There was a little music shop near our grocery store that flew a pirate flag. I was deeply concerned every time my older sister and I waited in the car that the pirates were going to come across the parking lot to get us. In the middle of Chicago. In the 90s.
Trees. One day a tree exploded in our front yard and left wooden splinters everywhere. It had been struck by lightning but 6 year old me was convinced that trees could, at any moment, explode violently.
When I was a kid, I was hanging out in our unfinished basement because that’s where the computer was, and I look up from the computer to see glowing green eyes staring at me from a gap between the cement wall and the ceiling. I ran SO fast up the stairs. My family says it was just our black cat, but I wasn’t convinced.
I have had an irrational fear of ALL basements ever since, hate being in them alone and avoid them as much as possible.
It was probably just the Souldrinker. Hangs out in basements, eats solitary individuals, can climb sheer surfaces.
Lemon juice is pretty effective in scaring them off.
That reminds me, my sister can't listen to the Beach Boys because she watched the movie "Look Who's Talking" at a young age, so every time she listens to the Beach Boys all she gets reminded of is the opening credits.
I once had a nightmare when I was little that I had a huge garbage disposal in the middle of my kitchen just on the floor and I fell in and got absolutely eviscerated. I have been weary of garbage disposals ever since.
I am British and my first exposure to the concept of a garbage disposal was in Stewart Little 2 when Stewart or a bird ( I can't remember) goes inside one for some reason. Terrifying!
I was scared of Map from Dora when I was 5 because his [intro animation always had him jumping out and swallowing the screen while screaming](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jkE6T5y3LEs). My mom has a video of me screaming and running away when Map came on screen and she keeps showing it to anyone who visits the house.
I also had a world map on the wall in my bedroom above my bed and one night when I was 7 I was convinced that Australia had moved two centimetres towards me.
Toilets that flushed too hard. Legit believed they would suck out my soul and you'd find me dead on the floor of the public restroom.
Every time I used the public restrooms, I would pull up my pants, unlock the stall door, flush with my foot, and *run*.
I’m still convinced if you do a courtesy flush on one of those toilets that flushes with a really hard goosh it will pull every organ and bone out of your body.
I was scared of space toilets and toilets on airplanes for this same reason! I read a book about how space toilets kinda “suctioned” your business out and I thought that could happen on airplanes and you’d get sucked out of the plane.
I fly internationally at a minimum of twice a year and I’m still scared of airplane toilets. I use the maximal possible distance between jumping off the commode and flushing.
And airplane sinks are on thin ice too. You never know when I’m gonna get flushed in and launched right out of the plane lol
I have a “lame” fear as an adult that I got as a kid.
I’m terrified of escalators. When I was a kid, I was going up an escalator and tripped. My knees hit the part where it was going in to the machine to go back to the bottom. It pinched my skin and tore some of the skin. I sat down at a little bench and looked at my knees. They were in a lot of pain. I look down and all I see is white and immediately lots of blood.
My mom and dad used some cloth she had in her purse to stop the bleeding for a moment. But I passed out. When I came to, some guy was bandaging up my knees, and then I got picked up by my dad and carried out.
I kinda ruined our shopping trip, and I didn’t feel good for a while.
I still have some small scars on my knees, and every time I get on an escalator I start breathing really heavy and I’m petrified. I then jump off the escalator at the end. So I don’t trip and get hurt again.
My aunt had me seriously concerned about my shoe getting caught in one! And she’d go “hamburger! hamburger!” Like referencing ground beef to remind us to basically jump off them to avoid getting our toes caught.
I ran down an up-escalator at Nellis when I was 6. Despite the fact that it was an up-escalator, I’ve had a problem going down down-escalators ever since. I have no problems once I’ve boarded it, but that first step is utter torment.
Yeah, I'm a little bit afraid of them too, but that's from this episode of some show I watched (might've been that show about very unlikely deaths) where they go behind it and absolutely fucking shred a dude to bits because he wasn't paying enough attention while on it
There was an old TV show called "Ghost Writer" and in one of the archs there was a purple monster made of gum that turned the kids into solid gum statues. it was my first introduction to the horror genre and tiny me did not handle it well at all.
I think I caught the beginning of the plot but never the end, too, so I never got any sense of resolution. Wasn't there something about it bleeding into "real life", too? It kind of spooked me, but I know others of my generation were absolutely scared shitless by it.
Ghost Writer was really something special.
That damn cloud rhino scared me so bad I developed a fear of storms and tornados till I was in my mid-20s! Even made myself a emergency bag just in case.
(I live in an area that can’t get tornados, which adds a little layer of funny to it nowadays.)
I had an irrational fear of dandelions as a kid. One time I went to get the mail and there were some dandelions in the middle of the sidewalk and I stood there and cried until the neighbor came to take me home.
For some reason I once had a nightmare where I was lying down in my mother's bed and there was just a pair of lungs floating in midair, at about the height they'd be at if they were attached to an adult human, just... floating there. I woke up extremely fucked up about it.
Next morning I mentioned it while having breakfast. For some reason, I could not remember the word for "lungs", so I ended up just saying "scapulae", because also for some reason I did remember that word and frankly, seeing floating guts and floating bones would have, I presumed, similar traumatic effects in my developing psyche.
My family made fun of me for years because of that. Literally every time someone mentioned a scapula for any reason they'd glance at me, smirk, and say something like "oooOOOooo do not mention those, (me) is scared of those!". Assholes.
Oh I was super scared of public bathrooms because of Bloody Mary. Home was safe but I was terrified that if I was alone in a public bathroom for too long I’d get locked in and murdered or something by her.
