As a kid I was terrified of atom bombs and thought I could cause an atomic reaction by accidentally splitting an atom. So I was terrified every time I used scissors or cut my nails.
i can’t believe you had like legitimate trauma about toilets flushing and overflowing meanwhile i was afraid of automatic toilets because loud noise hurty
The toilet flushing and overflowing is a fear of hers I lived through and it was an automatic flush lol. The toilet in my dorm hall kept flushing and flushed continuously for over 2 minted until it ended up flooding our whole floor. Me and another girl rushed to stuff towels underneath everyone’s door to avoid the water going into their rooms (I had to break into my friends dorm to pick up chargers and more off her floor so no one got electrocuted) 😂😂😂
same but very specifically with automatic hand dryers in public bathrooms (those little things that blow air out when you put your hands under them) i absolutely could not stand their noises and being in a bathroom with one of those and no paper towels made me so angry
When I was 8 I was terrified of Ozzy Osbourne; I was so hesitant to even say his name that I called him "Evil Joe". I've also had a longstanding fear of accidentally shape-shifting into the form of a character I hate, namely Wario.
when i was 9 i was literally afraid of the color brown like i’d literally have nightmares as a kid where i would just run around my house and everything would turn brown and i’d wake up crying 😭
lmao it’s fine 😭 i got over it eventually to clarify it was a specific shade of brown (like a lighter orange-y brown?) and i genuinely don’t remember how i got that fear, maybe through a dream
very specific but I could not STAND second hand embarrassment. Like whenever I would see a character in a movie/cartoon do something embarrassing/humiliating I would get so uncomfortable that I needed to leave the room whenever it happened.
Omg I STILL feel this one. So many things that I had to walk out of the room/not even bother watching because of it. Like I can’t stand Elf or The Office at all. Never got the appeal for watching somebody else embarrass themselves.
SAME and I'm still like that at almost 20!! I could NOT watch Disney Channel or a lot of cartoon network shows bc a lot of the humor was around pranks and public humiliation but "funny". It was so awful to me that I watched exclusively Nick Jr until I was 10
I still remember I had to cover my ears in science class for days after learning that 😭😭 I couldnt read or hear anything about space for months because of that
Man I remember staying up late with my dad while he watched the history channel when I was little and an episode about the sun's death started playing. I had never been so filled with dread. It didn't help that it straight up showed how that would end humanity lol
I remember being terrified of Hot Topic in the mid-2000s because my cousins who went there a lot convinced me it was a store for vampires. Whenever we'd go to the mall I would refuse to go near it because I was so scared.
Oh thank god I'm not alone in this lol, my sibling and I both were scared to go in there but only because we saw people dressed as skeletons in there. Like, full face of skeleton makeup and clothes. I love Hot Topic now tho lol
As a kid I was absolutely TERRIFIED of the book "the bad case of the stripes" Like, real existential dread. Every time my kindergarten teacher would read it I would have a full on meltdown and I'd have to sit in the office till it was over. It was so bad that I remember after I took a nap at home after school, I woke up in a panic and was running around the house trying to get it out of my head. My mom and dad tried to help, but I was inconsolable. Some of my classmates used to blackmail me with it because they knew I was scared of it. When I was in the second grade this one kid brought it out because he knew it would bother me and I think I just started hysterically sobbing. It was really bad. Even nowadays looking at the cover of the book disturbs me, but it's not as bad as before.
I was also terrified of this book so I feel you. In kindergarten we watched a story time video of it being read. I found the illustrations so disturbing and also had serious existential dread about it. I couldn’t get it out of my head and was terrified the class would pick it again another day. One day they did and I went immediately panicking to the teacher and she let me go to the other side of the classroom, so I spent the duration of this video facing away from the smartboard panicking with my head in my hands. I’ve seen the illustrations again since and still think some of them are pretty disturbing for a kids book. The painting style is really uncanny.
OH MY GOD I CRIED WHEN THEY READ IT IN FIRST GRADE. we would have activities where we'd rotate around the room doing other things, and one station was listening to the audiobook for it and I would cry and refuse to listen to it. Worst part was my teacher tried to force me even if only for a little bit, it was terrifying for me I had nightmares of turning rainbow for years. Now I'm gay, so idk you decide the amount of irony in that turnout
As a kid I was terrified of the concept of hell (a fairly reasonable fear tbh for a 6 year old growing up in Sunday school) but the cherry on top was the fact that I was scared because I believed, vehemently, at six years old, that I was already damned to hell. Needless to say; not a Christian now
@@Clodsire_loverI think it might be a belief that all children are pure and innocent therefore will go to heaven regardless and when you hit certain age you don't have that privilege anymore. It sucks but I heard a story like that from ine person
@@ЮлияПопова-ч5ю8хit depends on the sources you look at/people you ask Rules on what people think sends you to hell range from "you won't go to hell if you're not bad, and all children go to heaven because they can't really be bad yet" (no Christianity/other God worshipping religion really even needed) to "if you're not baptized as a baby/join into MY sect of this religion then you'll burn forever!!!" Possibly even applies to newborns who're "dead on arrival" (be it literally or only living for a very short amount of time. Either way probably couldn't really be baptized) Belief systems are just crazy like that
My church leader told me that all gay people go to hell, I was 6. So needless to say I thought I was dammed to hell. I was so traumatized that I tried to convince myself I was straight for 6 years straight, I sent myself into a depressive spiral and just general depression. All that to say, thats a completely justified fear
Also we had that Smeagol doll when I was a kid and would hide it around the house to surprise each other. We also told my aunt we got a kitten and wrapped Smeagol in a blanket and then acted like we were going to show her the cat, but she got Smeagol'd instead. You would have hated my house. Edit: the Kidpix "oh no" is the ultimate jumpscare, change my mind.
i don’t know how this idea started or even why tbh but as a child i was terrified of… the doodlebops watching me use the bathroom. the doodlebops were totally fine (i even had a toy! like a keyboard or keytar i think the girl had?) but specifically when i used the bathroom i had to pause/mute the TV so i couldn’t hear them or think abt them and sometimes i even cracked the door a little to make sure no one was out there. i have literally never said this out loud to anyone but i feel like if anyone gets this they would be in this comment section.
When I was a kid I had a fear of escalators that went down. I was always nervous to fall when getting on one, and I always had the idea in my head of me falling down on one and getting my hair caught in between the steps, unable to move as it kept going down. I still pause before getting on an escalator because of this.
I was confident my feet would get stuck on an escalator and I’d get sucked under the escalator and squished. To be honest I still kinda don’t like escalators 🫣
I was literally so terrified of escalators as a kid that I was stuck at the top of one crying at a mall while my mom and sister were at the bottom, and suddenly a totally random stranger threw me over his shoulder and took me down to them.
As a kid I was terrified of the X-Files theme song. I'm pretty sure the reason why is because it would air sometime around my bedtime, and all I knew about it was that it was a scary show about monsters and aliens, so it became the literal soundtrack to my nightmares. For YEARS randomly hearing the music would trigger a panic response, including a time only a couple years ago when I happened to be walking down the hallays in my house with the lights off, not knowing that my perents were having an X-Files marathon, and when it suddenly started blasting through the house I immediately dropped into a defensive stance. Now, after having watched several seasons of the show myself I've gotten over it through exposure, but I'll never forget the pants-shitting terror that gripped me that night, lmao
I absolutely HAD to change the channel or leave the room if xfiles was about to air. I couldn't do the theme song (or the creepy imagery) either. but now as an adult... oh that's my jam
i had the same fear but because of the simpsons episode where mr burns turns into that freaky alien and they parody the x-files. I had to leave the room and once put my head under the water in the bath because i could still hear the music.
@@jenniferch3ck i used to be afraid of that episode too! it wasn't because of the x files but because i was afraid of et and mr burns reminded me of him
When you spoke about fear of being out of control with electronic devices, blue screens ect. I realized this makes sense for my fear of gaming glitches. I have a terrible, unrelated fear of in-game water and the void, but any sort of camera glitch, getting out of the map/playable area/ losing control over a game makes me freak out so badly to this day. I am legit scared to play The Sims 3 because of that.
I used to be scared of void and deep water more when I was a child, like the inside of the big piramide in Minecraft or the galaxy view in Spore. Now it still is inside me but mostly when I play Space Engine and see big ass star, or worse, when in past game versions you could go through the texture of the planet and physically be inside of the live size planet. Instant alt f4
I have this faint memory (or maybe a nightmare) of trying to play a dvd and the menu screen saying “hurry up and press play!” and being so scared of technology acknowledging my existence or talking to me out of no where. Even now I get a bit startled when a game will talk directly to the player out of no where. The fear of being out of control of devices was so real
I find it very uncomfortable but I kinda like it for that reason. If I wasn't somewhat bothered by things like test maps in video games, I would find them less interesting
same. It’s Whales for me. I blame Pinocchio but I might have been a penguin in a past life because killer whales are monsters and idk why everyone is so freaking chill about it :c
Me with my phase as a child where I was scared of the wind. Seeing the leaves move on the trees would make me nauseous with fear and want to stay inside I think I was more afraid of a tornado/hurricane starting…. But I also lived someplace where those never happen
I’ve said this before, but for some odd reason, TV logo bumpers really spooked me as a kid… even some that aren’t even considered “scary” to a lot of people!
I was terrified for the longest time of a toy called Jake the Snake. It was a remote controlled green snake that could move around and even lunge. The worst part was that my brother would chase me around the house with it. I'm sure I knew that there wasn't a way for the toy to hurt me but that didn't matter
I would repeatedly try and convince my parents that Invader Zim wasn't terrible and bad. The episode that would always be playing when I convinced them to give it a try... was Dark Harvest. Every. Time.
For some reason, even worse than the Dark Harvest episode for me was the *meat* one. Called Rise of Meatboy or something. Zim and Dib get infected with some kind of microbe that slowly turns them into edible meat, like salami. Their skin changes color, their features swell and distort, and dogs start trying to bite them. The episode ends with the two of them turned into giant, inanimate sausage links wearing clothes, sitting in an alley as dogs bark in the distance. It disturbed me so horribly as a child. I remember hiding on the stairs leading to the basement, secretly watching as my brothers laughed at the episode, terrified but unable to look away. Nightmares for years.
It’s called Bolognius Maximus. Between that, Bloaty’s Pizza Hog, The Sad Sad Story of Chicken Foot, and the career day ep where Zim works at McMeaty’s I wouldn’t be surprised if IZ were responsible for turning some kids vegetarian
Oh my God, I was petrified of Invader Zim as a kid because I saw this episode and the Teen Titans episode where Beast Boy gets a job in a fast food place and my brain combined the two into some horrific nightmare scenario where all I could clearly remember about any of it was "green dude + meat = trauma"
@@morganorwhatever I was lowkey uncomfortable with meat as a child and eventually gave it up entirely as an adult. I would not be at all surprised if Invader Zim had something to do with it.
