Did you have any unintentionally creepy objects as a child, or afraid of a particular place/room?
Mom hung a mass produced art print on my bedroom wall when I was about 8. It's of a little girl holding her puppy.
Cute, right?
Thing is, this painting terrified me. And I was raised in the time where you just kind of swallowed any complaints and didn't bother mom or dad with kid foolishness.
Here is a copy of the thing I actually had hanging on my wall. This same frame. Probably came from Service Merchandise or some such.
What in the everloving hell is lurking just over her shoulder?!?! To me it always looked like a skull wearing a hat on the side of his head, like a little old timey jaunty hat a clown would wear.
It's a wonder I got any sleep. I was too afraid to tell mom I hated it. I never considered that I possessed the agency to take it off my wall and hide it at the bottom of the closet.
I think of this cursed painting still.
Did you ever have something in your childhood that unnecessarily scared the bejeezus out of you?
My mom always kept an old ceramic vase shaped like a little girl painted in a blue dress. It creeped and my sister out it gave off such weird vibes. Its still in moms room today and at this point I'll probably inherit it and keep it just for memories even if its still a touch weird.
Not really a thing a own, but definitely something I encounter a lot. It's an instrument you often hear in classical music, and sometimes ballads, and even rock tracks. A lot of the ancient cartoons used it as well. It scared me as a kid, and I still feel physically uncomfortable every time I hear it.
It's called a timpano, plural: timpani. It doesn't really elevate a track at all for me, it just makes it more frightening.
I played brass but sat in front of the timpani in high school orchestra. I loved them! And I'm pretty sure they led to my interest in taiko drumming as well.
I can see how they may make a frightening sound for children though. And if you had an early asversion to them, why they still cause discomfort.
What I did have was a seemingly inocuous video tape. It was called 'Steps', and it was a series of simple childrens' songs for foreign kids who were learning english.
But there were TWO songs that really, REALLY freaked the fuck out of 5 year old me.
The first one was a song about how a kid went to school and had a red pencil etc. -- Except it was sung in this very dramatic, very soulful voice that made it feel like we were supposed to mourn the death of this poor kid who had gone to school and never returned.
The second one was a song about eating your vegetables and shit. Think of any song like that, what you're imagining is probably pretty close to what it was like in the tape. But the imagery consisted of some singing fruit. And there was a bit where an apple would look right at the viewer -- And SMILE. With a set of (what seemed to be, it's been 25 years) VERY REALISTIC HUMAN TEETH.
These two songs always had me running for cover behind the couch. Surprisingly I enjoyed the rest of the tape.
We had a small animatronic monkey toy, similar to this one below, but in a sitting position snd with deep black eyes. We didn't play with it (try to imagine why) so it was on the top shelf of the room.
When we used the A/C in the hot summer, because it was high in the room, its face was slightly lit, and because in the resting position the head of the monkey looked at his side and below, it would end up looking at me while I was sleeping, barely lit by a status LED.
It actually didn't bother me always, but if I woke up from a nightmare it was the first thing I saw and usually meant not going back to sleep.
Bonus: I also hated mirrors. When going to the bathroom in the night, while cleaning my hands I was terrified of looking down from the mirror and look up back to it, I always imagined some horror creature like a ghost, or the girl from The Ring to happear behind my shoulders.
I was freaked out by pool drains, lights, and jet holes, basically anything other than the water and tile. I'd have nightmares about them. Loved swimming, but I'd panic as I got to the deep end, and I couldn't put my feet down on the floor without checking what was beneath me. I couldn't even look at them.
My local Safeway has a big air grate right where they keep sausage/bacon etc... I literally can't buy those items because I'm too scared to get close to the grate, I'll drive across town to a different store to avoid it
My parent's house has a long, dark hallway (partially lit by night lights). My bedroom was near the end with my bed positioned so when going to sleep the last thing I would see was the door at the end of the hallway. Pareidolia being a thing, child me saw the gap under the door as a mouth with the door knob as an eye.
