a year after I saw the movie I’d have to look down at the ground when I’d go upstairs to my room at night because I thought the bear man would be at the end of the hall in the bathroom watching me.

I was six when I saw the movie and he was the scariest thing I’d ever seen.

I still don’t like this part of the movie.

The Unsolved Mysteries theme.

My parents had some Dark Mysteries tome they received from ordering Reader’s Digest. I was horrified by it, but of course would read about the Jersey Devil, witch doctors, cannibals, cow mutilations, crop circles, and whatever else til I was I unable to fall asleep.

Airplanes flying overhead and trucks passing our car on the highway. Scared the shit out of me as a kid.

R7, what is a low frequency buzzer and when would one encounter one? I used to have a wired smoke alarm in an old apartment and when it accidentally went off it emitted a low droning buzz, and it was so unnerving. Tell me about your fear...

R9, 3:15 scares me too, but I don’t know why. Tell me what I’m missing...TELL. ME.

r42, like the buzz some electronic door lock electromagnets make when active. I think the sound is actually intentional... the magnet pulls the lock open, then briefly breaks the current at the very end to audibly vibrate so you'll know it's unlocked (and, I suspect, keep it from overheating, by briefly interrupting the current flow, and possibly communicate via unpleasant sound that the door shouldn't remain unlocked).

In a modern design, the same thing could be accomplished using a quiet stepper motor & a welcoming chime sound + LED-illuminated ring around the lock or knob.

Saw footage of the female Manson followers with shaved heads and and X carved into their foreheads when I was a kid.

This trailer—and they played it all the time at night.

Sleeping with the door open- terrifying. My bedroom had two doors, one to the hallway and one to the kitchen. I was very afraid that the kitchen one would be opened at night and someone would come in from the balcony off of the kitchen and into my room at night. Also afraid of the door to the downstairs apartment our house had, or in general, being down there after my grandma died. I felt that something evil was down there. I also was afraid of plushy characters at our outside of amusement parks. If I can't see your face do not come near me. I was afraid of tube slides too, the kind that are all enclosed plastic. Afraid of being stuck in one and/or suffocating. (Turns out that's not so crazy as people have died in them in waterparks).

This scared me when I was a kid. Nick at Night!

This movie is super campy, but the scene at 45:45 where the dude comes out of the grave scared the hell out of me after I saw it as a kid. Was terrified the dead dude would come into my room.

This is going to date me, but when I was a little, little kid the opening credits to Medical Center terrified me.

Look at this and tell me it wouldn't terrify a 4 year old.

This one terrified me. What in God's name is that claw?????

For some reason, the opening credits of The Wild, Wild West freaked me out as a kid.

Night Gallery Intro, the show hasn't aged too well unfortunately.

The QUEER child catcher in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. He might have been even scarier than the Wicked Witch Of The West in the Wizard Of Oz.

R52 Oh, yeah. I would get scared and leave the room as a kid when that show came on.

The opening to CHILLER THEATER on WPIX Channel 11. Was VERY creepy to me.

I was afraid of black people. I grew-up in a town that just didn't have any, so as a kid mostly confined to our own little slice of neighborhood, we never saw them. EXCEPT for the garbage men, who would come through your yard carrying these ginormous trash cans, into which they would pour the contents of your family trash can. As a little kid, when everything looked ten times bigger than it was, when I'd be playing in the back yard, and forgot it was garbage day, those guys would come around the corner of the house and I would just be terrified.

The scene in The Wizard Of OZ where the wicked witch showed up for the first time. I used to hide every time.

The Oompa Loompas

Gmork from the Neverending Story absolutely made me shit my pants every time I watched this movie.

R45 Jeez, that movie was SCARY! I've never really been able to not get creeped out by Anthony Hopkins since he was in it.

Also, the corpse "Mina" scene in the Frank Langella version of DRACULA:

Escalators. I tripped at the bottom of one when I was 3 or 4, and really banged up my knee. Wouldn't go on one for a few years unless my father carried me.

The Tornados "Telstar".

I can't shake the feeling that as a 3 year old someone tried to sexually assault me and this was playing on the record player. Have always felt inexplicably anxious when I hear it, even though it's a beautiful piece of music.

R61 Yep, me too. And I was also afraid to go in an elevator by myself. One time I was with my mom in an elevator and someone accidentally pressed the basement "B" button. Well, evidently they had done some construction/renovations and bricked up the basement, because the elevator door opened and revealed a BRICK WALL right at the opening of the door and everyone in the elevator gasped! Scared the SHIT out of me!

Two things:

Looking down a dark staircase going into an unlit basement at night.

The Winter Warlock in Santa Claus is Coming To Town

To my complete surprise, I discovered that I've never overcome the first one. Several years ago, I decided to rent a single family home instead of an apartment. One night, the cellar light bulb at the foot of the stairs blew out and I had to go down there and screw a new one in. I was petrified--and totally shocked to realize that I still had a deep fear of this.

R21, that is such a common fear among children. So common, in fact, that Mister Rogers has a song about it. It reassures children that they can “never go down the drain” and explains that they’re much too large to fit through the little hole.

Bless that man, he really did understand children. RIP, Fred Rogers.

Aside from the basement and other dark places, I was mostly afraid of certain people.

Good old Fred.

This is kinda dumb, but women with heavy facial hair. It just seemed odd as a child to see a woman with a mustache, lots of long chin hairs, etc

"A mysterious virus that is going to wipe us all out within the next 12 months."

Oh fuck off, asshole. You're pathetic.

I hated those fucking Rockit robots as a kid! Ugh uncanny valley hell. I didn’t realize the one in the bed was jerking off lol.

My grandmother would never let us help her decorate her Christmas tree. She was a control freak who didn't want us screwing up ornament placement. She wouldn't say that, though. We would go over there and she'd tell all us kids, "oh, the elves helped me, you just missed them." The elves reportedly lived in her basement. I was terrified of her basement--there were creepy elves down there. Years later after she died, we were cleaning out her house and I realized how scared I still was of her basement.

The very existence of the basking shark scared the hell out of me

Those Dan Curtis productions written by the great horror fiction author Richard Matheson. "The Night Stalker"; scary as hell, and it seemed more like a documentary than a fictional story. "Trilogy of Terror", which featured Karen Black in the tale about the bloodthirsty Zuni fetish doll. I don't think anybody who saw that ever forgot it. And "Dead of Night", another trilogy whose final tale, "Bobby", was terrifying.

Are You Afraid of the Dark is a good one. A few episodes of that really scared me as a kid.

I love scary things now, but as a kid, I'd flip out even around Halloween time when all the party/costume stores would put out their decorations and masks and stuff. I remember one that had a life-size cut out of the crypt keeper that scared me to death. The horror section of the video store was also a great place to get nightmare fuel.

A fully erect penis.