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Childish Terrors

I've always had a dislike for clown dolls. Clowns themselves I can handle. I even think they're funny but clown dolls? :nooo:

Anyway, what is the first thing we have to sew for my year 8 sewing class? A clown doll. When I brought the freaky thing home I announced that I was going to burn it. Mum would have none of that. because I was obviously going to burn the house down. So I vowed to wait until the next day, when she would be shopping, and then smite it with my lighter.
Before I went to bed that night I chucked it in the lounge room.

Next morning I wake up with the damn thing sitting on my chest staring at me! :eek!!!!: Turns out my little bitch brother had found it and put it there to scare me, which it did wonderfully. I could have killed him.
Instead I opted for scaring him into thinking he was schizophrenic later that week (see the erroneous childhood beliefs thread or pm me if you care but are lazy like i am) :twisted:
 
I started reading the Unexplained at a young age, and I still remember a picture that scared the living daylights out of me for years.
(I'd still rather not look at it now TBH).
Book 5- in issue 58- an artist's rendering of the top half of a staring, red haired alien that followed a man up the stairs. To me at the tender age of seven or eight, this picture embodied all that could possibly be evil enough to come and get me in the night. I was always terrified I would think it into existence.
For literally years and years I would have a horror of going up the stairs. Even nowadays I still don't look behind me if I'm going upstairs in the dark, last thing at night!
 
I have a terror of spiders that lasts to this day. My husband is totally unsympathetic; he thinks I'm being silly. Nothing like having your worst phobias minimized!

I read some of the Whitley Strieber and at least one of the Betty Andreasson books and lay awake in bed many a sleepless night in fear that the Greys were going to float through my bedroom walls. I also had the "thing under the bed that may grab my feet", so no body part could be dangling over the edge of the bed.

Also clowns, though now I just find them annoying. And dolls, creepy!

Wow, I guess a lot terrified me!
 
well, there were the standard childhood fears: the toilet (mostly because it was just so damn loud - loud noises still send my anxiety level skyrocketing), things in my closet (i swore there was some kind of evil robot in there), things under my bed (i still wont dangle an extremity over the edge of my mattress).

certain movies really freaked me out as a kid, including: the walking steak from poltergeist, the blood fountaining from the bed in nightmare on elm street, and pennywise the clown from it (which, best as i can tell, started a life long horror of clowns)

the worst, by far, was a series of books called scary stories to tell in the dark. there was one story about a vampire that peered into a girls window before breaking in and attacking her that really freaked me out. i still keep my shades drawn at night for fear of seeing that face in the window. and another story about a guy who hears a weird whistling/chanting from the woods behind his house, getting closer, then up on the roof, and then this giant head slides down the chimney, literally scaring his little dog to death before eating the guy or something. scared the hell out of me. the books were full of the most horribly frightening illustrations (even now, as a person who makes horribly frightening illustrations of my own, they give me shivers). damn books. to this day i will not allow them in my house. i borrowed them once recently and had the very satisfying experience of rereading the stories and realizing how childish most of them are (despite most of them being from actual folk tales and ihtm-style stories), but just having them there in my house made me very nervous. those books traumatized the hell out of poor child-me, and probably made me the person i am today :)
 
Here's a lad after me own heart -

Next morning I wake up with the damn thing sitting on my chest staring at me! Turns out my little bitch brother had found it and put it there to scare me, which it did wonderfully.
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Class. 8)
 
Reminds me of visiting "Symbolism in Europe" in 1976. I was a teenager then and my parents took me to the museum often - I'm still thankful for that. It was a great exhibition but one artwork gave me the shivers for many days afterward:

http://www.leopoldmuseum.org/html/body_grafik.php

This was compensated by another artwork that also gave me the shivers, but of another kind entirely (NSFW) - Alberto Martini, 1904:

http://i39.photobucket.com/albums/e182/uair01/martini.jpg

I still have that catalogue and it's full of what you would call "weird shit" today :) , strange times those 1900's ...
 
As a kid in the 60s we used to visit my aunt and uncle - now both nonogenarians and in the same house - in what is a nondescript city suburb but was then the northern limits of town and semi rural.
We didn't have a car and the day we went over every month or two, was Sunday and the bus service sporadic.

