The Sound of Music. Don’t ask, but I assure you it involved a horror too great to imagine. Luckily the movie does not invoke the flashbacks because it now contains one of my favorite movie scenes.
The mezzanine floor of the Hall of Ocean Life at the American Museum of Natural History had this display of sunfish that creeped me out big time. To get to the awesome dioramas in the downstairs, I’d run with my eyes squinted shut to the stairs and race down.
To this day I feel a bit antsy at the top of the steps, even though they renovated the mezzanine and no longer display the sunfish there.
My parents shouldn’t have let me watch the news, because that just led to me fearing mutually assured destruction or visits from terrorists. I also had a terrible fear of floods after witnessing a creek flood behind our house and I transferred this fear to hydro-electric dams. To this day I get uneasy looking at a dam.
When I was 12 I read a story in which a guy in Tennessee disappeared while walking across a field in broad daylight in front of his family. The story, like a lot of the “unsolved mystery” type crap that was around in my time, was presented as true (I’ve since learned that someone, possibly Ambrose Bierce, made it up on a slow news day) and it scared me silly. I was going through a rough time anyway and I didn’t need to have to worry about malevolent supernatural phenomena.
You would have loved the display we built at the record store (remember those?) for that album. Sucker had a 5’ long, 8’ high fighting machine in the middle of it. We won jackets from the record company for “Best Store Display.”
Also, my wife reminded me of my ingrained fear of tornados and flying monkeys.
When I was about 6 or 7, I was on an overnight camping trip with the Girl Scouts. One of the older girls told a scary story about a girl who owned a doll whose hands formed a gesture like this. The doll came to life and subsequently went around murdering the girl’s friends and family by puncturing their necks with her fingers. Eventually the doll murdered everyone in the world until only the little girl was left.
I was so traumatized that I went into paroxysms of terror upon returning home after the camping trip and discovering that several of my dolls had hands like the doll in the story. My parents even made an elaborate show of throwing all the dolls in the trash in an attempt to soothe me, but I continued to have nightmares for about a year that the dolls were coming for my family.
When I was a kid, we had most of the Time-Life books. One of them was The Body, and it had a photo of the nervous system from a cadaver that was the creepiest photo imaginable. The first time I saw it, it gave me nightmares! My best friend found out that it terrified me, and he would leave the book open to that page under the covers of my bed, or somewhere where it would startle me. I finally cut the page out of the book (without looking) and threw it away.
I looked for the image, and couldn’t find it, but this one is close. The image from the book was worse!
On a similar note, I remember reading 83 Hours Till Dawn - the story of Barbara Jane Mackle - when I was probably much too young for that. The book reproduced a note the kidnappers left in the capsule in which she was buried, as well as the ransom note they gave to her father - I found the phrase “She is buried in a lonely place” particularly distressing.
I shit you not, I had nightmares for years after I saw Gremlins. And I wasn’t that young - I was in high school when it came out.
Oh, god, yes. I actually was going to post this one too. I was a pretty hard kid to shake with written horror stuff–I read things like “The Amityville Horror” and “Helter Skelter” in 4th grade with nary a nightmare–but that book really got to me bigtime. Murder didn’t bother me that much, but the idea of being buried alive… <shudder> Yeah, I probably shouldn’t have read that book that young either.
I also was somewhat traumatized in first grade–one of my classmates was the son of the local vet, so the vet arranged a field trip for us to go to his office and see what vets do. Great, right? Go there, meet some animals, maybe watch him bandage up an injured paw or something?
Nope! We got to watch a cat get spayed! I still remember that poor cat, strapped spread-eagled to a board. She was a slim little Siamese. And the vet cut her open in front of this collection of wide-eyed first graders and narrated what he was doing. Did I mention I was a serious cat lover, even at that age?
I’m sure she was fine. I don’t remember anything horrific beyond just watching the surgery. But I can’t even imagine that happening with kids nowadays.
When I was 7, my older brother and his friend had to take me along, to watch *The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms. *They were both told ahead of time not to let me leave my seat alone. Well, at some point I had to go to the restroom. Neither of them could be bothered taking me, so eventually I peed in my pants. A lot.
For many years afterward, I always remember that movie as being something so frightening it literally made me pee in my pants. And decades later I finally got up the courage to rent the movie, prepared for an evening of terror. Yes, I made sure to empty my bladder first.
The movie actually turned out to be fairly lame.
When I was four my sister placed me in a patch of stinging nettles. Sort of a copse of nettles with only one way out. To this day I am morbidly afraid of the damn things. They’re not too common in America, thank God, but when I lived in California I had to avoid coastal trails.
I found a “Walking Liberty” fifty-cent piece in a friend’s backyard as a kid. Something about its size and Liberty’s headgear freaked me out. I have a real weird issue with large coins and statues.
I was eating a St. Michael’s sweetie and accidentally bit into the hard candy, and one of the jagged bits went down my throat. To this day I pretty much avoid (hard) candy.
We did the MS Read-a-thon when I was in third grade. I was convinced I was going to contract MS from the stickers they gave us as a reward.
Yes, I was a weird kid…
When I was about 6 my parents took me to see a double feature, The Black Hole and The Incredible Shrinking Woman. It was at my father’s workplace, not a cinema, just a projector set up in a basement. The whole experience was creepy and we had to leave before the end because I was too scared and upset.
To this day Lily Tomlin still freaks me out a little.
The “Charlie’s Angels” episode about “Beamish.”
Fake wrestling because I thought it was real.
Oh god, that freaking bunyip!
The animated version of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe scarred the hell out of me. My little sister and I were watching it, sad that the monsters were being so mean to the lion. “They cut off his hair! That’s mean. Why are they tying him to that rock? What are they doing with that knife…?”
My sister and I promptly lost it. I was in my thirties before I could watch anything to do with Narnia again.
Now to pee on your relief…
The chimp baby was supposed to be real. It just wasn’t Cornelius & Zira’s intelligent chimp baby, Ceasar. They traded it with the regular chimp mother at the circus where they were hiding, with the consent & knowledge of circus-owner Ricardo Montalban. MAYBE the baby chimp was stillborn so it was a more merciful trade.
Sitting on a pinecone?
[del] Khaaaaaaan![/del] FriarTedddd!
puppies and kittens. . . puppies and kittens…pup
Heh you should never, ever visit the Hunterian Museum in London. 
The Nairobi Trio: Ernie Kovacs - The Nairobi Trio "Solfeggio" - ABC Television Network Videotaped Version - YouTube
I still have a huge crush on Ernie Kovacs, but the Nairobi Trio *terrified *me as a child and *still *gives me major heebie-jeebies.