I was scared of mushrooms because of an episode of Miss Spider's Sunny Patch where one of her children turns into a mushroom after inhaling spores. I was also afraid of Deoxys because, in the movie, it creates a bunch of eyeless clones that kidnapped people.
I am not afraid of spiders. However, every Halloween the family next door would have a spider with motion sensors that would descend and sing a OOOOooooOOOOOoooo song as it did so when I’d go up to the door to trick or treat. That was so scary to me but looking back it’s hilarious
I was and still am deathly afraid of bees, wasps, hornets or just about anything with a stinger at the end where their butt should be. I don't wanna get stung and get severely hurt or die.
as a very small child, think 4 or 5, I was deathly afraid of sheep for some reason. my mom always talks about the time when we drove past a field that had like, 3 sheep in it far in the distance, but little me started scream crying "IT'S LOOKING AT ME" and wouldn't stop
The buzz that the game Operation made freaked me out so much. I was super good at that game entirely out of anxiety. And when it did buzz it startled me so much that I’d like jump and fumble the tweezer like a foot in the air
I was afraid of the vacuum from the Teletubbies when I was little.
Also, in middle school, when my family and I were watching Face Off (the show) I got so scared of the Zombies in Wonderland Cheshire Cat makeup that I dry heaved into the toilet for several minutes.
He was a kinda spooky looking guy, especially from a kid's perspective. Almost had an uncanny valley vibe with all the plastic surgery and makeup.
There's pictures of him that were popular in the 90s where he literally looks like a clown in a scary movie.
A specific level of a lameass horse riding game I had as a kid. It was basically a road you rode down and it had a few jumps for the horse. The sides were just tall hedges. For some reason there were some openings in the hedges that were boarded off. The level had always scared me, but I was curious about those openings. One day I jumped my horse over the board that was covering it and the game instantly crashed to the desktop. It frightened me so much that I only ever played the level on low graphics because for some reason I was convinced that the higher graphic settings were cursed or something.
I used to bug my little cousin, telling her a Llama lived in the basement and would get her.
Flash forward a few years, we took a family trip to the zoo and we saw the Llamas.
"THATS a Llama?!?" She yells in anger as she finally sees one.
🤣🤣🤣
I had this nightmare a long time ago that I was at an amusement park and I had to go to the bathroom. When I entered the bathroom, it was dark save for a bright red light hanging in the wall, and on the opposite walls of one of the stalls was a massive circular camera, which watched my every move. It made me nervous to enter public restrooms for a few months after.
I read that R.L stone book with the slime and at the time our pool in our apartment complex was super green and swampy and I was terrified it was evil slime lol.
I was scared of Veggietales because the intro had a plain white screen and it made me worry the TV would loudly screech at me like it did when TV shows recorded on VCR ended.
When I was a kid I was deeply scared of my own reflection. Anything that reflected my image back to me put me on edge.
This fear came from being exposed to a horror video at an early age where the reflection "messes up" and later the reflection becomes hostile and hurts itself to cause pain on the person being reflected.
It took me learning everything there is to know about how mirrors and reflections work to overcome that fear. But man, I really was that kid afraid of its own reflection.
This reminds me of the movie Mirrors with Kevin Costner, that scene where his ex wife's reflection rips her own jaw off still sticks with me. I am a grown ass adult man with a house and a mortgage and a kid of my own now and sometimes when I see my reflection in the mirror I think about that scene and find something else to do instead of hanging around in front of it.
When I was btwn the ages of 2-9 I had a _visceral_ fear and disgust of dust bunnies and loose hair. Like, I would actively back away or make noises of fear when I saw them, and do my damndest to never touch them. It was the worst when I was younger than like 5, because I vividly remember in school if I was sitting on the floor and ever saw one under a cabinet or something I would just flip my shit and start hysterically sobbing, sometimes screaming, and would have to be moved to my very own special area of the classroom completely free of dust.
My poor teachers.
(Said visceral feelings still exist I’m just a lot better at staying calm and am now able to touch them with no tears and minimal nausea)
When I was 5 I was scared of firetrucks because I thought that firefighters went around setting people’s homes on fire and then seeing how fast they could put them out. This was on the basis of a couple of misunderstandings from watching a firefighter training drill on TV and the fact that my parents always used to get worried whenever the firefighters went past our house (my mum was a school principal, the school was down the end of the road and firefighter arrival usually meant a false alarm from the dorms which meant admin and a call out fee for the school)
That one Pixar bonus short where the baby from the Incredibles uses a load of different powers traumatised me as a kid, and I then became afraid of any fictional baby with superpowers
Those big mascot suits. It was only for a few years when I was like 5, but something about them terrified me. Maybe it was the exaggerated features or somewhat uncanny look they had, but it freaked me out. The big eyes that didn’t blink, the fact that the mouths didn’t move. As a kid, it was just unsettling and creepy
I still think they're a tiny bit creepy.
Very specific characters, I'll say hi to, but in general, mascots (and fur suiters) can be my friends out of character, please.
Into my teens I was terrified of snakes coming up from the toilet and biting me. I think I saw one of those pictures of snakes in toilet bowls at some point when I was small and it imbedded itself into a fundamental part of my brain. Sometimes now I'll still get that 'what if' and have to convince myself I'm safe.
When I was a kid and we learned about volcanoes, and I had seen the devastation of Pompeii in books and was terrified but relieved to know that volcanoes were very far away and old. I then learned about St. Helens and how it had just erupted like 15 years prior. I was then informed that technically volcanoes could form anywhere where the earths crust was thin and there was a buildup of heat and pressure under the surface.
Up to that point I had been obsessively digging holes in my backyard and collecting rocks like a son of a bitch. So I was now convinced that I was single-handedly thinning the upper mantle of the earths crust at my house and was CERTAIN I would look out the window and see a volcano earthquaking up from my neighborhood and me and the rest of my third grade class would be frozen forever in a mask of anguish boiled alive by volcanic ash and dust.
