Kids are weird and they believe weird things, and sometimes the weird things they believe and the ways they behave in accordance with those beliefs are actually kind of scary, so. Here is thread for the scary things you thought were true when you were a kid. Me. The scary things I thought were true. Thing. Only one. Have you ever heard of the Velveteen Rabbit? If you haven't, the gist of it is, there's a stuffed rabbit toy in a rich boy's house that gets told that if it wants to be real that it needs to earn a child's affection. So it hides the kid's favorite toy to get a shot at wriggling its way into his heart, and after some time becomes the boy's new favorite. And he's happy for a while, but one day while he's chilling in the garden, he meets this group of actual rabbits who talk shit about how not real a rabbit he is. And he gets upset. And the boy gets sick and nearly dies. And in the end, the rabbit is to be burned but is saved from the flames by a magical fairy who grants him a brand new meat suit to drag around. I read the Velveteen Rabbit at age 5 or 6 or 7, some time after Toy Story 2 had convinced me that all my toys were secretly alive. And this story taught me that just cause something was alive and mine, that didn't mean that it loved me. And I was the kind of kid who didn't step on cracks, not cause I believed that it'd break my mom's back, but cause, yunno, what if it did? So I kind of assumed the worst, and took the necessary precautions. "Necessary precautions" in this case meaning rationing out my affection, so that none of my things could try and take what wasn't being freely given. And this kinda belief sort of segued nicely into some other things I had going on, like being a jumpy sleeper and getting sleep paralysis sometimes. So whenever that'd happen, I'd imagine that I hadn't been giving my toys enough affection, so they were taking matters into their own hands. Paws? Whatever. And, yunno how vampire bats nip at their prey and lap up mouthfuls of blood? Well, little me did, and little me was also frequently eaten up by bugs and scratched himself raw in his sleep. So I'd wake up to little cuts, and toys smeared with blood. SO, instead of assuming they were draining something vague, like my life force or soul or something, I had it in mind that these things were climbing all up over me while I slept and sucking up tiny little mouthfuls of blood, and over time that'd make them more and more like real animals, whist slowly killing me. And this went on for a good while. Months, maybe. I had all these little rituals and strategies to keep them away from me at night, while also having to disguise my intent, cause maybe they were getting impatient and greedy, but if they knew that I knew what they were doing? They'd have no reason to hold back, yeah? So I couldn't tell anyone or try to get rid of them, cause then they'd descend on me in a ravenous hoard, desperate to take whatever they could get in a last ditch effort to escape death. And now it'd just like, wow, I was a fucking weird kid, but back then it was like I was living in my own little horror movie. Or maybe it wasn't. I remember some of this shit clear as day, but hell if that's reliable. I just kinda thought it'd be an interesting thing to share, so. Yeah.
Oh, yeah, forgot to mention. There was one toy that I trusted. Not to love me, of course, cause what kind of moron trusts a bloodsucking parasite? Certainly not this extremely paranoid 5 or 6 or 7 year old. What I trusted was that this one actually needed my active input to get what he wanted from me. He was the biggest toy I owned, standing at about 2/3rds my height at the time. Nowadays he's quite a bit smaller than me, but back then he was fucking huge. And being fucking huge, he needed more of me than the others, who were all reasonably sized and smaller. And, to make things worse, he was a flat floppy elephant, with too much mass to move and no strength to move it with, with his big flat floppy elephant feets that couldn't grasp or hold worth shit. So, yeah. This thing wasn't getting anything of me that I wasn't giving it. And we both knew it. I'd whisper in its ear sometimes about how much I trusted it to protect me, and how I knew it was always keep me safe, how it was my favorite for sure, but I mean, if it stopped doing it's job, why I might just be forced to stop feeding it all my love and affection. And as extra incentive, whenever I'd get a cut, I'd have Mr Elephant "kiss it better". Yunno, give it a taste of what it can't have without me. So yeah, I made literal blood sacrifices to my big floppy pink elephant toy in exchange for protection.
@tinyhydra : whatever you do, and I don't care how you do it, but get this down on real paper. Don't leave it just floating around in the aether. One day you will need this story and you'll want it just as it is. You're not related to Wilhelm and Jacob are you?
@tinyhydra please write this down, damn. I would read the HELL out of that. As for me, I'm pretty paranoid, so there were tons of unreasonable things that I was terrified of. At the moment, the only thing I can remember was that damn plant from Little Shop of Horrors. Note that I hadn't even actually seen it. I read the wikipedia article, and suddenly could not deal. My bed was in the middle of my room, and I had to move it so it was squished in a corner cause whenever it wasn't I thought the plant was going to stretch it's plant arms up from under the bed and eat me. Yep.
Haha, this got a lot more attention than I thought it would. @jaob, I think I'd have to apply quite a bit of polish to make it a story worth telling. And I can't be certain, but I wouldn't bet on it, lol. @emythos, plants were fucking scary as a kid, all stationary and junk. What were they hiding behind that serene exterior?!?? I had a period where I'd only sit down on bare dirt and concrete, cause fuck if those leafy bastards are gonna get their roots into me.
@tinyhydra That is... Wow. Wow. Poor tiny you! Was there anything in particular that put an end to that fear or did you just grow out of it? There are only two things I can remember being afraid of as a kid. One was going in to the centre of the playground at school. I always stuck by the railings. I thought that if I went out there and was knocked down by another kid, I'd fall in to the sky. The other thing was the evil wizard that lived in my ceiling. He'd only appear in my dreams, and he'd make me fly around my room on my duvet at high speed. Pretty sure that one stemmed from watching Fantasia.
