The toll booth for the Mississippi Bridge. We’d read the book about a troll living under a bridge and when dad stopped the car at the “toll bridge” my sister and I gasped and held each other in our arms! This probably lasted for 3 or 4 years, but we didn’t cross it that often three or four times a year, just when we made a trip to our cousins’ house.
Yeah, Germans have no compunctions about scaring the crap out of children. My mom was raised in Germany and she couldn’t wait to read that one to us. :eek:
They still alarm me.
Also several songs whose humor escaped me at the time, most notably Darling Clementine, which I could not to bear to listen to.
When we were kids my brother gave me a piece of Cracking Oat Bran cereal. After I at it, convinced me it was Meow Mix cat food! Just 1 of the reasons I seldom eat cereal, especially wet.
I was totally creeped out by a picture, not even a photo, of a woman with the nose of a pig. It was in a paperback collection of Ripley’s Believe it or Not strips.
The Toilet Monster?
I was never bothered by clowns, but in my house when I was a kid there was an 8 by 10 watercolor head and shoulders portrait of a clown. I believe my great aunt had painted it. The clown wore the cone shaped hat that’s associated with Pagliacci. The portrait was all in primary colors on a field of white, and it terrified me when I was a little kid.
Truth to tell, even when I became a teenager I was really uneasy every time I saw that painting. I haven’t seen it in more than 40 years, and I don’t even know if my dad still has it. I’d be interested in finding out if it still has that same effect on me.
Water draining out of the bath. It was an exercise of coordination so that I could pull out the plug then get the hell out of the bathroom as soon as humanly possible.
Also, one night I pulled the nightlight plug out of the socket and some sparks came out. I spent several months after terrified that the sparks were slowly seeping their way into the floor and were going to start a fire that would burn the house down. I eventually confessed my bad deed to my father who gently explained that it wasn’t going to happen. Phew.
I remember being soooo afraid of the dark.
Also thinking mosnters were under my bed.
And clowns.
Amen to that. I also have a weird balloon fear.
Tornadoes. That would be a healthy fear if I grew up in Oklahoma. It’s kind of ridiculous in New Jersey.
Allium flowers freaked me out when I was a kid. A neighbor had them growing in her garden and I would not go near them. I don’t know if it’s because they were bigger than me or what.
I was ok with this until the squeaking noises part, which creeped me out. I feel like getting under the covers. Thanks a lot.
I grew up in South Georgia, but tornadoes terrified me, also… Sort of.
My brother and I had a set of children’s encyclopedias when I was a kid, and one of the books had a drawing of a really menacing-looking tomato, with arms and legs. Using little-kid logic, to me? THAT was a tornado - a scary, anthropomorphic tomato. Yeep.
Nature took most of it…I just finish it off …kinda miss the barbershop, it was nice to relax and be still for a little while
Falling over the railing, even when I was little and the banister-cum-railing was taller than I was.
Going down the bathtub drain.
The oddest is a morbid fear of those two-button wall switches found in older homes. I suspect that my incredibly German grandmother was the cause of that one. I still have to use something to push the button rather than my finger. Fortunately, I don’t see them very often anymore.
You’re welcome. The other dream from my youth I remember was several years later and involved Elizabeth Montgomery (at the age she was on Bewitched).
Common fixtures to drain the bath, but they looked both like faces and like something that would violate me. Plus I would see my distorted, scared-fat-pathetic reflection in them.
Combine it with Max Und Moritz and therapy WILL be needed.
Mischievous children end up eaten by ducks.
I was freaked out by a talking robotic tree when I was visiting a museum somewhere in Alabama.