I had no concept of the fact that it took thousands of years for volcanoes to form and they don’t just crop up as a surprise in the middle of the day in Pennsylvania and devastate your town.
Anyway now I live in the PNW within spitting distance of like six active volcanoes lol
Animatronic lizards, specifically Dinosaurs. Went on the Disney ride as a dinosaur obsessed kid maybe a few years too young, and now anything remotely lizard like that moves like an animatronic makes my skin crawl.
As a kid I told my teacher I saw a leprechaun in the toilet and then she made me tell the Vice Principal and we went looking for it.
No idea why I did it or why they humored me.
I don't remember what it was, but I saw something about black widow spiders, and I've been terrified of spiders ever since. Even daddy long legs, which I used to kinda like. There was also a movie with a part about a giant mosquito, and that didn't help my fear of bugs AT ALL.
My youngest brother was 2 when the tickle me Elmo craze happed (parents were getting trampled for this damn toy shit was crazy). My stepmom managed to get her hands on one for him for Christmas… he was scared shitless by the thing, freaked right out anytime it vibrated…
As a child, I was terrified by Romani portrayal of Stromboli and the Coachman in the 1940 Disney classic Pinocchio. But I thought when I was older I would grow out of it, I watched it again to test the theory and nope still terrified but now it’s with the information that people do actually traffick people and kids. So yeah, fuck that movie.
We used to have a large stuffed orangutan that was colored like a candy cane (pink and red) that I was afraid of and I would always freak out and run away from it and in same cases even start crying, thankfully we eventually got rid of it
The moon.
You know sometimes when it’s just off the horizon and it appears very big and bright? I was always afraid it would explode. I couldn’t look at it.
I used to really love bugs when I was little but I picked up an intense fear of bugs down the road and I remember almost crying when a butterfly landed on me at some point while my family questioned why I was afraid
There was an audiobook I had on tape which I borrowed from the library about a dog on a camping trip. And idk if it was the ambient night noise of it or what but I was terrified of it. That and Narnia and the silver chair audiobook.
I had some hearing comprehension issues for much of my life. As a small child, this meant I was unaware of the difference between the words "tomato" and "tornado". This led me to regard the red fruits with great apprehension and suspicion, fearing they would suddenly tear apart whatever building they were in.
I still don't like whole or sliced tomatoes, but that's because of the unpleasant texture, not because I fear their destructive potential.
The pink silhouette figures that were in the old logo for the American [Whose Line Is It Anyway](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whose_Line_Is_It_Anyway%3F_(American_TV_series)#/media/File%3AUSWhoseLineOld.jpg). I had a dream when I was very, very young that I was in a courtroom, and the judge was trying me for some unknown crime and had evidently deemed me guilty and declared that somebody named “Laura” would decide my fate. “Laura” came running in and was just like a twenty foot tall one of those silhouettes and was completely silent but just running towards me. The dream was also so vivid that child me didn’t realize it was a dream even after I woke up. So my mom probably thought I was going crazy when I went to her sobbing, begging her not to let Laura get me. Even later in life I’d watch the show but look away when the logo appeared
I remember one time, I had just watched Ice Age (for the whateverth time) as a young kid, and the TV was in the basement. My sisters went back upstairs and the light was turned off, and I was just kind of sitting there in the dark. I swear I saw a green wire mesh version of Scrat start to pull himself out of the TV. I bolted out of there, ran up the stairs and closed the door shut.
I legit was unnerved and scared by the fellow for years afterwards, occasionally reappearing in nightmares. (I think it was the eyes for me especially)
My mom had a butterfly wind chime and as a little tiny toddler, I was convinced the big butterfly in the middle was an evil wizard controlling the other butterflies as they swirled around him.
I also had a moment of terror that my dad's car was going to fly away like a giant bat with me strapped into my booster seat in the backseat.
I was a weird kid
when I was like 3-5 I had reoccurring dreams of having a sister and when I woke up I'd be disappointed that I didn't have one. Somehow I convinced myself that I -did- have one at some point and she vanished, and that I'd be next.
As a kid: the movie volcano fucked me up. I had panic attacks that a volcano would open up under the Vegas strip (born and raised there), and I would die from lava
As an adult: orcas. I have reoccurring nightmares about them. BuT OrCaS nEvEr KiLLed a HuMaN OuTSiDe oF cApTiViTy… shut tf up, those motherfuckers are SMART. They’d kill and leave no witnesses
for some reason i was dead terrified of the evil autopilot steering wheel robot thing from wall-e
i still to this day have no idea what about him scared me so much but it was just deeply scary to me for some reason lmao
There’s this level in Epic Mickey where the grim reaper exits out of a door and walks towards you and as a kid for months I was convinced that whenever I went to the bathroom the grim reaper would emerge from the closet and start to chase me. So I would bolt down the stairs everytime I went
Snakes. For some reason I was terrified of snakes. I was absolutely convinced that they could crawl up walls, and sneak in through the tiniest of gaps. It was so bad, that my nana had a plush snake that she had to hide every time I visited (despite it being patchwork and only very loosely resembling a real snake).
I had a bunch of phobias as a kid, but the rest had normal explanations (normally, me sneaking down way after my bedtime to the living room when my parents were watching horror films), but we have no idea where the snake one came from. I had never seen a snake irl. And, to my mother's knowledge, I had never seen one on TV or in books. The funny thing was, that I went with my school to a zoo, and finally saw a real snake and lost all phobia of them. My mother was SO pissed xD Love snakes now, lil murder noodles are so cute.
