What's something odd that you were scared of as a kid?

So thanks to Phelous, I unlocked the memory of something I had long since forgotten about but was extremely scared of when I was a kid: The moon in the Sesame Street game Astro Grover (or, more specifically, the jingle you got in general from getting an answer wrong).

Phelous used the jingle associated with getting an incorrect answer in a recent video (and then later superimposed the moon's face over that of a moon in the movie he was reviewing) and the memories came flooding back of playing Astro Grover on the NES my family used to have when I was four or so, and then never playing it again after the one time I tried to because the jingle combined with the unfriendly animations (the moon frowning and shaking his head in some of the games included on the cart and a big upset alien dropping down from the ceiling to do the same thing in others) scared the everliving daylights out of me.

I used to terrified of Disney Channel Halloween episodes. The ones from Bunk'd scared me the most.

I went through a phase when I was younger where I was absolutely terrified of tornadoes. Admittedly, this is a fairly reasonable fear (and still one I have, to an extent), but I remember getting outright paranoid. Part of it was probably that I didn't understand how tornadoes actually worked — for instance, I didn't realize that most of them tend to be pretty small, short-lasting, and cause little to no amounts of damage.

Thanks to the Simpsons episode "Natural Born Kissers" for a while I was scared of the freezer or fridge door being left open and all our food spoiling, like what happened to the family in that episode. I even had a nightmare about it at one point!

Around the same time, we watched a video in class about wrecking balls destroying buildings, and I was scared that a wrecking ball would destroy our school while we were inside the building. It didn't help that at this time they were doing construction on the school for a new wing of the building, and one kid decided to be a jerk and explain to me they were going to destroy the school (obviously they weren't)

The Photo-Me booths in supermarkets. A claustrophobic cuboid of space with white all around you and a dispassionate voice that talks at you as you try not to panic about getting your photo right. When my relatives had to take pictures for documents when I was a kid, I would sometimes peek inside instead of waiting. The experience all seemed so intimidating...

I also had a too-active imagination and thought something awful would happen to them if they messed up on their last try. Maybe the booth would beat them up or call the police on them or something, I used to think.

Edited by Riolugirl on Mar 21st 2024 at 7:43:21 PM

The "Everything is Honey" sequence from Winnie the Pooh (2011). The idea of hallucinating has always given me the creeps, but it especially scared me seeing it for the first time at eleven.

That reminds me: I was unnerved the first time I saw Larry the Cucumber imagine himself as a Russian icebreaker pilot, since that fantasy sequence had an ominous atmosphere to me. It's funny to look back on that and other scenes that felt ominous to me; I think I thought about Charlie Pincher's appearances in "The Ballad of Little Joe" in a similar way.

I was scared of the Oscar award when I was really young, for some reason. My mom has some framed posters of the Oscars, such as one for its 75th anniversary, and it used to be right outside my bedroom. I was scared that the statue was gonna come into my room at night.

The scene in the first Harry Potter movie when Dudley gets a pig’s tail. I thought he was going to transform into some beastly pig monster.

I used to be scared of Sonic.exe, the original creepypasta. It wasn't until I grew up that I noticed the terrible plot and read about a certain infamous rant. Now I just find it laughable because it's so bad.