What were the silly, irrational things that scared the shit out of you as a child?
Today I remembered going for holidays to my grandmother’s house in Portadown. She had 2 ivory carvings hanging in the bathroom, just facing the loo. One was called ‘The Devil’ and the other was called ‘The Devil looking over Lincoln’ - and it was the same devil as the other one, but perched on Ol’ Abe’s shoulder. They were really horrible.
I was terrified to go to the bathroom on my own when they were hanging there - and a few times my Gran used to put them in the back o the closet when I was there,[which wasn’t much better as I KNEW they were lying in wait for me there whenever I entered the bathroom] until a bitchy aunt convinced her that it would be ‘character building’ for me to have to confront these things . I would sit there shaking with terror, afraid that these 3D devils would come out of the walls and whisk me off the toilet and down to hell.
We heard a lot about the devil and hell in our church, and I was certain that he was based in my Gran’s bathroom - just waiting to get me on my own.
Another thing that really scared me was going to the Home Bakery. The woman who ran it had enormous breasts, and I don’t think she wore a bra, as they hung down almost to her waist. She wasn’t very tall, and when she came to the counter to serve someone she used to lift one, and then the other, and they would hit the counter with two almighty thwacks that always made me jump. I really hated that shop.
These things may seem silly in retrospect, but when I was a child they were terrifying to me.
I used to be afraid of toilets. This started when I was about 4 1/2 and continued for several years; it caused my parents plenty of misery since I would use the commodes at home but not the ones at school or the ones in truckstop restrooms when we were traveling. I remember having a screaming fit when my mother tried to make me used the commode at a rest station in Florida and my mother telling my father that I had behaved “like a monster.”
They grew bigger than any other leaves, and creeped me out when I was two feet tall and wandering alone in our backyard.
Later, when I got big enough to handle a scythe and get grass cutting jobs, [homersimpson]* I evened the score…*[/homersimpson]
PS: The Appalachian wind may have played a factor – the towering leaves were always moving. My mother once pointed out to me that the poplar trees on our hill never stopped swaying at the top.
My gramma’s basement toilet. When you flush it, it makes this weird, high-pitched whine, and it scared me when I was a kid for some reason.
But my sister has it all beat-when she was two years old, she was afraid of a carpet remnant. It was about two inches long, and used to fill in a corner or something. I remember picking it up and chasing her with it when she used to annoy me. (Which was often)
We lived on an isolated farm when I was little so I was frightened of strangers or any visitors to the property for that matter. I would even hide in the bushes outside if I heard a car drive by. The shearers were a particular worry for me because I overheard one say how cute I was and how he wanted to take me home. I spent shearing time hiding under my bed.
Several hundred yards behind where the house was situated, the land dropped away from a rocky limestone ridge onto a flat peat area which went for quite a distance. Beyond that lay natural bushland which was dark and mysterious. It fascinated me but I was always too afraid to venture there, I imagined all sorts of ogres living in the woods watching me from across the peat. It gave me nightmares for years.
Up till I was 7 we lived in a house that was tall, narrow, and long (front to back), the bathroom had a huge arched window at the far end [with no curtain] and I used to be scared out of my mind to go into the bathroom at night when it was dark out. My mother never could get her head round the idea that I was too scared to go in there, and was under the impression that I wanted someone to help me wipe after I’d been and done my number 2 …
I rarely use public toilets because the school I went to [when I lived in the above house] have toilets with metal cubicles and the doors used to jam. I was a terribly nervous child and the blood curdling [echoing] screams of a child who’d gotten trapped in a cubicle alarmed me greatly … :eek:
I saw a short film on TV late one night about a fella who gets stuck in a phone box (at the end he’s carted off to a warehouse full of phone boxes with [now dead]people trapped in them) and for years after if I had to use a phone box (Og be with the days before mobile phones ) I’d jam my foot in the door to stop it closing so I’d be able to get back out again …
Cougars… and clowns and Mount Rainier. I never actually saw a cougar, but I heard them “scream like a woman” I was sure if the bedroom window was open an inch, the cougars would come in and eat me.
