things you heard as a kid that scared the bejeezus out of you but no one knew

I had a dream when I was about 5 that involved King Ding Dong. (Have at it with the quote function.) That is the animated character on the Hostess Ding Dong box, and there may have been commercials with him back in the day as well - not sure. I only know what his imaginative name is because I just Googled it.

Anyway, he was coming down the river in a boat. Not only did he have his sceptre, but he also was carrying some kind of a chain that he rattled. And he was coming to get us! I knew this because my parents were panicked and told me we had to hide. So we ran into the cabin by the river to hide under the bed. Only the damn bedroom door WOULDN'T LATCH! So I ran over to try to latch it, and suddenly his rattling chain was right outside the door. And just as he ripped open the door, I woke up.

Even at age 5 or so, I knew that this animated character wasn't real, and that it was just a scary (and bizarre) dream. But it was so fucking real right up to the end that it left me in a cold sweat. Forty years later I still remember that stupid dream.

Clearly there's something wrong with me.

 

The Stay Puft Marshmallow Man.

 

If we'e venturing abroad from things we heard or were told, my parents have a door in their basement and I was terrified of it.
It just leads up some backsteps into the backyard, but I was convinced it was the home to evil.

I could play in the basement by myself, but I had to clear out before nightfall.

 

Between reading "Cujo" when I was seven and watching "Hellraiser" when I was eight, this bitch was never going to be normal. I also had horrifying dreams about cat people living in our shitty basement in Denver, so I've been scared of felines and leaky pipes ever since.

 

Salem's Lot. The clothes rising into a vampire. The kid knocking on the window. Don't leave laundry on the floor or put a bed by a window to this day.

 

The first time I watched the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre, I was probably 11 or 12. The ending fucking creeped me -- and still does, to a lesser extent -- today.

My house is right next to a pauper's graveyard. One of my best friends would freak me out every year around Halloween when I was a kid by saying the place was haunted and people's ghosts were walking around my house. I never really believed that, but that didn't keep me from keeping an eye on the graveyard around that time of year.

 

Re: things you heard as a kid that scared the bejeezus out of you but no one kne

I'm not sure if this story fits, but here goes.

When I was about 7 or 8, my family visited one of my uncles with my cousin, who is about the same age as me and my brother. We were playing hide-and-seek, and the cousin crawled into this old dog house my uncle had in the back yard.

A couple of minutes later he came screaming out of there covered with hornets. He'd stirred up a big nest of them and they weren't happy about it. My folks rushed him to the ER of the local hospital, which was, fortunately, just a couple of blocks away. As it was, he nearly died.

Ever since, I have had – and still have – an irrational fear of being stung by wasps, hornets, yellowjackets, bees, whatever

 

The Thriller video.

 

I had a professor share with me a story about her youngest always being withdrawn from the ages of about 4 to 10.

She said one of the older siblings was having heart surgery in the hospital, and after the surgery the family came to visit the older sibling. The older sibling showed the youngest the scar on his chest.

For years, the professor said this younger sibling was a very withdrawn child and timid, and it was not until the youngest child was about 10 or so did something wrong that a pretty unsettling thing was told by the child.

"Mommy, if I am bad, will you take my heart out, too? "

WTF

And WTF for a professor actually sharing way, way too much with a student. This was in a one-on-one evaluation session, but still.

 

"Wait Until Dark," the movie with Audrey Hepburn (she plays a blind woman who realizes that there are stalkers in her home with her and then realizes she needs to fight them off as no one will be coming to her aid). I was a kid, visiting a friend of my Mom's. They went off to have coffee and talk, and i was in the living room watching the tv that the friend had turned on. I'm sure they didn't know a scary movie was on. But there's some dramatic scene where Audrey gets something from the fridge, and closes the door and the scary guy is standing there (silently) behind it, and you know it and he knows it, but she doesn't know it. GAH. I think I kept thinking: This stars Audrey Hepburn--it can't be a scary movie! I was wrong.

 

I grew up on Staten Island near what was a notorious mental institution, Willowbrook State School. The institution abutted a park with multiple baseball diamonds, Willowbrook Park, where we practiced and played from Little League through High School. There was a suburban myth that there were kids in Willowbrook State School who had wings. It effectively kept us from ever setting foot on the institution's grounds and made us wary every time we collected a foul ball from the woods.

This was the '60s and early '70s. Robert Kennedy and Geraldo Rivera were in the process of exposing the awful conditions at the school and it was eventually shut down. When I think of the "kids with wings" stories now I can't help but think it was a byproduct of having developmentally disabled people completely segregated. Kind of sad.

 

Aw man, I was 8 when Ghostbusters came out and the SPMM looked just like my friend Jeff. When we were leaving the theater, I started bawling because it was like my friend got vaporized. Needless to say, my older brother had a field day when that happened.

For me, it was Carrie. I remember I was over a friend's house in the early-mid 80s and this movie came on TV. I was right at that impressionable age where everything must be true, and I can distinctly remember (uh, spoiler alert) seeing the blood in the sink (when Carrie is washing her hands), the house collapsing into the ground, and the arm shooting up out of the ground at the end when the girl wakes up. Holy crap, to a 7-year-old, that was intense. There was an old barn that had burned down near my house and seemingly for years I avoided exploring that because I didn't want an arm to come out of the ground and grab me.