I didn’t want to revive an old thread but just found this classic (“I’d Like to get to Know You” by Spanky & Our Gang) and remembered how it used to scare the hell out of me if I heard it at night- creepy but cool and ominous music, the disembodied male voice chanting in the background, very scary but very great song by the cutest big girl in rock, Elaine “Spanky” McFarland and Gang.
Thriller. I was 5 when that song came out, and it scraed the crap out of me.
I used to wake up for school by listening to the local classic rock station for a good hour before I actually got out of bed. I would drift in and out of sleep for most of that hour.
One morning I heard “Hotel California,” a song I’d heard millions of times before. For some reason I had the scariest, trippiest dream while this song was on and I was half-asleep, and I’m still a little wary of that tune.
Same. I remember cowering in terror behind the sofa until the whole thing was over. No one would change the channel because the video was “so cool”. Yeah, not to me, the only kid in the house.
I’ll add the *Uncle Albert * half of the song *Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey * by Paul McCartney. I don’t know exactly why. It reminded me of Aunt Bird from Mr. Dressup, which I thought was a giant, dead bird head. I was maybe 2 or 3.
Boogie Woogie Wu by the Insane Clown Posse
http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/icpinsaneclownposse/boogiewoogiewu.html
Ditto Thriller. Actually, it was just the video, not the song itself. Also, Hungry Like the Wolf and Hall & Oats’ Maneater. Actually, those are just due to the videos as well. I guess people turning into wolves and cats and things freaks me out.
Stairway to Heaven If it came on the radio as I was falling to sleep I would have to turn the station and would still have nightmares! I was a pre-teen/middle schooler.
It made me think of death-- bleh.
Two come to mind. As soon as I read the OP I remembered the song that really freaked me out as a little kid. **Joan Crawford ** by Blue Oyster Cult. I used to sleep with the radio on, and I was sound asleep to awake to the chorus. “Joan Crawford has risen from the grave…”
I didnt even know who Joan Crawford was at the time, but she scared the crap out of me. 
The other song was Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite by the Beatles. The calliope is just creepy. Again, I woke up in the middle of the night to the sound of the calliope and ended up sleeping with the lights on.
Baker Street by Gerry Rafferty. That wailing sax part and sort of atmospheric production just alarmed me for some reason. It doesn’t bother me in the least anymore, hasn’t since I was like 14
Elton John’s Funeral for a Friend, for pretty obvious reasons. Honestly, I can’t see any reason for recording that song *other * than to freak people out.
The intro to Paul McCartney’s **Silly Love Songs ** with that industrial clangy sound effect. Don’t know why but it freaks me out for some reason.
Tell Me Something Good by Rufus is a kick ass song except for the weird,er. . .monkey sounds they make just before the chorus. It always brought to mind images of spear wielding headhunters or something.
And I had a love/hate relationship with The Night the Lights Went Out in Georgia. It’s a great song, but I always felt a little disturbed when Vicky Lawrence got to part about the guy lying in a puddle of blood.
“Fire on High” by ELO always scared the bejeezus out of me. I remember the “backmasking” scare of the mid-80’s, when I was 12 or 13. And, gasp!, “Fire on High” has backwards music right there at the beginning! It didn’t help that once, when I was alone in the car with my older brother and the song came on, he turned to me and got this crazy-guy look on his face. He proceeded to scare the crap out of me with a Method Acting performance worthy of Anthony Hopkins. I don’t remember what he said, only that he was being really creepy and acting like he was getting his orders from the music or something. I finally started screaming, and he knocked it off. Shudder…
Not a song, but a whole album: Jeff Wayne’s War of the Worlds. During the day, I’d sit and groove to that shit for hours, begging my dad to turn the volume on my headphones up “just a little more.”
Once it was dark, and I was all alone in bed, I kept waiting to hear “ULLA!!!”
“The Erl-King” scared me just as a poem, set to no tune. (I did once, as an adult, hear it done as an art song, but in German, so it didn’t really resonate with my childhood fears.)
Not a song, but a video. I was alone in my mothers house shortly after she had died with the lights out and only half awake on a couch when I saw the video for adonna’s “Like a prayer”. When the statue of Jesus started moving in the video it gave me a chill. Enough that I called to my dog and turned the lights on.
That and “the video of Total Eclipse of the Heart” with the glowing eyed creepy kids.
I actually played it backwards on my turntable when I was a kid. It says “Music is reversible, but time is not!”
Don’t know how young I was when I first heard it, but the freaky part in Led Zeppelin’s “Whole Lot of (Lotta?) Love” was too much for me then, and barely tolerable now.
*Revolution 9 * by the Beatles used to scare me when I was around 9-10. Now I see it as a kind of dopey example of musique concrète.
Around that same time the movie *Alien * was in the theaters and there was a short version of the trailer on tv that showed the egg splitting with greenish light coming out. The music/sound effects for those commercials used to scare the crap out of me.
Yeah Hall & Oates Maneater freaked me out when I was a kid. Not because of the video but because of the idea of a woman that eats men.
Seconded, emphatically! I was a young elementary school kid when this song was on the radio all the time. Always freaked me out.
Here is another of my number one creepy songs from childhood. Angie Baby by Helen Reddy. Someone made a video that “kind of” captures the feeling of the song.
I used to imagine her sucking people up into her radio. Brrrrrr!
Oh, yes, this is the first one I thought of!! So freaky! Still gives me a bit of the creeps if I hear it after dark.