When I was 2, I was terrified of windsocks.
Shudder.
The Blimp hangar at Moffet Field. It is this massive structure (biggest blimp hangar on the west coast, I believe) and we would pass it while driving to my grandparents. Something about such a massive, gaping structure…:eek: It made me imagine there was something terrible contained within.
When I was in middle school, we got to go on a tour of the place, and I actually walked inside the blimp hangar! :eek: However, this time I was not scared, but simply impressed. Also, they had real life harrier jets on display!
Another thing that scared me was deep water. The public diving pool was something like 15 feet deep, and staring into that abyss absolutely mortified me for some reason 
When I was in second grade, they made us watch some fire safety video in school. It started with a house that was engulfed in flames. Then the narrator comes in and says something like “What a shame. It could have been prevented.” Then time runs backwards in high speed and the house is restored. After that it went all cartoony and turned out to feature Donald Duck (as well as Huey, Dewey, and Louie, I think).
So why did this scare me? Bright little kid that I was, I picked up on that word “could.” “It could have been prevented.” Meaning it wasn’t prevented. The house really burned down, and Donald, Huey, Dewey, and Louie were all killed, and what we saw after was just a fantasy of what might have been (if only they’d known about fire safety.)
I swear, this gave me nightmares for weeks.
Abraham Lincoln. I was terrified of the man. I had nightmares of the man.
Growing up, for reasons unknown to me, we had this large, dark, dreary picture of Lincoln. It was in the dining room. The eyes would follow me. Everywhere.
My cries and pleas to have the eerie painting removed went unheeded. The biggest problem was in the evenings. We would all be in the living room - safe, happy, well lit and no staring eyes. But if I had to go to the kitchen, I had to walk past Honest Abe. His eyes would track my every move. I would run through the dining room convinced of Abe’s plot to kill me.
I was afraid of the drive-through car washes when I was little. Those big brushes that came roaring towards us would make me cower and cringe every time.
Also, when I was a toddler my mom and dad had a Volkswagen bug. The ceiling had a series of small holes, which I just called “dots.” I was afraid to look at these dots because every time I did my vision would distort and the dots would look like they were coming alive and would appear to move around. Doing this scared me every time. My parents didn’t think of it then, but as I needed to wear glasses by the time I was in first grade they think they should have heeded this as some kind of indication of a visual disorder.
A-F-ing-men to that. I used to have to be let out of the car to walk around to the car wash exit, where I would wait to be picked up. I got to be quite friendly with the car wash man after a few trips. To my mind, there’s something wrong with any kid who isn’t afraid of a car wash.
Also, vacuum cleaners. In particular, an old yellow canister-style vacuum cleaner from about 1952 that my mom had when I was very young. The shell had broken and some fiberglass insulation-looking stuff was coming out. Plus, it was loud and it stank - smelled like burnt hair and mildew.
E.T. for the Atari 2600 scared the shit out of me when I was 3.
nutcracker suite
also chickens, but eating the one that attacked me for dinner later that night helped.
You know, the 5 year old Lagomorph thought the same thing about his four year old brother.
When I was about 3, our family was sufficiently tight on money to have bought a used washing machine from a secondhand appliances store instead of getting a new one, and it unbalanced really easily.
The washing machine was taller than I was. When the spin cycle first started, it would often unbalance a bit and go whang, whang, whang a few times and then it would smooth out; but other times it would get worse and worse instead, whang, whang, whang, whang, WHANG, WHANG…and then it would start to walk across the floor, as the offbalanced whangs made it kind of pivot around one leg or another, and it would work its way out of the little cubbyhole it was tucked into and shudder its way out into the middle of the narrow hallway, making the most godawful racket as it did so.
Damn, that thing scared me.
This is really stupid, but the toilet in my gramma’s basement. It’s really old and when it’s flushed, the pipes make this awful screechy whine, which creeped me out when I was little.
Dear, Og! My parents made the stupid mistake of taking me into a car wash when I was really little and I screamed like I have never screamed before or since!
IIRC, I didn’t have a sense of the spinny brushes’ mass. They were just really big, red, moving things. I thought they were going to crush the car.
bouv, you can find it on Amazon if you’re really curious. The Jabberwocky scene is terrifying, but what really used to get me was the scene when the White Queen turned into a goat.
Now this one was a true amalgam of weird fears. As a child I was terrified of those high-power towers and lines that sprawl across the landscape. I was firmly convinced the towers were monsters that could walk around and ZAP their lines down on passing cars.
There were several causes. One was my surrepitiously watching the cheesey “Creature Feature” movies on Friday nights. It didn’t help that my parents always cautioned us about electrical outlets and appliances, but meanwhile somebody was executed in the electric chair. That scared me absolutely spitless and witless.
The worst thing was that driving under those huge electric lines made the car radio crackle and fade. I’d cower in the backseat, petrified with fear until we passed the danger. But if you look at those towers, especially the nasty horned ones, they look just like lines of alien monsters marching along the landscape. They don’t move until you take your eyes off them.
Ahem. Not that they bother me all that much anymore. Really.
Veb
Oh, and the channel that just had “snow” on the TV.
It may have been Channel One, but I recall it being unnumbered on our dial. On our dial it was Channel “U”.
And this was prior to Poltergeist and “there heeeeere.” Something about the hiss of the TV snow channel and the electric, static-like… I want to say “feel” of it, because it almost seemed tactile to me.
Creepy. Gave me the heebie-jeebies.
I still find it kinda creepy.
When I was very young, I remember seeing a “claymation” type cartoon that gave me the absolute heeby-jeebies.
It started off with this woman vacuuming. And after a while, things started getting sucked up the vac. Like the rug. And the lamp. Then the dog, then her husband in his armchair … finally it sucked up the whole world including ITSELF and that was the end.
No wonder I was traumatised by vacuum cleaners for YEARS after that! I’m talking well into my teens - rationally, of course, I knew that I wouldn’t get sucked up the hose, but I’m sure that rationally the arachnophobe knows that that daddy longlegs in the bathtub isn’t much of a threat too.
I’m better now though. Whew!
I remember being scared by television sign offs. T.V. stations that wouldn’t broadcast 24 hours a day would play the star spangled banner, announce their call letters, broadcast power, and inform viewers they had come to the end of their ‘broadcast day’. I was eight, had just moved to my new room in the semi-finished basement, and should have been in bed. To know that T.V. Ended at a certain time was a scarey bit of forbidden knowledge. T.V. was always there, wasn’t it?
OMFG! I’d forgotten all about that! That thing was fucking awful! I remember being 5 years old and freaked out. I think that movie is partly to blame for my fear of the use of mirrors in horror movies. shudder
Woops, hit submit too soon.
Oh man, I hated that too. The rollerguys freaked me out too. Actually most of that movie freaked me out, lol. And yet it seems so appropriate that it was a young Fairuza Balk playing Dorothy. I’ll have to rent it from Blockbuster one of these days, I’m morbidly curious to see it again.
:eek: Me too! My fear stemmed from hearing a replay of “War of the Worlds” and my imagination supplying the images. Tall metallic aliens=tall power line towers. I was convinced those things moved when no one was looking.
I was also afraid of Beaker from the Muppets. Abso-freakin’-lutely terrified of him and his pal the scientist with no eyes. Why, oh why, did he not have eyes?