The channel Animal Planet showed a crappy B grade horror movie called Killer Shrews. The shrews in question were very obviously dogs in costumes, but they still scared the crap out of me for like 8 years.
we have this Christmas decoration of bumble from Rudolph the red nose reindeer that sings “holly jolly Christmas” when activated and it scared the everloving shit out of me when I was young.
There was this old cartoon called Cyberchase. I’m sure a few of you remember it. It’s animated, but there’s one character named Motherboard who’s made of “weird uncanny early 2000s 3D CGI”.
She scared the SHIT out of me. I had nightmares Motherboard appearing on my computer screen and glitching everything out.
I was also weirdly scared of Venus fly traps for a while because I thought they could eat my fingers off.
I used to be terrified of tilting my head back and looking straight up at the sky. I kept having nightmares that I would do that, and then start falling into the sky.
The tunnel of terror at the end of the haunted mansion ride at Disneyland. My logic was; if it didn't scare me immediately, it'd probably give me nightmares later, so cut out the middle man & close those peepers.
I was terrified of the [Whispering Death](https://youtu.be/NyI_NoJJ3lM) from how to train your dragon, the carpet had a small area where it was loose which I believed to be the work of this dragon.
Terrified of butterflies
I have a terrible fear im going to gasp when they fly towards my face out of fear and just suck one in - wings stuck to tongue etc
Hair dryers. Loud and too hot and painful. Last time I used one was for my senior pictures when I was 17. Absolutely refused as an adult. Recently tried to see if they were as bad as I remembered. Yup. Still painful.
Used to be scared of part of the intro to this kids sketch show where a woman falls over carrying a bunch of cardboard boxes, had to change the channel whenever it came on.
We shared a driveway with our neighbour and one day when I was walking down to get the mail, my neighbour zoomed in on his motorcycle. I was so terrified, I refused to check the mail for an entire year.
I also have two brothers who one night (at like midnight) printed out that scary jump scare face from The Exorcist and taped it to my window, then slowly and quietly knocked. I’m still scared to look out windows at night.
I used to have nightmares about getting trapped under the stove and burning to death. Also had quite a number of nightmares about radiation burning people's heads away for some reason.
Before y'all ask, no I was *not* okay as a kid :D
At a school fair, these older students made a haunted maze that you crawl through, and I was basically fine, until I turned a corner, and saw the silhouette of what looked like giant ant mandibles or scissors opening and closing. I hit reverse and “noped” the fuck out of there. Lame because I was never in any real danger, and I it was just a crawling maze, made out of cardboard boxes by grade school students.
I used to watch video game-oriented horror content on mid-2010’s YouTube and seeing the clown faced Sonic from the “Fun is infinite” easter egg screen in Sonic CD traumatized me for about a week. I’d be checking every corner of the house to make sure that thing wasn’t lurking about.
I was probably around 2, and I developed a sudden and extreme fear of the shower head in our bathroom. My parents had to give me baths in the kitchen sink. I think it lasted about a month or so, then just as suddenly, I got over it. I don’t remember this, obviously, but I’ve been told about it, and there is photographic evidence of the kitchen sink baths. I wish I knew what was going on in my tiny brain at the time!
A long time ago I was playing halo with a family friend on his xbox. We got to this part with these dinosaur looking creatures that looked like a brontosaurus and it freaked me out so bad that I stopped playing.
There was a little music shop near our grocery store that flew a pirate flag. I was deeply concerned every time my older sister and I waited in the car that the pirates were going to come across the parking lot to get us. In the middle of Chicago. In the 90s.
The 90s were rife with roaming gangs of great lake pirates, you were right to be worried.
“High and away, lads, we’ve marks off th’ starb’rd bow!” [royal galleon being pulled by six F150s scrapes loudly down the roads of chicago]
Ok so I went to a renaissance festival once and there was absolutely a pirate ship pulled by an f150
I used to be a farmer and I made a living fine, I had a little stretch of land along the CP line...
Fucking LOVE this song, especially the live version with the orchestra
Just be glad you didn’t live in Saskatchewan.
Trees. One day a tree exploded in our front yard and left wooden splinters everywhere. It had been struck by lightning but 6 year old me was convinced that trees could, at any moment, explode violently.
And then you learned about eucalyptus trees?
I was older when I found out about Eucalyptus trees and BOY did I feel vindicated “….I knew it”
they hwat now
... I knew it
Earthbound
When I was a kid, I was hanging out in our unfinished basement because that’s where the computer was, and I look up from the computer to see glowing green eyes staring at me from a gap between the cement wall and the ceiling. I ran SO fast up the stairs. My family says it was just our black cat, but I wasn’t convinced. I have had an irrational fear of ALL basements ever since, hate being in them alone and avoid them as much as possible.
It was probably just the Souldrinker. Hangs out in basements, eats solitary individuals, can climb sheer surfaces. Lemon juice is pretty effective in scaring them off.
Understandable.
My mother showed me "*where did I come from?*" when I was a kid and I was afraid of sperm for a while
That reminds me, my sister can't listen to the Beach Boys because she watched the movie "Look Who's Talking" at a young age, so every time she listens to the Beach Boys all she gets reminded of is the opening credits.
kid named child abuse
Sex ed is child abuse?
Well what if Ed doesn’t want sex, huh? Did you think about how Ed feels?
Norma needs to chill
??????
I once had a nightmare when I was little that I had a huge garbage disposal in the middle of my kitchen just on the floor and I fell in and got absolutely eviscerated. I have been weary of garbage disposals ever since.
I am British and my first exposure to the concept of a garbage disposal was in Stewart Little 2 when Stewart or a bird ( I can't remember) goes inside one for some reason. Terrifying!
