Childhood Boogiemen

I used to be terrified of the dark for a long time, much longer than normal? I kept a night-light on in my room until I was about 12 or 13, and only switched to just listening to the radio because the panels would light up while the radio was playing, so it was less embarrassing and less light. The thing is, I don't remember anything specific about the dark and why I was so terrified of it, just that from when I could walk until around sixteen, I needed some form of light in my room or else I would just be still in terror and convinced someone could either break in or amble into my room without me seeing who it was.

Nowadays, I generally spend most of my time in the dark (as a result of working graveyard shift) and prefer driving around after midnight, so it's kind of an ironic twist in a way. I still get occasional chills if I'm walking though, like someone is watching me from a distance away.

 

Going in, as best as I can remember, age order:

When I was two or so, we had a picture book in which a toddler learnt to do things and one of those was use the loo. The picture of the toddler on the loo had them falling into it. I used the potty almost exclusively right up until I had to go to school. (I don't remember this one, but have been told it enough times that I have a fake-memory of falling into the loo.)

One of my earliest actual memories is from when I was three or four, and at my Granny's house. Their stairs were carpeted slabs without a vertical part between, and I used to crawl up them instead of walk because I thought if my foot slipped when walking I'd fall into the space between the stairs and... die, I guess? There were cabinets under the stairs, so for quite a way up it wouldn't have been a long drop.

Four started when I was between the ages of six and nine (sorry it's so vague a time). In no particular order, they are as follows: we had framed copies of Arthur Rackham illustrations on the stairwell, including quite a few of goblins and such, so of course I became convinced that totally black all over goblins lived beneath my bed, and would grab my ankles if I didn't jump into and out of bed from the long rectangular rug in my room, which I'd placed carefully so it would be out of the goblins' reach.
The second was an awful fear of this ceramic "mask" that was mounted on the wall of the dining room, right by the entrance. At some point between the ages of six and eight, it spat water at me from its eyes when I went into the dining room in the dark, and ever since then I had to put the light on before going in, or of course if the sun was up that was fine. My sister, who is seven years younger than me and was therefore one year old at best when this happened, has also claimed that the mask spat water at her.
Third, I used to always make sure my wardrobe door was shut and locked before bedtime (it was old-fashioned and had a fancy key, and if not locked the door tended to swing open by itself which is creepy enough) because if it wasn't I could see inside from my bed and the shapes of my clothes used to develop faces in the dim light.
Finally, I used to watch the Jumanji cartoon a lot, and there was a video of the film at my primary school which, alternating with the film Matilda, we used to watch when it was raining too hard to play outside. I wasn't scared of watching either of them, I was scared of somehow accidentally playing the Jumanji game, so I used to watch them a lot in order to pick up tips on how to survive.

And, barring actual phobias I developed as a kid, I think that's it!

 

Man I feel sorry for some of you little folks. xP

My particular fears... big, ivy-covered trees on a footpath that ran from my home to my primary school that we'd walk home via sometimes if it was nice weather. I was fairly convinced that they were petrified ogres or something similar that might come alive at any moment. There was also a tree, big ol oak set off from the path in the cornfield it ran by, that I was pretty sure had a wolf behind it. That wolf, of course, desired to eat me. I actually still mostly believe it, though I no longer really believe the wolf has truly objective reality. I have been trying to make friends with the tree as a result, so it can protect me.
I also used to walk home from the bus stop once I got back to secondary school, which took me past the entrance(s actually) to that footpath, and I hated them. A fuzzy belief that one of our horses had been put down just inside them, combined with a terrifying moment in a book where a skeletal horse attacked the protagonists, convinced me that some kind of ghost, spirit, zombie or skeletal (I wasn't precisely certain) horse lurked inside them, and if I looked back too often once I'd walked past the entrances then it would pounce. I was also worried about a skeletal horse in a patch of woodland nearby, after a dream I had where I got off the bus two stops too early and had to walk along the road through the wood, and on the other side of the road a skeletal horse was pacing me through the trees.
Playing alone in woodland or really anywhere other than my own garden also scared the shit out of me because I would always feel watched, and who the fuck knew what might come out of the undergrowth?
I also became rather concerned at one point, and actually still kind of am, that as I walk back along the path from our horses' field in the dark with my parents after taking the horses out, one of my parents will turn into a werewolf and attack me. You know, as you do.

