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Original poster

Gurning & Spontaneous Human Combustion

237 replies

Underminer · 29/05/2023 23:47

Not connected to each other, but when I was little, circa mid 80s, gurning used to be a regular thing on telly, along with spontaneous human combustion being a thing we were all scared of happening to us.
Anyone else remember this? Maybe the gurning was on Record Breakers? I remember watching it on more that on occasion, my brother has a memory of old men with no teeth pulling faces through horse collars, and he thinks it was a toothpaste advert and that’s why we don’t really hear about it now? We don’t live in an area with contests.

What other random things do you remember that seem to have spontaneously combusted in history?

OP posts:
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17
007DoubleOSeven · 30/05/2023 07:48

Random789 · 30/05/2023 07:07

Quicksand here, too. Why were we all so terrified of it?

The fridge, thing, as I recall, was a genuine danger. Their closure mechanism was different in those days, so if you crawled insie a discarded fridge and the door shut you would be trapped and suffocated.
Children played out and about without adults more in those days, so might often have come across fltipped fridges. I think there were actual cases of children dying? I'm starting to doubt myself now. Perhaps I am just remembering scare stories.

I also remember being sternly warned about:
Peanuts - not allergic reactions but the Near Inevitability of Choking to Death if you ate one carelessly
Fish bobes - ditto.
Swimming less than half an hour after eating - you would get cramp and drown

Fish bobes ??

RubyMurry22 · 30/05/2023 07:48

I was also terrified of being stuck in quick sand or falling into a river and getting stuck in a whirlpool - I think this was from watching a lot of Tarzan - these things must be more common in the jungle rather than in suburban England!

007DoubleOSeven · 30/05/2023 07:49

Oh, bones!! Took me longer than it should've to work test out 😆😆

Random789 · 30/05/2023 07:49

Swallowing apple pips was also extremely dangerous. I was told as a child (and believed it) that an apple tree would start to grow inside me.

Random789 · 30/05/2023 07:52

@007DoubleOSeven Has my typo accidentally started ascary urban myth about fish bobes? Grin I wonder what they would be? Piranha-type fish gangs at the British seaside perhaps.

LadyOfTheCanyon · 30/05/2023 07:55

Fish bobes are undoubtedly their testicles

Crampo · 30/05/2023 07:55

@DressMadeOfSeashells Superb!

Chumssss · 30/05/2023 08:05

Does anyone remember Ghostwatch in the early nineties with Sarah Greene? Later on it was revealed that it had been faked, but it was bloody scary to watch.

MillicentTrilbyHiggins · 30/05/2023 08:09

I remember all manner of horror stories about what would happen if you swallowed bubble/chewing gum. Including that they would wrap around your heart and kill you, stick your intestines together or that you'd blow bubbles from your bum!
Mind you it must have worked, I still don't like gum!

Swallowing the seeds from fruit is definitely dangerous. There was an episode of Rugrats where one of them swallowed a watermelon (?) Seed. The other babies had to use a shrink ray to go inside Grin

lunar1 · 30/05/2023 08:11

Ghost watch was terrifying!

As a child of the 80's I definitely remember spontaneous human combustion being something I felt I needed to worry about, that and being lost in the Bermuda Triangle 🤦🏻‍♀️

QueenofLouisiana · 30/05/2023 08:11

@TheMurderousGoose i loved that book and the others in the series. Read them all so often, I would be the ideal spy/ paranormal investigator based on my 1980s knowledge.

I now drive past the site of Borley Rectory almost daily and can report no random events (apart from strange people at Halloween) in the 20-odd years I’ve been here. The tudor house a couple of miles down the road, however, is a different kettle of fish 👻👻👻

AtomicBlondeRose · 30/05/2023 08:12

Is this one the book anyone had? I have it next to my bed 😂 I introduced DS to the world of the unexplained and he loves all the same stuff I used to. Some of these stories don’t really seem like mysteries now. There’s some “mysterious disappearances” which just scream out “kidnapped and murdered” and some of the tales I felt were stone-cold irrefutable proof of weirdness when I was a kid just sound like the ramblings of drunkards now.

