What scared you when you were a child?

[Gare]

So I had this silly idea of a thread last night while I was lying in bed, trying to fall asleep. Pretty sure we've done this before, but still, it couldn't hurt to do it again.

Since we all know kids have the most active imagination ever - what things scared the shit out of you when you were young? And I'm not only looking for genuinely scary stuff - the more interesting part would be to find things that seem pretty harmless now, but back then, were terrifying. Like a scene in a movie that now makes you go "why did this scare me so much back then?". This can be something imaginary as well. If you thought a giant werewolf was standing right in front of your bed every night back when you were 6, then yeah, go ahead and post it.

In any case, here's mine.

There was this old 80s movie called The Peanut Butter Solution, and there's a scene where this kid goes into an abandoned house a gets the living hell scared out of him. And I don't think the camera ever shows what happens, yet I still had nightmares of it for weeks.

The other one is from the DnD cartoon. Yeah, this one. There was this scene in which one of the female main characters looks into this magic mirror, which somehow ages her so much that she turns into an old lady. This transformation also scared the shit out of me back then for some reason.

Alright, that's all I could think of for now. Your turn, gogogo!

[Zaladane]

Saw E.T. With my mom when it came out. She said I freaked and had nightmares for awhile. Think I was 4 and don't really remember. To clarify it was E.T. Himself that freaked me out.

Also the clown from IT. Think this one scared a lot of kids. Even though I was around 13 it was still pretty creepy.

Oh and muppets like the big dudes from the muppet show and I think it was a talking garbage pile or something from fraggle rock. Very young for those too.

[skullpoker]

I think I was pretty traumatized by the part when the guys came to take ET away near the end.

Also, the opening theme to Doctor Who scared me for some reason. I think the never ending wormhole was kind of a falling thing and the music just seemed creepy.

[luffy4]

i was scared by a 6 ft tall stuffed pink unicorn with glowing eyes....NO JOKE, it was fucking creepy, it still is....(though i tossed it in the garbage)

[Gare]

Forgot to mention this 90s movie called The Witches. I remember having nightmares for weeks because of a certain scene.

[SilentMagus0]

When I was in middle school I got this really bad fever, so I was sleeping in my moms room( don't laugh). As I looked towards the wall I saw my mom's picture that had two angels. Normally I wouldn't pay it any mind, but I this weird hallucination that they cam out the frame and tried to kill me. To this day moms pictures still creep me out.

[Zieg30CT]

Dreaming about those big mosquitoes from Jumanji, while everything is all black and white and grainy, inside a lone house on the hill, and they suck you dry, and no obviously not in the good way, can really fuck a person up. Thankfully, I got over that dream and the other night terrors I had as a child and now view them in quite a different light. Although some so called nightmares still bother me due to the fact that I usually end up dying or miraculously escaping, with no logical or dream-logical answer provided, whatever grotesque or incredibly high tech gone rogue machine is chasing after me/issuing utter and complete annihilation on me and any other dream forms of people in my dreams.

[Colamisu]

Marble Madness nightmares. That black marble was fucking scary, bro. I woke up screaming.

[Shareware]

Thanks to Soul Reaver, I used to have an irrational fear of stone faces. I once had a nightmare when I was a kid that all the windows in my house were blocked by distorted, demonic, stone faces. They were all warped together to make like a wall or something, and their eyes were glowing red. I think I remember them screaming, too. This caused me to not be able to sleep for like 3 days after I woke up, and I was like 8 at the time.

Another thing I remember being scared of was this recurring nightmare, like I wouldn't want to go to sleep and run the risk of having it again. It was like watching a commercial, and it started where this kid runs into his house to after playing or something and he asks his mom for some Sunny D, and his mom says they don't have Sunny D, and she pulls out this carton of orange juice and tells him to have this instead, and the kid has some, and as he drinks it, the mascot on the carton comes to life and starts yelling at them about how the orange juice is good for them, and they start screaming and running. The mascot runs after them with like a big smile on his face and totally gets the mom by the ankle. She topples over, and tells the kid to run as she's dragged away and killed, and then seconds later, the mascot catches up with the boy and the dream ends.

Yep. I remember the mascot was a little animated sun with arms and legs, kind of like Ristar.

[Mistral]

I was reminded of it by the thread on parasites, but as a kid, I once got an article on parasites in a magazine. In it was included a full section devoted to the Guinea worm, which will enter the human body as a microscopic larva. Once inside the body, two of them will mate, then the female will migrate to the limbs, usually near a joint, where it will grow, and eat, and grow, until it reaches around 2-3 feet long. Around a year later, when it's reached this length, it will create a burning blister which can be alleviated by immersing it in water. However, if you do this, the worm will release hundreds of thousands of larvae, contaminating the water and perpetuating the cycle. The traditional treatment for this? Wait for the blister to appear, then pull the worm out by wrapping it around a stick. This can take weeks or months to finish because it has to be done slowly (to avoid ripping the worm in two while it's still inside your body, which lets it escape, die, and decay). Alternately, nowadays, there's surgery, but that's only if it's found before it grows to full size. If you use certain medicines, it might make it easier to remove...or it might prompt the worm to dig its way to another part of the body.

This, understandably, gave me nightmares for months.

[lizard81288]

come to think of it, nothing. weird.

[Jazzmarazz]

Sometime when I was really little, my mother was watching some baby birth show and the part when they performed a Cesarean Section scared me so badly, that I have never recovered. It may have been the most graphic display on television I have ever seen.

[Drageuth]

There are a few things that traumatized me when I was a kid, but they are way too personal to discuss here. And they didn't really "scare" me so much as made me really uncomfortable, and to this day there are certain things that I can't do because of them. Also doesn't help that my discomfort was increased a few years ago because of something else that happened relating to the same thing.

As for actual fear, there was this one episode of Alone In The Dark where, for some reason, blue ooze poured out of people's mouth and eyes and whatnot, and the "hero" of the little story was trying to find the cause and fix it. I had a fever when I watched it (my brother put the show on) and I had nightmares for months where everyone I knew was chasing me around my house and I couldn't escape.


Also, I have this irrational discomfort around cotton balls, and Styrofoam. I hate them both, and touching them makes me shake. That one hasn't changed in almost fifteen years.

[Kermit Da Frog]

Fucking Ghost Writers Goo episodes.

[Lee]

I was afraid of the dark.

At one point, i had a flashlight next to my bed in case i needed to go to the bathroom, which was literally, inside my room...

It was pretty bad.

Now, I've learned that I have night vision.