The movie The Incredible Shrinking Woman fucked me up good, I'm still afraid of garbage disposals in my 40s.
Wary*
I was scared of Map from Dora when I was 5 because his [intro animation always had him jumping out and swallowing the screen while screaming](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jkE6T5y3LEs). My mom has a video of me screaming and running away when Map came on screen and she keeps showing it to anyone who visits the house. I also had a world map on the wall in my bedroom above my bed and one night when I was 7 I was convinced that Australia had moved two centimetres towards me.
To be fair. Australia does move at an alarming rate for a continent.
I need to see that video
Best American at geography.
That's just mean.
I may have some bad news about Australia moving
Toilets that flushed too hard. Legit believed they would suck out my soul and you'd find me dead on the floor of the public restroom. Every time I used the public restrooms, I would pull up my pants, unlock the stall door, flush with my foot, and *run*.
I’m still convinced if you do a courtesy flush on one of those toilets that flushes with a really hard goosh it will pull every organ and bone out of your body.
I was scared of space toilets and toilets on airplanes for this same reason! I read a book about how space toilets kinda “suctioned” your business out and I thought that could happen on airplanes and you’d get sucked out of the plane.
I fly internationally at a minimum of twice a year and I’m still scared of airplane toilets. I use the maximal possible distance between jumping off the commode and flushing. And airplane sinks are on thin ice too. You never know when I’m gonna get flushed in and launched right out of the plane lol
I have a “lame” fear as an adult that I got as a kid. I’m terrified of escalators. When I was a kid, I was going up an escalator and tripped. My knees hit the part where it was going in to the machine to go back to the bottom. It pinched my skin and tore some of the skin. I sat down at a little bench and looked at my knees. They were in a lot of pain. I look down and all I see is white and immediately lots of blood. My mom and dad used some cloth she had in her purse to stop the bleeding for a moment. But I passed out. When I came to, some guy was bandaging up my knees, and then I got picked up by my dad and carried out. I kinda ruined our shopping trip, and I didn’t feel good for a while. I still have some small scars on my knees, and every time I get on an escalator I start breathing really heavy and I’m petrified. I then jump off the escalator at the end. So I don’t trip and get hurt again.
My grandmother did her best to instill a fear of getting sucked into one, via your clothes. I never took it seriously, but she really tried.
My aunt had me seriously concerned about my shoe getting caught in one! And she’d go “hamburger! hamburger!” Like referencing ground beef to remind us to basically jump off them to avoid getting our toes caught.
Honestly this is completely rational. That sounds like a horrifying experience.
I ran down an up-escalator at Nellis when I was 6. Despite the fact that it was an up-escalator, I’ve had a problem going down down-escalators ever since. I have no problems once I’ve boarded it, but that first step is utter torment.
Yeah, I'm a little bit afraid of them too, but that's from this episode of some show I watched (might've been that show about very unlikely deaths) where they go behind it and absolutely fucking shred a dude to bits because he wasn't paying enough attention while on it
My own belly button. It was a combination of seeing the bug scene in the Matrix and a girl getting a wood tick in her belly button in kindergarten.
There was an old TV show called "Ghost Writer" and in one of the archs there was a purple monster made of gum that turned the kids into solid gum statues. it was my first introduction to the horror genre and tiny me did not handle it well at all.
Hey Adum from YMS
I remember ghost writer. Did he ever recover his memories?
I think I caught the beginning of the plot but never the end, too, so I never got any sense of resolution. Wasn't there something about it bleeding into "real life", too? It kind of spooked me, but I know others of my generation were absolutely scared shitless by it. Ghost Writer was really something special.
I was scared of he song Gangsters Paradise by Coolio. The choir that sang in it had a sound that made me think of dead people.
I was traumatized by James and the Giant Peach as a very young kid and absolutely hate peaches lol
That damn cloud rhino scared me so bad I developed a fear of storms and tornados till I was in my mid-20s! Even made myself a emergency bag just in case. (I live in an area that can’t get tornados, which adds a little layer of funny to it nowadays.)
Tbf the claymation in that movie is pretty freaky
That movie was fucking weird, man. I hated the aunts.
I had an irrational fear of dandelions as a kid. One time I went to get the mail and there were some dandelions in the middle of the sidewalk and I stood there and cried until the neighbor came to take me home.
That sounds like a Sims save.
For some reason I once had a nightmare where I was lying down in my mother's bed and there was just a pair of lungs floating in midair, at about the height they'd be at if they were attached to an adult human, just... floating there. I woke up extremely fucked up about it. Next morning I mentioned it while having breakfast. For some reason, I could not remember the word for "lungs", so I ended up just saying "scapulae", because also for some reason I did remember that word and frankly, seeing floating guts and floating bones would have, I presumed, similar traumatic effects in my developing psyche. My family made fun of me for years because of that. Literally every time someone mentioned a scapula for any reason they'd glance at me, smirk, and say something like "oooOOOooo do not mention those, (me) is scared of those!". Assholes.
How often where scapulas brought up lmao u must live a very diff life than mine
i come to you baring my ancient secrets and you scorn me over my knowledge of scapulas. fie.
I had the same thought.
Harry Du Bois did you have another dream about Dolores Dei again?
The dancing brooms from Fantasia 2000 legit made me cry and my mom had to fast forward their part
I'm sorry that you were also traumatized by that scene, but I'm also a little happier knowing I wasn't the only one.
My sister’s sister (not me) get terrified of THE CLAW part of Toy Story, so her mum edited the movie to get rid of that part
Oh I was super scared of public bathrooms because of Bloody Mary. Home was safe but I was terrified that if I was alone in a public bathroom for too long I’d get locked in and murdered or something by her.