Gurning & Spontaneous Human Combustion
NoBiscuitsLeftInMyTin · 30/05/2023 08:16

I found these terrifying!

British public information films of the 70s

https://youtu.be/uUjhmBDUjFE

MidgeHardcastle · 30/05/2023 08:21

Loved those books! Must hunt around to see if I still have them. I loved the bad black and white photos of ectoplasm coming out of people's mouths. The same stock photos of a priest with stigmata and the foot and trolley of the SHC victim. I always thought it was a man?

Hoffi · 30/05/2023 08:21

This is the 70s/80s all over - yes, children were allowed to roam free over woods and beaches until dusk, but only once the adults had filled their heads with cautionary tales about killer fridges, quicksand, the deep deep water of quarries, railway lines, men with puppies, rip tides, spontaneous combustion, rabies and ghosts.

SquirrelSoShiny · 30/05/2023 08:26

CoreyTaylorsSoggyTshirt · 29/05/2023 23:52

Quicksand.

I was terrified of it and thought it would feature quite frequently in my adult life. We even had safety videos about it in school.

Never been a problem once in my life.

This 😂 Though I did nearly have a trainer sucked off on a beach recently and suddenly remembered the existence of quicksand! Starfish, people, starfish!

funnelfan · 30/05/2023 08:32

To be fair, there are quite a few beaches in the UK where quicksand/mud are an issue if you go outside the safe areas, and you don’t want to be stuck up to your waist with the tide coming in. RNLI/ beach rescue/ fire engines/ coastguard/ police/ ambulance all attend. That’s a lot of emergency services for an entirely preventable event.

Nohelpfromme · 30/05/2023 08:35

Random789 · 30/05/2023 07:49

Swallowing apple pips was also extremely dangerous. I was told as a child (and believed it) that an apple tree would start to grow inside me.

But they do contain amygdalin which reacts in the body to produce cyanide. Admittedly you'd have to eat a lot of apple pips to die from cyanide poisoning but the danger is real.

BittenontheBum · 30/05/2023 08:43

I was shut in a discarded chest freezer as a toddler, by a wanker of a cousin who thought it was funny.
He also shut me in a bin store around the same time.
He was late teens, definitely knew better.
SHC still fascinates me.
I'm sure I watched/heard something recently where the advice for quick sand is to stay still?
The AIDS adverts were very scary , at a vulnerable age for me. A boyfriends father was a haemophiliac and had to be tested. The wait was bloody awful for them and thankfully after 6 months he was cleared.

Rockbird · 30/05/2023 08:46

Anyone remember the flesh eating bug that was around for a while. That scared the absolute shit out of me!

UsernameNotAvailableNow · 30/05/2023 08:53

My 5 year old is obsessed/terrified of quicksand. No idea where its come from as its certainly not a concern of mine!

I remember the pylon ad vividly. I lived near one and once as kids we did start to fly a kite near it and I swear every neighbour ran out shouting NOOOOOO

Also genuine question, does chewing gum NOT kill you if you swallow it? I've never had the updated memo after the 80s

Andanotherone01 · 30/05/2023 08:55

Singleandproud · 30/05/2023 07:22

@Andanotherone01 to be fair currents are a very real and serious problem. Tourists die off of the North Norfolk coast every year.

The public service films 'the don't play on the railway tracks' and 'don't go into the electricity transformer' made sense to me growing up in London, never quite saw the releventness of the 'don't play in the grain silo'. I'm assuming all of these things were actually a problem in the 80/90s as children were playing out unsupervised more.

I wonder if spontaneous human combustion was more frequent due to the types of industrial jobs people did and clothing being contaminated with flammable liquid/dust and more people smoking.

Oh I know. It’s just that I thought if I so much as dipped a toe in, I’d be pulled under - as if by some magnetic force.

CurlewKate · 30/05/2023 08:55

Many "mysteries" didn't survive the introduction of the internet and the camera phone!

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