This popped into my head from reading this thread, but didn’t want to hijack
Did your parents ever inadvertently scare the crap out of you, that still (somewhat) affects you into adulthood?
My parents took my brother and me(I?) to the drive-in movies (remember them?) back in '76 or '77. They used to play two movies then, I can’t recall what the other one was. They went to see Jaws.
I believe my brother had fallen asleep by then, but I hadn’t. (I was 7-8 years old, he was 4-5) I watched some of it, before diving under the blankets in the back of the station wagon, scared to all hell from watching Jaws tear up the boat with the lifeguard (where the kids sailboat capsizes in the ‘pond’).
Flash forward about 6 weeks, we vacationed in Virginia every other year with my father’s family. We went to Virginia Beach and well, my dad put me on his shoulders and started out into the water. I slowly began to panic, and when the water began to touch my legs, I hit the panic button and freaked. My father, not knowing what was wrong, let me down to check on me. I tore off towards the beach like there was no tomorrow. I refused to go into the water again the rest of the summer, yet wouldn’t say why.
Flash forward to adulthood. I still get that edgy tingly fear when I go to the beach, and occasionally I have to force down the panic that suddenly creeps up on me in the water. I’m 42 years old now, and I still squirm when I go to the beach.
The irony of it all is, whenever Jaws comes on TV, I am drawn to it like a moth to light, and will sit through the whole thing, and enjoy every minute of it.
I told my mother this story last year, and she felt awful, but we laughed over it afterwards.
Yes. Like you, my parents took me to a drive-in movie, but they didn’t know that the subject matter was too strong for kids. The movie was The Naked Prey, and it featured many imaginative, realistic and terrifying torture scenes. It scared the holy fuck out of me and I threw up in the back of the station wagon. Unlike you, I still feel oogy nowadays if I happen to watch a bit of this old movie on television.
My parents said they thought it would be a nature movie about African wildlife!
Slight hijack: When I managed a movie theatre, I saw parents bringing their young kids to see The Emerald Forest. We tried to tell them that it had nudity, violence, and cannibalism, but they insisted that because of the title it must be Disney. So I’ve done my part to scar young lives.
Parents decided to watch “The Shining” on television when I was nine and we were on a family road trip. My brothers and I hid in the bathroom, singing lalalalalalalalala for three hours.
Nope: Emerald Forest. I saw it as a kid (maybe 3-4th grade [edit: must’ve been older, since it came out when I was 11–oops!]), but don’t remember being traumatized by it. Definitely it wouldn’t be okay for much younger than third.
Overheard my mom telling my aunt that she couldn’t stand cherry tomatoes because it was like giving head when you bite into them and they squirt goo down your throat. I was probably in 5th grade or so at the time.
To this day, I cut the cherry tomatoes in half when I make salads.
Not my parents, but my grandfather. I was brushing my teeth–a wee, adorable tot of five or so. My father’s father wandered by and I asked, “Grandpop, can I see your teeth?” and he took them out and handed them to me. My mother told me she could hear me scream halfway across the house.
Oh! I just remembered another one: my uncle Bob’s flashy younger wife Mary decided to play hairdresser for my mother, and bleached her hair platinum blonde. There I was–the same wee, adorable tot of five or so, probably just having recovered from the tooth episode, and out comes my mother, looking like a two-dollar dance-hall girl! Again, I am told my screams woke the neighbors.
When I was in grade school one time at lunch there was a kid who had two false front teeth. We all asked him to pull them out and would stare in awe. Apparently we were easy to amuse and we found it amusing as hell. He’d put them back in and we’d ask him to pull them out again. After doing it a few times he finally said enough and we were all bummed out.
Edit: I guess I don’t have any scared for life stories. My parents did some things that scared me for a while, but eventually I got over it.
Not my parents, but one of my teachers was under the idea that the way to get a young child over his fear of water was to make him dunk his head underwater 25 times. My fear is 100x worse than it’s ever been, and to this day I have not learned to swim, and with more important fears to deal with, I don’t have any plans in ever doing so.
I have had nightmares of being burned alive for years.
I had no idea where they came from till I saw Bambi again in college.
Looking at IMDB, I realized the last time it was in theaters, I was slightly over a year old.
Not my parents, but my grandmother used to watch ‘‘Unsolved Mysteries’’ when I was about four years old. That show messed with my head so hard. There was one episode about a serial bomber who placed bombs in innocuous things like lunchbags. After that I was always worried my stuffed animals had bombs in them. And until I was eight or nine I refused to be left alone in a car because I was convinced someone was going to plant a bomb under the car while my mother was in the store.
I am very nervous around chainsaws. Like, to the point where I back well away when anyone is using one. I won’t touch one at all - if I ever needed to use one, I’d be unable to.
My mom took me to see Scarface for my 12th birthday - you make the connection.
My sister who is 4 years older than me used to tell me all the slumber party stories her and her friends would tell each other. Thump thump drag being the all time winner for scaring the crap out of 5 y.o. old me. Even now I get kind of queasy ooged whatever by missing limbs on people.
I got tired of two of my boys goofing off after going to bed. I would have to go back several times to quiet them down and threaten bodily harm. Then one night, as I was leaving the room the first time, I shut off the light and closed the door, but stayed in the room. The whispering started, then the giggling, and then I went GAAAHHHHHHH! at the top of my lungs and turned the light on. Scared the living shit out of them, and I never had problems thereafter. Of course, they probably still lie there at night 30 years later, waiting for Dad to come creeping.
When I was quite young, I believe somewhere between 3 and 6, my parents made the annual trip up to New England to see my father’s relatives. One of my father’s brothers had several lobster pots, and he donated a couple of lobsters to a family get-together.
My parents transported the damned overgrown cockroaches in a cooler in the back seat of their car. Grandma Bodoni and I were also in the back seat. The lobsters showed some inkling of self preservation, they tried to crawl out of the cooler. They were BIG lobsters, too, and seemed to be mostly claws. I was convinced that they were going to give me a good pinch.
Good thing that Grandma Bodoni was there, she wasn’t going to put up with any nonsense, not from lobsters, not from ANYONE. She just kept putting them back in the cooler.
And that is why you *never *tell children “Grandma went to sleep . . .”
Just remembered: when my grandmother died, my Mom got a sympathy card reading, “She is not dead–she is merely asleep.” “Christ!” Mom said, “and we *buried *her!”