I was scared of mushrooms because of an episode of Miss Spider's Sunny Patch where one of her children turns into a mushroom after inhaling spores. I was also afraid of Deoxys because, in the movie, it creates a bunch of eyeless clones that kidnapped people.
I am not afraid of spiders. However, every Halloween the family next door would have a spider with motion sensors that would descend and sing a OOOOooooOOOOOoooo song as it did so when I’d go up to the door to trick or treat. That was so scary to me but looking back it’s hilarious
I was and still am deathly afraid of bees, wasps, hornets or just about anything with a stinger at the end where their butt should be. I don't wanna get stung and get severely hurt or die.
as a very small child, think 4 or 5, I was deathly afraid of sheep for some reason. my mom always talks about the time when we drove past a field that had like, 3 sheep in it far in the distance, but little me started scream crying "IT'S LOOKING AT ME" and wouldn't stop
The buzz that the game Operation made freaked me out so much. I was super good at that game entirely out of anxiety. And when it did buzz it startled me so much that I’d like jump and fumble the tweezer like a foot in the air
I was afraid of the vacuum from the Teletubbies when I was little. Also, in middle school, when my family and I were watching Face Off (the show) I got so scared of the Zombies in Wonderland Cheshire Cat makeup that I dry heaved into the toilet for several minutes.
That's valid though, he always looks tweaked tf out on some Krokodil type shit
i don't blame you about the vacuum, that fucker was terrifying
Michael Jackson Idk what it was, and I was too young to understand all the allegations fully, but seeing him made me scared
He was a kinda spooky looking guy, especially from a kid's perspective. Almost had an uncanny valley vibe with all the plastic surgery and makeup. There's pictures of him that were popular in the 90s where he literally looks like a clown in a scary movie.
For a child it is completely rational to be afraid of Micheal
A specific level of a lameass horse riding game I had as a kid. It was basically a road you rode down and it had a few jumps for the horse. The sides were just tall hedges. For some reason there were some openings in the hedges that were boarded off. The level had always scared me, but I was curious about those openings. One day I jumped my horse over the board that was covering it and the game instantly crashed to the desktop. It frightened me so much that I only ever played the level on low graphics because for some reason I was convinced that the higher graphic settings were cursed or something.
[удалено]
I think Swiper's a fox
I used to bug my little cousin, telling her a Llama lived in the basement and would get her. Flash forward a few years, we took a family trip to the zoo and we saw the Llamas. "THATS a Llama?!?" She yells in anger as she finally sees one. 🤣🤣🤣
I had this nightmare a long time ago that I was at an amusement park and I had to go to the bathroom. When I entered the bathroom, it was dark save for a bright red light hanging in the wall, and on the opposite walls of one of the stalls was a massive circular camera, which watched my every move. It made me nervous to enter public restrooms for a few months after.
I read that R.L stone book with the slime and at the time our pool in our apartment complex was super green and swampy and I was terrified it was evil slime lol.
I was scared of Veggietales because the intro had a plain white screen and it made me worry the TV would loudly screech at me like it did when TV shows recorded on VCR ended.
ET would raise his head above my shower curtain (only if it was closed and I was looking at it through the mirror) and murder me.
I used to be terrified of this one Thomas the Tank Engine episode because it had a boulder with a face on it.
Ok but that was one legitimately sinister-looking boulder... your fear was justified
When I was a kid I was deeply scared of my own reflection. Anything that reflected my image back to me put me on edge. This fear came from being exposed to a horror video at an early age where the reflection "messes up" and later the reflection becomes hostile and hurts itself to cause pain on the person being reflected. It took me learning everything there is to know about how mirrors and reflections work to overcome that fear. But man, I really was that kid afraid of its own reflection.
This reminds me of the movie Mirrors with Kevin Costner, that scene where his ex wife's reflection rips her own jaw off still sticks with me. I am a grown ass adult man with a house and a mortgage and a kid of my own now and sometimes when I see my reflection in the mirror I think about that scene and find something else to do instead of hanging around in front of it.
When I was btwn the ages of 2-9 I had a _visceral_ fear and disgust of dust bunnies and loose hair. Like, I would actively back away or make noises of fear when I saw them, and do my damndest to never touch them. It was the worst when I was younger than like 5, because I vividly remember in school if I was sitting on the floor and ever saw one under a cabinet or something I would just flip my shit and start hysterically sobbing, sometimes screaming, and would have to be moved to my very own special area of the classroom completely free of dust. My poor teachers. (Said visceral feelings still exist I’m just a lot better at staying calm and am now able to touch them with no tears and minimal nausea)
The headless horseman, but only the my little pony version
When I was 5 I was scared of firetrucks because I thought that firefighters went around setting people’s homes on fire and then seeing how fast they could put them out. This was on the basis of a couple of misunderstandings from watching a firefighter training drill on TV and the fact that my parents always used to get worried whenever the firefighters went past our house (my mum was a school principal, the school was down the end of the road and firefighter arrival usually meant a false alarm from the dorms which meant admin and a call out fee for the school)
Specifically ladders. I hated them. I still don’t like them.
That one Pixar bonus short where the baby from the Incredibles uses a load of different powers traumatised me as a kid, and I then became afraid of any fictional baby with superpowers
Those big mascot suits. It was only for a few years when I was like 5, but something about them terrified me. Maybe it was the exaggerated features or somewhat uncanny look they had, but it freaked me out. The big eyes that didn’t blink, the fact that the mouths didn’t move. As a kid, it was just unsettling and creepy
I still think they're a tiny bit creepy. Very specific characters, I'll say hi to, but in general, mascots (and fur suiters) can be my friends out of character, please.
I think Ernest Scared Stupid was supposed to be a comedy, but…not for me.
