Things that scared the shit out of you as a little kid.

[Nekromantik]

Pigs, My grandmother would make tamales with pig heads sometimes. When she would clean the head and take out the eyes, she'd tell me it was so they couldn't see me. To this day I won't make tamales this way and she gets upset saying it's a tradition.

I once got really scared when a lightning storm started to come in because I thought an alien ship was hiding in it, I had just seen an episode on aliens on Unsolved Mysteries. I ran to my dad to tell him about the aliens coming, and he looked me dead serious in the face and said "Don't worry, we're really far from the border." I had to explain to him I wast talking about real aliens from space, he looked embarrassed.

 

[bbpoison]

This fucking bullshit right here:

Sorry about the crappy quality; there seem to be no good versions of it on the 'tubes.

You're so lucky! I wish I had seen this as a kid!

 

[Francis E. Dec Esc.]

I was terrified of cowboy boots for some reason.

Also, I grew up when the Satanic Panic was in full swing, and I thought all Satanists could shoot force lightning like Emperor Palpatine.

 

[Angry New Ager]

Swimming pool drains. I learned to swim at a very early age, and wasn't afraid of the water in general; if swimming was on the agenda, I was there. But the drain in the bottom of the deep end terrified me. I was afraid if I got too close to it I might my arm get sucked in and not be able to escape. I even avoided the deep end of the pool in order to stay away from the drain. I'd dive off the diving board and swim as fast as I could to the shallow end.

It was such a weird, specific fear that I can't help but wonder if I saw it in a movie. My parents weren't very good at taking us kids to age-appropriate films; my dad, who usually decided what we were going to see, had a thing for really violent films (I saw Serpico, The French Connection, Marathon Man, and Shaft in their first theatrical releases as a little kid), and blockbuster disaster flicks (ditto, The Towering Inferno; The Poseidon Adventure, Airport, etc.), but occasionally we'd see Gothic-creepy thrillers such as The Other or The Omen). And I tended to watch a lot of the latter type of flicks on TV, on Saturdays, once morning kids' cartoons gave way to old movies in the afternoons.

So I keep thinking that some day, I will find out exactly which late '60s-early '70s horror/suspense film has somebody getting sucked into a pool drain, but so far, nada.

I did make myself get over it, however. I knew that fear was too crazy to tell anybody about, and eventually I decided it was too crazy to keep living with. When I was maybe seven or eight I started forcing myself to dive down and pozload my negholel drain cover every time I got in a pool, until it stopped being scary.

 

[Overcast]

Clowns man. I fucking hated seeing clowns. I remember seeing the book cover of "It" inside a drawer in my house when I was little and being freaked out by Pennywise just giving me his cold side ways stare on the book cover. I was always pretty wary of it even though it's just a book.

Oddly enough neither The Joker or Krusty the Clown scared me though.

 

[Fatcat]

the movie chucky, fuck that ugly ass doll

 

[ForgedBlades]

My family's first PC, that we bought in '95 or '96, had this weird glitch where the game Hover would randomly open. It was fucking weird, you'd just be typing on Word, screwing around in Paint, or playing Solitaire, and Hover would pop up on the screen out of nowhere. There was no rhyme or reason to it either. Sometimes it would go days between popping up, and sometimes it would do it every five minutes.

Anyway, long story short, my 8 year old mind convinced myself that the computer was haunted. There was no other logical explanation. Twenty-some years later, and now having a good grasp on how Windows works, I still can't explain it.

That goddamn title screen still gives me the chills.

 

[soryu]

There was an episode of Full House where Michelle's feet wouldn't stop growing to the point where the whole family had to run out of the room. I remember clearly being afraid of her giant, red toenails.

I also remember an episode of Arthur gave me a panic attack when I was like 7. There was an opening sequence where Arthur and his friends were in class and his rat teacher was writing on the chalkboard. Suddenly, everything started slowing down and the chalk was screeching.
I can't find a video of the scene, but it was definitely scary.

 

[Schmeckel]

Accidentally eating apple or watermelon seeds meant that your stomach would explode from the seeds growing. I had nightmares about that.

 

[Fleeb]

Talking skeletons used to scare the shit out of me. There was a scene in Are You Afraid of the Dark that I remember, even though I never really watched the show.

 

[Rabbit without a hat]

There was this sort of educational adventure game we played as a class when I was, like 7, 8 years old called grannies garden.

If you clicked the wrong things then this witch would appear and she scared the shit out of me more months.

Apparently there are two versions of the game? I googled grannies garden and what I got was something with atari style graphics, and I remember the version I played wasn't like that.

 

[Slowpoke Sonic]

the fucking dance of the sugar plum fairy song.

 

[Un Platano]

When I was a kid I can vividly remember one evening where there was something huge outside just behind the wall of my bedroom scraping on it. It wasn't an imagined sound either, there really was something out there banging and scraping on the wall. I was about ready to shit bricks because there was a monster trying to break down my wall. I ran out of there and sat in the living room and a little bit later I saw a moose walk by in the front yard. Turns out it was him scraping his antlers on the trimming on the corner of the house.

 

[ShittyRecolor]

These two frickin' monsters from Spartakus and The Sun Beneath The Sea used to scare the living bejeezus out of me when I was 4:

I used to think the screams and moaning of the orange beast named Thot (heheheheh) were really terrifying, but in hindsight he's kind of a sweetie.

Oh, and THIS fucker of course:

And how could I forget the Joker from Mask of The Phantasm:

 

[heymate]

I also remember an episode of Arthur gave me a panic attack when I was like 7. There was an opening sequence where Arthur and his friends were in class and his rat teacher was writing on the chalkboard. Suddenly, everything started slowing down and the chalk was screeching.
I can't find a video of the scene, but it was definitely scary.

I think I remember that scene. Arthur was talking about how slowly the passage of time felt during class or something and the second hand on the clock was just inching along taking its merry time. Not sure what the episode was though.

 

[Angry New Ager]

the fucking dance of the sugar plum fairy song.

Haha--between that creepy-ass piece of music and how fucking creepy nutcrackers are, attending a performance of The Nutcracker is never part of my holiday plans. Ever.

 

[SoGoose]

The idea of heaven scared me as a kid, the idea of living eternal without an end to rest.

 

[The Fair Lady]

Hot air balloons, but only if they were up close. I couldn't tell you why.

Also that part in the first Harry Potter movie where Quirrell snarls like a dog after drinking the unicorn's blood. It freaked out my best friend at the time too, and I remember we once ducked behind the couch when that scene came on.

 

[ThePentiumWay]

When I was about eight years old, my parents would take me to church and in the pew behind us was a group of elderly couples I gradually became friends with. We'd say hi, talk after church (donuts were served after mass and I sat at their table) and just generally hit it off. After a year or so, they started declining in health and I remember Robert, the first of the group dying first. At about 3 AM Sunday morning, I woke up to the sound of footsteps outside in the hallway adjacent to my room. Thinking it was my dad getting water like he usually did, I called out to him. No response. A little unnerved since he usually responded, I turned my light on and waited. To this day I'm not sure if it was a hallucination or what, but I remember Robert peeking through my door wearing a camo shirt, smiling, and closing the door. This terrified me so much that even into my teens I couldn't sleep without the blanket over my head. I later found out that about the time said vision happened, Robert had passed away.

 

[UnsufficentBoobage]

So many things...often something I saw on MTV, little cartons they had very often pretty unnerving for a kid. Also, that one commercial (also shown there) of some kind of beauty product or something - it had woman who cut her had away cause her fingers started cutting like scissors (cutting was shown offscreen, but rolling head, sadly, wasn't).