 

Started at around grade four or five, (9,10,11 age) some girls in our changing room for gym got obsessed with ghost stories, and then one day they found this piece of braided purple cloth in the changing room, that apparently had fallen out of one of their pockets the day before, and since we had the last class of the day for gym, it must have been a ghost, ( specifically Bloody Mary, because we had a bathroom attached to the room) that braided it. Now I have an unease as I pass a mirror, but it's gotten drastically better since the start, it didn't help that my technical first name was Mary, and I feared that Bloody Mary was going to appear in the mirror and drag me in, killing me with the glass shards of the broken mirror. Or that if I closed the door of the bathroom too forcefully that I'd smash the mirror and die the same way Bloody Mary did and become the new one. I really am not a fan of mirrors now.

 

ive always hated windows at night; mirrors never really bothered me (though i used to cover my full-size mirror in my room with a blanket at night) but windows? when its dark outside, and a light is on inside, it effectively becomes a one-way mirror, and that has always flipped me out, especially if it's really late and everyone else in the house is asleep.
i've also had this really specific fear, ever since i was little; we have those roll-up shades in my house, the one in my old bedroom was fabric and the one in my new bedroom is one of those "blackout curtains", so they're completely solid. i always ALWAYS avoid opening the shade at night, especially with the lights off, because im always convinced that i'll see a face or a mouth pressed up against the glass with too many teeth and burning eyes
which is irrational in itself, all the windows in my house have screens on them :p but still

 

oh my gosh @rats yes. That face thing. I had a nightmare at some point (probably after reading that parrt in Deathly Hallows where voldemort can fly)
that I opened my curtains and voldemort's (who has no nose obviously) face was pressed against my window, and his robes were billowing out and blacking out the rest of the window.

Also, after watching the 10th doctor + martha episode with the witches (Shakespeare episode), i got super freaked out at one point where one of the witches leaned out a window and looked down at the person below, and since i had a bunkbed, i was scared that one would do that to me.

Heh I was scared of lots of things.

 

When I was a kid I was told the story of Adam and Eve I vividly remembered how god came to punish them and he was invisible but they could see his foot prints. So every time at night whenever I heard little bumps or anything that remotely sounded like someone walking I thought god was coming down to smote me for ....idk being a bad kid I guess? No particular reason I just thought I was a horrible person for no reason before my age was in the double digits because that's wort of a thing when anxiety and depression are basically developmental disorders.

There are similar awful themes like that, but that's all I got for anything like a boogey man coming to get me.

............... so I've considered writing a memoir about growing up with mental illnesses because pretty much all of the narratives about depression I see are from people afftected after they hit puberty

 

(addition: i can't sleep unless my back is either to a wall or another person, i can only sleep on my sides and if my back is facing open room i literally cannot sleep, it's not even a specific fear, it's just Really Uncomfortable)

 

When I was a kid I saw the Sword in the Stone Disney film, at one point the protagonist is chased by a group of wolves into a forest. That creeped me out so bad. I was a kid with bunkbeds as well, and I slept in the bottom bunk. For ages every single time I had to go to the bathroom when it was dark I was convinced a herd of wolves would jump of my top bunk and chase after me.

 

Oh that reminds me! I read Fantastic Beasts and Where To Find Them and instantly became convinced that I was going to be eaten by a lethifold. Never mind that they live in tropical places and I live in an incredibly temperate place, one of them was going to fucking get me.
I slept with the covers over my head for years.