That door became the big bad of a long series of nightmares. I only remember bits of the dreams, but it was out to get me, with unknown creatures securing me to a gurney and rolling me down the hallway (now longer and lit by torches casting creepy shadows) to the door as a sacrifice... really weird, kid nightmare stuff. But what still creeps me out, decades later was the last dream about the door.
My parents had renovated the attic to form a new bedroom and storage closet. At last I would be moving away from the door. One of the last nights I slept in the old bedroom, I dreamed the door was lounging on the stairs, and the message was clear "I can get you up there".
My brother had a Buzz Lightyear toy. With the head sealed in a closed, unremovable dome, buttons to play catch phrases from the movie, and popout wings... not only would it randomly speak with no one around, but the head (sealed in plastic) slowly rotated over months to face backwards.
We took it apart, fixed the head, and weeks later it was backwards again... we threw it out.
I think I've seen this one before. You throw it in your or any bin, and it just inexplicably shows back up on your nightstand when you wake up in the morning.
My dad had this segment of a tree trunk about three feet high with a large knot in the side. Inside the knot was carved a super-realistic human face. That thing creeped me the fuck out.
My parents got me a toy anatomical body model thing for christmas one year. Idk why, I wasn’t remotely into medicine. But they put it at the foot of my bed, and so I woke up in the middle of the night to a skeleton zombie thing staring at me .
My aunt collected painted ceramic clown dolls. Her house was a fucking nightmare, like some shit out of a horror movie. They were in every room. I only stayed there once.
You know, when I hear about a person like that, I wonder their deal is. Are they just really into clowns? Or do they decorate their house like that specifically to freak people out when they come visit. Like trolling made physical, stretching over years.
Back when I was about five, I was walking with my grandfather and some cousins.
We came across a cow skeleton in a field.
For whatever reason, some of the cousins wanted bones. I ended up with a tooth, one of the molars.
By the time I got home, I had halfway forgotten about it. It freaked me out. In my head, the tooth was haunted by a cow ghost, and this was a scary idea.
But I couldn't get rid of it. I had to hide it. Problem was I knew where it was, so it still creeped me out for over a year until I finally got up the nerve to take it back.
Weird as fuck, I know. What's funny is that I ended up having a small bone collection lol; some skulls, some long bones, baculum, and an almost intact dog skeleton. That's what I have left, I used to have more.
There was also the back room. That didn't get creepy until I was a little older, and became aware that I had an older brother that died before I was born. I can't say I was scared of the room, I wasn't. But in my young brain, despite him never having lived in this house, that was "his" room. Why? No fucking clue, it was used for storage, my mom's sewing, and the spare bathroom. There was nothing about it that pointed to a haunting or anything.
But I didn't want to go in the room. Again, not out of fear, I just didn't want to bother him. It was like going in the room would somehow interrupt his sleep or something.
What's really fucking weird is that I've never believed in ghosts. Ghost stories never scared me, I never saw a movie and thought ghosts were anything but fiction. Despite that, my brain managed to find exceptions to that belief lol. The cow and my brother weren't ghost ghosts, it was some other thing that I could only associate with ghosts, and I have no clue what the fuck my brain was doing other than its usual thing where I could wind myself up with imagination and the real world would drop away.
It isn't like I really thought there was a ghost present, or that there was anything real involved, but it was still giving me that same frisson of the numinous the way deja-vu feels mixed with a sense of mystery.
I kind of get that. "Ghosts" were silly things on Scooby Doo, or the scary things in grown up movies (my dad let me watch Poltergeist when I was about 7). But they weren't real. Then there were the scary/creepy/other things that felt real but had no definition.
My babysitter was watching a movie where a lady in a car caught on fire and burned to death. When a guy opens the door her burned body lunges at him. Thankfully his sister made him turn it off so I didn't see anything else. But it scared the crap out of 4 year old me. That night I couldn't sleep and wanted to go to my parents room. But their room was at the end of this long hallway and there was a big hutch just before their door. Somehow my 4 year old brain was convinced that the "burned lady" was hiding behind that hutch. I was so scared I would not go near my parent's room for months.
When I was maybe 5 or 6 my mom had hung a couple of "Cydney" clown prints in frames on the wall in my room. Feel free to look them up online for a whimsical taste of 60s-era coulrophobia fuel 😬.