I agree! Dark Harvest is, of course, disturbing, BUT the main effect it has on me is nausea. Watching someone vomit out harvested intestines, only to slurp them back up like spaghetti is not something you should watch before, during, or after eating. 😅 I think the Halloween special takes the cake when it comes to fear. I rewatched it this past October, and I was legitimately terrified. Being trapped inside your own mind and losing your sanity has always been a fear of mine.
I had never heard of that show before and now I wish I still didn't. Also what kind of name is that, even, Angela Anaconda sounds like the alias of an adult movie star.
Weirdly, I always see people mention how creepy this show was and I honestly don't remember being bothered by it in Germany as a kid? So I looked up both versions, and oh wow, for some reason the german dub is way less uncanny valley. Maybe the fact it's already dubbed helps with the suspension of disbelief or something, but the original feels way creepier somehow.
@@oomflem I also grew up with the German dub and don’t remember it being scary. But I think we had the VHS tapes when I already was a bit older, maybe around 10. That could also have helped.
This reminded me... I was weirdly afraid of styling heads when I was a kid???? Like the kind that would look like a giant barbie head or something that you'd style the hair of, they freaked me out to no end. If a friend of mine as a kid had one in their room, I wasn't going in there. I even had nightmares about them where I would be turned into a styling head against my will lmao 😭
oh, I hated those too! especially when I'd go to beauty supply stores with my mom and the wig displays were just a HUNDRED or more of those wig heads lining the walls, floor to ceiling. they still creep me out a little bit
I used to have one but I watched The Ring over my parents' shoulder and just COULD NOT stop feeling it LOOK at me in the dark. I literally grabbed it in the middle of the night and stuffed it in the garage 😭
i distinctly remember being absolutely terrified by this video of a cgi hippo singing the lions sleep tonight with a dog dancing next to him as a kid,, like legit that shit made me cry it was so scary
i remember that shit it was literally so unsettling to me too my family would always play it and i wasnt terrified so id go along with it but id secretly always feel looming discomfort every time it was on
OH MY GOD I FORGOT ABOUT THAT i was scared of it too! i had this thing when i was a kid where i'd just be so scared of things that felt too old for me. like, that video felt like it was for adults, and that i wasn't supposed to be watching it
Angela Anaconda is so scary back then to me. I was so terrified, and it was understandable to me because it had incorporated realistic faces that were grey. The illusion of it being seemingly realistic but also unrealistic at the same time just made me scared.
My weirdest fear when I was a kiddo was me being scared of butterflys. I saw the sponge bob episode about wormy, and I got absoulty terrified from the close up realistic footage of a realistic butterfly, I honestly think it was more so the loud noise in the show that scared me.
As a young teen I was terrified of the Gorillaz. I would sometimes watch Adult Swim when my parents were asleep and one day they played the music video “Clint Eastwood” and my young mind was terrified of the artstyle and visuals. I was raised on Disney so i guess I wasn’t used to such a style at the time. It’s silly to think about today since they’re now one of my favorite bands now. 😂
Lol, I was just thinking about how it wouldn't surprise me if someone had been. I really liked them as a kid (and am just getting back into them) but I also found the artstyle unsettling at first. And first time I heard of them was some text presenting them which had the headline "Gorillaz - the band that does not exist" or something like that and for some reason I thought that sounded creepy xD
THANK YOU for mentioning Angela Anaconda... how on EARTH did they think that character design was ok, they freaked me out too. Never watched it, didn't want to see it
Discovering your channel was almost eerie, you're the first youtuber that seems to have had the exact same cultural upbringing as me. It's like tailor-made nostalgia for zillennials Edit: totally forgot to mention I was also unreasonably unsettled by Austin Powers as a child. I didn't watch the movies until my mid 20's.
is that what we're called? i have no idea bc i'm not a millennial but i also def am not gen z, i'm nothing like them, born in 1999 and also relate to Li SO much
@@tokyotrashbbyGen Z starts at 96 or 97. Definitely Gen Z but old enough to remember and experience the same things millennials did. Zillennials are 96(97)-02.
About spontaneous human combustion, I vividly remember seeing that on TV, maybe Discovery or History Channel. It was also a huge fear of mine. Nowadays i am mature enough to know that it's still scary but there is nothing we can do about it. Growth!
I remember my dad was watching something on Discovery or History that showed some guys eyes exploding, and the colour grading was really weird so it looked like his eyes were full of black goo. That scared me a lot as a kid
I had this fear too I read about it in a book once & then a few years later I saw something on TV saying that it wasn't a myth & it could happen and explained science why it could happen. I forgot about till this video.
I had an intense fear of the undead as a small child, which was understandable but manifested in a number of specific ways. There was a golf course by my house that I would get confused with a nearby cemetery, and when we drove past either one I would go into a panic. We had a Veggietales VHS that I refused to watch when I realized the logo on the tape were “skeleton” versions of Bob and Larry. I cried when my godmother gave me a pirate-themed I Spy book because it had a Jolly Roger flag on the cover, which I proceeded to keep covered with a taped piece of paper for several years.
Oh my god I had the same fear. It wasn't like the wrapped up mummies or skeletons, it was the shriveled up dessicated ones. A lot of my elementary school classrooms had books about mummies where they showed actual images of the unwrapped dead. Now i find it fascinating, but back then, if someone was reading one of those books, I'd run out of the room. Skyrim came out when I was 13 and I still would not play it because I couldn't get past the draugr in Bleak Falls Barrow. I didn't pick it back up until I was an adult, and then I became obsessed with it.
when i was like. i wanna say six, i had a dream about one of my classmates coming out of my wall in plush form and moving on her own and constantly following me, and upon waking up i was 1) scared of that classmate for a couple of days and 2) TERRIFIED of EVERY SINGLE ONE of my beloved plushies during the night, i was convinced toy story would happen to me but in an EVIL and Fucked Up way . this fear continued to haunt me until about 19 when i could finally deal with having plushies in my room without making sure they couldnt see me at night (thank you masky makeship plush for curing me i love you)
I fully understand being afraid of Dark Harvest. It’s a wonder to me that Zim was allowed to air on Nickelodeon at all, let alone that episode. I’ve enjoyed that episode as an adult but if I’d watched it as a kid it would have been traumatic
Bugaboo creek was a themed restaurant near where I lived that had this absolutely chilling animatronic pine tree. It had this huge gaping mouth and I was convinced it ate children. I would edge around it as far away as a I could never turning my back on it. Sometimes my dad would kind of nudge me towards it which did not help.
@@NumeroLetter Its eyes also would rarely both be working at the same time and would kind of twitch and blink out of sync. For some reason upkeep was not a priority for the animatronics. There was also a scheduled musical performance where all the animatronics would perform at once.. it was frightening. The complimentary bread was really good though I miss Bugaboo🥲
I never heard of Bugaboo Creek Steakhouse before, so I looked it up… never in my life, had I seen a tree animatronic so terrifying; not even the ones at a Rainforest Cafe I’ve been in, nor a storytelling tree animatronic at a mall from my grandparents’ former home town 😂
Oh yeah! I used to fantasize about it getting arrested (seriously) so I wouldn’t have to see it again. The worst part was that it was near the entrance (at least in the restaurant near my house) so there was no way of avoiding it when we went there.
The dying birthday card one is valid. I personally don't think I've ever been scared of them cause the only one I was ever given was a Hoops and Yoyo Hamster Dance card. BUT the idea of hearing a distorted version of a song you know play from a thing you thought was safe from that IS pretty unsettling imo
I was terrified by the song “the sweet escape” by Gwen Stefani (now one of my favorite songs) and the Space Cows from Spyro Enter the Dragonfly - these lasted for years too beyond my childhood for no reason
i completely relate to all of these fears, especially the glitch/crash screens, for some reason i have still not gotten over it and they terrify me to this day. also it’s comforting to know so many kids simultaneously felt the terror of the sun possibly exploding in our lifetime
this reminded me of my fear of the stairs at my elementary school. super old catholic school, very long stairways that you could see all the way down. now that i think about it i was afraid of a lot of things at my dusty old catholic school lol
I live in a one story house and had so many nightmares about trying to go an bathroom upstairs but the steps being so small and the door being right on the ledge.
those sound strips on roads were my ultimate favorite thing as a kid. my dad called them "mooing strips" and would sometimes drive through them on purpose just for the moo
I was horrified of the Mr. Burns as an alien episode of the Simpsons. I remember coming home and turning on Fox to see it was that episode and I began to sob like crazy
as someone who grew up with their dad being in law enforcement, i was told a lot of scary stuff about drugs a lot throughout my childhood. i'd say the topic as a whole was less of a fear and more of a morbid fascination (i feel that morbid fascinations can often connect to childhood trauma), but at night i was always scared someone was gonna like, break into my room and try to give me pills in my sleep to get me addicted. think i stopped worrying about this by the time i was in middle school. sidenote, this weird fascination with drugs as a kid was so intense that i remember making a "movie" with my zhu zhu pets where the baby of the family gets addicted to drugs and has an overdose (don't worry the doctors gave her a magical cure), and in the next part, the dad buys the mom a car to apologize for the whole incident, and then while driving her new car the mom hits one of her own kids. was i okay in 2009
Things I was scared of as a kid: 1. Art Attack - i used to love this show but then they did a skit where a bust talked and the concept of an all-white decapitated head talking terrified the shit out of me to the point where i just stopped watching it altogether. 2. The sun exploding and/or engulfing the Earth is a fear I can relate to. I remember once at school there was a lunar eclipse so the sun looked huge ans i was convinced that we were all going to die. This was in the year 2012 also so I thought the world was gonna end. Also, whenever i heard a loud plane overhead, I thought i was hearing the sun move closer to the Earth. 3. Dying in Super Mario 64. There would be a blackout screen where bowser laughs and idk something about it scared me so much. 4. When Toad says "foul" in Mario and Sonic at the Olympic Games. I forgot what minigame this was but the voice sounded nothing like Toad and it was really loud so I thought Toad got possessed (?????) 5. Michael Jackson. I just thought he looked terrifying. And after he died i was scared that he was going to haunt me. 6. The song 'I wish it could be Christmas everyday'. I hated when the singer yelled "ITS CHRIIISTMASSSSSSS" towards the end. I hated loud noises and yelling and something about his raspy old man voice shook me.