My uncle was a robust countryman, more interested in gardening than ghosts but he seems to have been a natural psychic and eventually the relatives would winkle some story or other out of him as the sun set.
There was always a routine to this and the backdrop has stayed with me. Before gas fires were installed they had a miniature range, a Rayburn type thing that was fireplace, water heater and kettle boiler. He was a reluctant teller of a tale, with blanks in the narrative designed to avoid giving the children nightmares but which served only to heighten the terror and my aunt would bank up the range with coal from the scuttle as he had the story winkled out of him by the visiting aunts and the wind whistled down the chimney.

By the time we came to leave I was in a state of jitters and hid my face in my anorak and relied on my parent's hands to guide me, too terrified to look. The bus stop was opposite the cemetery gates on top of a hill. Standing inside that concrete shelter with the graveyard clock dolefully chiming the quarters took forever and when the lights of the bus came into view the relief was enormous.
It wasn't helped by a story in the local newspaper by a conductor on the route going to take the fare of a passenger upstairs who had disappeared.

It still gives me the shivers now.
 
fnordish said:
the worst, by far, was a series of books called scary stories to tell in the dark. there was one story about a vampire that peered into a girls window before breaking in and attacking her that really freaked me out.
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Argh, that sounds very familiar. I've always remembered reading a story when I was a kid about something at a child's window, and how she would hear it scratching at the window or something like that. I'm 27 and I still hate the noise of things at my bedroom window at night!

Going to order that book off amazon now to see if it is the story I remember; would be kind of a shame if it turned out to be totally non-scary now though.
 
When I was very young and had first learned to read my mother gave me a book called "There's A Nightmare In My Closet". Very thin, lots of illustrations, kinda Maurice Sendik meets Dr. Seuss (actually illustrated and written by Mercer Mayer).

Basic story; boy is convinced there's a monster in his closet; his mom says there isn't; Boy waits up with a cork gun, shoots monster, monster cries. Boy comforts monster, subsequently making friends with him. Now all is well, right? Nothing in this book bothered me until I opened to the very last page which had a nightmarish illustration of some Cat-In-The-Hat like monster (the previous monster's friend) standing in front of the open closet door. Scared the hell out of me.

It wasn't that I thought it was in my closet or anything, it just looked so damned scary! The book disappeared but showed up again 6 years later. Forgetting my previous experience I opened it up with fond memories since this was the first book I had read all the way through by myself (and started a lifetime of reading). I suddenly opened to the last page....Aaahhhhhh!!!!

I used to buy those little, cheap locks from gumball machines and had 20 or so laying around. Later that day I took my mom's hole punch, punched 15 or more holes around the cover, and locked it shut. I then hid it in the very back of my mom's closet so I would never have to look at it again.

Oddly enough the idea of the locks wasn't to keep me from accidently opening it again....it was to keep that monster in!
 
Does anyone remember being afraid of Rita Tushingham as a child? Maybe when she was guest starring in 80s sitcom Bread? I'm sure I read this from someone somewhere but I'll be darned if I can recall where. Anybody?
 
As a child I was convinced that the Cybermen lived in a barn near Stenhousemuir. I was also terrified of shop dummies after they featured in an episode of Dr Who. Frankly, Jon Pertwee had a lot to answer for.
 
Struwelpeter scared the bejeezus out of me. Years later I found the book and I could only pick it up by the corner and dump it in the bin. What sort of monster conceived that as a book for children?
 
I remember the Ladybird book of the Three Little Pigs used to terrify me. Especially the illustration of the wolf, slyly peering into the pigs house that was made of bricks.

I forgot about it for years and then my wife who is a teacher brought a copy of it back from school one day. Across 30 years of forgetfulness, the fear returned in a nanosecond. The wolf in question had a particularly long muzzle. I can recall having a nightmare as a five year old about it. I was sat outside the bathroom which was directly opposite to my bedroom at the time. My Mam was running my bath and she walked out if the bathroom and started down the stairs. As she did, a long muzzle started to menacingly emerge from behind the wardrobe. I tried to scream to my Mam not to leave me up there as I couldn't move, but I found that I couldn't shout/speak either. Fear ratchets up until I awoke in fits of tears.

