When I was a child I was scared of my curtains. They had flowers on them, but I could see monsters in the flowers.
My godson is scared of electric fans. He won’t stay in the same room as one.
Onions.
I can’t talk about it right now; maybe later.
I was afraid of the the noise that katydids and/or locusts made late at night. I thought they were rattle snakes. I guess I got the idea because my dad killed one while we were out deer spotting. Odd that this thread was started, because I was just telling someone else this Monday night as we were sitting on my back porch listening to the locusts.
Something like a fluffy dandelion seedball, slowly rolling across the floor toward a four-year-old Ice Wolf freaked the heck out of me. I thought it was some kind of white spider going to get me.
I was even more of a wuss then that I am now.
ladyfoxfyre said,
Oh my god, there is another like me out there. Those things wer just not right. I always thought they came out of the closets whenever we left the house. Shudder.
My 2-year-old son is scared of houseplants. He’s so frightened of them that we can’t eat in restaurants that have plants around the booths and tables (which is just about ALL of them). I can’t even imagine what he must be thinking about them. I guess the fact that I water the ones at home makes him think they are some sort of creepy animal that doesn’t move much.
However, plants and trees outside don’t bother him at all.
Figure that one out!
That turning world thing that used to show at the end of certain sitcoms/drama shows really scared me. I remember that it used to show at the end of the Waltons of all things. Now that thing was scarey.
On Sesame Street there was a skit that ended with one of the big, blue monsters (I don’t remember his name, but it wasn’t Cookie Monster) growling at the camera close up, fogging up the lens (which was actually just shown by whiting out the screen with just his eyes showing through). This just scared the bajeezuz out of me. After I learned how to identify this skit at the beginning I either turned the TV off or changed the channel and waited a couple minutes and then switched back once I knew it was over.
My parents had a Volkswagen bug, whose ceiling had a dense pattern of small holes in the surface. These were just “dots” to me as a three-year-old. Whenever I looked up at the dots the pattern would throw my eyes out of focus and the dots would appear to come to life and move. This freaked me out and scared me to the point that I was afraid to look at the ceiling anymore. My parents never thought about it then, but they figured this was an indication that my eyes may have been having trouble focusing, and by the time I was six I was wearing glasses.
I also hated going through the automatic car washes and seeing those huge, roaring brushes come spinning and charging towards us.
Oh, how could I have forgotten? I was afraid to enter a bathroom with the lights off because I was sure I would see Bloody Mary in the mirror.
And I know I can’t be the only one who jump into bed from about 2 feet away so the person/thing under my bed couldn’t grab my ankles.
Calliope, I still do that! Probably a hold over from when I was a kid and couldn’t let my feet hang over the end of the bed 'cause the squirrels lurking under the bed would eat them.
Fiddlehead ferns. They used to grow in my sandbox, and I always hated them during their fiddlehead phase. They reminded me of big wormy things - yuk!
I had this ridiculously terrifying dream that a gigantic yellow letter “Y” was coming to get me. What the heck?
I was horribly, terribly afraid of the song “The Cat Came Back.” Man, that cat should have been dead, but it just kept coming back! It just wasn’t right.
I had recurring nightmares that I was riding in the back seat of my parents’ Camaro, going across Lake Ponchartrain on the Causeway on the way to New Orleans. I’d be staring out the window, and when I looked up to talk to my parents they would be GONE! I was sure the car was going to go right off the bridge into the lake.
I was incredibly afraid to cross both that bridge, and the really tall bridge over the Mississippi in Baton Rouge. I’m stll not overly fond of bridges, but it’s better now that I’m the one driving.
Chicken Scratch, I think there was a Sesame Street skit where there was a yellow Y chasing someone. I can see it pretty clearly in my mind, but don’t remember who was being chased. Maybe Grover? And dwc1970, I think the monster’s name is Harry (Hairy?).
Oh, and this is pretty normal, but I was terrified of the Big Bad Wolf from the Three Little Pigs cartoon. I had to keep all hands and feet under the covers at night just in case he was under the bed.
Those nasty, little, green faced flying monkeys in The Wizard of Oz!! That they could just carry people off and fly them away absolutely terrified me. The scene where they flew off with Toto…* shudder*
The tree bark on the sycamore in our back yard (it used to peel off and drop down on me when I was playing).
Also, I went through a long “night terror” phase in which I believed the drawers in my dresser opened & closed at night…eventually, my mom pulled out all the drawers and stored them in her room until I got over it.
I’ll also mention automatic carwashes. I was sure those spinning brushes were going to get me. Scared the shit outta me. I always laid down on the floor in the backseat whenever we went through.
There was this sump-pump in my grandparents basement under the stairs that scared the crap outta me too. The worst part was the the stairs had an open back on them, so you could see it as you went up them.
<shudder>
I had a lot of nightmares where I was being chased by Animal from the Muppet Show.
Other than that, the most traumatizing thing I remember seeing was an episode of Fantasy Island (the original) where there’s a masquerade ball. At the end of the dance, they remove their fancy 18th century style masks to reveal that they’re all monsters. I had bad dreams about that one for almost 10 years…
I was terrified of losing my baby teeth. Not only did I think it would hurt a lot, I thought you lost them all at once. I knew they grew back, but I thought you had to spend months gumming your food until you got your grown-up teeth. I still have nightmares where I lose all my teeth. shudder
Whoa!! I had almost the SAME EXACT recurring nightmare!! Only difference was that our car was at the top of this big hill and I would look up at the front seats and my parents would be gone and the car would shift out of gear and roll backwards down the hill by itself with me strapped inside.
Guuh…I still have hold-overs from that dream. I still get the heebie-jeebies if I am in the backseat of a car and the driver gets out while the car is running.
So I’m the third one to be terrified of the yep-yeps. 
Who the heck thought those things were a good idea for little kids? I had a bunch of nightmares based on them.
I had this tape, when I was really young, of lullabies and the last song ended with these outer spacey sound effects. They scared me SO much and conjured up thoughts of flesh-eating aliens.
I saw a news special around age 5 about a guy that broke into a house and brutally tortured and murdered the family members. Well, for no less than SEVEN years, it took me forever to get to sleep at night because I was convinced the same would happen to us. (For the first four years or so I would start crying if I thought about it too much and sleep on the rug in the interior bathroom [the only room in the house without any windows] and crawl back to bed before my parents woke up.) It didn’t help that my bedroom had two exterior doors and a window and a hall door that didn’t lock.
I saw a picture in a book warning about the dangers of chemicals or somesuch that was a very exaggerated illustration of a boy pulling his hand out of a bucket of bleach, seeing it was completely soft and boneless, and screaming. I thought that would actually happen if I touched bleach, so I would constantly remind people to wear gloves while doing the laundry (not that they did, of course).