I was also scared of Angela Anaconda! My sister told me that the characters on the show were the stolen faces of bad kids, and if I didn’t do what she wanted, she’d call the show and they’d come steal my face 😅
I slammed the like button at the Austin Powers fear. Kids minds are so fun! The weirdest fears I had were the 6 Flags Guy and Mrs. Doubtfire. I Unfortunately, took a bit of that into adulthood lol. Lovely video!
You were honestly a really smart kid for being worried about getting burned using this sort of toys. I remember wanting a children’s oven so bad ever since I saw it on curious George even though I have accidentally burned myself on the stove at least twice before
It's funny that you used The Mask as your example. I was TERRIFIED of this movie as a kid, like my parents had to block the TV when a commercial for it came on cuz it freaked me out to the point of tears. I still have not seen it almost 30 years later because it activates a fight of flight mode in me.
I had the complete expansion pack of the first Sims on our Windows XP desktop computer. Over time the computer got old and slow and all that stuff and a lot of times when I'd play the game it completely froze to the point the whole computer had to be restarted. I always had a big sense of dread for the whole day/evening after it. Not to mention that the Sims 1 in itself is creepy anyway, with the damn burglar sound effect, cockroaches, the monster potion, phone call pranks, the clown painting and general uncanny gameplay. Also I feared going out of bounds of my lots and having my screen be just one whole grey square.
I vividly remember watching a movie with my parents where a couple wakes up in bed to see the entire house lit up with spectral goo and I was terrified to open my eyes while sleeping for many years after that. Nowadays I kind of wish I could figure out what that movie was.
green goo? i remember watching a trailer for a movie where a couple siblings found a green jelly-looking glob of goo and brought it home and the thing wreaked havoc in their home. im not sure if it wqs supposed to be comedy or horror but i remember being scared of it😅
@@byggrynsgroet After posting this comment I went searching for the movie and turns out it was based on a true crime, and the goo was luminol! There were hundreds of comments from other people saying that it traumatized them in the exact same way it did for me LOL Something about goo was a central fear in the 90s and early 2000s so I totally relate to you not being sure if yours was meant to be scary or not hahah!
god, the death of the sun is a real one. as an existential child with ocd, i thought about death a LOT, and the death of the sun was similarly depressing. also, thank god i never thought about toilets overflowing or i’d never have used any public toilet; i already hated them for germ reasons, plus the automatic ones were spooky, so the threat of overflowing? yeah, no, i’m out fjdbbf
When I was young I was scared of dropping or losing a stuffed animal out of the car window. The thought of a dirty teddy bear getting run over by cars kept me up at night for YEARS.
man i had a toilet related fear too... it started when i was fairly young, maybe 5ish years old. for the next solid 5 years, i was terrified of the sound the toilet made after flushing. not the flush itself, but the minute of hissing that comes after. for a while i was convinced that there was a creature of some sort inside that could grab me and pull me into it. i would always look at the toilet while washing my hands so as to be sure that there was nothing there. at some point though i stopped believing in the creature, but the sound still scared me until i was like 10. now i realise how absurd this fear truly was lol
for me i had to be out of the bathroom before the toilet water had "refilled" after my flush. im not talking the actual visible flush itself, but when the water looks still but you can audibly hear water rushing through pipes after the "visible flush". if i was still in the bathroom after that was done, some kind of eldritch horror would come up from the toilet and kill me😀
I was (and still am) disturbed by the loud THX intro but I feel like that's valid tbh (I'm autistic and don't handle loud sounds well) my brother on the other hand used to be scared of animatronics, specifically dancing Santas. My mom couldn't even drive by a Krogers that had a Santa there that's how bad it was (he's improved since then obviously)
I cannot BELIEVE someone else was terrified of what would happen after neglecting their pixel chix. I thought I was entirely alone on that front. We got mine second hand from a flea market, so mine came pre-neglected. I had to get my dad to reset it while I cried I’m pretty sure.
Top 3 irrational childhood fears: 1. Woody from Toy Story. I saw some DVD bonus features where there were animation bloopers where Woody came detached from his animation skeleton and it was so scary I couldn't sleep. 2. The Sims... but in Spanish. I was over at a friends house and she installed The Sims for the first time and it was unexpectedly in Spanish rather than in English. I was very very young at the time so I have to think just that it was something I didn't expect that freaked me out moreso than the fact that it was specifically Spanish. I studied Spanish later and it was fine. 3. The Windows 95 startup jingle. Dommmmm ding... ding... ding... I used to have to run down to the other end of my house every time I turned the computer on so I wouldn't have to hear it.
Oh, I love Invader Zim! Such a fun show. Dark Harvest is actually one of my favourite episodes, but I can absolutely 100% understand why it unsettles people.
There legitimately wasn't a lot that truly scared me, only one thing persisted until today. But regarding the toilets: I personally loved automatic toilets, but was deathly afraid of these stupid loud blow dryers for your hands, no thank you! Also Hasslehoff with beard and white suit, because in Knight Rider he played a guy like that and was an asshole. A crazy asshole I still carry an irrational fear of, the guy activates my fight or flight. Also blue eyes. I don't know, I always thought people with them looked as though they were wanting to kill me X'D
Omg I hated those blow dryers! When a bathroom only had those loud blow dryers sometimes i would just leave without drying my hands… it got so bad that eventually i came up with a technique where i move my hands up and down so the noise isn’t as loud constantly. These days they’re still a pet peeve of mine and I almost never use them if there’s the choice to use paper towels instead.
Girls at dance played bloody mary so I ran out of the room screaming. I was scared of mirrors for YEARS. A more ridiculous one: We raised butterflies in first grade. As someone already icked out by insects, I was very cautious. Someone told me one was on my jacket, and I FLIPPED and ran crying and trying to get it off, and to the horror of us all, I mistakenly stepped on a butterfly AND KILLED IT. Kids got so mad at me and I thought I was a murderer. Shortly after, the spongebob butterfly episode came out, and I hated the close up of the butterfly and thus, my fear followed me for ten years, (I believe I was also thinking the butterflies wanted to avenge the one I killed) until my mother dragged me into a butterfly garden. I still get weirded out when they get near me.
One of my weirdest, most irrational fears was the opening song of ‘The Sopranos’, of all things. My parents used to watch it but I was absolutely not allowed to even see it (for good reason I guess) but they would watch it in a room close enough to my bedroom that I could HEAR it, and I would always feel really panicked by the opening song, like I was listening to something forbidden. The song still makes me feel unsettled by listening to it! 😅
invader zim was terrifying to me too, i also had to regularly leave the room because the grossness of some of these 2000s shows made me feel so uneasy. there was a short on nickelodeon about a fly going into someone's ear and getting caught in the earwax. why
Was anyone else absolutely terrified of the Numberjacks?? The music that they played when they introduced the villains would send me running from the room screaming
Kind of similar to the land before time thing, I was absolutely TERRIFIED of the air conditioner in Brave Little Toaster. I would hide behind the couch somehow lol.
when I was kid I was terrified of stop motion movies like Chicken Run and the Wallace and Gromit movies, usually I'd just be extremely uncomfortable when I saw them playing and change the channel asap but I still remember one or two times where I just straight up left the room bc I didn't want to be there with them playing LMAO. tbh I'm not sure where this fear comes from and I'm not afraid of them anymore but I still think they're just hard to watch so to this day I have not seen the movies mentioned above even though a lot of people love them. I also think its kind of curious how it didn't apply to every stop motion movie, for example Coraline is part stop motion but the animation didn't make me uncomfortable, I really don't know why
I did like the Wallace and Gromit episodes but I think as a kid I thought they were kinda creepy too. Chicken run anyways because of the whole thing of them going to get killed XD and Wallace and Gromit had a movie about Wallace being a were rabbit and I was SOOO scared of that😭
A strange thing that scared me as a kid (5 or 6 years old) was on old Macintosh computers, if there was an error, a box would pop up with an image of a bomb and the text "Sorry, a system error occurred" and sometimes additional text. I thought that if you left the window open, the computer would blow up.
my most prominent dumb childhood fear was definitely the thx sound. i was so terrified of it as a kid that i would refuse to go to the theater even if i was assured said sound would not be appearing and i would force my mom to mute the beginning of any movie with the symbol on the case AND would leave the room just in case it messed up somehow. i understand why it would be scary to a kid but i still have no idea how this took precedent over any other loud uncomfortable sound
Oh you are not the only one! Everytime that would come on, before I’d watch any movie with that logo in the beginning, I would bring a blanket with me so I can cover my ears with it.
I became insanely scared of the inclement weather warnings broadcasted on the radio as a kid because I was listening to my shower radio on Radio Disney and all of a sudden, the loud "EERRRRRRR" sound pierced the air and made me drop to my knees in the shower, tuck and cover and everything bc I was convinced my radio was haunted or smth.
the old toilet we had in my house when I was a kid was broken, and when you pressed the flush button it would make a super loud and creepy sound, little me was convinced a vampire lived inside the toilet and the flushing sound it made was actually him screaming
I had a fear of that one scene from "A Christmas Story" where the kid got his tongue stuck to the flag pole. I thought they had to rip his tongue off to free him! So every year I would hide behind the couch or run out of the room and start crying as soon as the scene started. A couple years ago my mom sent me a Christmas card....with a screenshot of that scene on it. 🤦♀
One of my irrational fears as a kid was some Movie company logo intros, idk what it was about them but some of them gave me the chills, same with the SEGA intro, I was genuinely scared of that fucking intro 😭
I had a Furreal Friend of Serafina the cat from Barbie Princess and the Pauper as a kid... the batteries started to die and the once sweet high pitched voice turned into a low and ominous one... needless to day, she stayed in the bottom of the toybox for a few years.