Ah, great days.

Secretly threw the book out with the recycling! Heh, there'd be a size 11 and a rounders bat ready for said wolf if he showed up in my nightmares nowadays. Please, no references to Fortean Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals....that hairy bas*ard ahs got it coming to him.
 
some of my childhood terrors came from book stories.

a childrens book about ghosts i think it may have been an usbourne book. there was one page about a type of ghost that had a tiny tiny mouth and a mean look on its face. because they had such tiny mouths they couldnt feed properly and had to resort to residing in a living persons stomach and would get in when the person yawned without covering their mouth with their hand.
that freaked me out for years. i used to yawn with my teeth clamped shut my mouth as closed as i could make it and my hands over my mouth.

there was a short story in a book of horror tales. it was a man staying in a very old stone cottage and was told not to look at the ancient stones in the garden at night time. well he did and saw them moving and they saw him watching them and got him and turned him to stone.
i wouldnt mind reading it again does anyone know the name of the short story or the book?

a short story in a childs book about 2 children accidently breaking the panel hiding a fireplace in their home. and it started making a strange noise like it was talking to them. they started placeing objects inside and the objects would return with a strange worm button on them and the older brother decided to get in to investigate and he comes back unable to speak and is clearly insane and he has a worm button on his face.

some starnge short stories that id like to reread if anyone could help out with titles and authors

things that still make me uneasy as an adult.
the generic whitely striber type of alien.
the gas mask child in dr whos are you my mother episode.
 
paganfrog said:
a short story in a childs book about 2 children accidently breaking the panel hiding a fireplace in their home. and it started making a strange noise like it was talking to them. they started placeing objects inside and the objects would return with a strange worm button on them and the older brother decided to get in to investigate and he comes back unable to speak and is clearly insane and he has a worm button on his face.
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That's a Nicholas Fisk short story, but I'll be darned if I can remember what it was called. I think it actually ended with the brother trying to drag his sister into the hole, and the worms were revolving in his eyes (he also looked much bigger than before he went in).

We have a Nicholas Fisk thread in the Fortean Culture forum you may wish to investigate.
 
oh yeah i remember nicholas fisks books now. he wrote some pretty creepy stuff for a child. "todays" kids scary novels aint a patch on fisks and some other books from the 70's and 80's childhood.
i want to read a copy of this book so i hope to find one somewhere.
 
I have always loved ghost stories, even as a child, but what really scared me was a tape I had, featuring some kind of squirrell and its strange friends. All in German.
There was a mad professor, who had invented a pill that would clean up the environment somehow [I really can't remember] but the main character accidentally swallowed it, which turned him inside-out :shock: , so the first side ended with him making these really squidgy noises and calling for help because he was turned inside out...I always stopped the tape there and never dared to listen to the second side until I asked my best friend to listen to it with me.
I was petrified and had my fingers ready on my ears. Basically others turned inside out and in the end someone made it all return to normal! Phew.
After that it became my most favourite tape.

Another thing that scared me was a picture in our large Lexicon, which showed a Japanese demon mask on an actor, the picture was from the 50's and I always skipped that page as it really freaked me out.

Strange what kids find scary, I didn't find my Devil-pupped scary, I used to kiss it and play with it all the time, I also used to read [since I was 5] the comic 'Gespenster Geschichten' [Ghost stories], which were really graphic. It seems kids find more subtle things scary. Things that have no explanation?
 
Anonymous said:
Had to sleep with the curtains closed, because I was convinced that if I woke in the middle of the night I would see a face at the window watching me - even though my bedroom was upstairs. And I had to make sure that my ears were covered as I was terrified that an earwig/woodlouse would crawl in there, in the night, and make its home in my ears.
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My best friend had this fear and would make me go around and close all the curtains for her. Even as an adult she still has the fear but can manage to close the curtains now...just. Occasionally it rubbed off on me, especially if I was 'stuck' somewhere like on the toilet with my back to the window and I'd imagine a face pressed to the glass :shock:

I think half the fear of toilets is the fact that you can't easily run away if something does happen. I hated our toilet as a child to the point where I'd become constipated or try to poo behind the settee :oops:. I place the blame squarely on the cistern. Big looming black box high above, long creepy chain, HORRENDOUS noise. It was the noise that finished me off.
 