I was also sure that as soon as I fell asleep, Mount Rainier would erupt and bury my house.
The clown thing wasn’t/isn’t irrational…I’m not going to embarrass myself by saying I’m afraid of clowns now But if you wear size 17 shoes, don’t sneak up on me!
I was afraid of the milkman. Not sure why, I wasn’t afraid of the mailman or any of the other service-type people who came by the house, but the milkman terrified me. I think he felt badly about his (I know my mother was embarrassed), and he would often bring me a little pint carton of chocolate milk as a nice gesture. I certainly appreciated the chocolate milk, but it didn’t stop my fear of the milkman. In a nice Pavlovian response, I think this contributed to my increasingly hysterical behavior around the milkman – I was hoping to score chocolate milk out of the deal.
I was also afraid of my dad’s army trunk, which was used as a catch-all in our spare bedroom. At some point in my childhood, someone had cautioned me to be very careful about trunks, because the lid could slam down and you could be locked inside FOREVER because no one could hear you scream. My parents must have been aware of this same information, because my father removed the lock and clasp, so that it couldn’t be locked, or even latched. No one pointed this out to me, however, and I also missed the part where you had to be a stupid child and climb into the trunk under your own power – I leapt to the conclusion that some force from inside the trunk would grab you and suck you in. Every time I had to put something away inside the trunk, I would slowly inch over to it, in abject terror, and work up the nerve to open it, deposit my item, and then slam down the lid and run away. I had also heard the expression “coming home in a box” (I was a little kid at the tail end of Viet Nam) and related the box in question to the trunk, and thought that was the original purpose – for shipping body parts, and it struck me as unsettling that we would now use such a morbid item for storing our extra blankets.
This story has a happier ending, because I finally realized that I had gotten too tall to fit inside the trunk anyway, and eventually I took the trunk with me to my college apartment, where I spray-painted it in funky neon colors and used it as a radical chic coffee table.
I used to be afraid of the opening credits of “My Three Sons.” Something about the way the outline of the three faceless people was drawn in and then the squeezebox manner of showing the credits–it just creeped me out when I was a kid. Still bugs me a bit, but I’m not really afraid of it now, of course–just residual feelings, I guess.
OK, you know the big characters at Disneyland (Mickey, Minnie, Goofy, etc.)? You know how little kids love to hug them, get their autograph, and take pictures with them? Not me. I don’t remember this, but I’m told that until I was about 3 or 4, I hated them. They were huge animals with huge heads and apparently they scared the hell out of me. For whatever reason, my family would want to eat at the restaurant at the Disneyland Hotel called “Goofy’s Kitchen” where the characters would come around and smile at you and dance around while you were eating. My parents would make violent “Go away!” gestures, pointing at me. But the characters apparently didn’t get it most of the time, so I was placed under the table where I couldn’t see them, until they left.
BTW, now I’m 16, and I love hugging the characters and taking pictures with them and such.
I also vaguely remember being afraid of parked cars with no one in the driver’s seat, but not ones with a driver in them.
Whenever I had a chipped tooth I’d take an emery board to file down the sharp jagged edge to the tooth to prevent cuts to my inner lip and cancker sores.
I used to be terrified of Beaker and the Scientist on The Muppet Show. I have no idea why–something about Beaker’s beaker-shaped head and that squeaky Beaker voice. And the Scientist, well, that’s obvious–he wore glasses but had no eyes!
My dad used to have a journal published by CBS (as a promotional item, I guess), and it had the CBS “eye” logo on one of the front pages – just this black logo on the white page. I was scared of the eye logo, as if it were an Evil, Dangerous Thing. I used to pull this book off the shelf every one in a while to see if this eye were still there – yep, still there! I wondered why my dad would have such a thing in our house – didn’t he know it was Evil?
I think I was entering my teens before I decided it wasn’t scary any more.
) I’d jam my foot in the door to stop it closing so I’d be able to get back out again …