I was also a really sensitive kid and had a lot of strange fears such as: - the goat from Hoodwinked - the rumor weed from Veggie Tales - the monkey from Toy Story 3 - emptiness/void, an example of this being an empty level in LittleBigPlanet - gremlins, after watching that movie I was constantly afraid of one jumping out at me at night - the grim reaper, specfically from the Sims 2 and a game called Crystal Maze. It was kind of like Pac-Man except 3D, you played as a girl running around temples collecting gems while avoiding enemies but if you took too long the grim reaper would show up and make these CREEPY whispering sounds and chase after you. I always made my dad play it for me lol - speaking of the sims 2 I was also afraid of the social bunny, the burglar (I got robbed a LOT), and whenever your sims had a mental breakdown from low aspiration and that therapist would drop down from the sky.. yeah. - animatronics, specifically Halloween decorations and Christmas decorations. I had a nightmare as a kid about being in Walmart and seeing an animatronic of the Grinch, I think it tried to haunt me. I also had more serious fears because my dad never really filtered himself around me and would go on rants about these things like - global warming/climate change, I remember him telling me by the time I got to the age I am now the world would be so different. - the end of the world - a civil war breaking out, or another world war - being bombed - nuclear powerplants
things I was scared of as a child: 1. loud bathroom noises (toilets flushing, the water going down the bath drain when you pull the plug, etc. I would literally push the flush button and sprint out of the bathroom to the other end of the house. this was only a problem in the bathroom) 2. dropping things (again, loud noise bad) 3. plants vs zombies (I played it for like 6 months straight without a problem but one day I guess the zombies were just scarier than usual??? I couldn't sleep properly for months because I thought the plants vs zombies zombies were outside my house. literally only those zombies, all other zombies were fine) 4. the ghost minigame in I spy spooky mansion (my sister told me that one time I passed out while she was playing it next to me which is so funny to me now) 5. touching people (like I refused to make any physical contact with anyone other than a family member until I was about 15. not an exaggeration. honestly, at 22 years old I'm still kind of like that) 6. almost everything in this video, austin powers included. 7. shiny pokemon. I thought they were glitches and video game glitches were a HUGE fear of mine. it took me way too long to realise that they are, in fact, intended and desirable
I get the bit about Bingo Bear and old TTS as a whole - There's a Fall Out Boy album that ends with a real grody TTS voice and it freaked me out to where I would stop the album like 4 songs before the last one. Weirdest one was probably either a dancing cactus toy that played Feliz Navidad or the PS2 game Whirled Tour. That game isn't even a scary game, it's a razor scooter collectathon.
I used to be terrified of cows. I had like a ZhuZhu pet thing, one of those mouse toys that Rolled around and made silly little noises and shit. Well one of my favorites made a cow noise, but man did I love that mouse so instead of not playing with it, I memorized the pattern of the sounds so I knew that after the cat sound, it moo’d so as soon as it meowed i would crawl out of the room, hide in a corner with my ears covered for exactly 6 seconds before going back to the playroom and continuing
I always thought quicksand was going to be a bigger problem in my life than it turned out to be, also tv shows like mr. meaty, robot chicken and Naruto freaked me out
I had a similar automatic toilet fear, or just general public toilet fear. One day I had the thought, "what if a shark just jumped out of the toilet and bit me?" and for about 6 months I would get up from ANY toilet outside of my own home and flush as fast as I could to prevent any sort of thing with teeth from grabbing me. I was also afraid of sleeping next to a window because I thought Nosferatu was going to crawl through the window and get me. I was definitely one of those kids who was able to talk themselves into being afraid of something they never had been before....
this unlocked my own childhood fears i forgot about, while i wasnt afraid of automatic toilets i have vivid memories of being in first grade and thinking the bathroom was haunted because the automatic sinks would go off when no one was there so i refused to use that restroom at school
I had an irrational fear of the book The Tailypo. It wasn't just the illustrations, but at the time when my class were all reading the book, the librarian also played the audiobook aloud on a casette player. It haunted me for years and I still think about it to this day. I think I was right because now, even if the book doesn't scare me anymore, it was still such a gruesome story for kids.
I was a very anxious child. A short list of my odd fears include: any odd toilets - especially on planes or boats, boats in general (I lived on an island), the sea (again, I lived on an island), our kitchen because I once saw a rotting potato under the counter, our basement because it was messy, holes because I was afraid to fall into them, vomiting, escalators, elevator doors, spinny doors, and so much more
When I was a kid I was DEATHLY terrified of Lavender Town syndrome because 8-bit style music gave little 12 year old me headaches anyway so I thought it was real and if i listened to the song too long it would get me.... wild shit
I was scared of pooping out one of my organs by accident... Dunno where that came from, maybe it was the same place the spontaneous human combustion came from..
The thing about spontaneous combustion is complex. While there have been deaths attributed to it, scientists doubt that fires actually started within the victim. Presumably you as a kid read or saw some "Unexplained phenomenon" thing which brought it up.
Automatic toilets used to scare me as a kid too. I still don't like having to use them and honestly I think they're a really misguided attempt at conserving water that just doesn't work, since they go off all the time and never seem to work as intended.
I had several of these as a kid, but two that immediately come to mind are the early 2000s honeycomb cereal commercials (I thought it would actually turn you into a bee, and the cgi/ mascot were so freaky) and the gremlins. Really any older movie where the monsters/creatures were done with puppets, like labyrinth, gremlins, the never ending story, etc. Freaked me tf OUT.
i made up a whole thing to be scared of. they were called "boogie-boxes" and they were gray, translucent, and looked basically like cartoon ghosts. their whole deal was that when you flushed the toilet, one would come out from behind the toilet and punch you in the face. so, i would always run out of the bathroom at top speed as soon as i flushed the toilet, then go wash my hands in another sink or come back into the same bathroom after making sure i was in the clear to do so. i was also afraid of specifically a frog or spiders coming up out of the toilet bowl to touch my butt while i was sitting there. dunno why i was so unsettled by toilets. beats me.
my fear as a child was the dragon/lion dance--im chinese so every year we'd celebrate chinese new year and we'd see the performance but i was smol and dragon was big and loud so i'd just cry. the fear lingered until high school and while im not afraid of it now, i'd still rather not see it (even tho it's hecking cool and i love it in theory lol)
I was terrified of end credits and the green/red rating screens. The somberish music in most of them or outright silence gave me an intense fear of existential finality. This also was the case with production logos after shows on vhs, specifically Nickelodeon. I had nightmares about the THX logo and its meaningless void. I think it's the fact that production logos and credits exist in this meta liminal space where all the fun ends and the ambiguous dread begins.
the fear of sun exploding is a classic. i was really into reading encyclopedias as a kid so i had it too! as well as some other ones. three of the most notable include being afraid of a volcano spontaneously forming right at our doorstep, spontaneous beginning of a new ice age and being trapped in my room by a glacier (i thought that the glacier would enter the building through the entrance like a distinguished being it is, then fill all the rooms up with ice, and block all the ways out of the house. i practiced gnawing on the wooden frame of my bed in case i would have to survive this event without food stashes), and a fear of breaking the earth's crust and unleashing the burning magma hell upon my hometown. this one was caused by a diagram showcasing earth's cross-section, on which the crust (of course) appeared to be paper thin. i was SO disturbed by other kids digging holes in the ground
I had a toy planetarium that came with an educational cd that taught you about space that I thought was incredibly cool, but also scared the shit out of me because one of the final lessons explained black holes and the heat death of the sun. I spent years as a child afraid that the sun would go out AND that a black hole would develop close enough to Earth to such us all in. Recently I was reminiscing over my childhood with my parents and told them about this, and they were horrified because they gave me that planetarium as a Christmas gift and had no idea it caused me so much anxiety.
I love how so many of these just read as "I was a neurodivergent child" to me, who was also a neurodivergent child.
As a kid I was terrified of atom bombs and thought I could cause an atomic reaction by accidentally splitting an atom. So I was terrified every time I used scissors or cut my nails.
I was scared that I would accidentally crush an atom and make an explosion if I stomped on the ground but that fear only lasted like 2 years
Wow, that's actually a really random and crazy fear. I think I'd probably have that fear as a child, too.
Accidently splitting atoms 😭
i had this same fear because of a spongebob gag i saw when i was way younger lmfaoo
Same!!! Every time I cut paper or anything I tensed up!
i can’t believe you had like legitimate trauma about toilets flushing and overflowing meanwhile i was afraid of automatic toilets because loud noise hurty
same and now I know I'm autistic
i'm still afraid of the loud noise i hate those toilets so much
The toilet flushing and overflowing is a fear of hers I lived through and it was an automatic flush lol. The toilet in my dorm hall kept flushing and flushed continuously for over 2 minted until it ended up flooding our whole floor. Me and another girl rushed to stuff towels underneath everyone’s door to avoid the water going into their rooms (I had to break into my friends dorm to pick up chargers and more off her floor so no one got electrocuted) 😂😂😂
same but very specifically with automatic hand dryers in public bathrooms (those little things that blow air out when you put your hands under them) i absolutely could not stand their noises and being in a bathroom with one of those and no paper towels made me so angry
@@jamdeluxe7456 same!! I would get anxious if other people were also in the bathroom just because I knew they’d use the automatic stuff
When I was 8 I was terrified of Ozzy Osbourne; I was so hesitant to even say his name that I called him "Evil Joe". I've also had a longstanding fear of accidentally shape-shifting into the form of a character I hate, namely Wario.
your fears are valid, but omg the way you phrased this is just so funny. "evil joe" is too good lmao, and wario shape-shifting is gold. im sorry
HOWLING this one takes the cake 😭😭
Omg no not Ozzy 😂😂😂 he's so harmless! Also omg accidentally shape shifting, that's a first one for me 🤣
@@mr_selfdestruct i dont mean to ruin the mood, but ozzy isnt harmless.. he nearly strangled his wife sharon to death
@@mr_selfdestruct My dad told me he bit the head off a live bat once and I never looked back
when i was 9 i was literally afraid of the color brown like i’d literally have nightmares as a kid where i would just run around my house and everything would turn brown and i’d wake up crying 😭
WHAT 😭
I’m sorry but I’m dying laughing
I am laughing right now. I’m so sorry for that though.
lmao it’s fine 😭 i got over it eventually
to clarify it was a specific shade of brown (like a lighter orange-y brown?) and i genuinely don’t remember how i got that fear, maybe through a dream
@@better4096 lmao like a terracotta color??? hahaha like the world turned sepia or something
very specific but I could not STAND second hand embarrassment. Like whenever I would see a character in a movie/cartoon do something embarrassing/humiliating I would get so uncomfortable that I needed to leave the room whenever it happened.
i feel that so hard omg, i absolutely hated watching anything when there was someone else in the room bc the second hand embarrassment was insane
I had the same thing!!
Omg I STILL feel this one. So many things that I had to walk out of the room/not even bother watching because of it. Like I can’t stand Elf or The Office at all. Never got the appeal for watching somebody else embarrass themselves.