That reminds me of the Pete and Dud routine where Dud tells Pete that if he doesn't get to the foot of the stairs before the toilet has finished its flushing and filling back up again, he will die.
 
Not so much tv, we used to relish the Hammer horror films,presented iirc by Peter Tomlinson with his panda.
Places, the fields where you didn't go, the wind blew my cowboy hat into the field and my older sister had to get it, I can't remember the particular terror in the fields but none of us would go in there.
The thing in the local cemetery, backed up by reports of a ghost sighting.
Electricity pylons for some reason,lost in memory,especially those in a field :shock:
 
I've been thinking about the quite innocent things that actually used to terrify me.

My dad used to tickle me a lot in play fights which was fun, but it lead to recurring nightmares about 'the tickly man' coming down the street to get me. Think Mr Tickle from the Mr Men with the long arms but a human version. The dreams were horrendous!

My dad also liked to scare me by shouting 'RED EYES!' probably expecting me to imagine some werewolf type creature creeping about but what I always imagined was an old man in a flat cap with round glasses and red eyes staring through the window! Many a sleepless night with that too!

My dad has a lot to answer for bless him!
 
Ilikepencils said:
My dad also liked to scare me by shouting 'RED EYES!' probably expecting me to imagine some werewolf type creature creeping about but what I always imagined was an old man in a flat cap with round glasses and red eyes staring through the window! Many a sleepless night with that too!
:shock: We lived by a forest which surrounded a reservoir when I was young, and my dad would take me and our dogs thought it several times a week for a walk. He used to love telling me about "Red eyes". They were a tribe of men who couldn't be seen in the trees as their skin was so dark and the only way to know if they were there was to see their red eyes. :shock: They used to take naughty kids and tie them to trees and thats where the kids would stay forever. :( ......They fuck you up, your mum & dad.......
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cherrybomb said:
:shock: We lived by a forest which surrounded a reservoir when I was young, and my dad would take me and our dogs thought it several times a week for a walk. He used to love telling me about "Red eyes". They were a tribe of men who couldn't be seen in the trees as their skin was so dark and the only way to know if they were there was to see their red eyes. :shock: They used to take naughty kids and tie them to trees and thats where the kids would stay forever. :( ......They fuck you up, your mum & dad.......
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I wonder if this is what my dad had in mind when he was trying to scare me? I've not heard of the red eyes tribe story but it's the sort of thing that could morph and spread for the use of dads everywhere.
 
Brrrr.... Yeh, maybe their father's told them about the red eyes? TBH, that forest that I mentioned before is a rather odd place, and I'm not sure why we visited it so often when we had loads of fields and farmland to wander about on. :shock:
 
I had a childhood fear of arranging my legs in a certain way when I'm lying in bed because I know (irrationally, of course) that if I lie like that, something awful will happen. I still can't lie like that and I'm in my 40s now. :shock:

I also can't BEAR it if there's a gap in the curtains when they are closed. My childish self has a name for that gap, but I can't bring myself to type it here and I never say it out loud in this context.

Blimey. :D
 
onetwothree said:
I had a childhood fear of arranging my legs in a certain way when I'm lying in bed because I know (irrationally, of course) that if I lie like that, something awful will happen. I still can't lie like that and I'm in my 40s now. :shock:

I also can't BEAR it if there's a gap in the curtains when they are closed. My childish self has a name for that gap, but I can't bring myself to type it here and I never say it out loud in this context.

Blimey. :D
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You're as bad as me...I can't write down the names of my worst childhood fears, either! Particularly those from a very young age. I don't know if it's superstition, or what I think is going to happen if I do, but ya know...why tempt fate? :lol:

I've only recently been able to admit I was scared senseless by the
New Zoo Revue http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Zoo_Revue
and H.R. Pufnstuf http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H.R._Pufnstuf

70's children's television has a lot to answer for, in my book. :p
 
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