Oooh! Ooooh! I had a “101 Dalmatians” record when I was a kid, and the Cruella Deville Theme Song creeped me out mightily, especially the line that goes: "All innocent children, you better beware . . . "
(Note on the link: Don’t bother with the button to hear the song–it’s some really hokey instrumental version. And besides, it’s the lyrics, the lyrics that will scare your pants off. If you’re an innocent child. Like me.)
Ditto on the scary dolls. Any dolls (besides Barbies, since we all know that there’s no way they can be REAL), especially dolls with eyes that can open and shut, and the worst - smiling dolls with parted lips that have TEETH showing.
The reason - well, I have horrible eyesight, and have since I was very small. When you don’t have your glasses on (now contacts in), your eyes are constantly trying to focus.
So, when you’re five years old, and looking at two dolls that very closely resemble your flesh and blood cousins (don’t get me started on that one) with eyes that open and close and TEETH, and you don’t have your glasses on, it looks like the dolls are MOVING AND TALKING.
Did I mention I don’t like dolls?
Oh - and clowns. They freak my shit out too.
Oh - and those animatronic things that people have for Christmas and stuff - the ones in the display windows?
That’s like my doll scenario above come to life. I hate those things. Even the ones at Disney.
JARTS, especially when weilded by my big brother. He’d launch them from atop our garage like Charles Whitman from the University of Texas tower.
Of course, he could turn any household item into a weapon. One time we had to call our parents back home from the restaurant because he was blowing his boogers onto poker chips and flingin them at us.
As a kid, we had this large toy horse that had spring loaded legs with little wheels in the feet. It stood probably about 3 feet high. I suspect it was made by Marx, but I can’t confirm this. A small child was supposed to bounce up and down on the horse’s back as if riding it, and the ratchet action of the wheels in the feet would move them forward. It never really worked that well.
Anyway, my older sister told me a story that she and a friend were in the basement playroom talking about the devil when the horse started moving around the room on it’s own. She convinced me that it was possessed by satan.
I wouldn’t go near it. I shoved it off into the corner with a broom and wouldn’t touch it. It gave me nightmares. It still, to this day, makes appearaces in really bad dreams. I hate that horse.
I never liked dolls that looked like grown women; I only liked baby dolls, b/c the other kind just creeped me the hell out. Maybe it had something to do with the book on the the Titanic that my brother had, with a picture of the ocean floor and the white porcelain face of some little girl’s doll that was still eerily, astoundingly untouched by time. Just the face of it still remained; the body was cloth and had long since disintegrated, but the head of that doll lived on, deep in the ocean floor, with its vacant eyes and vacuous smile, staring into eternal darkness long after its owner had drowned…
You see now why I didn’t like porcelain dolls.
Oh, and I’ll join the Clown Hating Crowd. Grandma collected 'em, and had a whole china cabinet full of the hideous things, and between that and Poltergeist I made it clear to everyone who knew me that I would kill anyone who cursed me with a clown.
Still don’t own either one.
My older sister and I convinced my younger brother (about three years younger) that the big Ragedy Anne doll wakes ever full moon. He thought the doll was out to kill him. When he wasn’t looking, I moved it to his bed, and he thought it was moving on its own.
Personally, I was scared of anything to do with clowns. I HATE CLOWNS! Even to this day, they scare the hell out of me. I’ve always been uneasy whenever anyone read There Was An Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly.
I don’t know why.
My sister had a doll that was evil. Really, I have no evidence of this, but the doll was posessed by an evil spirit.
You wouldn’t have known it from the look of it. It was a plump baby doll with a rubber head and limbs, about the size of a 10-month old child. It had no hair. An eraser-sized hole on top of its head advertised that it once had, but now didn’t. No one remembered why. In fact, when I asked years later, neither my mother nor my sister remembered where the doll had come from. Probably a gift from a relative or friend for a forgotten occasion, but I prefer to say that it manifested itself out of thin air from the Nether Realms.
As a child, the pit of my stomach would grow cold, and the back of my neck would prickle with heat if I saw the doll’s eyes on me. I couldn’t sleep with it in the room. I would put it in the closet at every opprotunity just to avoid looking at it.
This, of course, pleased and amused my sister, who would use it to torment me, the rotten little monster. I would sometimes awake to find it lying on my chest, staring down at me. Leaping from bed with a shriek of shock is not a pleasant way to start the morning, I’d tell her. (No . . . that’s a lie. Usually my responses involved shouting dire threats of bodily injury as I chased after her, murder in my heart.) She’d carry it with her around the house, grinning at me.
I blame my terror of this doll on my natural and instinctual reaction to being in the presence of Pure Evil. What tempted this innocent looking doll over to the Dark side, I wonder?
My mother, on the other hand, hated my talking stuffed cat, for a very practical reason. It was a perfectly normal-looking stuffed animal, but it would talk to you when you pressed different parts of its body. One afternoon, my mother nearly had a heart attack when cleaning my room. She picked up the cat by the ear to put it away, and it said, “OW! That hurts!” She ordered me to remove its batteries when I wasn’t playing with it.
Auntie Em
I have that record! One of the great joys of my childhood was listening to those story records in the days before VCRs.
Hey BuckGully
was it Marvel the Mustang, I had one of those as well.
Obviously, the title of this thread can be summed up in two words, and those two words are “sock” and “monkey.” However, I see meow meow has already covered that. (And welcome to the SDMB, meow meow.)
So I will also mentioned something else that terrified me, a cartoon-ish book that told the “story” of the Haunted Mansion at Disneyland. A 45 also came with it (that’s a small “record” that we used to play on a “record player”, btw), equally scary. So scary, in fact, that both book and record had to be kept in the closet of the guest bedroom, and for an occasional thrill I would muster my wits to enter the closet and open the book to any random page, at which point I would have a small, child-size stroke if it opened to the page with the bride with the glowing heart.
I was also not entirely sold on the concept of Weebles. Egg shaped people with no limbs or discernable head freak me out.
I must have repressed all such memories of an evil toy; I can’t remember any. My friend though, hated his My Buddy doll. Someone had let him see Chucky, so – screaming holy terror – he ran to his room, grabbed the My Buddy doll, and threw it down the basement stairs at his dad. He was convinced his parents were trying to kill him.
I actually hand one of those when I was a kid, or something very very much like it. The one in the picture looks a little smaller than mine was.
I named him Chauncey. I actually loved him very much, but now that I think about it, he was slightly creepy.
I will join your friend in the My Buddy thing. I was convinced that it was going to come alive and go Chucky on me, so one afternoon, my brother and I took his doll into the backyard, hung him up on the clothes line, and proceeded to cut his arms and legs off with scissors. It took forever, but it was strangely calming to see the torso of My Buddy hanging on the line. Mom was NOT amused.
I also vote for the clown hating. My father was watching the movie It, and I hid behind his chair and watched it without him realizing. I sat through the whole thing, and played it cool until I tried to sleep. “They ALL float!”
A wind-up turtle. It was ok as long as it wasn’t moving, but when wound up I couldn’t stand it. I’d hide behind the refrigerator until someone put it up.
Also, any toy that my older brother got his hands on. He had a way of turning them all into torture devices.
I dunno about past tense but my mother-in-law has as many dolls in her house as the foundation can withstand. TheLadyLion and I visited last summer and we stayed in her old bedroom. I don’t frighten easily but waking up in the dawn light and seeing several dozen porcelan faces staring at me creeped me the fuck out.
Marvel The Mustang scared you? Criminy, I loved mine. Marvel was awesome. He was a lot smaller than you remember too, barely a foot and a half high I think. My mom actually bought one at a junk shop and I’ll go measure it next weekend.
It wasn’t a toy - it was a painting of a clown - on black velvet no less, if I remember correctly. At my grandparent’s house the stairs to the upstairs - where us kids slept when we were there - had a door at the bottom. The painting hung above the door. So as you entered the door to climb the steps the thing would be above and behind you. Oh man, I cannot tell you how fast I zipped up those stairs and turned around to make sure that thing wasn’t going to get me!
Many, many years later all the cousins were together for my grandmother’s funeral and we were all gathered at a bar and somehow that wretched painting came up in conversation. Every single one of us - 14 of us spanning 15 years in ages - hated that painting and was (were?) terrified of it. But until we were all together that night as adults we had never discussed it with each other. My grandfather learned about our conversation and threw the painting away and said he wished we had said something to them when we were kids.
My mom actually MADE me a stuffed clown. It had big, vacant black eyes and a hideous, Pennywise smile. God, that thing scared the beejezus out of me. Still gives me the heebie jeebies.
Oh, add me to the Jack-in-the-Box haters, too. The Hitchcock-like suspense, the heart-pounding horror–turning the handle and waiting for that thing to come leaping out at you!
But you have to admit, that leering, red-eyed face on Big Lou is nightmare fodder.
Oh, and my grandparents had one of those “wood spirit” thingies. They’re like a face carved in wood so the eyes follow you wherever you go. Scary!
And someone, I forgot who, once had a creepy, American Gothic-style painting that I swear to god was staring at me.
"Pulsar The Ultimate Man", a weird-ass action figure my friend had in the 70’s.
Ewwwww!!!
When you pressed a button on his back his heart would pump real ‘blood’ through veins and his lungs would expand and contract and…
Ewww!!