SAME and I'm still like that at almost 20!! I could NOT watch Disney Channel or a lot of cartoon network shows bc a lot of the humor was around pranks and public humiliation but "funny". It was so awful to me that I watched exclusively Nick Jr until I was 10
i'm so glad i'm not the only one who was deeply frightened by the hypothetical death of the sun 😭
I thought that shit was happening TOMORROW I was so stressed at 7 yrs old
I still remember I had to cover my ears in science class for days after learning that 😭😭 I couldnt read or hear anything about space for months because of that
We fr were acting like the sun was gonna “die” the NEXT day.
oh fr
Man I remember staying up late with my dad while he watched the history channel when I was little and an episode about the sun's death started playing. I had never been so filled with dread. It didn't help that it straight up showed how that would end humanity lol
I remember being terrified of Hot Topic in the mid-2000s because my cousins who went there a lot convinced me it was a store for vampires. Whenever we'd go to the mall I would refuse to go near it because I was so scared.
Oh thank god I'm not alone in this lol, my sibling and I both were scared to go in there but only because we saw people dressed as skeletons in there. Like, full face of skeleton makeup and clothes. I love Hot Topic now tho lol
To be fair, there’s been this trend of “edgy ‘vampires’” to this day? I never understood that, even with the existence of the Twilight book series
I was too afraid to go in spencers as a kid because of the chuckie dolls they had 😂
Nahhh the vamps are in the back takin a nap. They're out on night shift security
I was afraid of Spencer’s as a kid because they had Chucky dolls near the back of the store
As a kid I was absolutely TERRIFIED of the book "the bad case of the stripes" Like, real existential dread. Every time my kindergarten teacher would read it I would have a full on meltdown and I'd have to sit in the office till it was over. It was so bad that I remember after I took a nap at home after school, I woke up in a panic and was running around the house trying to get it out of my head. My mom and dad tried to help, but I was inconsolable. Some of my classmates used to blackmail me with it because they knew I was scared of it. When I was in the second grade this one kid brought it out because he knew it would bother me and I think I just started hysterically sobbing. It was really bad. Even nowadays looking at the cover of the book disturbs me, but it's not as bad as before.
I was also terrified of this book so I feel you. In kindergarten we watched a story time video of it being read. I found the illustrations so disturbing and also had serious existential dread about it. I couldn’t get it out of my head and was terrified the class would pick it again another day. One day they did and I went immediately panicking to the teacher and she let me go to the other side of the classroom, so I spent the duration of this video facing away from the smartboard panicking with my head in my hands. I’ve seen the illustrations again since and still think some of them are pretty disturbing for a kids book. The painting style is really uncanny.
I looked it up because i never heard of it and it made me a little nauseous lmao. What was the author thinking.
I had the same experience!
OMG when I was little I was terrified of it because of the page where there were weird things growing out of her face or smth, now I love it!
OH MY GOD I CRIED WHEN THEY READ IT IN FIRST GRADE. we would have activities where we'd rotate around the room doing other things, and one station was listening to the audiobook for it and I would cry and refuse to listen to it. Worst part was my teacher tried to force me even if only for a little bit, it was terrifying for me
I had nightmares of turning rainbow for years. Now I'm gay, so idk you decide the amount of irony in that turnout
As a kid I was terrified of the concept of hell (a fairly reasonable fear tbh for a 6 year old growing up in Sunday school) but the cherry on top was the fact that I was scared because I believed, vehemently, at six years old, that I was already damned to hell. Needless to say; not a Christian now
Why did you think you were already damned!? What the hell was your Sunday school teacher teaching you?!?
@@Clodsire_loverI think it might be a belief that all children are pure and innocent therefore will go to heaven regardless and when you hit certain age you don't have that privilege anymore. It sucks but I heard a story like that from ine person
@@ЮлияПопова-ч5ю8хit depends on the sources you look at/people you ask
Rules on what people think sends you to hell range from "you won't go to hell if you're not bad, and all children go to heaven because they can't really be bad yet" (no Christianity/other God worshipping religion really even needed) to "if you're not baptized as a baby/join into MY sect of this religion then you'll burn forever!!!" Possibly even applies to newborns who're "dead on arrival" (be it literally or only living for a very short amount of time. Either way probably couldn't really be baptized)
Belief systems are just crazy like that
My church leader told me that all gay people go to hell, I was 6. So needless to say I thought I was dammed to hell. I was so traumatized that I tried to convince myself I was straight for 6 years straight, I sent myself into a depressive spiral and just general depression. All that to say, thats a completely justified fear
Oh, yeah, I forgot about this fear I had...damn. I'm also not a Christian either...not really religious at all, but I am considering Wicca.
Also we had that Smeagol doll when I was a kid and would hide it around the house to surprise each other. We also told my aunt we got a kitten and wrapped Smeagol in a blanket and then acted like we were going to show her the cat, but she got Smeagol'd instead. You would have hated my house.
Edit: the Kidpix "oh no" is the ultimate jumpscare, change my mind.
haha ur family is like, "GET SMEAGOLED"
i don’t know how this idea started or even why tbh but as a child i was terrified of… the doodlebops watching me use the bathroom. the doodlebops were totally fine (i even had a toy! like a keyboard or keytar i think the girl had?) but specifically when i used the bathroom i had to pause/mute the TV so i couldn’t hear them or think abt them and sometimes i even cracked the door a little to make sure no one was out there. i have literally never said this out loud to anyone but i feel like if anyone gets this they would be in this comment section.
When I was a kid I had a fear of escalators that went down. I was always nervous to fall when getting on one, and I always had the idea in my head of me falling down on one and getting my hair caught in between the steps, unable to move as it kept going down. I still pause before getting on an escalator because of this.
I CANT BELIEVE I FUCKING FORGOT ESCALATORS!!!!!!!!!!
I was confident my feet would get stuck on an escalator and I’d get sucked under the escalator and squished. To be honest I still kinda don’t like escalators 🫣
I'm still terrified of escalators
My mom had to push the emergency stop button on one particularly steep escalator because my sister and I were too scared to walk down it
I was literally so terrified of escalators as a kid that I was stuck at the top of one crying at a mall while my mom and sister were at the bottom, and suddenly a totally random stranger threw me over his shoulder and took me down to them.
As a kid I was terrified of the X-Files theme song. I'm pretty sure the reason why is because it would air sometime around my bedtime, and all I knew about it was that it was a scary show about monsters and aliens, so it became the literal soundtrack to my nightmares. For YEARS randomly hearing the music would trigger a panic response, including a time only a couple years ago when I happened to be walking down the hallays in my house with the lights off, not knowing that my perents were having an X-Files marathon, and when it suddenly started blasting through the house I immediately dropped into a defensive stance. Now, after having watched several seasons of the show myself I've gotten over it through exposure, but I'll never forget the pants-shitting terror that gripped me that night, lmao
I absolutely HAD to change the channel or leave the room if xfiles was about to air. I couldn't do the theme song (or the creepy imagery) either. but now as an adult... oh that's my jam
i had the same fear but because of the simpsons episode where mr burns turns into that freaky alien and they parody the x-files. I had to leave the room and once put my head under the water in the bath because i could still hear the music.
@@jenniferch3ck i used to be afraid of that episode too! it wasn't because of the x files but because i was afraid of et and mr burns reminded me of him
Same!!!!
Me too!!!
When you spoke about fear of being out of control with electronic devices, blue screens ect. I realized this makes sense for my fear of gaming glitches. I have a terrible, unrelated fear of in-game water and the void, but any sort of camera glitch, getting out of the map/playable area/ losing control over a game makes me freak out so badly to this day. I am legit scared to play The Sims 3 because of that.
YES
I thought I was the only one!!!!!! I used to have nightmares about arcades filled with only boot up/crash screens.
I used to be scared of void and deep water more when I was a child, like the inside of the big piramide in Minecraft or the galaxy view in Spore. Now it still is inside me but mostly when I play Space Engine and see big ass star, or worse, when in past game versions you could go through the texture of the planet and physically be inside of the live size planet. Instant alt f4
I have this faint memory (or maybe a nightmare) of trying to play a dvd and the menu screen saying “hurry up and press play!” and being so scared of technology acknowledging my existence or talking to me out of no where. Even now I get a bit startled when a game will talk directly to the player out of no where. The fear of being out of control of devices was so real
I find it very uncomfortable but I kinda like it for that reason. If I wasn't somewhat bothered by things like test maps in video games, I would find them less interesting
I had a fear of "part of your world" from The Little Mermaid. I always thought Ursula would suddenly appear. It took me years to get over that fear.
Watching this does help to remind me I'm not the only one that is scared of things that aren't supposed to be scary.
same. It’s Whales for me. I blame Pinocchio but I might have been a penguin in a past life because killer whales are monsters and idk why everyone is so freaking chill about it :c
@@loverrlee no but Pinocchio is traumatizing
Me with my phase as a child where I was scared of the wind. Seeing the leaves move on the trees would make me nauseous with fear and want to stay inside
I think I was more afraid of a tornado/hurricane starting…. But I also lived someplace where those never happen
I’ve said this before, but for some odd reason, TV logo bumpers really spooked me as a kid… even some that aren’t even considered “scary” to a lot of people!
I was terrified for the longest time of a toy called Jake the Snake. It was a remote controlled green snake that could move around and even lunge. The worst part was that my brother would chase me around the house with it. I'm sure I knew that there wasn't a way for the toy to hurt me but that didn't matter
I would repeatedly try and convince my parents that Invader Zim wasn't terrible and bad.
The episode that would always be playing when I convinced them to give it a try... was Dark Harvest.
Every. Time.
automatic toilets were truly the bane of my existence as a child
even as an adult they are the bane of my existence. although horrifying as a child, now they're just annoying 😭
Same, and hand dryers as well
For some reason, even worse than the Dark Harvest episode for me was the *meat* one. Called Rise of Meatboy or something. Zim and Dib get infected with some kind of microbe that slowly turns them into edible meat, like salami. Their skin changes color, their features swell and distort, and dogs start trying to bite them. The episode ends with the two of them turned into giant, inanimate sausage links wearing clothes, sitting in an alley as dogs bark in the distance. It disturbed me so horribly as a child. I remember hiding on the stairs leading to the basement, secretly watching as my brothers laughed at the episode, terrified but unable to look away. Nightmares for years.
EXACTLY!! everyone always talks about how scary dark harvest was, but I always thought the goddamn sausage disease was wayyy more disturbing
It’s called Bolognius Maximus. Between that, Bloaty’s Pizza Hog, The Sad Sad Story of Chicken Foot, and the career day ep where Zim works at McMeaty’s I wouldn’t be surprised if IZ were responsible for turning some kids vegetarian
Oh my God, I was petrified of Invader Zim as a kid because I saw this episode and the Teen Titans episode where Beast Boy gets a job in a fast food place and my brain combined the two into some horrific nightmare scenario where all I could clearly remember about any of it was "green dude + meat = trauma"
@@morganorwhatever I was lowkey uncomfortable with meat as a child and eventually gave it up entirely as an adult. I would not be at all surprised if Invader Zim had something to do with it.
