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Flipping through records at the store earlier today, I flashed back to the cover of one that was in my parent's collection when I was a small kid, Billy Joel's Piano Man. Every kid from the 70s and 80s has at least one picture of them in the family photo collection sitting in front of some woodgrain stereo system listening to records on oversized padded headphones with the curly wires on them. I was no exception as I enjoyed listening to mom and dadrock thoroughly as a small one. However, gently caress that album forever. Look at it. He looks like a werewolf with that hair and those yellow eyes and missing brow ridge and I thought he was going to come right off the album cover and kill me. I always managed to hide that drat album so I wouldn't have to stare at his creepy face in a black void.
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Mar 22, 2014 04:27
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One time when I was around 5 my mom bought some tiramisu ice cream and told me it had ladyfingers in it. You can see where this is going.
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Mar 22, 2014 04:48
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Vrikkian posted:Once when I was young my dad said "you and I will be dead before the Cubs win the World Series again". I took this to mean that as they got closer and closer to winning it my chances of dying rocketed up and up until it was inevitable I would die. This is the best story yet.
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Mar 22, 2014 10:24
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When I was 5 years old or so I was scared absolutely shitless by the air conditioning/heating vents in the ceilings of large department stores. That, but 6 feet wide and 20+ feet above your head. I don't remember if I was scared of them falling on me or sucking me up like a helium filled balloon stuck on the ceiling, but they really did it in for me. Soon as one turned on and started going WHOOOM WHOOOM WHOOOM real slow like, I would get sweaty palms and my heart would try and beat its way out of my chest. I could walk right underneath them, but it distressed me more than anything else I can remember. Jurassic Park gave me raptor nightmares too, but I still loved dinosaurs after the fact and I feel like that is too common of a childhood fear to really fit with the thread. 
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Mar 22, 2014 10:35
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My parents used to keep a lot more books around the house when I was 4 or 5 or so, and one of those books was Vital Signs by Robin Cook. I had no problem with rummaging through their Stephen King books at that age, but that particular cover freaked the hell out of me for reasons I don't understand. Was it the dark colors? The big, scary-looking font? The fact that the lady on the cover looks like she's dead and about to be cut up?
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Mar 22, 2014 16:30
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When I was about 5 years old, I was scared of men with big bushy beards. There's a lot of Sikhs where I used to live so yeah, I was mostly scared of old Sikh men.
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Mar 22, 2014 19:57
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Guys the Sherwin Williams logo is loving terrifying or maybe it's metal as hell
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Mar 22, 2014 20:07
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p-hop posted:When I was 5 years old or so I was scared absolutely shitless by the air conditioning/heating vents in the ceilings of large department stores. OH MAN! I hated those things too! For me it was the WHOOOM WHOOOM sound, although I'm still not really sure why. This thread has been an absolute mindfuck as I keep finding people who were scared of the same mundane poo poo I was.
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Mar 23, 2014 00:35
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ET. gently caress that movie. I'm still terrified of it, actually. After high school I worked at a CD/DVD store and any time someone tried to buy it or related stuff, I'd have to get someone else to ring them up and then take a break. The one time I went to Orlando with some family, they had to go to Universal when I wasn't there (from different parts of the country, flew separately) because I refused to go, in case we saw some merch in a store or there was an ET walking around or something. The uncovered windows, too. Because rapists/murderers could see in. I didn't watch scary movies but I watched a lot of cop related things, because that's all my Dad watched (now he just watches lifetime movies and lovely reality shows...). That also includes unlocked doors, open closet doors, space under beds, shower curtains, etc. The problem is, you don't want your bedroom door unlocked or open because then they can get in your room easier, but what if they're already in your room? I found out later that my brother was also crippled by these fears... thanks, Dad. Being awake past midnight. I was pretty sure you'd die if you stayed awake past 1159, or turn into a vampire or something. Sinkholes Fantasia Gremlins, in both forms Honey I Shrunk the Kids, particularly the scene with the giant grasshoppers or whatever A CD my mom would occasionally play, I think it might the soundtrack to Joseph and the Technicolor Dreamcoat? I remember one song about gambling or cards or something. My brother was afraid of the pufferfish in Donkey Kong. One episode of Winnie the Pooh where there's giant crayons that attack them. Who the gently caress thought that would be a good idea? I'm still afraid of snowmen. I currently live in a third/top floor apartment, with a crazy lady and her large brood in the apartment directly below me and the one below and across the hall from her (yes, it's super weird). A couple of weeks ago some of the kids made a giant snowman, I guess for her or something, and instead of putting it in their little patch of yard they put it directly in front of the stairs, facing the stairs, with a giant grin made out of bits of roofing. It took all my willpower to not run away and/or kick the thing over.
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Mar 23, 2014 03:25
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I'm 35 and I still refuse to swim in dark bottom pools to this day. I don't remember what started the phobia but its been for as long as I can remember. Many swimming birthday parties I stayed out of the pool during the 80s and 90s. Can't see what's underneath? no deal. I was convinced the lights on the radio towers were signaling aliens and I was going to get abducted. Alien fear was huge, and, as many have posted, I made it worse by being so interested in it and reading/watching books/shows/movies which made sleep horrible.
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Mar 23, 2014 22:36
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You Are A Elf posted:Flipping through records at the store earlier today, I flashed back to the cover of one that was in my parent's collection when I was a small kid, Billy Joel's Piano Man. Wow, I'm glad that wasn't in my parents' collection. For me, "that" album was Jethro Tull's Aqualung. I liked the album itself, but its box was one of those that opened like a book, and both sides were covered in this mural that looked, as far as I can describe it (not looking that trauma back up, thank you), like a bunch of homeless men hanging out and getting drunk. They all looked like the stereotypical old man in tatters style of bum, but they also all looked angry as hell, like they would kidnap and do terrible things to a kid just out of boredom. "Eyeing girls with bad intent" indeed.
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Mar 24, 2014 01:28
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When I was about 9 or so I had a nightmare where I was in a sea of harlequin babies. I was also scared to death of those grey aliens with the big black eyes. I did it to myself, getting books from the library about abduction accounts. And gently caress Unsolved Mysteries 
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Mar 24, 2014 04:30
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Not really a fear, but when I was young, I had a very specific reoccurring fever dream. I'd find myself wandering an Escher-esque environment of white walls. They were pristine, innocuous, and blank, but there was something off about their perfection. I could almost feel how smooth they were just by looking at them, and as I stared at one wall, it would suddenly rot seemingly from the inside out. It was slimy and dark and mildewy and as it grew to consume everything else, the wall would expand to take up my entire field of view, so it was as if I was falling face first into it. It was always, unfailingly at that point that I'd wake up and remember everything in great detail. Sometimes my mind will play the moment of rotting completely unbidden and I'll just stop. For some reason, it's very threatening to me.
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Mar 24, 2014 23:55
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I used to be scared of having my bedroom door open at night for any reason. I didn't give a gently caress if it was the middle of summer..I'd strip naked, crack a window and put on the giant fan my Dad gave me that sounded like a wind storm. The reason why? My mom once made a comment about not liking her bedroom door open because she didn't like the idea of rolling over in the middle of the night only to see someone staring at her. WAY TO PASS IT DOWN, MOM.  (I can't even say that this was just when I was young, this followed me all the way up until I was nineteen and moved in with my boyfriend. I just slept on the side furthest away from the bed in the hopes that the creepy door looker would get him first.)
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Mar 26, 2014 13:44
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SodomyGoat101 posted:I wound up burying that doll in a bog not far from my house a week or so later because I thought that little stuffed bastard was going to cut me up and steal my soul. What's awesome about this is think about how horrifying it would be to find this doll out in the middle of a swamp if you were a kid.
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Apr 14, 2014 20:04
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TheKlontz posted:When I was about 9 or so I had a nightmare where I was in a sea of harlequin babies. This is not a remotely unreasonable thing to be afraid of.
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Apr 15, 2014 00:49
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I was scared of drat near everything as a kid, but the main one that's hung around even to this day? Eyes. Things or people with bulging eyes, damage to eyes, sharp things near eyes; it wigs me right the hell out even now. I think I've pinpointed the beginning, too---when I was like seven I watched an episode of Star Trek with my older cousin and it was the one where the Captain (I forget the name; he's played by the bald guy who's Professor X) is being turned into some kind of cyborg. To do this, it was apparently needful to drill through his eye while he was still conscious and staring at the drill. I don't understand WHY that specific image stuck with me for so long; it was just a split second and it cut away before it actually drilled in (he might have been rescued, even? I was too busy hiding behind the couch to see the rest.) Oh, and like someone else said, windows open on darkness, uncovered by blinds or curtains. I have a horrible fear of looking over to see someone (or something) looking in.
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Apr 22, 2014 03:57
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Astrofig posted:
And what if you look out into the darkness and a duplicate of yourself is out there looking back in? Fuuuuucked up.
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Apr 22, 2014 04:00
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SteveVizsla posted:One episode of Winnie the Pooh where there's giant crayons that attack them. Who the gently caress thought that would be a good idea? Winnie the Pooh's first acid trip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CLnADKgurvc This didn't scare me as a kid, I actually loved it - but I could see it easily being unsettling to a kid.
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Apr 22, 2014 06:52
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You know those glaucoma test things with the air puffs at the eye doctor? I hate those things. I'm convinced that somehow it's going to shoot a needle through my eye. Why? Who knows!
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Apr 23, 2014 05:42
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This loving show called Knightmare, which was on British telly when I was small. See, the show had the gimmick where they played everything straight and were all "If you fail... you shall perish" and the like, and there was an antagonist who was explicitly said to kill the kids in the dungeon on a couple of occasions. And me, being a small child, didn't realize this was fake. I thought if you went on that show and lost, you got straight-up for real killed.
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Apr 23, 2014 21:49
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When I was about 3-4 we had a Commodore 64 computer and hundreds of games for it, and although I loved most of the games we had there was one called "Jumpman" which terrified me. I think it was a combination of many aspects of the game, including: the fact that your little pixel character could get shot by random roaming bullets; the horrible jumble of sawtooth sounds it made when you missed a jump and tumbled to the ground; and the way the whole screen flashed and turned red when you got a game over. The whole thing promptly resulted in nightmares I had where losing the game was the literal end of the world and I was the only person who was aware of this peril. I'm 30 years old now and I still can't look at screenshots of this loving game without getting the creeps.  (At some point my uncle actually beat this game. I had no idea games could be beaten and I thought he was an actual god.)
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Apr 23, 2014 22:15
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Looking at it on youtube, the weirdest thing about that game is the super quick lofi pitter-patter noise walking makes as you scurry around with barely any animation.
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Apr 24, 2014 06:49
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Vrikkian posted:Once when I was young my dad said "you and I will be dead before the Cubs win the World Series again". I took this to mean that as they got closer and closer to winning it my chances of dying rocketed up and up until it was inevitable I would die. I think this may be my single favorite post on the entire Internet. I've come back and read it over and over all day and it's not growing any less hilarious. So, one of the other big irrational fears I had as a kid was zombies. Now zombies are pretty creepy when you think about it, but I wasn't a little creeped, out, I was absolutely deathly terrified of the impending zombie apocalypse for years. It began when my grandma's friend gave me a little book that was like, a guide to zombie media, but something about it affected me in a primal way. Reading about how one setting had the possibility of a radioactive space probe causing zombies just wrecked me, I couldn't begin to deal with the possibility that invisible radiation would rain down and reanimate the dead. From the age of about six to maybe seventeen I had a consuming phobia of zombies. I would assess any and every building I entered for defensibility and escape routes. I always had an escape route in my head from wherever I was, usually several. I planned what I would do if a zombie came shambling out of a building across the road, or if every other human on Earth turned into a zombie at that exact moment. I was acutely aware of anything I could potentially use as a weapon (Being in the UK we didn't have an abundance of guns as a kid, which seemed to me to be actively suicidal  ).It finally passed between the ages of 17 and 20-odd, and today I'm fascinated by zombies and love zombie poo poo, but I used to have one hell of an enduring unreasonable fear of something that doesn't exist. Edit: TheKlontz posted:When I was about 9 or so I had a nightmare where I was in a sea of harlequin babies. What the loving Christ, how did you not just die of absolute terror in the middle of the night  
Ms Adequate has a new favorite as of 07:24 on Apr 24, 2014 |
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Apr 24, 2014 07:20
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IronicDongz posted:Looking at it on youtube, the weirdest thing about that game is the super quick lofi pitter-patter noise walking makes as you scurry around with barely any animation. Something about the sound effects was just really creepy and off-putting to me. It is really scurry-like now that you mention it. Probably one more reason I was scared of it So I remembered another one: When I was about 7 or 8, I got really fascinated with Ancient Egypt and the pyramids and stuff. My teachers and parents encouraged my newfound interested by getting me books and things on the subject. I happily devoured these until I got to one picture book that included photographs of a horribly creepy unwrapped mummy, you know, with the darkened, shriveled skin and all that good stuff. This unsettled me but what really did me in was that not long after I had a nightmare where the unwrapped mummy came back to life all zombie-like and was out to get me. Needless to say I promptly lost all interest in Ancient Egypt at that point.  I also hid that book somewhere and refused to look at it again for like five or six years.
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Apr 24, 2014 16:12
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Hummingbirds posted:One time when I was around 5 my mom bought some tiramisu ice cream and told me it had ladyfingers in it. You can see where this is going. ladyfingers they taste just like ladyfingers - I was full of all sorts of irrational fears as a child. When I was about 3 or 4 we had a security system installed in our house and there was a motion sensor in the corner of the ceiling in the hall which would activate an orange or red light whenever it detected anyone. This light faced directly into my bedroom and straight at my bed, and every time I saw it I would freeze in terror in case the evil red light saw my minute movements under the covers. - To this day I still get the trembles when I think about watching the movie Titanic. I was about 3 when I first saw it, because for some reason I really wanted to watch the VHS we had of it. gently caress the 'beautiful, timeless romance', all I remember is the captain drowning in his room and all the dead bodies floating in the water. For weeks I had nightmares of my bedroom filling with ice cold seawater. - The movie 'The Day After Tomorrow' also gave me the nightmare treatment. Specifically it was the scene where Jake Gyllenhaal is running back to the library place while the ice is chasing him. Cue nightmares of my bedroom filling with ice. - Add me to the list of goons afraid of the sound of the toilet flushing. It was just so loud  until I was about 9 or so I still flushed with one finger in my left ear and my shoulder mushed up to my right.- I was also frightened of the Touchstone Pictures logo that would play with this music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GskFOf2WLZ0 The logo itself was perfectly fine, but it was the music that got me. The ominous tinkling and then BWAAAHHHH I really liked the Touchstone Television logo though, because it came with the nice piano riff. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VRYTyP5RP9M
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Apr 25, 2014 13:03
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This still freaks me out as an adult: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GWDkyvvKipk
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Apr 28, 2014 21:10
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a7r2rGq8fpU I was terrified of Scrubbing Bubbles as a child. I thought that if you got any of it on you the scrubbing bubbles would scrub the flesh off your bones.
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Apr 28, 2014 22:40
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More things I was scared of: There was an episode of Goosebumps when some jock kid got sucked up into a hand dryer. Could not dry my hands for months afterwards. I was terrified of the washing machine too, and thought it was a King Washing Machine (a la King Bob-omb) that would kill me. I think I was just scared of life, to be honest.
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Apr 28, 2014 23:06
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An Angry Bug posted:The squid and whale. gently caress that thing to hell A lot of the things I was scared of were pretty much listed off on here: Wallmasters from Ocarina of Time, the theme to X-Files and ER, but my strangest was probably this statue my mother has  I don't know why, but when I was little I'd have nightmares of an army of these statues coming down the hallway to kill my parents and me.
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Apr 30, 2014 04:47
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Grape Juice Vampire posted:gently caress. THAT. WHALE. I'm always afraid I'll be the upper walkway and it'll suddenly just break loose and crush everyone who is sitting on the floor under it. I thought you were joking about the no glass... amnh.org posted:Visitors often ask why the sperm whale and giant squid diorama is so dark and why, unlike all other dioramas, there is no glass on the front. The darkness is deliberate—to approximate the pitch-black conditions of the deep ocean where no sunlight penetrates. The glass was removed in the 2003 renovation because reflections created a mirror effect against dark interior leading visitors to think the diorama was empty. Also in 2003, blue-colored fluorescent light was installed and color, based on the best scientific data available at the time, was added to the figures, which originally had been painted a flat black. When I visited AMNH a few years ago, I thought it seemed a lot less spooky, and chalked it up to my being a boring old grown-up now. Now I have confirmation that it actually is brighter and more colorful than the diorama that terrified me as a child. Glad I didn't try to lean in too far, I probably assumed it still had glass!
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Apr 30, 2014 18:49
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there is no glass)
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This talk about whales reminds me of a display in the Milwaukee Public Museum, a giant whale skeleton that was the bane of my early years. I remember the first time I saw it, I was watching the stairs to see where I was stepping, and when we hit a flat area, I looked up to see where we were heading just to see that big rear end thing floating right above me. Holy poo poo was I terrified, and for years I didn't want to go back.
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Apr 30, 2014 19:28
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Uber Nyasu posted:I still get a little antsy when I think about the Philip Glass thing from Sesame Street: I also sort of got tense about the old WGBH Boston logo with the synth noise.
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Apr 30, 2014 19:39
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S-Alpha posted:This talk about whales reminds me of a display in the Milwaukee Public Museum, a giant whale skeleton that was the bane of my early years. The New York State Museum in Albany has a room that's about the whaling industry and there's a bunch of baleen whale skeletons mounted on the wall and they play whale song in that corner of the room. You know that fad for, like, "relaxing nature music" where they put some new-age piano and poo poo underneath Nature Sounds like rain and bird calls and whale song, it was pretty big in the '90s? Mom had some of that stuff on tape and I became scared of it after going to the museum and discovering that those noises were made by massive skeleton-ghost fish-things
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Apr 30, 2014 20:26
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When I was little, my dad gave my mum a pair of moccasin slippers for Christmas. I had a nightmare about these slippers talking with others owned by other people (the lace bow loops were eyes and the front opened at the stitches for a mouth) and plotting to take over the world by forcing people to walk off cliffs and into traffic and stuff. I was absolutely terrified of them and refused to wear slippers of any kind for ages. Shoes were fine though. I also had a large teddy bear that was hard and not at all fluffy and worst of all made a horrible groaning noise when you tipped it over. I think it was meant to be a growl but it sounded in pain or possessed or something. I refused to play with it and it sat untouched in my room for ages until it fell over in the night and scared the poo poo out of me and was banished to the attic which I was then scared of for some time because it was up there.. waiting for me. BSE/Mad cow disease and CJD were a massive deal here in the UK when I was a kid and they terrified the poo poo out of me. I refused to eat beef of any kind and stopped drinking milk or eating any sort of dairy product for a while. I wasn't ever scared of cows as such but I was afraid that if I looked one directly in the eyes or breathed too close to one then I might catch it's mysteriously contagious insanity. Just as I was getting over that, I got another incredibly rare disease to worry about when there was a small outbreak (like four people or something) of necrotising fasciitis that sent all the tabloids into a frenzy of printing overblown "flesh-eating bug" terror headlines with accompanying grim pictures for nightmare fuel.
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Apr 30, 2014 21:16
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InediblePenguin posted:The New York State Museum in Albany has a room that's about the whaling industry and there's a bunch of baleen whale skeletons mounted on the wall and they play whale song in that corner of the room. You know that fad for, like, "relaxing nature music" where they put some new-age piano and poo poo underneath Nature Sounds like rain and bird calls and whale song, it was pretty big in the '90s? Mom had some of that stuff on tape and I became scared of it after going to the museum and discovering that those noises were made by massive skeleton-ghost fish-things Hello (possible) fellow upstater! I was more scared of the Native Indian exhibit personally. The thatch house thing. With the random dude just kinda hiding out on the roof or some poo poo. Their blank stares. Sorta creeped me out.
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Apr 30, 2014 21:28
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Stringbean posted:Hello (possible) fellow upstater! I was more scared of the Native Indian exhibit personally. The thatch house thing. With the random dude just kinda hiding out on the roof or some poo poo. Their blank stares. Sorta creeped me out. I was past the age of getting creeped out by mannequins by the time they installed that - I think we went and watched them build part of it during our 7th grade State History class segment on Native Americans. I don't even remember there being mannequins on it when I saw it! They took out the scariest room in the museum at some point too - there used to be a little room the size of an elevator with images of a forest fire on all the walls and they'd lock you in there and play the sound of a forest fire and why did the museum and my dad think this was a good thing to do to a toddler? The forest fire scene in Bambi bothered me after that because it reminded me of being locked in the elevator fire.
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Apr 30, 2014 21:34
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This advert and that character in it messed me right up: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4bx1lAwQ_1M&sns=em That "hooooooooooo" noise in the song (although oddly never the Toy Dolls version) still makes my stomach twist. I almost got hit by a lorry once running away from a picture of Ready Eddie, the poo poo.
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Apr 30, 2014 21:40
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The Crocomire, from Super Metroid. No, it wasn't the death sequence where its skin melts off and then it (briefly) comes back as a skeleton. I didn't actually beat Crocomire until years later. In a way, that's probably a good thing, because I'm sure that. It was just me, a kindergartener, having fun exploring a planet and blasting bugs, when suddenly I was trapped in a room with a huge thing with melting red skin and too many eyes that crushed me up against a spiked wall
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May 28, 2014 17:30
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I had a few irrational fears as a wee one... Street Sweepers-loud dirty thing would come rumbling down the street with very little notice. Blimps-I think it was the fact that they were big and made no noise when flying around that creeped me out. The Car Wash- Something about these things scared me to death and I would scream my head off if someone tried to wash the car with me in it. Fireworks-nope too loud! Get me away from them! I don't wanna stay and watch the pretty fireworks! I did not get over this fear of very loud noises until I was in my teens. Garbage-Pail Kids-Now this is a bit more rational. These were gross and I wanted nothing to do with them. Pulling one out was a sure way of sending me running. The Red-Hot Letter I sketch from Sesame Street. I would scream, cry and run out of the room when this came on. My Grandmother had to pretend to call in to complain about it to calm me down. It got so bad I would not watch an episode that was brought to you today by the letter I. Worms-not all bugs, just worms. They're slimy and have no head. Ditto on slugs and snails. I still step around them if I see them on the streets and I hesitate to walk through wet grass with no shoes or sandals on.
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May 29, 2014 06:54
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