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.
Plot twist, that’s how your mom got it. And how your daughter will get it. It’s just this creepy thing. Nobody knows where it came from, and the only reason anybody has it at any given time is because their mom had it while they were growing up.
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.
I didn’t have any objects.
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.
I found a voodoo doll in somebody’s free pile and hung it up in my room where it could watch me sleep.
Was it kinder to you than its last keeper because you willfully adopted it?
‘That was a bold move, Cotton. Let’s see how it plays out.’
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 used to own one of these SpongeBob lamps…
SLEEP.exe deleted by NIGHTMARE.trojan
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.
I still have this fear!
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
Nothing comes to mind for me, but that picture of yours isn’t cute, it’s creepy. That girl’s eyes stare into your soul.
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 would’ve driven across town and thrown it in someone else’s bin.
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.
I vaguely recall a Teddy Ruxpin that was missing an eye or two.
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.
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 .
It was similar to this:
Lol, wtf! That thing would be terrifying in the dark!
It’s your own personal Cenobite to watch over you. “The terror is so exquisite.”
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)
Which shoulder is the skull over? I’m looking for it
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
Thanks!
I think the lighter area in the upper right corner of the painting. I can kinda see it. It’d be over the girl’s left shoulder at about 2 o’clock.
Same here. Does anyone know what OP is talking about?
They posted a picture in reply to me if you wanna check the thread for it :)
I found the comment. Thank you. comment
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.
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.