I agree! Dark Harvest is, of course, disturbing, BUT the main effect it has on me is nausea. Watching someone vomit out harvested intestines, only to slurp them back up like spaghetti is not something you should watch before, during, or after eating. 😅 I think the Halloween special takes the cake when it comes to fear. I rewatched it this past October, and I was legitimately terrified. Being trapped inside your own mind and losing your sanity has always been a fear of mine.
Talking about Angela Anaconda has unlocked a deeply hidden trauma I had regarding how horrifying that show looked.
I had never heard of that show before and now I wish I still didn't.
Also what kind of name is that, even, Angela Anaconda sounds like the alias of an adult movie star.
@@mimicmeyimagine, you go in for the Digimon movie and you gotta see that before the film starts
Weirdly, I always see people mention how creepy this show was and I honestly don't remember being bothered by it in Germany as a kid? So I looked up both versions, and oh wow, for some reason the german dub is way less uncanny valley. Maybe the fact it's already dubbed helps with the suspension of disbelief or something, but the original feels way creepier somehow.
@@oomflem I also grew up with the German dub and don’t remember it being scary. But I think we had the VHS tapes when I already was a bit older, maybe around 10. That could also have helped.
This reminded me... I was weirdly afraid of styling heads when I was a kid???? Like the kind that would look like a giant barbie head or something that you'd style the hair of, they freaked me out to no end. If a friend of mine as a kid had one in their room, I wasn't going in there. I even had nightmares about them where I would be turned into a styling head against my will lmao 😭
oh, I hated those too! especially when I'd go to beauty supply stores with my mom and the wig displays were just a HUNDRED or more of those wig heads lining the walls, floor to ceiling. they still creep me out a little bit
I used to have one but I watched The Ring over my parents' shoulder and just COULD NOT stop feeling it LOOK at me in the dark.
I literally grabbed it in the middle of the night and stuffed it in the garage 😭
the Angela anaconda fear is SO real I made my dad go into my room and turn the TV off for me idk why it was so visceral for me as a child
My massive fear as a child was when cds would skip! I started sobbing the first time I had it happen
Oh my gosh YEAH!! Relatable!!
i distinctly remember being absolutely terrified by this video of a cgi hippo singing the lions sleep tonight with a dog dancing next to him as a kid,, like legit that shit made me cry it was so scary
i remember that shit it was literally so unsettling to me too my family would always play it and i wasnt terrified so id go along with it but id secretly always feel looming discomfort every time it was on
wtf same. we got shown that video some time at primary school and it made me so scared
OH MY GOD I FORGOT ABOUT THAT i was scared of it too! i had this thing when i was a kid where i'd just be so scared of things that felt too old for me. like, that video felt like it was for adults, and that i wasn't supposed to be watching it
LMAO i legit watched that video all the time and i’m amazed anyone else remembers it
@@cwover that was the la bomba hippo!
Angela Anaconda is so scary back then to me. I was so terrified, and it was understandable to me because it had incorporated realistic faces that were grey. The illusion of it being seemingly realistic but also unrealistic at the same time just made me scared.
The uncanny valley
My weirdest fear when I was a kiddo was me being scared of butterflys. I saw the sponge bob episode about wormy, and I got absoulty terrified from the close up realistic footage of a realistic butterfly, I honestly think it was more so the loud noise in the show that scared me.
Fun fact, the close up in the show was actually a horsefly! They thought the actual butterfly wasn't creepy enough X)
As a young teen I was terrified of the Gorillaz. I would sometimes watch Adult Swim when my parents were asleep and one day they played the music video “Clint Eastwood” and my young mind was terrified of the artstyle and visuals. I was raised on Disney so i guess I wasn’t used to such a style at the time. It’s silly to think about today since they’re now one of my favorite bands now. 😂
Lol, I was just thinking about how it wouldn't surprise me if someone had been. I really liked them as a kid (and am just getting back into them) but I also found the artstyle unsettling at first. And first time I heard of them was some text presenting them which had the headline "Gorillaz - the band that does not exist" or something like that and for some reason I thought that sounded creepy xD
OMG I WAS TERRIFIED OF 2-D!!! I had a terrible nightmare with the "Feel Good" music video that played on MTV 😭 now I'm a huge fan though!
THANK YOU for mentioning Angela Anaconda... how on EARTH did they think that character design was ok, they freaked me out too. Never watched it, didn't want to see it
Discovering your channel was almost eerie, you're the first youtuber that seems to have had the exact same cultural upbringing as me. It's like tailor-made nostalgia for zillennials
Edit: totally forgot to mention I was also unreasonably unsettled by Austin Powers as a child. I didn't watch the movies until my mid 20's.
Same here! XD we're the gen Z softie gang I guess💀
is that what we're called? i have no idea bc i'm not a millennial but i also def am not gen z, i'm nothing like them, born in 1999 and also relate to Li SO much
@@tokyotrashbbyGen Z starts at 96 or 97. Definitely Gen Z but old enough to remember and experience the same things millennials did. Zillennials are 96(97)-02.
1998 and I feel like I'm way too young for millennials but also too old for gen z
About spontaneous human combustion, I vividly remember seeing that on TV, maybe Discovery or History Channel. It was also a huge fear of mine. Nowadays i am mature enough to know that it's still scary but there is nothing we can do about it. Growth!
I remember my dad was watching something on Discovery or History that showed some guys eyes exploding, and the colour grading was really weird so it looked like his eyes were full of black goo. That scared me a lot as a kid
thats why you dont hold in your farts! thanks, south park!
dude the history channel….i was scared to death of it🤣🤣it always had some disturbing existential shit playing, 1000 ways to die, 2012 etc
I had this fear too I read about it in a book once & then a few years later I saw something on TV saying that it wasn't a myth & it could happen and explained science why it could happen. I forgot about till this video.
I had an intense fear of the undead as a small child, which was understandable but manifested in a number of specific ways. There was a golf course by my house that I would get confused with a nearby cemetery, and when we drove past either one I would go into a panic. We had a Veggietales VHS that I refused to watch when I realized the logo on the tape were “skeleton” versions of Bob and Larry. I cried when my godmother gave me a pirate-themed I Spy book because it had a Jolly Roger flag on the cover, which I proceeded to keep covered with a taped piece of paper for several years.
I too am inconsolable when passing by a golf course
hey man..... you know there's a skeleton inside you, right now?
@@byggrynsgroet N-no way, r-r-really? Like, zoinks! 😱
I was like that too!
Oh my god I had the same fear. It wasn't like the wrapped up mummies or skeletons, it was the shriveled up dessicated ones. A lot of my elementary school classrooms had books about mummies where they showed actual images of the unwrapped dead. Now i find it fascinating, but back then, if someone was reading one of those books, I'd run out of the room.
Skyrim came out when I was 13 and I still would not play it because I couldn't get past the draugr in Bleak Falls Barrow. I didn't pick it back up until I was an adult, and then I became obsessed with it.
when i was like. i wanna say six, i had a dream about one of my classmates coming out of my wall in plush form and moving on her own and constantly following me, and upon waking up i was 1) scared of that classmate for a couple of days and 2) TERRIFIED of EVERY SINGLE ONE of my beloved plushies during the night, i was convinced toy story would happen to me but in an EVIL and Fucked Up way . this fear continued to haunt me until about 19 when i could finally deal with having plushies in my room without making sure they couldnt see me at night (thank you masky makeship plush for curing me i love you)
I fully understand being afraid of Dark Harvest. It’s a wonder to me that Zim was allowed to air on Nickelodeon at all, let alone that episode. I’ve enjoyed that episode as an adult but if I’d watched it as a kid it would have been traumatic
Bugaboo creek was a themed restaurant near where I lived that had this absolutely chilling animatronic pine tree. It had this huge gaping mouth and I was convinced it ate children. I would edge around it as far away as a I could never turning my back on it. Sometimes my dad would kind of nudge me towards it which did not help.
I love animatronics, so I just googled this guy, and I can see why you'd be scared of him!! He's kinda spooky!!
@@NumeroLetter Its eyes also would rarely both be working at the same time and would kind of twitch and blink out of sync. For some reason upkeep was not a priority for the animatronics. There was also a scheduled musical performance where all the animatronics would perform at once.. it was frightening. The complimentary bread was really good though I miss Bugaboo🥲
I never heard of Bugaboo Creek Steakhouse before, so I looked it up… never in my life, had I seen a tree animatronic so terrifying; not even the ones at a Rainforest Cafe I’ve been in, nor a storytelling tree animatronic at a mall from my grandparents’ former home town 😂
I just looked it up and it’s so cursed 😭 why did they think kids would like that?!
Oh yeah! I used to fantasize about it getting arrested (seriously) so I wouldn’t have to see it again. The worst part was that it was near the entrance (at least in the restaurant near my house) so there was no way of avoiding it when we went there.
The dying birthday card one is valid. I personally don't think I've ever been scared of them cause the only one I was ever given was a Hoops and Yoyo Hamster Dance card. BUT the idea of hearing a distorted version of a song you know play from a thing you thought was safe from that IS pretty unsettling imo
I was terrified by the song “the sweet escape” by Gwen Stefani (now one of my favorite songs) and the Space Cows from Spyro Enter the Dragonfly - these lasted for years too beyond my childhood for no reason
What was it about sweet escape that you found scary lmao
i completely relate to all of these fears, especially the glitch/crash screens, for some reason i have still not gotten over it and they terrify me to this day. also it’s comforting to know so many kids simultaneously felt the terror of the sun possibly exploding in our lifetime
THAT PARTICULAR HOOPS AND YOYO CARD WAS AN ARTIFACT IN MY MEMORY LOST TO TIME UNTIL THIS VERY MOMENT
this reminded me of my fear of the stairs at my elementary school. super old catholic school, very long stairways that you could see all the way down. now that i think about it i was afraid of a lot of things at my dusty old catholic school lol
I live in a one story house and had so many nightmares about trying to go an bathroom upstairs but the steps being so small and the door being right on the ledge.
those sound strips on roads were my ultimate favorite thing as a kid. my dad called them "mooing strips" and would sometimes drive through them on purpose just for the moo
I was horrified of the Mr. Burns as an alien episode of the Simpsons. I remember coming home and turning on Fox to see it was that episode and I began to sob like crazy
as someone who grew up with their dad being in law enforcement, i was told a lot of scary stuff about drugs a lot throughout my childhood. i'd say the topic as a whole was less of a fear and more of a morbid fascination (i feel that morbid fascinations can often connect to childhood trauma), but at night i was always scared someone was gonna like, break into my room and try to give me pills in my sleep to get me addicted. think i stopped worrying about this by the time i was in middle school.
sidenote, this weird fascination with drugs as a kid was so intense that i remember making a "movie" with my zhu zhu pets where the baby of the family gets addicted to drugs and has an overdose (don't worry the doctors gave her a magical cure), and in the next part, the dad buys the mom a car to apologize for the whole incident, and then while driving her new car the mom hits one of her own kids. was i okay in 2009
Things I was scared of as a kid:
1. Art Attack - i used to love this show but then they did a skit where a bust talked and the concept of an all-white decapitated head talking terrified the shit out of me to the point where i just stopped watching it altogether.
