Gurning & Spontaneous Human Combustion

[Underminer]

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?

Yes I think SHC was actually just people having a heart attack/stroke/seizure and in the process dropping their cigarette - it then ignites the fat in the body, with the original burn as the entry point and the cigarette stub itself is incinerated so no trace. Horrible way to die though hopefully the stroke/heart attack had killed them first! It tended to happen to elderly, overweight female alcoholics apparently.

OMG I have that book in my bookshelf. I took it with me when I moved out of home.

Also I think caused by paraffin skin treatments!

I have a childhood memory of going to the doctor for something moving in my ear and a living insect being stuck in there. Thing is I have no idea if it really happened or if it was just a weird dream!

Will have to ask my mum when I see her next.

Growing up in Australia I was terrified by stories of children having their intestines sucked out in pools.

SHC was spooky because apparently the surroundings didn't catch fire like a normal fire.

Especially carrying their head under their arms. That was the holy grail of a ghost for me as a child.

😅brilliant thread. Explains why I don’t even like seeing “quicksand” on the TV. As kids we used to go on hols to Walton on the Naze and play on these abandoned concrete barges-already creepy they used to scare the s**t out of me surrounded by all this sticky stuff. (Even more so because in the ‘70s everything was of course in black and white!)

So many memories in this thread 😂 what weird childhoods we all had.

It strikes me that those cautionary public service ads were the 20th century equivalent of the Brothers Grimm tales which were originally a collection of the fucked up stories adults told children, and not intended to be recommended reading.

In the Black Saturday in Australia a chef survived because he locked himself into a restaurant walk-in fridge.

That has haunted my nightmares. Along with the woman and her child who survived because they crawled into a wombat den.

My parents were living in rural Australia at the time. I was in the UK and monitoring the progress of the fires during my day when they were sleeping at night.

*Black Saturday Bushfires that was

Wasn't it a tartan slipper? 😄

Borley Rectory and the messages on the wall to Marianne.

The scariest though was the faces that appeared on the floor. They became more mournful and suffering the more anyone tried to scrub them.

My grandma had the Readers Digest book with the brown cover - it used to be my favourite read when we went to stay! Does anyone else remember the one about the faces that apparently appeared spontaneously in someone’s tiled kitchen floor?

I think I may also have been affected by those films designed to terrify children. I get stressed on bonfire night because we don’t have a metal biscuit tin to keep the fireworks in, and therefore doom must surely follow!

The faces of Belmez. These still give me the creeps.

That’s the one! They are very creepy

This is a brilliant thread. The quicksand thing was definitely massive in the 80s. I wonder if there was an actual quicksand problem? I remember reading about some of this stuff in the magazine that came with the news of the world on Sundays.
My 7 year old with asd is obsessed with the Bermuda Triangle

aaah the ASD special interests. How much i love them!

Mine was obsessed with the Titanic and how handbags are constructed. I might see if i can direct him to the bermuda triangle.

Strangler vines! I think it was the name that scared me most rather than the potential of what they could do to a human body.
One of the boys at my primary school in the 70s told me if you stood under one for weeks, they would literally strangle you, which impressed and unnerved me at the time. It slowly dawned on me that it would take an awful lot of standing about to have the remotest chance that any there would be any risk of death by plant.

There was a tv series when I was small of The Day of the Triffids where these huge flowers lashed people in the face with their stamens to kill them. That didn’t help my love of plants much either.

My cousin had a disaster and mysteries book. On the cover, which was white, there was a picture of the Hindenburg on fire and I think the tartan slippers of a spontaneous human combustion victim with armchair and by the fire. I think there was also a story about the San Francisco daily line and the many earthquakes over the years.

One thing that did freak me out was a school programme, The Boy From Space. He gave me the really heebie jeebies. I'd sort of forgotten about it until a few weeks ago, on a dog walk, there were some people in front of us and one was quiet thing had very straight, silvery blonde hair. Took me straight back to that programme.

Ah, the 70s, @CuriousMariette, when you could play on abandoned concrete barges surrounded by quicksand and treacherous estuary tides.
Those were the days. Today's visitor attractions just don't cut it in comparison, with their bland focus on children being still alive at the end of the day

Was it a really massive heavy book with a black cover with pictures of UFOS? It was about 8-10 cm thick and bigger than A4 size ? If so I took it out of the school library every week and it was SO heavy. My mum said to me ‘if you keep bringing that fucking book home I don’t want any moaning on the way home about how heavy your bag is’!!!!
I think it had various sections I loved the alien abduction bit but would get scared reading it home alone and there was something about a girl seeing faces appear on the floor of her house . I had a lot of nightmares over the course of that year !!!!

I was obsessed with the Bermuda Triangle from age 8-15 (I have ASD) . Every bit of work I did in primary school I somehow managed to incorporate facts about the Bermuda Triangle 😂😂

Oh my god @MagpiePi I too had a terrified-of-stonefish phase. Wtf. Mine was about 1998, I must have read something in my grandparents' Daily Mirror and totally missed the fact that I lived, and still live, in England. I remember walking on my hands in the sea, a rock dislodging and me freaking out, convinced I'd disturbed a stonefish and was DOOMED.

tagged Magpie by mistake.. but yeah those hideous Charlie says cartoons. Why did he make that noise? Wrrooaoarhrhhhhgghghg..

I read this book so much when I stayed with my Nan when I was younger. I made sure I kept it after she died, I’ve got it in the garage somewhere I’m sure.