What was the dumbest thing that scared you as kid?

My Nain (that's Welsh for grandma) who was a living embodiment of Victoriana and who lived with us.

She always dressed in black with a white bit of lace at her throat and although she never once raised her hand to me she threatened to on a regular basis.

She was a constant source of Victorian sayings which she absolutely believed in such as "Those who don't work shouldn't eat" and "Children should be seen but not heard" and many more on the same sort of hard viscous morality.

Judgemental in the extreme and never restraining herself from telling people they were wrong and reverting to Welsh whenever she heard English indeed it was her who taught me Welsh by refusing to talk to me in English.

Her sisters were worse but they only occasionally visited us.
 
aeron said:
My Nain (that's Welsh for grandma) who was a living embodiment of Victoriana and who lived with us.

She always dressed in black with a white bit of lace at her throat and although she never once raised her hand to me she threatened to on a regular basis.

She was a constant source of Victorian sayings which she absolutely believed in such as "Those who don't work shouldn't eat" and "Children should be seen but not heard" and many more on the same sort of hard viscous morality.

Judgemental in the extreme and never restraining herself from telling people they were wrong and reverting to Welsh whenever she heard English indeed it was her who taught me Welsh by refusing to talk to me in English.

Her sisters were worse but they only occasionally visited us.
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Da iawn I mamgu! But only for the Welsh bit!
 

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When I was little my bedroom ceiling had an access panel to the attic and that conjured up all sorts of scary thoughts, of course my older brothers helped to fuel my imagination about what might be up there!
 
Very simular here too, Aunt Bea. I wrote this a long time ago but will never forget it.

I was watching Celebrity Ghost the other night and their guest was Vince Neil from Mötley Crüe. He was telling his time as a young boy and the thing in his room that lived in the closet. This story got to me as I had similar things in my room on the old house on West Hill.


I was 8 or 9 when these unexplainable things happened to me. I had a long walk in closet where I kept my clothes and most of my toys. This closet had the type of latch that you raised up ang the bar would fit in a groove. Impossible to open by itself.


I had an upstairs bedroom and the only light was moonlight that shown in my dormer window. Every night before I went to bed, I always looked into my closet and made sure the latch was shut. I could see the closet door from my bed and could see the outline of my room. One night, as I was about to fall asleep, I heard a slight noise. I had a small lamp on my bed stand as well as a Airline AM radio from Montgomery Ward. As I lit up the room, I noticed the closet door was open about 3 inches. I relatched the door and went back to bed.


Here is where it gets weird. A very bright light started coming through my dormer window and the closet door was open again. I saw something move across the room. What or who, I do not know. ET, shadow person or ghost.....I still have no idea but it did scare the day lights out of me. This was the start of my sleeping with my head covered up. I don't recall this happening again, but I did add two more bolt locks on the closet door.
 
The heat vents in the floor. I was positive that there was something lurking down there waiting to reach up and grab me. I was OK as long as there was hot air coming out (for some reason, I thought they couldn't stand the heat), but when the vents were cold.....wooooooo. In winter, I used to get dressed in the morning in the kitchen, which was the warmest room in the house. I would stand over the heat vent in my voluminous flannel nightgown and get dressed under my gown. Needless to say, I got dressed FAST.

Fast forward many years. I saw a horror movie about a house that was built over an old mine shaft. Some thingie with tentacles lived down in the mine shaft and grabbed this guy through the floor vent. It "strained" him through the vent. SEE? I was right all along! I was in my 40's by then and still had nightmares about that movie.
 
Dolls. Even though I was a girl I hated dolls and was afraid of some of them. Still don't care for dolls today. Clowns too, I remember my older brother chasing me with a big stuffed clown and I was screaming my head off. Still don't care for clowns today. :D
 
Gee, I can't remember anything? What's wrong with me? Maybe because I didn't have brothers & sisters to torture me? IDK.

Oh wait, just remembered something!!! I was afraid to ride the school bus home in first grade for a few weeks, because the first day of school the driver went past my house and didn't let me off. I didn't know I was supposed to tell him.:rolleyes: Got over it and loved the school bus ride after that.
 
I liked to roller skate and we had a nice arena in the next town over. You could skate all day long for fifty cents. It closed around five in the afternoon and in the winter it was dark by then. I had to take the bus and then walk a few blocks home. I had to pass the cemetery. Some folks put candles or some sort of light on the graves. They flickered and made all sorts of horrible shadows. Of course my imagination ran wild. I tried to stay calm but always picked up speed until I was running full throttle for home. What made it hard was the fact that back in the 50's my skating box was all heavy metal. So heavy I could sit on it waiting for the bus. Running at full speed was not easy with the added weight. Sometimes I wonder how the outer screen door stayed on its hinges from the way I tore it open to get in the house.
 
I grew up in Wisconsin and was terrified of tornados. There hadn't ever been one that touched down when I lived there but we did have warnings. In the early years of elementary school I didn't want to go to school any time there were dark clouds. My dad had shown me photos in books of tornadoes, not to scare me, but because he found them interesting. He tried to calm my fears by telling me how rare they were where we lived, but that didn't help. I would sit in my school classroom just petrified when it got dark outside and windy.

Later, it was air raid sirens that terrified me. Growing up in the era of bomb shelters and bomb drills at school I had an inordinate fear of an all-out nuclear attack. Any time I heard a siren outside when I was at school I would worry that it could be an air raid, but that maybe to closer sirens weren't working. They would test them from time to time, and even that made my blood curdle. It makes me feel anxious now to even think about how I worried back then. I don't think my parents were aware of the extent of my anxiety. When I would bring it up, they'd tell me not to be silly, nothing was going to happen.

Sometimes I wonder if I had been killed in a natural or nuclear disaster in a previous life. :D
 
I grew up in New Mexico and when I was three my mom took me to Los Angeles to visit her sisters. One day, when I was playing in their back yard, I heard a low call that really frightened me. I immediately flattened myself on the ground hoping that if I played dead it wouldn't get me. The low call continued but didn't get any closer. Eventually my aunt came to check on me and rescued me from that monster. She explained that the noise I heard was from a pigeon. We didn't have those at home.

That was a memorable trip. I remember being very sick in the desert from bad water. I also remember being locked inside my aunt's car in downtown LA while the women went into a department store. I didn't know how to unlock the door but a little red-haired girl came along on her tricvcle and told me how to open the door. We were making our escape on her tricycle when we were caught. :D
 
My mother was terrified of tornados...she would drag us to the storm shelter in the middle of the night every time it thundered....I was more scared of the spiders and spider webs in the shelter than the storm.
 
So very, very, many weird things...medication might have helped

The witch from Snow White which is also sadly the first movie I remember clearly.

The crypt-keeper puppet on "Tales from the Crypt"

Oddly " technical difficulties"...that is when a network had a service problem all of a sudden the screen would blank out to some test pattern. I would run for my Mom or at least cover my eyes.

The dumbest fear? I must have been really young. My brother's room was next to mine. Of course he wanted to keep his pesky baby sister out. He put a sheet over a music stand and turned it into a ghost. A crude face with open mouth. I went nowhere near his room:eek:
 
A few things:

Superman on TV. He was all right when he was on the ground but he scared the %$#@ outta me when he was flying.

The kitchen back door at night. For some reason I thought a monster stayed on the back porch at night and I didn't want it to see me walk by the door. At that time we lived near the railroad tracks and I though the monster came up from there.

The fear our house would be struck by lightning and burn down.
 
My grandmother's mother. Nobody is sure, but she was in her 90s. She was at least 92. I came from French Canadian stock, so she spoke no English. She was only visiting for a short time. My grand mother, and all her daughters, my mom included, acted like it was a royal visit. They were all running around and saying things like, "Where will she sit?" What will she eat?", etc., etc., Then the day when "she" arrived. All my cousins were told not to make a sound. This wasn't the usual warning to keep quiet. It was a scary warning. They weren't messing around. Something super bad would happen if we didn't. In twos , we were taken into the room where my great grandmother was. She looked like something from the 1800s. She was all in black. She had some kind of hat on. She was covered in black lace from head to toe. You couldn't see her face. She didn't say a word. I was terrified. It was like we were on display. I was afraid she was going to snatch some of us away.
 
I also have to confess to sleeping with my bedroom door cracked open and the bathroom light on until midway in my teens. The shades up too. Even with my Mom's cat curled up and sleeping with me every night I didn't like the dark. Fast forward a few decades later. I was camping with best buddy.
Dark woods and he had taken the kids on a night hike. I was sitting at the picnic table enjoying the quiet and a cigarette. Suddenly KNOCKKNOCKKNOCKKNOCK...dangedable forest critter threw down acorns from over the table...almost jumped out of my skin...still don't like the dark so good.
 
I read the book The Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham as a kid, it described really well the sound of plant branch striking someone . It went whoosh, slap, then after it hit you you were dead. I could not walk into a dark room for years without expecting to hear that whoosh slap noise
 
I just thought of something oddly ironic. Here I was scared of so much as a kid but I watched " Creature Features" every week. Guess I enjoyed fueling the nightmares:confused:
 
God. When I was a child we attended an extremely fundamental church that used "God" as a tool for keeping people in line, especially kids. I suppose they all do to some extent, but this church had you convinced He was around every corner with a huge can of Unspeakable Wrath in His hand. And when you're scared to death of God, you're basically afraid of everything.

I've been a devout Atheist since about age 25. My conversion had very little to do with fear, obviously.
 
anod, my husband could so relate...Catholic school before Vatican II, you were zapped for any thought. But then you had to figure out what kind of sin it was exactly...
 
anodyne said:
God. When I was a child we attended an extremely fundamental church that used "God" as a tool for keeping people in line, especially kids. I suppose they all do to some extent, but this church had you convinced He was around every corner with a huge can of Unspeakable Wrath in His hand. And when you're scared to death of God, you're basically afraid of everything.

I've been a devout Atheist since about age 25. My conversion had very little to do with fear, obviously.
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Similar with me except I turned atheist at 14. I'm still amazed my devout Catholic parents accepted it!!
 

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