2. The sun exploding and/or engulfing the Earth is a fear I can relate to. I remember once at school there was a lunar eclipse so the sun looked huge ans i was convinced that we were all going to die. This was in the year 2012 also so I thought the world was gonna end. Also, whenever i heard a loud plane overhead, I thought i was hearing the sun move closer to the Earth.
3. Dying in Super Mario 64. There would be a blackout screen where bowser laughs and idk something about it scared me so much.
4. When Toad says "foul" in Mario and Sonic at the Olympic Games. I forgot what minigame this was but the voice sounded nothing like Toad and it was really loud so I thought Toad got possessed (?????)
5. Michael Jackson. I just thought he looked terrifying. And after he died i was scared that he was going to haunt me.
6. The song 'I wish it could be Christmas everyday'. I hated when the singer yelled "ITS CHRIIISTMASSSSSSS" towards the end. I hated loud noises and yelling and something about his raspy old man voice shook me.
I was also scared of Angela Anaconda! My sister told me that the characters on the show were the stolen faces of bad kids, and if I didn’t do what she wanted, she’d call the show and they’d come steal my face 😅
Sounds like creepypasta material.
I slammed the like button at the Austin Powers fear. Kids minds are so fun! The weirdest fears I had were the 6 Flags Guy and Mrs. Doubtfire. I Unfortunately, took a bit of that into adulthood lol. Lovely video!
You were honestly a really smart kid for being worried about getting burned using this sort of toys. I remember wanting a children’s oven so bad ever since I saw it on curious George even though I have accidentally burned myself on the stove at least twice before
You have actually reasonable fears as a child.
I was scared of the LaLaLoopsy movie and Mr Noddle from Elmo’s World.
Hated LaLaLoopsey bc I had seen Coraline before that movie and I was horrified
It's funny that you used The Mask as your example. I was TERRIFIED of this movie as a kid, like my parents had to block the TV when a commercial for it came on cuz it freaked me out to the point of tears. I still have not seen it almost 30 years later because it activates a fight of flight mode in me.
I had the complete expansion pack of the first Sims on our Windows XP desktop computer. Over time the computer got old and slow and all that stuff and a lot of times when I'd play the game it completely froze to the point the whole computer had to be restarted. I always had a big sense of dread for the whole day/evening after it. Not to mention that the Sims 1 in itself is creepy anyway, with the damn burglar sound effect, cockroaches, the monster potion, phone call pranks, the clown painting and general uncanny gameplay. Also I feared going out of bounds of my lots and having my screen be just one whole grey square.
I was absolutely terrified of ghosts in the sims, I would run away from the computer and hide under a blanket
I also stopped playing my Tamagotchi after it died 💀 I was scared by the death screen too. Unlocked a memory for me.
I also had an irrational fear of the kidpix ‘oh no’ guy when i was a kid. I feel seen.
I vividly remember watching a movie with my parents where a couple wakes up in bed to see the entire house lit up with spectral goo and I was terrified to open my eyes while sleeping for many years after that. Nowadays I kind of wish I could figure out what that movie was.
green goo? i remember watching a trailer for a movie where a couple siblings found a green jelly-looking glob of goo and brought it home and the thing wreaked havoc in their home. im not sure if it wqs supposed to be comedy or horror but i remember being scared of it😅
@@byggrynsgroet After posting this comment I went searching for the movie and turns out it was based on a true crime, and the goo was luminol! There were hundreds of comments from other people saying that it traumatized them in the exact same way it did for me LOL
Something about goo was a central fear in the 90s and early 2000s so I totally relate to you not being sure if yours was meant to be scary or not hahah!
god, the death of the sun is a real one. as an existential child with ocd, i thought about death a LOT, and the death of the sun was similarly depressing.
also, thank god i never thought about toilets overflowing or i’d never have used any public toilet; i already hated them for germ reasons, plus the automatic ones were spooky, so the threat of overflowing? yeah, no, i’m out fjdbbf
The rollercoaster fear is so valid, I'm still terrified of them tbh
When I was young I was scared of dropping or losing a stuffed animal out of the car window. The thought of a dirty teddy bear getting run over by cars kept me up at night for YEARS.
man i had a toilet related fear too... it started when i was fairly young, maybe 5ish years old. for the next solid 5 years, i was terrified of the sound the toilet made after flushing. not the flush itself, but the minute of hissing that comes after. for a while i was convinced that there was a creature of some sort inside that could grab me and pull me into it. i would always look at the toilet while washing my hands so as to be sure that there was nothing there. at some point though i stopped believing in the creature, but the sound still scared me until i was like 10. now i realise how absurd this fear truly was lol
I was always scared there would be something in there that was going to grab me and drag me down “flushed away” style as a kid
for me i had to be out of the bathroom before the toilet water had "refilled" after my flush. im not talking the actual visible flush itself, but when the water looks still but you can audibly hear water rushing through pipes after the "visible flush". if i was still in the bathroom after that was done, some kind of eldritch horror would come up from the toilet and kill me😀
omg i also was scared of something grabbing me from the bowl, like i always imagined a lobster pinching my butt
Oh man I hate this hissing. And the fact I like in a state that does in deed have things come up and out of toilets doesn’t help.
I was (and still am) disturbed by the loud THX intro but I feel like that's valid tbh (I'm autistic and don't handle loud sounds well) my brother on the other hand used to be scared of animatronics, specifically dancing Santas. My mom couldn't even drive by a Krogers that had a Santa there that's how bad it was (he's improved since then obviously)
I cannot BELIEVE someone else was terrified of what would happen after neglecting their pixel chix. I thought I was entirely alone on that front. We got mine second hand from a flea market, so mine came pre-neglected. I had to get my dad to reset it while I cried I’m pretty sure.
Top 3 irrational childhood fears:
1. Woody from Toy Story. I saw some DVD bonus features where there were animation bloopers where Woody came detached from his animation skeleton and it was so scary I couldn't sleep.
2. The Sims... but in Spanish. I was over at a friends house and she installed The Sims for the first time and it was unexpectedly in Spanish rather than in English. I was very very young at the time so I have to think just that it was something I didn't expect that freaked me out moreso than the fact that it was specifically Spanish. I studied Spanish later and it was fine.
3. The Windows 95 startup jingle. Dommmmm ding... ding... ding... I used to have to run down to the other end of my house every time I turned the computer on so I wouldn't have to hear it.
GIRL I WAS SCAREARED OF AUSTIN POWERS TOO 😭😭
his presence truly was strong
Oh, I love Invader Zim! Such a fun show. Dark Harvest is actually one of my favourite episodes, but I can absolutely 100% understand why it unsettles people.
There legitimately wasn't a lot that truly scared me, only one thing persisted until today. But regarding the toilets: I personally loved automatic toilets, but was deathly afraid of these stupid loud blow dryers for your hands, no thank you!
Also Hasslehoff with beard and white suit, because in Knight Rider he played a guy like that and was an asshole. A crazy asshole I still carry an irrational fear of, the guy activates my fight or flight. Also blue eyes. I don't know, I always thought people with them looked as though they were wanting to kill me X'D
I was scared of loud blow dryers too XD
Omg I hated those blow dryers! When a bathroom only had those loud blow dryers sometimes i would just leave without drying my hands… it got so bad that eventually i came up with a technique where i move my hands up and down so the noise isn’t as loud constantly. These days they’re still a pet peeve of mine and I almost never use them if there’s the choice to use paper towels instead.
i used to scream at the hand dryers and the sound of water being loudly sucked down a plughole
Girls at dance played bloody mary so I ran out of the room screaming. I was scared of mirrors for YEARS.
A more ridiculous one: We raised butterflies in first grade. As someone already icked out by insects, I was very cautious. Someone told me one was on my jacket, and I FLIPPED and ran crying and trying to get it off, and to the horror of us all, I mistakenly stepped on a butterfly AND KILLED IT. Kids got so mad at me and I thought I was a murderer. Shortly after, the spongebob butterfly episode came out, and I hated the close up of the butterfly and thus, my fear followed me for ten years, (I believe I was also thinking the butterflies wanted to avenge the one I killed) until my mother dragged me into a butterfly garden. I still get weirded out when they get near me.
One of my weirdest, most irrational fears was the opening song of ‘The Sopranos’, of all things. My parents used to watch it but I was absolutely not allowed to even see it (for good reason I guess) but they would watch it in a room close enough to my bedroom that I could HEAR it, and I would always feel really panicked by the opening song, like I was listening to something forbidden. The song still makes me feel unsettled by listening to it! 😅
invader zim was terrifying to me too, i also had to regularly leave the room because the grossness of some of these 2000s shows made me feel so uneasy. there was a short on nickelodeon about a fly going into someone's ear and getting caught in the earwax. why
Was anyone else absolutely terrified of the Numberjacks?? The music that they played when they introduced the villains would send me running from the room screaming
Kind of similar to the land before time thing, I was absolutely TERRIFIED of the air conditioner in Brave Little Toaster. I would hide behind the couch somehow lol.
when I was kid I was terrified of stop motion movies like Chicken Run and the Wallace and Gromit movies, usually I'd just be extremely uncomfortable when I saw them playing and change the channel asap but I still remember one or two times where I just straight up left the room bc I didn't want to be there with them playing LMAO. tbh I'm not sure where this fear comes from and I'm not afraid of them anymore but I still think they're just hard to watch so to this day I have not seen the movies mentioned above even though a lot of people love them. I also think its kind of curious how it didn't apply to every stop motion movie, for example Coraline is part stop motion but the animation didn't make me uncomfortable, I really don't know why
I did like the Wallace and Gromit episodes but I think as a kid I thought they were kinda creepy too. Chicken run anyways because of the whole thing of them going to get killed XD and Wallace and Gromit had a movie about Wallace being a were rabbit and I was SOOO scared of that😭
A strange thing that scared me as a kid (5 or 6 years old) was on old Macintosh computers, if there was an error, a box would pop up with an image of a bomb and the text "Sorry, a system error occurred" and sometimes additional text. I thought that if you left the window open, the computer would blow up.
my most prominent dumb childhood fear was definitely the thx sound. i was so terrified of it as a kid that i would refuse to go to the theater even if i was assured said sound would not be appearing and i would force my mom to mute the beginning of any movie with the symbol on the case AND would leave the room just in case it messed up somehow. i understand why it would be scary to a kid but i still have no idea how this took precedent over any other loud uncomfortable sound
Oh you are not the only one! Everytime that would come on, before I’d watch any movie with that logo in the beginning, I would bring a blanket with me so I can cover my ears with it.
Omg I forgot I was scared of that 😭
I remember being terrified of Emperor Palpatine as a small kid. Just look at the dude!
I became insanely scared of the inclement weather warnings broadcasted on the radio as a kid because I was listening to my shower radio on Radio Disney and all of a sudden, the loud "EERRRRRRR" sound pierced the air and made me drop to my knees in the shower, tuck and cover and everything bc I was convinced my radio was haunted or smth.
ME FUCKING TOO
I still hate those to this day, like it’s warning me of either a disaster that will screw over my entire life, or even an actual apocalypse!
the old toilet we had in my house when I was a kid was broken, and when you pressed the flush button it would make a super loud and creepy sound, little me was convinced a vampire lived inside the toilet and the flushing sound it made was actually him screaming
I had a fear of that one scene from "A Christmas Story" where the kid got his tongue stuck to the flag pole. I thought they had to rip his tongue off to free him! So every year I would hide behind the couch or run out of the room and start crying as soon as the scene started. A couple years ago my mom sent me a Christmas card....with a screenshot of that scene on it. 🤦♀
One of my irrational fears as a kid was some Movie company logo intros, idk what it was about them but some of them gave me the chills, same with the SEGA intro, I was genuinely scared of that fucking intro 😭
it took me like 13 minutes to notice the teeny weeny ichimatsu plush you have behind you 😢 he's so cute
I had a Furreal Friend of Serafina the cat from Barbie Princess and the Pauper as a kid... the batteries started to die and the once sweet high pitched voice turned into a low and ominous one... needless to day, she stayed in the bottom of the toybox for a few years.
I was also a really sensitive kid and had a lot of strange fears such as:
- the goat from Hoodwinked
- the rumor weed from Veggie Tales
- the monkey from Toy Story 3
- emptiness/void, an example of this being an empty level in LittleBigPlanet
- gremlins, after watching that movie I was constantly afraid of one jumping out at me at night
- the grim reaper, specfically from the Sims 2 and a game called Crystal Maze. It was kind of like Pac-Man except 3D, you played as a girl running around temples collecting gems while avoiding enemies but if you took too long the grim reaper would show up and make these CREEPY whispering sounds and chase after you. I always made my dad play it for me lol
- speaking of the sims 2 I was also afraid of the social bunny, the burglar (I got robbed a LOT), and whenever your sims had a mental breakdown from low aspiration and that therapist would drop down from the sky.. yeah.
- animatronics, specifically Halloween decorations and Christmas decorations. I had a nightmare as a kid about being in Walmart and seeing an animatronic of the Grinch, I think it tried to haunt me.
I also had more serious fears because my dad never really filtered himself around me and would go on rants about these things like
- global warming/climate change, I remember him telling me by the time I got to the age I am now the world would be so different.
- the end of the world
- a civil war breaking out, or another world war
- being bombed
- nuclear powerplants
i loved that mountain goat
things I was scared of as a child:
1. loud bathroom noises (toilets flushing, the water going down the bath drain when you pull the plug, etc. I would literally push the flush button and sprint out of the bathroom to the other end of the house. this was only a problem in the bathroom)
2. dropping things (again, loud noise bad)
3. plants vs zombies (I played it for like 6 months straight without a problem but one day I guess the zombies were just scarier than usual??? I couldn't sleep properly for months because I thought the plants vs zombies zombies were outside my house. literally only those zombies, all other zombies were fine)
4. the ghost minigame in I spy spooky mansion (my sister told me that one time I passed out while she was playing it next to me which is so funny to me now)
5. touching people (like I refused to make any physical contact with anyone other than a family member until I was about 15. not an exaggeration. honestly, at 22 years old I'm still kind of like that)
6. almost everything in this video, austin powers included.
7. shiny pokemon. I thought they were glitches and video game glitches were a HUGE fear of mine. it took me way too long to realise that they are, in fact, intended and desirable
"Spontaneous human combustion" got me LOL. It reminded me how I'm afraid of heads exploding
I get the bit about Bingo Bear and old TTS as a whole - There's a Fall Out Boy album that ends with a real grody TTS voice and it freaked me out to where I would stop the album like 4 songs before the last one.
Weirdest one was probably either a dancing cactus toy that played Feliz Navidad or the PS2 game Whirled Tour. That game isn't even a scary game, it's a razor scooter collectathon.
I used to be terrified of cows. I had like a ZhuZhu pet thing, one of those mouse toys that Rolled around and made silly little noises and shit. Well one of my favorites made a cow noise, but man did I love that mouse so instead of not playing with it, I memorized the pattern of the sounds so I knew that after the cat sound, it moo’d so as soon as it meowed i would crawl out of the room, hide in a corner with my ears covered for exactly 6 seconds before going back to the playroom and continuing
I had a bunch of zhuzhu pets and I think I had the one u were talking about
After watching Jumanji as a child, I had night terrors bad enough that I still haven't watched it again a whole-ass 25 years later
I always thought quicksand was going to be a bigger problem in my life than it turned out to be, also tv shows like mr. meaty, robot chicken and Naruto freaked me out
I had a similar automatic toilet fear, or just general public toilet fear. One day I had the thought, "what if a shark just jumped out of the toilet and bit me?" and for about 6 months I would get up from ANY toilet outside of my own home and flush as fast as I could to prevent any sort of thing with teeth from grabbing me.
I was also afraid of sleeping next to a window because I thought Nosferatu was going to crawl through the window and get me.
I was definitely one of those kids who was able to talk themselves into being afraid of something they never had been before....
this unlocked my own childhood fears i forgot about, while i wasnt afraid of automatic toilets i have vivid memories of being in first grade and thinking the bathroom was haunted because the automatic sinks would go off when no one was there so i refused to use that restroom at school
I had an irrational fear of the book The Tailypo. It wasn't just the illustrations, but at the time when my class were all reading the book, the librarian also played the audiobook aloud on a casette player. It haunted me for years and I still think about it to this day. I think I was right because now, even if the book doesn't scare me anymore, it was still such a gruesome story for kids.
I was a very anxious child. A short list of my odd fears include: any odd toilets - especially on planes or boats, boats in general (I lived on an island), the sea (again, I lived on an island), our kitchen because I once saw a rotting potato under the counter, our basement because it was messy, holes because I was afraid to fall into them, vomiting, escalators, elevator doors, spinny doors, and so much more
When I was a kid I was DEATHLY terrified of Lavender Town syndrome because 8-bit style music gave little 12 year old me headaches anyway so I thought it was real and if i listened to the song too long it would get me.... wild shit
I was scared of pooping out one of my organs by accident... Dunno where that came from, maybe it was the same place the spontaneous human combustion came from..
The thing about spontaneous combustion is complex. While there have been deaths attributed to it, scientists doubt that fires actually started within the victim. Presumably you as a kid read or saw some "Unexplained phenomenon" thing which brought it up.
YOU BROUGHT BACK FORBIDDEN FUCKING MEMORIES WITH ANGELA ANACONDA. HOLY SHIT.
Automatic toilets used to scare me as a kid too. I still don't like having to use them and honestly I think they're a really misguided attempt at conserving water that just doesn't work, since they go off all the time and never seem to work as intended.
I had several of these as a kid, but two that immediately come to mind are the early 2000s honeycomb cereal commercials (I thought it would actually turn you into a bee, and the cgi/ mascot were so freaky) and the gremlins. Really any older movie where the monsters/creatures were done with puppets, like labyrinth, gremlins, the never ending story, etc. Freaked me tf OUT.
i made up a whole thing to be scared of. they were called "boogie-boxes" and they were gray, translucent, and looked basically like cartoon ghosts. their whole deal was that when you flushed the toilet, one would come out from behind the toilet and punch you in the face. so, i would always run out of the bathroom at top speed as soon as i flushed the toilet, then go wash my hands in another sink or come back into the same bathroom after making sure i was in the clear to do so. i was also afraid of specifically a frog or spiders coming up out of the toilet bowl to touch my butt while i was sitting there. dunno why i was so unsettled by toilets. beats me.
I actually had a brief period of time as a kid where I thought crocodiles or monsters would come out of the toilet while I was on it XD
my fear as a child was the dragon/lion dance--im chinese so every year we'd celebrate chinese new year and we'd see the performance but i was smol and dragon was big and loud so i'd just cry. the fear lingered until high school and while im not afraid of it now, i'd still rather not see it (even tho it's hecking cool and i love it in theory lol)
I was terrified of end credits and the green/red rating screens. The somberish music in most of them or outright silence gave me an intense fear of existential finality. This also was the case with production logos after shows on vhs, specifically Nickelodeon. I had nightmares about the THX logo and its meaningless void. I think it's the fact that production logos and credits exist in this meta liminal space where all the fun ends and the ambiguous dread begins.
the fear of sun exploding is a classic. i was really into reading encyclopedias as a kid so i had it too! as well as some other ones. three of the most notable include being afraid of a volcano spontaneously forming right at our doorstep, spontaneous beginning of a new ice age and being trapped in my room by a glacier (i thought that the glacier would enter the building through the entrance like a distinguished being it is, then fill all the rooms up with ice, and block all the ways out of the house. i practiced gnawing on the wooden frame of my bed in case i would have to survive this event without food stashes), and a fear of breaking the earth's crust and unleashing the burning magma hell upon my hometown. this one was caused by a diagram showcasing earth's cross-section, on which the crust (of course) appeared to be paper thin. i was SO disturbed by other kids digging holes in the ground
I had a toy planetarium that came with an educational cd that taught you about space that I thought was incredibly cool, but also scared the shit out of me because one of the final lessons explained black holes and the heat death of the sun. I spent years as a child afraid that the sun would go out AND that a black hole would develop close enough to Earth to such us all in. Recently I was reminiscing over my childhood with my parents and told them about this, and they were horrified because they gave me that planetarium as a Christmas gift and had no idea it caused me so much anxiety.