Things we hear as children

[Eireann]

A Facebook post got me started thinking about this, and now I can't get it out of my head.

I'm sure we've all heard some kind of eerie story. No, I KNOW we've all heard eerie stories. What I mean is, there's always some kind of story that's not quite an urban legend, was told to us as the truth, and now there's no way of verifying it.

Take my case.

My mother, when I was really much too young to be hearing things like this, told me about a young couple who were at the girl's house, watching a movie on TV. When this was, I don't know. They were alone in the house.

The movie was a horror movie about a man who killed his wife and put her body in a freezer.

The girl's parents had a tenant. Said tenant kept a LARGE freezer on the back porch. Said freezer was always locked.

As the movie went on, the young couple got increasingly paranoid about the contents of the freezer. Finally, they broke the lock and opened it.

Inside was the body of the tenant's wife.

What stories have you heard that scared the living hell out of you?

[zombiequeen]

Well, I did own a doll that looked EXACTLY like the Chucky doll...and then mum laughed when I told her I didn't want it anymore.
After Toy Story came out, I was super paranoid. I mean, scared to death of my toys coming to life and killing me. Mum never dissuaded these thoughts, they helped to kept my room clean! She told me this story one night right before I went to bed, because she was sick of me crying all night long.

"There was a little girl who lived at the end of [dead end road close by]. She had lots of toys, everything she could ever want. But she didn't take care of them, she left her barbies out and their hare got all matted, she broke the legs off of her toy horses, she let the dogs chew on her teddy bears. One night, she had a terrible nightmare and woke up to see her toys climbing out of the toyboxes. They climbed towards her bed, and every time she screamed for her parents, the toys would fall down when they opened the door so it looked like she had just left them out. Her parents wouldn't let her sleep in their bed, and her mum told her that she was being naughty and turned off her nightlight.
The next morning, the mum found her daughter had been beaten to death."

[42_42_42]

That's a terrible thing to tell a child!

The scariest thing either of my parents ever did when I was a kid was my dad told me the story of A Christmas Carol and acted out the different characters. When he got to the Ghost of Christmas Future, he put on this bathrobe he had that had a hood attached and pulled it forward so his face was in shadow. I don't remember how old I was, I know I was younger than 8 because that was in our old house, before we moved.

[Kogarashi]

Well, my uncle who's two years older than me told me some stuff when we were kids, but those were patently false and even provable now, so I don't think those count.

But when I was about twelve or so, my sister and I were staying over at a friend's house for the night. Said friend told us a creepy story about how her other friend was home alone one night, and someone in a trench coat came and knocked on the door. That friend didn't open the door, but looked out the window. The trenchcoat and a hat hid the stranger's face completely, and then that friend noticed that the stranger had no feet, just a gap between the coat and the ground. Said friend then hid in the bathroom until her parents got home.

Well, we were young and impressionable, and had (and still have) no clue whether or not the tale was true (this town did have its share of ghost stories), and we were so freaked out sleeping in the basement playroom with its uncurtained windows that we went to our friend's older sister's room for the night. Yikes.

[firecat88]

The worst thing I can think of (and it's tame) is that, when I was four, I was told that the pearls in tapioca pudding were fish eyes. Even though I know better now, I still can't touch the stuff.

[Misanthropical]

I was about 7 years old and I ate all the raw broccoli when my parents were out. When they got home they were upset that I ate it and told me to lie down because eating raw broccoli will kill a person. This was in the 70s so before the eating healthy was thought of let alone told to the public.

They kept it up all night that I was going to die while laughing about it but I thought that was their way of dealing with the fact I was going die. I had already had a NDE when I drowned but I was still scared even though I was at complete peace when I had my NDE.

They told me when it was bedtime that they were just screwing with me and I wasn't going to die.

I still think of that when I look at broccoli but I still eat it.

I would never in a million years think of doing that to my children.

[Kanalah]

There's a YMCA right down the street from my grandmother's house. We used to walk down there to go swimming sometimes in the summer. Well this particular pool had a weird huge black grated drain in the deep end. It went the whole width of the bottom of the pool and was about 8 feet wide. I've never seen another drain like it and as an adult it still gives me the willies.

Anyway when I was little I heard a story about this kid that was swimming in the pool alone and they were going to drain it, thinking it was empty. He tried to swim away but got sucked down and stuck to the grate and drowned. Yeah I refused to go swimming for nearly 5 years.

Then of course there was the times when my parents went nuts and made me sleep in the backyard or garage.

[Food Lady]

We used to hear about bodies turning up in the orange groves. Adults probably just wanted us to stay out of the orange groves. Although, one night driving next to a grove, my mom got the weirdest creepy feeling, and read in the paper the next day a little girl was found in that spot. So, I guess the OG stories don't belong on this list.

[KellyHabersham]

This one is from when my family lived in northern Arizona - rumour had it that behind one of the hardware stores, there was an area where some kind of large animal had made a nest. Nobody was ever able to identify the said animal, but apparently other animals would avoid that particular area, and you wouldn't even hear birds singing.