Eh, it prolly wasn't all that bad. I remember it sort of coming and going based on current events and how I was feeling and junk. I think starting school probably killed it entirely, cause then I'd be out of the house for most of the day, and I'd head to the playroom when I got home, so there was less time to be hanging round in my room. Eventually, I just forgot it entirely. Except for the elephant blood sacrifice thing, I think that lasted the longest and got to being kinda its own separate thing.
oh my god, that was hilariously terrifying. I still am was incredibly terrified by the dollhead spider from toy story. I don't think I could watch that movie again until I was like, 20, and it still makes me uncomfy as hell.
I watched the original broadcast of Dr Who The Awakening, back in 1984 when I was just a wee smout, and the concept of The Malus - that weird telepathic face in the wall - got inside my head and terrified the life out of me. I was convinced that going too near the wall (especially in the bathroom for some reason?) meant that 'Malice' was going to come through and, I don't know, eat bits of me, or take me into the wall to suffocate. The whole concept of a hideous wall-dwelling malevolent face was reinforced by watching the ITV show Knightmare at age 7-ish, which featured CG wall monsters which drained the 'life force' of the kids playing through the dungeon. It took me years to be comfortable with leaning on walls, which is... yeah, weird. British kids TV in the late 70's - 80's was terrifying and seems to have been purposely written to upset kids with over-active imaginations.
Hmmm. Well, when I was maybe six, I was having these recurring nightmares about giant spiders coming to devour me and suck out my blood. Just the idea of them rearing up to stab me with their fangs still kinda freaks me out. That was where my fear of spiders came from - not 'fear, therefore nightmares', but 'nightmares, therefore fear'. I had a lot of that, and I was more or less convinced that either my brain was trying to drive me insane, or that I was reliving some kind of past life trauma. I was a tiny hippie, what can I say. (Other things I got recurring nightmares about: War, skeleton monsters, accidentally selling my soul to demons and causing an apocalypse, the Holocaust, zombies... I had a vivid imagination. XP) I read a bunch of books about unicorns at about the same age, and somehow got it in my head that if you got stabbed in the heart by a unicorn, you could go Somewhere Else. And well, no flesh-and-blood unicorns available. But I sure did try to stab myself in the chest with unicorn toys. A lot. Thankfully, they were plastic, so it wasn't very effective. When I got a little older, maybe eight or nine, I just used to hide outside and try to bargain with whatever dark gods might be listening. Like, magic has a price, right? So if whoever's listening can just get me out of here, I would trade my sight, I would trade my voice, I would trade my ears, I would pay in blood. I had this incredibly elaborate rules-lawyering, about what would be an acceptable price, trying to hedge it enough that the dark gods wouldn't be able to make me hurt anyone, and to ensure that I had some quality of life left. After my cat died, I carried around and snuggled a "ghost cat" for about a year. My parents got me a t-shirt with a black cat and I used to pet the image on the shirt, too. Until we got a new one and I decided that it was actually the reincarnation of my old cat. I was a tiny mystic, basically.
@hellfirelover Oh yeah, I did something a lot like that! I was convinced that these guys ( ) lived in my staircase, so I was terrified of going downstairs.
I used to throw screaming fits about how I HAD to sleep in the bed closest to the door when i shared a room with my sister. Home or away, didnt matter. Eventually someone thought to ask me why and apparently my logic was "if Someone Broke In At Night* then they'd kill me first and my sister would have time to get away maybe." *i was apparently very concerned about this as a child. There was a bell on the inside of our bedroom door and i kept stealing kitchen knives and hiding them under my pillow/between my mattress and bed-frame as well.
I've been afraid of shadow men for years as a kid. Just shadows with varying forms that stalk about the night and like to hide in closets and open doors. They're also the night sky, which I am terrified of falling into. Because then I would get stuck up there with them and their bright star eyes. I'm still afraid of the things really.
I used to believe the Joker from Batman lived under my bed and if I didn't jump out far enough in the morning he'd grab my leg and pull me into some sort of hell dimension. I'm... not quite sure where I got that from, besides knowing that clowns are terrifying.
i used to suffer from constant sleep paralysis up for a while as a kid and it was not a very fun experience you see, there are some things aside from the whole being unable to move part that make sleep paralysis really nasty to experience the first is that since you are dreaming, you have a tendency to experience Vivid Hallucinations, normally involving horrific abominations staring malevolently at you the second is that because your body is still asleep, you breathe at a slower rate, often making it feel like you are suffocating and better yet, these things can often combine, making it very possible to hallucinate your personal horrorterror strangling you to death and lucky me had these nearly every night in my experience, i would "wake up" to hear my horrorterror making its way up the stairs. now since my horrorterror was a huge asshole, it couldn't be bothered to ascend the stairs in a non-terrifying manner. instead, it decided that the preferable way of overcoming the series of short ledges was to take two consecutive steps at a time followed by a brief pause, then repeat and so here i am staring at the open door, forced to listen to an increasingly loud and suspenseful "thu-thump ... thu-THUMP ... thu-THUMP!" up until i can make out its silhouette in the hallway light, at which point it pauses for a differing short period of time upon the end of which, it eratically sprints into the room at unnervingly fast speeds and climbs up onto the foot at my bed, its entrance accompanied by a series of deep loud percussive noises and a metallic-sounding cross between a screech and a growl at which point i am greeted with the sight of a beast that can only be described as a cross between the world's most evvil housecat and a werewolf of some kind of horrible eldritch origin, its body too black to see anything but it's piercing, predatorial, reptillian, eyes. after allowing me a brief pause for me to piss myself, the eldritch feline abomination begins throttling me with its black tendrils, slowly revealing an impossibly wide grin, the grin reaching its widest point as i feel i am about to die from the suffocation it is then that the tendrils drag me into its maw, where i see nothing but darkness before falling seemingly endlessly into the abyss, before eventually awakening gasping for air with a cold sweat cathulhu naturally became a very deep fear of mine