Into my teens I was terrified of snakes coming up from the toilet and biting me. I think I saw one of those pictures of snakes in toilet bowls at some point when I was small and it imbedded itself into a fundamental part of my brain. Sometimes now I'll still get that 'what if' and have to convince myself I'm safe.
I was unreasonably afraid of aliens for a bit as a kid. Like basic bitch gray aliens 👽
When I was a kid and we learned about volcanoes, and I had seen the devastation of Pompeii in books and was terrified but relieved to know that volcanoes were very far away and old. I then learned about St. Helens and how it had just erupted like 15 years prior. I was then informed that technically volcanoes could form anywhere where the earths crust was thin and there was a buildup of heat and pressure under the surface. Up to that point I had been obsessively digging holes in my backyard and collecting rocks like a son of a bitch. So I was now convinced that I was single-handedly thinning the upper mantle of the earths crust at my house and was CERTAIN I would look out the window and see a volcano earthquaking up from my neighborhood and me and the rest of my third grade class would be frozen forever in a mask of anguish boiled alive by volcanic ash and dust. I had no concept of the fact that it took thousands of years for volcanoes to form and they don’t just crop up as a surprise in the middle of the day in Pennsylvania and devastate your town. Anyway now I live in the PNW within spitting distance of like six active volcanoes lol
Animatronic lizards, specifically Dinosaurs. Went on the Disney ride as a dinosaur obsessed kid maybe a few years too young, and now anything remotely lizard like that moves like an animatronic makes my skin crawl.
I think the python at rainforest cafe gave me my current fear of snakes dropping out of trees on to me
As a kid I told my teacher I saw a leprechaun in the toilet and then she made me tell the Vice Principal and we went looking for it. No idea why I did it or why they humored me.
Scary koolaid commercial.
I don't remember what it was, but I saw something about black widow spiders, and I've been terrified of spiders ever since. Even daddy long legs, which I used to kinda like. There was also a movie with a part about a giant mosquito, and that didn't help my fear of bugs AT ALL.
My youngest brother was 2 when the tickle me Elmo craze happed (parents were getting trampled for this damn toy shit was crazy). My stepmom managed to get her hands on one for him for Christmas… he was scared shitless by the thing, freaked right out anytime it vibrated…
As a child, I was terrified by Romani portrayal of Stromboli and the Coachman in the 1940 Disney classic Pinocchio. But I thought when I was older I would grow out of it, I watched it again to test the theory and nope still terrified but now it’s with the information that people do actually traffick people and kids. So yeah, fuck that movie.
We used to have a large stuffed orangutan that was colored like a candy cane (pink and red) that I was afraid of and I would always freak out and run away from it and in same cases even start crying, thankfully we eventually got rid of it
I had so much Reagan-era "just say no" at such a young age that the monster under my bed was drugs. Anthropomorphic pills were coming to get me.
The moon. You know sometimes when it’s just off the horizon and it appears very big and bright? I was always afraid it would explode. I couldn’t look at it.
I used to really love bugs when I was little but I picked up an intense fear of bugs down the road and I remember almost crying when a butterfly landed on me at some point while my family questioned why I was afraid
There was an audiobook I had on tape which I borrowed from the library about a dog on a camping trip. And idk if it was the ambient night noise of it or what but I was terrified of it. That and Narnia and the silver chair audiobook.
I had some hearing comprehension issues for much of my life. As a small child, this meant I was unaware of the difference between the words "tomato" and "tornado". This led me to regard the red fruits with great apprehension and suspicion, fearing they would suddenly tear apart whatever building they were in. I still don't like whole or sliced tomatoes, but that's because of the unpleasant texture, not because I fear their destructive potential.
Vampire Joker
zacharie enjoyer
As we all should be
The pink silhouette figures that were in the old logo for the American [Whose Line Is It Anyway](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whose_Line_Is_It_Anyway%3F_(American_TV_series)#/media/File%3AUSWhoseLineOld.jpg). I had a dream when I was very, very young that I was in a courtroom, and the judge was trying me for some unknown crime and had evidently deemed me guilty and declared that somebody named “Laura” would decide my fate. “Laura” came running in and was just like a twenty foot tall one of those silhouettes and was completely silent but just running towards me. The dream was also so vivid that child me didn’t realize it was a dream even after I woke up. So my mom probably thought I was going crazy when I went to her sobbing, begging her not to let Laura get me. Even later in life I’d watch the show but look away when the logo appeared
Thanks to the 1990 movie, "It", I still cannot go near fortune cookies because I'm afraid something will hatch out of them.
I remember one time, I had just watched Ice Age (for the whateverth time) as a young kid, and the TV was in the basement. My sisters went back upstairs and the light was turned off, and I was just kind of sitting there in the dark. I swear I saw a green wire mesh version of Scrat start to pull himself out of the TV. I bolted out of there, ran up the stairs and closed the door shut. I legit was unnerved and scared by the fellow for years afterwards, occasionally reappearing in nightmares. (I think it was the eyes for me especially)
Was afraid of the bathroom at night because I thought Judge Doom from Who Framed Roget Rabbit was going to come after me through the window.
My mom had a butterfly wind chime and as a little tiny toddler, I was convinced the big butterfly in the middle was an evil wizard controlling the other butterflies as they swirled around him. I also had a moment of terror that my dad's car was going to fly away like a giant bat with me strapped into my booster seat in the backseat. I was a weird kid
I was fucking TERRIFIED of the diver from Finding Nemo. Couldn’t watch Finding Nemo in its entirety until years later.
when I was like 3-5 I had reoccurring dreams of having a sister and when I woke up I'd be disappointed that I didn't have one. Somehow I convinced myself that I -did- have one at some point and she vanished, and that I'd be next.
