Peewee Herman’s Big Adventure. (The Large Marge scene terrified me).
All of Edward Gorey’s art, and Jack Skelington from Nightmare Before Christmas.
Not really ‘innocent’ things, but they were all definitely intended to be funny-creepy, not keep-you-up-all-night creepy.
Oh, and puppets. Any and all puppets, including the Muppets.
The adult (as in, as opposed to kids’; not X-rated) section of the library we used to go to. There were these weird carvings (meant to be artistic?) on the walls/ceiling that seriously gave me the heebie-jeebies.
The carwash…My mom drove–or sat while the car was pushed through on the rollers-- and I curled up in the back seat, in the darkness, terrified of the sweeping washy things that swept over the car like black tentacles from hell.
Add me to the list of kids who was terrified of going down the drain with the bath water.
I had no idea this was so common. I was expecting to add my fear to the list of weird ones that you weirdos had posted, and that you’d crown me as your king of weird. Imagine my disappointment!
As a little kid I was all by myself at my dad’s house at night. The house started settling. So much creaking going on, I was sure there were people in the house, but I was too terrified to get up and check.
There’s a developmental stage all children go through where they have problems with how volumes/sizes/relative spatial relationships work. They see all the water in the bathtub go down a drain and can’t understand why they wouldn’t also fit down the drain. It also accounts for fear of being flushed down the toilet and falling between the slats on stairs or wooden walkways.
Probably in some cases accounts for a fascination with flushing objects down toilets (will this fit? Will that fit?) and dropping things through holes/slits, too.
I once had a coloring book with a bright, royal blue cover, and the title was in bright red letters. Apparently, there’s an optical phenomenon where if you have two intense colors with a tortuous boundary, the colors appear to jiggle and twitch. This is exactly what the title of the coloring book appeared to do, all on its own.
I ended up burying that coloring book under everything I could pile at the back of my closet.
Other people were terrorized by toilets as a child? I thought that was just me. And my younger sister. Who used to take dumps in the bathtub and of course tell our mother that I did it.
I don’t know if they’re innocent exactly, but I used to be totally irrationally terrified of wasps. Didn’t matter what kind: mud-daubers, yellowjackets, hornets, red wasps, etc… something about the way they looked terrified me. I still don’t like them, but I’m not terrified of them either.
Oddly, bees never bothered me in the least, and we had far more of them flying around since my friend’s dad kept 3 or 4 hives in his backyard.
ET, who is still fucking terrifying I don’t care if you say he’s cute he’s horrifying and scary.
Dr Seuss books with the surrealistic landscape drawings. I’ve always been a very literal minded person, so I couldn’t just see those images as art. I always had to imagine living in that kind of landscape: How did you get around? How did you not fall off? Was is supporting that land bridge? What is it connected to? Excuse me, I have to go lie down in a dark room for a while.
I remember a Twilight Zone episode where the woman found a spider in her sink, turned on the water and ran it down the drain, each time she ran it down the drain it came back bigger. Pretty soon she couldn’t run it down the drain. I admit I remember that on the very rare occasions I have had to run a spider down the drain.
Clowns.
The moon–the fuller its phase, the more afraid of it I was.
The brake wheel on the back of a boxcar (in the Santa Fe RR logo).
Toilets that make a very loud sound when they flush.
Spiders, if they were crawling on me or adhering with the web to something I was holding.