 

Oh man, I did that too. I still sleep with covers over my head now, it's stuck.

 

Moon Maid

*shudders*

 

the link is broken :(

 

Good news: despite it being four years later, rereading the posts reminded me what I must have linked — it was Daniel Ortberg’s horror retelling of The Velveteen Rabbit, which I’m pretty sure got taken down because it’s in one of his books now? IIRC it had similar themes of, uh, stuffed animals draining life energy

 

I've been afraid of mirrors in the dark since I was... heck I don't even remember, I was very young. Of course I heard of her the way almost everyone does, through kids passing down the story on schoolyards and playgrounds. Our specific iteration said you had to wear red and say her name in the dark three times into a mirror and she'd take your eyes.

Of course I had to try it, so I put on my red sweats, went into our bathroom at home with the lights off, and said bloody Mary twice. I chickened out of course, I've never had a good track record with the supernatural, and I know* to this day she's waiting for me to fuck up. To say her name that third time, in every darkened night. So yeah.

*Know as in I have paranoid delusions sometimes, not know as in coming from any place logical

 

I was afraid that a burglar would steal my plush cat at night so I tried sleeping with her hidden under my knees? But not for more than a few nights because I dunno, I had a pretty short attention span for fears. I was only afraid of most things for short bursts of time, and only as long as they remained relatively formless.

My fears were incredibly correlated, I think, with my anxiety that manifests in OCD ways sometimes, and my learning disability that makes focus very intense when it happens but not easy to maintain over time, along with verbal skills and empathy being coping mechanisms. I was primarily terrified of nebulous things. Anything that resolves into a shape is no longer capable of embodying all of the doom. Anything that talks is inherently no longer in the same category at all, and it may be possible to file even momentary eye contact away under social interaction equivalent to a verbal conversation. And that's why Pinhead is by far the least frightening cenobite, and doesn't actually even register as scary, and the chatterer is probably the scariest, but not nearly as scary as that... thing that isn't remotely human shaped and definitely doesn't want to have a conversation. Not that I watched Hellraiser as a child, that's just a pretty good example of how my mind works with scary things. If I can converse with it, I can see it in a way that's much more meaningful than physical eyesight. Though being able to look at it certainly helps for nonverbal communication. I was very much afraid of the dark.

 

Ooh this a fun thread to read through. I‘m glad it isn‘t dark rn :‘)

Nothing so chilling but: Carefully rationing out affection and energy to all the things I had (especially stuffed animals) is very familiar - I did that starting tiny and until I was maybe 14 or 15. I was completely driven by the worry that I‘d be unbalanced to one or another of them and a) they‘d fade away like unwanted toys from the polar express (which struck me as both very unfair and very plausible, as a kid with a really bad memory & focus) and I would therefore be Bad or b) something bad would happen as a sort of reciprocal punishment for me leaving my toys unfed, starving and paralyzed. After a while I started only using one side of my bed and whispering a little chant to myself inviting friendly fair folk to rest as long as they did and intended no harm and made a good faith effort to protect me for the duration. My most vivid boogeymen other than Nameless Dire Consequences were almost always an older version of me, indifferent or hostile to younger me, sometimes with sharp teeth, though that was usually more of a sad horror.

 

For a good chunk of my childhood, I was terrified of quicksand. This might have made some sense if I’d lived somewhere where quicksand was something I had any real chance of encountering, but I didn’t and still don’t—I just heard about it in a video game or book or something as a very young kid and decided it was the scariest thing ever and that I had to be wary of it.

What’s really nuts is that I couldn’t even handle hearing the word. If someone offhandedly used the word “quicksand” in literally any context, I would scream and sob and panic and generally freak out.

Yeah, I dunno either. :P

 

I was paranoid about alien abduction for about six weeks when I was twelve or so, to the point that I slept with a light on. I don't remember why it passed. Maybe I just got tired of being scared.