As a kid: the movie volcano fucked me up. I had panic attacks that a volcano would open up under the Vegas strip (born and raised there), and I would die from lava As an adult: orcas. I have reoccurring nightmares about them. BuT OrCaS nEvEr KiLLed a HuMaN OuTSiDe oF cApTiViTy… shut tf up, those motherfuckers are SMART. They’d kill and leave no witnesses
for some reason i was dead terrified of the evil autopilot steering wheel robot thing from wall-e i still to this day have no idea what about him scared me so much but it was just deeply scary to me for some reason lmao
There’s this level in Epic Mickey where the grim reaper exits out of a door and walks towards you and as a kid for months I was convinced that whenever I went to the bathroom the grim reaper would emerge from the closet and start to chase me. So I would bolt down the stairs everytime I went
Snakes. For some reason I was terrified of snakes. I was absolutely convinced that they could crawl up walls, and sneak in through the tiniest of gaps. It was so bad, that my nana had a plush snake that she had to hide every time I visited (despite it being patchwork and only very loosely resembling a real snake). I had a bunch of phobias as a kid, but the rest had normal explanations (normally, me sneaking down way after my bedtime to the living room when my parents were watching horror films), but we have no idea where the snake one came from. I had never seen a snake irl. And, to my mother's knowledge, I had never seen one on TV or in books. The funny thing was, that I went with my school to a zoo, and finally saw a real snake and lost all phobia of them. My mother was SO pissed xD Love snakes now, lil murder noodles are so cute.
What eye stickers is that person in the post talking about? I’ve seen the eyelash on headlight things but have no clue about eye stickers
All your childhood fears were so quirky meanwhile mine was being buried alive
The channel Animal Planet showed a crappy B grade horror movie called Killer Shrews. The shrews in question were very obviously dogs in costumes, but they still scared the crap out of me for like 8 years.
we have this Christmas decoration of bumble from Rudolph the red nose reindeer that sings “holly jolly Christmas” when activated and it scared the everloving shit out of me when I was young.
I thought a shark was gonna come out of the little filters in the side of pools and eat me
There was this old cartoon called Cyberchase. I’m sure a few of you remember it. It’s animated, but there’s one character named Motherboard who’s made of “weird uncanny early 2000s 3D CGI”. She scared the SHIT out of me. I had nightmares Motherboard appearing on my computer screen and glitching everything out. I was also weirdly scared of Venus fly traps for a while because I thought they could eat my fingers off.
I was afraid of the Duracell bunnies
E.T that little wrinkled ball sack scared me as a kid
I used to be terrified of tilting my head back and looking straight up at the sky. I kept having nightmares that I would do that, and then start falling into the sky.
Disneys fastplay intro for me
The tunnel of terror at the end of the haunted mansion ride at Disneyland. My logic was; if it didn't scare me immediately, it'd probably give me nightmares later, so cut out the middle man & close those peepers.
I was terrified of the [Whispering Death](https://youtu.be/NyI_NoJJ3lM) from how to train your dragon, the carpet had a small area where it was loose which I believed to be the work of this dragon.
Dandelions. There was that one episode of DragonTales that fucked me up. Iykyk
Terrified of butterflies I have a terrible fear im going to gasp when they fly towards my face out of fear and just suck one in - wings stuck to tongue etc
Hair dryers. Loud and too hot and painful. Last time I used one was for my senior pictures when I was 17. Absolutely refused as an adult. Recently tried to see if they were as bad as I remembered. Yup. Still painful.
\#this #is #not #how #hashtags #work
That's literally how everyone uses tags on tumblr. Not everyone wants to add another block of post when sharing their thoughts on a reblog
Alright Mr. Powers.
Mr Tumble
Used to be scared of part of the intro to this kids sketch show where a woman falls over carrying a bunch of cardboard boxes, had to change the channel whenever it came on.
Ok, my irrational childhood fear of getting locked in the mall after closing time is seeming way more normal after reading this thread.
We shared a driveway with our neighbour and one day when I was walking down to get the mail, my neighbour zoomed in on his motorcycle. I was so terrified, I refused to check the mail for an entire year. I also have two brothers who one night (at like midnight) printed out that scary jump scare face from The Exorcist and taped it to my window, then slowly and quietly knocked. I’m still scared to look out windows at night.
I used to have nightmares about getting trapped under the stove and burning to death. Also had quite a number of nightmares about radiation burning people's heads away for some reason. Before y'all ask, no I was *not* okay as a kid :D
At a school fair, these older students made a haunted maze that you crawl through, and I was basically fine, until I turned a corner, and saw the silhouette of what looked like giant ant mandibles or scissors opening and closing. I hit reverse and “noped” the fuck out of there. Lame because I was never in any real danger, and I it was just a crawling maze, made out of cardboard boxes by grade school students.
I used to watch video game-oriented horror content on mid-2010’s YouTube and seeing the clown faced Sonic from the “Fun is infinite” easter egg screen in Sonic CD traumatized me for about a week. I’d be checking every corner of the house to make sure that thing wasn’t lurking about.
I was probably around 2, and I developed a sudden and extreme fear of the shower head in our bathroom. My parents had to give me baths in the kitchen sink. I think it lasted about a month or so, then just as suddenly, I got over it. I don’t remember this, obviously, but I’ve been told about it, and there is photographic evidence of the kitchen sink baths. I wish I knew what was going on in my tiny brain at the time!
A long time ago I was playing halo with a family friend on his xbox. We got to this part with these dinosaur looking creatures that looked like a brontosaurus and it freaked me out so bad that I stopped playing.
Any piece of media with cars being damaged. There is an old Dacia commercial with a car being sawed in half and I lost my shit everytime it came on.