Was your Mom a child when she got the card? That would be eerie, never mind the fear a child would feel going to bed at night…
Huh, I always thought Bambi’s Mom getting killed (and it being obvious even to a child) would be disturbing enough. It never occurred to me the forest burning would be disturbing, but I can see how it affected you.
Wow! Jaws was bad enough, I can imagine that can really screw with a kid’s head.
Either one…disturbing
Granny Bodoni sounds bad ass but she couldn’t figure out how to shut a cooler?
That was just one of those foam coolers and I don’t remember that it even HAD a lid. It was just used as a carrying device, as opposed to carrying the lobsters in one’s bare hands.
And Grandma Bodoni WAS badass. So was Grandpa Bodoni.
Heh. Yeah. I remember running out of the room in fear during that part when I was maybe four or five. That wasn’t scarring, though, what was scarring was my dad mocking me for it. :rolleyes: Because apparently it was a ‘waste of his time’ to put on a movie if I wasn’t going to sit through every damn minute of it. Thanks, asshole.
When I was six, my mother took me to visit an older sister in Maine. We went to visit relatives in a huge old house by the ocean, and I fell asleep on the couch while all the adults were chatting. It was late afternoon, and as the sun set, the relatives invited my mother and sister up to the roof/balcony to watch the sun set, thinking I would be sound asleep for a while. They got to talking, and I woke up in pitch blackness, completely alone. They finally heard me screaming and came down to rescue me. To this day, walking into a dark house freaks me out. TURN ON A LIGHT!!
Not my parents but a speaker at an assembly program when I was about 8 or 9. I don’t recall what the entire program was but he told the story about a mother who had dropped a hand mixer before putting it away. Her daughter decided to make a cake the next day and ended up electrocuting herself. To this day when I drop an appliance like a hair dryer, curling iron, mixer, even a cell phone that has to be charged, I can’t touch it or plug it back in unless I put on rubber soled shoes to prevent getting fried.
Oh, yeah, I remembered another one. When I was 11 or 12, my folks took me out of school for two weeks to accompany them on a driving vacation to Mexico that my dad wanted to take. I was told by schoolmates that I would be “strip-searched” for drugs at the border. I was a timid, modest girl and this terrified me. My mom asked what was bugging me, and I told her. Instead of reassuring me that this wasn’t going to happen, she just mocked me for being afraid - sang “teela’s gonna have to strip!” at me and frightened me. Now I was doubly certain it was going to happen. The fact that it didn’t occur on the way down didn’t reassure me; I thought it far more likely that they’d do it on our recrossing when coming back north.
When we were finally back in the states, I was able to calm down. They wondered why I wouldn’t eat down there and was miserable all the time, and I wasn’t going to tell them.
Not my parents, but when I was a small child, an insurance salesman came to the house – or was he a fire alarm salemasn? He vividly described a house fire, and I remember screaming and running from the room, crying. For decades, I was convinced that it was my destiny to die in a fire. I guess it wasn’t scarred for life, but scarred/scared for decades, as I don’t worry about it anymore. Though I do always have a fire extinguisher in the house, and unplug things when I’m not at home.
Oh, man, this makes me want to spank your mother. Shame on her!
my parents let me watch “the fly” (the old one.) when i was 6. i was doing fine until his wife took the towel off his fly head. that was it for me. 5 years of reoccuring nightmares with my parents having fly heads; until i read “the fly” in a short story collection.
my parents went to niagara falls when i was 1 ish. for years and years i had a reoccuring nightmare about a bridge that stops half way across a body of water. people, vehicles, and stuff going over the edge; with us sometimes going over, sometimes stopping just in time.
years and years later in my twenties i went to niagara falls on the canadian side and saw the us side’s viewing platform…my mother said “remember when we visited?” “you were about one”. another nightmare solved.
I was the big sis, so I didn’t get to be scared of anything, but poor little sis…
When we were really young (I can remember it, but she can’t) our great-grandfather, “old-opa” died. After that, little sis would sometimes suddenly become absolutely convinced, literally convinced she was going to die. And for the longest time we couldn’t work out why. It turns out it was the smell of Detol, that they had used around my “old-opa’s” body. She’s still a little scared of Detol to this day.
No, my Mom was 60-ish and a wise-ass.
Oh, it didn’t disturb me. I’m not afraid of fires, or anything. (Good thing, too, considering that I’ve been on fire a few times.) I just had these nightmares of being burned alive. Very specific fire pattern. Not very common, maybe two-five times a year, but they lasted for decades. I’d put it down to some primordial thing, and all of a sudden, boom, I see this exact fire pattern again in Bambi. Hit me like a ton of bricks. I think it’s also probably much more impressive if you’re literally one year old and in an old-style movie theater. I don’t think I understood the plot really well, but I knew what fire was, and it was two stories tall.
So you saw an pattern in the fire when you were a child, and then that ‘pattern’ appeared in nightmares. To quote Spock, “Fascinating”. Do these nightmares continue today, or did they end when you realized where this pattern came from?
Hmm, I wonder. I used to dream (have nightmares) about going off a bridge that collapsed while riding in a car, I always attributed it to the time there was an accident we witnessed on the Newport Bridge when I was a child. No one went off the bridge, but it was a big mess. I’ll have to ask my parents if we went to Niagara when I was a kid.
Straight Dope homework 
Were parents really dumb about taking kids to the drive-in movies in the 70’s? For me it was ‘Carrie’ my parents were sure I would sleep through at age 6 or 7. We’d buried my Poppa Nick a few months prior and I awoke to see Carrie’s hand coming out of her grave. I sure pissed my folks off telling them Poppa Nick was still alive in his grave. Took years for me to look at a grave w/o visualizing a hand reaching out of it.
I begged and pleaded with my parents for weeks, to let me watch it, all my friends had already and I knew the difference between make-belief and real…so they relented.
And let their seven- year-old, blonde-haired daughter with long hair watch the movie Poltergeist. Now to be fair, they hadn’t watched it yet, so they didn’t know what was in it but I know for a fact my parents did not have sex in their bed at night for about three months.
Because I was in there, every night.
Followed closely by a friend’s mom, that rented Something Wicked This Way Comes for her daughter’s eighth birthday party.
For me it was the movie Ghost Story. To this very day I am deathly afraid of ghosts which look like rotting corpses, and ghosts in general. And I don’t even believe in them.
Saw The Ring and The Grudge when they came out and my fears were still in full force. The Shining I am almost okay with.