Every time we went out of town to visit relatives the glass on one of them would be fogged over when we came back. It was creepy as shit and I would refuse to step foot into my room until my dad wiped the fog off the glass.
Idk why we didn't just ask them to remove the pictures. If I could go back in time to any point to meet myself, I'd go to 8y.o. me and get rid of that painting. (And then tell myself to remember to go all-in on AAPL and Bitcoin, etc etc)
I was scared of real demons and spirit forces lurking in the dark until I was around 10 years old. Ghost stories were common and told by most people around me with my religious upbringing. Around 10 is when I realized I had never actually seen anything like the stories and first started saying I want to see them to prove my beliefs system real. Over the decades that evolved into god doesn't have to be weird and can call me any time, my phone is on.
I was afraid of the world and realms around me, now I only ever fear the cruelty of humans and the monsters that hide within all of us, especially the battle within.
I'm a goddess and I'm not weird about it. I have a mortal body for an avatar so I can do stuff in the physical plane. Deus is supposed to have the Pope for a mouthpiece, but He doesn't bother directly talking through the guy, and he really ought to have more than one with the size of His religion. People should stop worshipping Him to teach Him a lesson about being so distant.
My mom and her siblings shared a wealth of disturbing/paranormal stories with us growing up, many of which were retold and/or corroborated by the others or extended family seperately. I grew up terrified of the dark as a result, as most kids are told that ghosts and monsters aren't real. I still believe they saw many of the things that they spoke of, but I didn't need to know about it. Not then.
If it is not too disturbing for you, I'd love to hear some of those stories. I think oral traditions such as story telling are some of the most interesting traits/ customs families pass along. My own family has some stuff they liked sharing too, some disturbing, some creepy, some plain stupid but part of the lore nonetheless.
When I was six years old, I was afraid of the sound of flushing the toilet. I still flushed after using the bathroom, but I'd run out of there after pushing the lever. At one point, my dad and my younger sister found out about this and so of course they trapped me in the bathroom and kept flushing the toilet over and over.
I also had this fear. It lasted later than six years old, too. I don't like the sound even now as an adult. I never questioned it until recently when discussing sensory issues. It was pointed out that while I keep saying I have none, there's actually a a list of things I've mentioned that are what other people call sensory issues.
"Sensory issue" might be the right way of describing it for me too. I wasn't scared that a monster would come out of the toilet. I just didn't want to hear the sound of the flush.
My mom bought these old mink skins from a garage sale and the cats loved them so we couldn’t throw them away. Super creepy to come across randomly around the house.
Oh! Also when I was really little our house had a gigantic furnace that took up the whole basement and creaked 24/7. Had to sprint up the stairs after turning off the lights.
My grandmother had a porcelain doll in the closet where we used to sleep as kids. It had these creepy glass eyes and cold “skin” that was just too freaky to happen to come across whenever you’d go in there for something.
I received the budget-friendly version - AJ Bear. The mouth didn't move. There was no tape player to play stories. It had a box thing inside it with a mic and a speaker. The mic picked up anything you would say to the bear and parrot it back "in bearish", which sounded basically like the teacher from Peanuts. Fortunately I didnt find AJ creepy. We became pals. He was cuddlier than Teddy because he didn't have all the internal animatronics. Yet it was still a little bitter that the parents whiffed that one. That was a common theme.
We had a furnace in the basement that was noisy and scary when down there and was heard through the house via the radiators. Also, the basement bomb shelter with the light switch in the middle of the room. Also, the literal ghost in the attic constantly walking and flushing toilets. Also, the bear in my closet.
I found this little metal globe thing(appears to be a necklace charm), that has some rings or chimes inside that make sound, buried in the dirt when I was really young. I always thought of it as some type of luck charm. But it brought bad luck first and then good luck. Like if you rang it something bad would happen soon, but then something good would happen. Have never been able to get rid of it, it just stays with my stuff anywhere I move. I still have it 20+ years later.
Ahhh, okay. I kinda sorta saw the skull, but I kept looking for the hat and the right side (where the hat is) blended in with the frame so I kept looking on the left and couldn't see anything