What were you scared of as a kid that wasn't meant to be scary?

[Kala24]

For me it was Dastardly and Muttley. I have no idea why but I was terrified of them and if I woke up in the night to use the bathroom I used to run because I thought they were hiding in my attic and would snatch me and pull me up.

It's just funny looking back because they're not even scary characters and not meant to be😂

Those red tulips that have black and yellow bits in the centre and I always thought it was a bee or wasp. I just googled them and they still give me the willies.

Also Ming the Merciless, from the cartoon “Defenders Of The Earth”. My brother got an action figure of him for his birthday and I made my mum wrap him (Ming, not my brother) up in a bin bag and put him in a drawer in her room 😂

Wonder Woman! When she'd spin round, I'd duck behind the sofa till it was over.

OMG me too. I had a recurrent nightmare that it was in our local park.

Showing my age here, but there was a kids' TV puppet show called 'Twizzle'.
He could grotesquely extend his stick-thin arms and legs, accompanied by a horrible sort of clicking sound effect.
His face had exaggerated features with large eyes, big cheekbones and that flappy marionette mouth.
*shudders

@Redlarge Blimey , that reminds me that the same Granny told me about a lady who sat on a discarded sewing needle. Apparently it travelled from her bottom and either into her heart or lung and punctured it and she died. As a child this seemed quite feasible. We were told to always leave some knotted thread hanging out of a needle when we had finished sewing, so it was more visible and less likely to be sat on. God, my granny told us some weird tales.

How cool! I remember the programme well, especially Crystal's freaky hair. 😄

Car wash

Automatic car wash machine

Not quite the same thing as I didn't see this till I was an adult, but The Brave Little Toaster is fucking terrifying. The whole thing is centred on death. Way too frightening for kids imo, and if I'd seen it as a kid I'd have been properly scarred.

https://screenagewasteland.com/3-reasons-why-the-brave-little-toaster-is-the-most-frightening-movie-ever-made/

The song you sexy thing by hot chocolate.

to this day my sister finds it hilarious to sing the first dum dum dum dum dum dum opening bar and see me creeped out.

When the girl’s dad in the film Casper went into the machine and came out as a ghost.

and the children’s film ghost dad.

on reflection maybe I had a fear about my dad leaving us (he was away a lot for work)

Some of these are so funny. Some of them make sense though too!

My sister was always terrified of drop dead Fred when his head gets stuck in the fridge and he pulls it out and it's huge and flat 😂

Omg ha ha

Clowns... 🤡

I was terrified of ET 👽and i'm still not fond of him 🤣

@persister

I was the same! Flushing a toilet except I thought spiders would come! I remember standing in my dear old Granny's house, using the loo then opening the door as wide as it would go before flushing the loo and bolting! So bizarre!

Not scared of flushing the loo now but still petrified of spiders😆

Bagpuss

My Nans black overhead toilet cistern - I used to pull the chain then run to the bottom of the stairs, I had to get there before the flush finished.

Putting my legs down to the bottom of the duvet, always had to be tucked up.

Any kind of mannekin or clothed costume model in a museum or similar.

The "faces" in my curtain at night (streetlights shining through the pattern)

there was/is something very eerie about that programme. The dreamy Victorian vibe.

Worzel Gummidge, to the extent that I couldn’t watch anything with John Pertwee in it. Completely at odds with my sister who loved it so much she went to see it live and meet the cast. I was horrified! I haven’t watched the recent remake either.

The Laughing Cavalier painting my grandmother had on her spare bedroom wall. I used to have to cover it up with my dressing gown whenever I stayed there.

People dressed up in fancy dress that covered their faces - this is something that eventually reached true phobia level and I still have problems with it now in my mid-50’s.

The classic - clowns - but with good reason after my dad took us to the circus when I was tiny and we were singled out by one particularly scary looking specimen through the whole show. I was somewhere between two and three years old, but I can still see his face!

I was a sensitive child (in hindsight I think I've been neurodiverse all my life) and here are just a few of the everyday things that used to scare the whatnots off me when I was about 6/7/8: 😄

The National Anthem. (The drumroll at the beginning still gives me an unpleasant chill tbh, and I'm 55 now. I think it's partly because when 'closedown' was a thing my kid brain seemed to think something apocalyptic would happen if I was still in the room after closedown. No idea where I got that idea from.)

The MOT vehicle testing centre symbol, with the three triangles. I used to see it as a face.

The Open University opening in the 70s always felt sinister to me:

And the News at Ten theme tune was plain scary (again the word 'apocalyptic' springs to mind). Especially the very end when it just went mental:

TV newsreaders' faces used to scare me too, they always looked so stern and ominous back in the 70s. (I seem to remember finding Sandy Gall particularly scary.)

The words 'Yorkshire Television' used to spook me when the Yorkshire TV ident came on TV. This one truly baffles me. There was literally something about the formation of the words that scared me.

Also, I'd been told at Sunday school that God speaks to everyone, and when I got up to go to the loo in the night I used to be scared stiff that he'd speak to me and make me jump.

I did say I thought I was neurodiverse. 😂

Piers and those open type wooden stairs. Planks of wood with a gap. Terrifying!

Just remembered another one Daleks from Doctor Who, I used to properly hide behind the couch. They all terrified me, their voices.....exterminate <shudder> but the one that was a man on the top and a Dalek body really used to send me over the edge!

The ringmaster with a huge whip and the horses galloping round at the circus.

Those scared me too, as did cattle grids, although I guess that one makes more sense given the size of the gaps...

Mine were the Play-Doh Top Shop, I absolutely hated the way the play-doh came out of the holes to make the hair and beards, which is weird as I went on to be a hairdresser. I was also terrified of water towers which was quite problematic as we used to go to France on holiday every year and there was an abundance of them in the french countryside.