Alice the Goon from the Popeye cartoons. Store mannequins…I’m talking about the kind painted to look “realistic” that were common up through the 1970’s. Damaged ones were even worse. Dressmaker’s dummies.
When I was little, my parents took me for a long trip up the Atlantic coast to Maine and a few of the Maritime Provinces of Canada.
Lobster is an expensive luxury dish in most places, but up there, it was omnipresent and very cheap. So, my parents ate lobster at many meals.
Those dead, red, cooked lobsters scared the bejeezus out of me! I didn’t want to sit at the same restaurant table with my parents while those things were on their plates!
This. Balloons popped for seemingly arbitrary reasons, making a scary loud noise with no warning whatsoever. Handling them, even gently, increased the odds of popping; even if you didn’t handle them at all they sometimes popped spontaneously, and the closer they were to you, the louder/scarier the sound was when they finally did pop. The solution has always been to keep them as far away as fucking possible.
I’m middle-aged now so I don’t cry anymore when they pop in my vicinity but I still don’t enjoy them.
When I was very little, I’m told I was afraid of the Cliff Hangers game on The Price Is Right and would hide when the game’s yodeling music would start to play. I guess I was scared of the mountain climber falling when a contestant lost!
For a long time, police composite sketches used to freak me out. If my family was watching the news and a report about an unsolved crime came on, I’d either leave the room or close my eyes until the report was over. Otherwise, the images would be burned in my mind to the point where I’d have trouble sleeping the next few nights.
I don’t know if this is all that uncommon, but I was also deathly afraid of fireworks until I was about six or seven. My sister also had the same problem, and to this day is still a little uneasy around them (she’s almost 40). I could never figure out why, as the noise didn’t bother me nor did the colors. But man, the combination of those two…
When I was a child and we would visit my grandmother, she had snapdragons growing on both sides of her front porch. For some reason (most likely the name), I was convinced that if I stuck my finger inside one of these flowers, they would bite me. I hated those damn flowers.
I’ve since conquered my fear.
Don’t worry. When I was little I was terrified of dandelion leaves. I thought the pointy ends would cut me. I still won’t touch them with my bare hands and I’m 41.
Watch out for holly leaves! Even dead ones are razor-sharp.
When I was little, my aunt and uncle lived in a house where the pump for their water well was inside. That booger was loud, and it freaked me out whenever it ran. When we ran the water at home (municipal water), there was no gawdawful rackt at all, and even at either grandparent’s house with wells, their pumps weren’t noisy.
About the time I started to grow up and began losing my fear of that pump, my uncle did a major remodel of the house. The pump wound up in a covered pit outside. For about a year of two afterwards, I was convinced he spent $$$$$ to do that because I was afraid, and not because he needed the space for the new furnace.
Sesame Street was might first thought, too. Mostly from this clip involving close-ups of a tomato.
My grandparents had a crawlspace, and I followed my grandfather once to see where he was going. I was curious, so I crawled in. And promptly backed out. Red clay walls with roots coming out of them! Trauma! I still can’t deal with the thought of being underground at all.
The Doors song, “Riders On The Storm” scared me when I was a kid.
Because of the foreboding nature of the melody (minor key, for example)?
Oil derricks vaguley reminded me of some prehistoric beast and that slow up and down bobbing of the head was just oogie.
Sunflowers were (and still kind of are) creepy, especially when they’re bowing they’re evil sunflower heads.
The Great Western building on L.A. seriously disturbed me. Now that I live in Florida this one does.
When I was growing up the heating unit was in a closet right outside the bathroom and when it was kicking on you would hear about 2 minutes of a building clicking sound until it burst into blow mode. I can remember laying in bed waiting for it to cycle through before I would go past it to the bathroom.
The MGM lion.
I remember having some kind of OCD as a kid, which I eventually grew out of. If I made some sort of gesture with my left hand or foot, I had to do the same thing with my right hand or foot, or the MGM lion would eat my feet that night when I was asleep.
There was a Scooby Doo episode where this was actually plot point.
The scene in Help when Paul gets shrunken. Creeped me out, I haven’t seen it since.
Intro music to Unsolved Mysteries scared me. Once when I visited my Dad for the summer in Atlanta we stayed at his girlfriend’s apt. I barely got any sleep, not just because of being in unfamiliar surroundings but I had to sleep on the living room couch and I could see the thin sliver of golden light from the foyershining under the bottom of the door.Was terrified someone would break in and became convinced the door was unlocked. though I wanted to get up and check I just knew a monster would grab me from under the couch.
For some reason my brother was terrified of a commercial (for beer, I think) that had these penguins and a little ditty at the end that said “Doo Bee Doo Bee Doo, beware of the penguins!”
Cuckoo Clocks. That awful, sudden racket out of nowhere would scare the crap out of me. I still hate the damned things. :mad:
Like when the little cuckoo came out at noon?
My mom, on days parents would come to school. She was a country girl and never wore anything but jeans, but would show up at school in a dress and makeup and I didn’t understand til much later what a beautiful woman she was. Just thought, who is this? And why isn’t she big and fat like all the othr mommies?
She wore only jeans around the house? Didn’t it embarrass your Dad to see her with her bosom bare? :eek: