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I'm not talking about logical things like spiders, the dark or that time you saw mummy playing with a plastic sausage*

No, i'm talking about the completely illogical, or at least, completely illogical to an adult's mind.

Me, I was scared of the Wimpy beefeater man (anyone remember him?) I think I must have 'met' him at some Wimpy restaraunt opening, and his grotesque unnaturalness must have feaked out my tiny liitle mind. I guess that wouldn't be so bad, but whenever we went to eat at Wimpy's (which was often, we were poor back then) The beefeater stood behind us, motionless and scaring the bejeebus out of me.Don't know why I never mentioned it to my parents- probably the even greater fear that my older brothers would laugh in my face :(







*I actually never wittnessed such an event, though I imagine it would be traumatic, it freaked me out finding an elcric dildo charging up when i went into my parent's bedroom for some sissors about half a year ago-even now knowing they get up to that kind of stuff- Ugghh  

i was scared of the toilets of school. this was when i was about five or six. i think i saw the bit in the goonies when they mess up the pipes under the country club and was paranoid that'll happen to me. i once ran out to the loo so fast i didn't do my little girl trousers up and they kinda fell down infront of the class.

i don't know why i'm mentioning it, cos last time someone mentioned it to me i poured a pint over his head.

I didn't use to be scared of Doctor Who... except for the theme tune (I think it was the bit where the Doctor's face faded in and, did it (?) wink).

The Monster Munch monsters on the adverts. How pathetic is that?

Pete.

i was a fearful child;

the 'memories' i suffered from when trying to get to sleep, these started from before age 5, one where i was getting stabbed in the stomach & bundled into a boot of car,
one i was tied up in the dark in a ship, suffocating as a grown woman, i can taste the rank salt air now.  

the way the blackness would start to pulse around me at night & make me lurch & not able to breathe until it expanded bigger than the universe & crushed me with sickening size, before it started to shrink & my whole body would spin out of itself......
i still sleep with the light on.

those wierd thunder storms in the SW in 1976.

small spaces.

fire.

the rubber mask that they gassed you with to knock you out for tooth extraction & the way the faces warped & distorted.

so all in all, wearing full BA fire kit & crawling around small tunnels in burning buildings is quite an achievement. thankyou.

Jaysis Bou, are you fucked in the head?

Owls. More specifically some owl that presented some kids show or something circa 1975ish. I remember being carried upstairs over my dad's shoulder because the owl made me cry.

I was afraid of things that looked like something else in the dark. Like the cardboard box in top of the wardrobe that made it look like a giant robot.

Dressing gowns on coathooks that looked like scary monks. That one still gets me now and then.

Monsters under the bed.

The tunnel effect at the start of Doctor Who, but I got over it.

Skulls, like in Image of The Fendahl(Doctor Who) and in the montage in the titles of Scooby Doo.

Factories - quite irrational, that one. But I know why I was afraid of them. Firstly because we lived near factories and we were told not to go near them, which seemed strange to us because we couldn't think of any good reason why we would, and there was a 12-feet tall fence around the industrial estate. Secondly because I really believed I would one day have to go and work in one, and I thought they were knee-deep in soot on the inside, with klaxons sounding every 10 seconds.

Max feels pete's fear. Scary buggers.

Okay, now don't laugh...

Among the many posters I had on the wall as a little kid was one (taken from Look-In, I think) of Richard Anderson, who played Oscar Goldman in The Six Million Dollar Man.

One night I had some sort of weird waking nightmare in which I was convinced that Oscar was looking at me, and what's more, he was the devil. Scared the crap out of me, and for years afterwards I wasn't comfortable seeing Richard Anderson on the screen.

Mike C.

The worst nightmare I ever had featured a pig. My family was for some reason replaceed by that of the family from crap BBC sitcom, 2.4 Children, and for some reason my gran had a giant (approximately 3ft in every direction) satanic pig head instead of her own.

Everyone wanted to give my gran (with her glowing red pig-eyes) a hug, but I didn't want to, as I knew that she would spew this green gunk, which had the consistentcy of washing-up liquid, onto me and give me bubonic plague.

As I ran away from her, it became apparent that only I could see the pig-head, and only I knew it was her causing the plague that was slowly killing everyone. I ran through a hospital, and every bed had a sick soldier, for some reason dressed as if they were in the Napoleonic Wars, sick with her green gunk sickness.

Eventually I was cornered, and my 2.4 Children family were dragging me to hug my gran. To this day, pigs give me a slight shiver, but from the age of around 8 to 10 I was petrified of them.

That snot-puppet Gilbert that was voiced by Phil Cornwall that used to appear on kids tv on ITV.

Ted Rogers' robot chum Dusty Bin on 321 (sort of like a gurning, lobotomised silent satanic Metal Mickey. Who was a pedal bin). My great aunt used to have one in her bedroom, and we'd always get stuck in there playing Monopoly at some point, so I'd always have to stay on the other side of the room by the door in case it ever decided to suddenly come alive and lurch drunkenly towards me.

Seymour from Little Shop of Horrors - I genuinely had this irrational fear that he would eat my parents whilst I was in my bedroom.

Being burried alive - probably only heightened after a childhood interest in Edgar Allen Poe and watching the Dutch version of The Vanishing.

Tidal waves - though they were kind of cool too.

Triffids, after my dad told me that the giant rhubarb in Windsor Great Park were actually killer Triffids, shortly before hurling me into a big clump of them.

Barbers.

Illogical things that scared me as a kid?


P & ~P


A joke for logic-types only, that one.

In principulurg HaHa

Link: http://www.geocities.com/ridiculousrhymes/fruitandveg.html?20052

Quite on topic this one, I was scared of Hartley Hare too - Damn you John Smith!

Pete.

More a "still scares me..."

Cars, or more specifically driving them - the thought of freezing while at the control of a ton of  speeding metal doesn't fill me with happy thoughts.

I used to be a very nervy passenger,  but these days I always seem to fall asleep very easily in a car. Odd.

Or though having seen the way some people drive round here, maybe not so irrational.

Although I did have nightmares about nature being consumed by heavy machinery when I was a kid, so something like a printing press freaks me out a bit.

- Steve

I was scared of Hartley Hare

That's quite a rational kids' telly-related fear, pretty much the same as being terrified of the permanently shit-faced Beryl Reid.

This is the funniest thread I've ever seen.

- Trout

Lepers.

I read too much about the middle ages and was paralysed with fear about people with bits dropping off them. In South Wales in the 1970s.

Before I'd ever read an issue, 2000AD always used to scare me. It seemed like a 'big boys' comic, full of bad, dark and evil - far removed from my weekly batch of footy-related fun in Roy of the Rovers.

M@

P & ~P

That still scares me.

True or false?

"Jaysis Bou, are you fucked in the head? "

why thankyou james,
 what did no-one else get the spinning universe being too big crushing pulsing falling into a blackhole blackness problem as kids ?

the curtain patterns turning into demon foxes was pish compared.

Now i have many many more fears but they are all completely grown up & rational.

i have learnt to completely override fear, you just sortof channel the adrenalin. i suffer trauma instead.

except with the dark.

This bastard used to give me the creeps.

Everything amazed me when I was a kid.

I think i had an illogical fear of one person. That was all.

Actually we had some pretty nasty orange curtains, I seem to remember those combined with Bohemian Rhapsody giving me nightmares when I was a kid.

- Steve

The original Honey Monster.

The one with the hunchback and slack-jaw that used to smash up the house of that guy off of The Benny Hill show

Brrr.

Larry the Lamb was an irritating bastich - but he didn't scare me.

Ronald McDonald, on the other hand...

Mr Blobby is still kind of scary...

why do people create these big hulking mosters for 'kiddies' when their big hulking mossterness scares many of those selfsame 'kiddies' ?

Aye - at the hotel I worked at they had these giant "cuddly animal suits" that the ents staff got dressed up in.  Some kids thought they were great and others thought that great lumbering monsters with huge teeth were running towards them waving their arms and their parents were pushing them towards the monsters saying "it's okay, dear!"

Much screaming, crying, wailing and gnashing of teeth ensued:  and that was just the irritated parents.  The managment recieved complaints about permanent mental scarring and nightmares weeks or months after the visit.

I'm not sure if that was due to the life-sized furry animals or the fact that, if you walked around the back of the hotel, you could find them with their heads torn off, and their skins being worn by fag-smoking and vodka-drinking 'dults.

what did no-one else get the spinning universe being too big crushing pulsing falling into a blackhole blackness problem as kids ?

I had something similar thing but nothing to do with blackness, was more like an insurmountably huge rock that I had to eat or something, so similar in a kind of infinite way that it would take forever to get this thing down to size. I dunno, kind of weird. There was a book once that described the feeling perfectly (Shadow's End). The rock was connected with some kind of taste or something, weird metallic feeling. Was maybe related to the dentist or something. Recurred to some extent in later life when erm, partying.

But funnily enough, I wasn't scared of the gas thing at the dentist. I remember getting that and staring down the tube I was breathing it in through (which of course I wasn't, just some mind thing going on). Wish you could still get it now, far preferable to the usual torture.

Santa - As we didnt have a chimney I asked how Santa got into our house. Mum explained that he sent his wee elves through our letterbox to fetch my dads keys. The thought of elves running round the house while I slept scared the shit out me for years but I had to keep quiet for the sake of pressies.

Sticky (i think that was his name) from Rupert the Bear - especially the puppet version from the Gerry Anderson series.

Shit!  Bad Andy!  That's... that's...

That's the thing from my nightmares!  I was always convinced I'd imagined it: a floating orange *thing* with horrible goggly eyes and glossy black human arms...  Fucking hell, that's been scaring me shitless for years, and now it turns out it's REAL?

What is it?  Looks like a kid's show of some sort...

I must have seen it as a sprog and never forgotten.  Egad, what an unsettling revelation...

The ghost of my mate's dad, who called at the door one day while we were watching Stand By Me on video.

Really.

I still get a chill of horror, due to the aforementioned hovering bodiless goggle-eyed weirdo thing, when I see one of these little shitters:

Si

It's Wordy from Look & Read, the schools programme.

The link below has more information on both him and the prog, including clips.

It may be kill or Cure tho'

Dan

Link: Look & Read

That sticky thing from Rupert used to scare me to death as well when it was on the telly...

cheers lobster doug !

glad i'm not alone in my insanity, it was indeed a sense of the infinate, wether it was too large or soo small. I was starting to wonder if i was having some toddler un-noticed epilepsy or something. luckily i was just born mad instead.

 El Spurioso - you share the same fear as my cat.

"Sticky (i think that was his name) from Rupert the Bear"

That right there's Raggetty.

Gunge. (But after I got over it, I became obsessed)


The old intro to Tomorrow's World, with the massive head.

Sorry if I've started any psychological breakdown there Si, but from recent Megs I would say you are halfway there already.

I've just remembered one other thing that used to ferak me. There was an episode of the Benny Hill show where all the electrical appliances came to life and killed everyone.

They were led by the televisions which exuded this strange glow from the screens. Unfortunatley it looked exactly like the old televisions when you turned them off. Caused me lots of sleepless nights that.

I had a book of the Three Billy Goats Gruff which had a horrible rendition of the troll in it, a great big ugly critter with a wopping great nose and big paws for feet.

I had recurring nightmares about him for seven years, I would always be in my bed and he'd make his way agonisingly slowly up the stairs towards my room... Sometimes I could see his shadow moving up the wall, other times my door would be shut and he'd start smashing the panels of my door one by one with his big nose, then he'd slide in through the hole and look at me with a big bloodshot eye...

my father

Whirlpools.  I was so terrified of them that I would never pull th eplug before I got out of the bath.  Alomost certainly derived from an illustrated edition of '2000 Leagues Under the Sea".  Brrrr.

 I also had a 'Children's Encyclopedia' yolk, which had an entry entitled "The Hobbit".  The accompanying illo was actually a foregrounded Gollum, spying on a tiny Frodo and Sam from a clifftop, presumably (and erroneously) from the start of 'The Two Towers'.  I assumed that this goggle-eyed maggot-fingered monstrosity WAS 'the hobbit', and as it haunted my dreams, I avoided the eponymous book for years - until I watched the Bernard Cribbins Jackanory version, and all was right with the world.  This single image scared me so much I actually couldn't open the book without peeking  through my fingers.

And they say children should read more...

Three Billy Goats Gruff

Hmm, I too had nightmares about that bastard.

Oh, and one of those Norwegian troll things that was at the scout hut reminded me off him. Horrible horrible horrible things!

The old Moomins stop-motion tv show (not the animated cartoon) had some evil thing in the forest that coveted the magic hat one of the Moomins had.  I never saw what it was, or if it even existed outside my own imagination, but it worried me greatly, nonetheless.

I had the exact same thing about the original Moomins! I think, secretly, that's why I was so dissapointed with the animated version - it completely failed to shit me up, and was so fucking twee. I remember that, as a kid, it once angered me to such a degree that I actually attacked the screen with a walking stick.

I still fear technology even now...it reeks of the future...

he-man's cat - cringer? - i had the toy and my dad had to get rid of it through the night coz it was scaring the shit out of me.

that time when i was abducted by aliens.

okay okay, what actually happened was;
It was the hot summer of 76, in somerset, i was a cute little 9 yr old. i was in my b'room painting & glueing smarty tubes & loo roll tubes to make a ...thing ? ( clearly a homing beacon for aliens )

i was stood at my desk, the lights went out, there was this terrifying flash & un-goddly noise like a celestial plug hole draining noisily.

there was something there, in the pitch black.

i appear to have blacked out, my mother is shaking me, somehow i'm the other end of the room curled up feotal under the bed.

hmmmm, clearly alien abduction.
or bad remembering of a sheet lightning related power cut & childhood fient/ panic attack ?

actually thinking about it, i used to fient a lot...  thats not normal for a kid ?!?

i remember being terrified by the opening credits of "armchair thriller" with the man's shadow cast over the chair.

I can't remember if the programme itself was scary, but it was on @ 2pm ish during the week, which for any school-dodging schoolkids was wholly inappropriate

thinky

i preferred it when 'crown court' was on instead - although if 'the sullivans' was on at lunchtime, i'd already had my quota of top-tv for the day.

I still occasionally hum the tune to armchair thriller- which is quite disturbing in itself...

I can't remember if the programme itself was scary

Judge for yourself...

Link: Jemima Shore gets shat up!

occasionally hum the tune to armchair thriller

For the last couple of weeks, I've found myself doing that with the theme tune from Terry & June for some unknown reason. :s

That would be an ace halloween costume.

I remember an episode of Star Trek really freaking me out when I was a kid (Charlie X blanking someones face)...

- Steve

how about completely logical things which scared the crap outta you today ? things which involved cliffs 100s of feet above the road, pishing rain & no phone signal & getting stuck...

xtreem dog walking Bou.

ps. fooking hell wheres me horlix.

i was a very sketchy kid, grew up with a bullying older sister, in a house with lots of coridoors and a celler, ouch.

i do remember being reduced to a panic attack by star trek, the borg still minorly freak me out.

Anyone remember an old British show called Beasts? There was one episode where these people were renovating an old cottage and in a hollow wall they found a horrible decayed thing wrapped in old rags... I won't go on because even now, it creeps me out just thinking baout it!

Mike C

You mean Nigel Kneale's Beasts? Man, I wish I could get ahold of that. And The Year of the Sex Olympics too...some of us don't have this new-fangled digital television, you know...

I always found the Cookie Monster on Sesamie Street disturbing, since he had this overly-large mouth, and a preponderance for violent chomping action, so I felt it was only a matter of time before he tried to gobble me up like some fleshy Hob Nob.

I actually had a mate who was literally petrified by The Count from Sesamie Street as a kid, and will still freak out even now if he sees a picture or hears the voice of the numerically obsessed blood sucker.

"horrible decayed thing wrapped in old rags... "

useless fake memory alert,
 was it a dead half mumified dead cat which was buried alive in the walls as part of a witch craft curse? did this really happen in plague times ? or was it sommat to do with dick turpin ?


ooo ooo those standing stones which moved in the scary kids program.

and was there a program with peter duncan as a kid, drama, scary , with a bad guy in leathers ? man that bad guy really really creeped me out.  if he existed.

childhood was such a long long time ago.

"ooo ooo those standing stones which moved in the scary kids program. "



I got this dvd recently- highly recommeded!

ewww he's scary !!

I had an illogical fear of being thirtythree and still not getting Dredds shoulger eagle_quite_right...

... the Kinder advert from (i think) the early 80's where he's a giant egg on a wall with the most grotesque head and horrible voice, maybe it reminded me of the first time a Sontaran took his helmet of in the Jon Pertwee Doctor Who story The Time Warrior, arrrrgh! wheres my sofa???...

Dr Who never scared me, but Monty Python used to give me nightmares, as did the kids show with the giant evil pumpkins

You mean Nigel Kneale's Beasts? Man, I wish I could get ahold of that. And The Year of the Sex Olympics too...some of us don't have this new-fangled digital television, you know...

Well, the BFI have released Year of the Sex Olympics...

No sign of Beasts anywhere, though.

Link: BFI Website

A single illustration I once saw, which if I had any talent at all I could reproduce down to the last pencil line.

It's a man, sitting up in bed, holding the covers near his chin.  Around him stretches blackness to infinity.  The scene is lit by a single candle.  At the bottom of the bed is a gigantic, black pig, easily larger than a bus.  It has its trotters propped on the bars at the foot of the bed, rearing its full body height above the man.  Its eyes are alight with intelligence and malevolence, and you know, you just know, that in the next second it will fall on the man and eat... his... feet...



Also, men with dog's heads.  Still totally freaks me out.  Some kid came round trick-or-treating with a wolf's mask and I damn near shat myself.

OK, New candidate...

Link: Japanese mannequin show

Oh shit !

musta been ten or so?

tabloid newspaper, mirror or mail or sun, some boys at school got a hold of it & brought it to school to scare the girls. I was playing in the back bracken field where i had a den in the trees & this lad showed me this picture they had on the front cover;

It was a burned up body from an IRA type attack, some shock tactic horror story, unrecognisable black stump limbed mess on a white backround, i was very very very disturbed by it, the fact that they had printed it, the fact that the boys thought this was entertaining, the fact that somebodys loved one was reduced to this & used in this way, and the fact that fire can do that to a human body, i mean jeez there were no hands or feet.

whilst death & images of death or real dead people no longer distress me so, that aspect of humanity which exploits such images, & disrespects human values, has no regard for what trauma it can cause to children or vunerable people, still sickens me.  

I can't walk thru that back field without recalling the sickening terror that image filled me with.  They put PG ratings on films & yet kids are exposed to all sorts of inappropriate bollox every day. I wish people would take more resposibility for the images that get out there.

  This culture of de-sensitization isnt big or clever & it undermines all respect & empathy for human life.

Just for James...