I never saw this alleged nest, and am not sure which store it was supposed to be near, but it was definitely a story which got passed around. (this area does have a version of Bigfoot sightings, so I think that was what people were suspecting it was)

[ShadowBall]

There's a wine cellar in my grandma's house in the basement, and in order to keep the grandkids out of there, she would tell us all that there was a bottomless pit behind that door. Then again, this is the same woman who claimed that pixie sticks were poison, bouncing a ball off one's head would cause them to vomit blood, and that all cats "got disease."

I never went in that cellar, even when I realized my grandma was full of shit. I've also heard someone died in the upper level of Grandma's house and that there was a ghost wandering up there. I never saw anything, personally...sometimes it sounded like someone was walking around in the hallway, but I assumed when I was that young that it was just the floor being all creaky and nothing more.

[dragon_wings]

One of the houses we lived in in Tennessee had lots of windows on one side of the house. All the windows looked out into the woods in the lot next to out house. Many times in the 7 or so years we lived there I would be scared to look out the windows at night. Granted all the windows had curtains or shudders but it gave me the creeps and I had many nightmares that featured something/someone coming through those windows.

Damn. Now I'm gonna have one of those nightmares again... Cause I can remember at least several of them and my room here has a wall full of windows. Damn.

[Eisa]

And now that reminds me of when I looked out my window into the backyard when I was 12 and saw glowing red eyes. That looked and felt evil.

BUT -I- only have one window...and fuck all if I'm gonna look out it tonight. Good luck dragon wings!


I'm coming up blank right now on stuff like this. Hmmm. I know I heard weirdo stuff.

[Misanthropical]

There was a house my family lived in when I was child that I have no conscience memory of anything bad happening in, but I have nightmares about the place to this day and the thought of ever stepping foot in that house again scares the hell out of me.

I was thinking of hypnosis to find out why I have such feelings about the house, but Mr. Mis told me there is a reason my mind blocked it and it is probably best to leave it that way. I agreed with him.

[zombiequeen]

There's another one my mum told me about this big dog that lived in the wooded area by their house and it ate deer, and one time I was looking out of a window in my room and I saw this HUGE brown and black dog with red eyes in the field behind the house. I ended up sleeping in the top bunk of my brother's room because when I went in and told him, he got scared too.
When we told mum about it, she was like "Oh it's probably just the bear that's living around here." She didn't even remember telling my brother and I the dog story!
It was a dog. A big brown and black dog bigger than a horse though. I still have nightmares about that dog.
*shudders* I'm glad for my nightmare's sake that I live in the city now. No places for gigantic demon-dogs to hide.

[Kogarashi]

Not quite the topic of the thread, but....

Many times in the 7 or so years we lived there I would be scared to look out the windows at night.

For some reason, looking toward our (very dark) kitchen in our apartment after I've turned off all the lights at night unnerves me. I don't know why. I think I'm afraid I might see something there, which is kind of silly since nothing odd has ever happened in this apartment, and I doubt it ever will, at least for the four months yet that we have before we move.

And now that reminds me of when I looked out my window into the backyard when I was 12 and saw glowing red eyes.

My senior year of high school, for my birthday, I had two friends over to watch movies and spend the night. One friend was busy until late evening, so I offered to pick her up and take her back to my house. The other friend and I got in my parents' minivan and headed off for her house, which was even further out in the country than my house (farming country in upstate NY). It was dark, and for most of the drive the only illumination was the van's headlights and the occasional lit window in a farmhouse.

And then for a split second we both spotted what looked like glowing red eyes at the side of the road. That freaked us out, and we immediately locked the doors (and no, we didn't stop). Nothing else weird happened that night, but that was unnerving.

There was a house my family lived in when I was child that I have no conscience memory of anything bad happening in, but I have nightmares about the place to this day and the thought of ever stepping foot in that house again scares the hell out of me.

My parents had an old brown minivan like that. Nothing odd ever happened with the van, yet during the last few months they owned it, I had a series of three recurring nightmares about it. Mostly creepy and unsettling rather than freak-out worthy, but it was unusual enough for me to have recurring dreams (to the point where each night the dreams would play out the same exact way), and unusual enough that they would involve something so specific and not change that detail the next time I dreamed it. Not only that, one of the three involved two relatives and I in the van as it drove down one of the roads near my house, and it always restarted right before we got to the end of the road. Also, in the two of the three dreams that I recall, the van always drove itself; there was never any physical person in the driver's seat.

My parents finally decided to sell it for some reason (I'm not sure, but I think it was because they wanted a newer van with better seats), and while it sat in front of my grandpa's house with the For Sale sign on it, one of the side windows busted in one night. No idea what broke it at all; we just found the window frame nearly completely empty and the window itself shattered into a zillion pieces all over the interior of the van.