To want to know a light-hearted childhood fear?

[GeorgeAndTimmyTheDog]

What I mean is you can possibly laugh about it now.
For instance because of reading the Unexplained magazine growing up I was convinced I was going to "Self human combust" as that was an article in there.
Also an adult told me that bleach "Makes things smaller" so I was petrified to sit on the loo if I could smell bleach as I thought my bottom would disappear.

There was an episode of the incredible hill I once watched where he turned and burst his arm through a window. I was always terrified his arm would burst in the same way from under my bed. Yes no monsters under my bed, just the hulk....or just his arm because even I could see his whole body wouldn't fit 🤷🏻‍♀️

When I was about 6, I saw something on the telly about 'real' vampires. God knows what they were actually talking about but I got it into my head that there was a real possibility that I would turn into a vampire. I stewed on it for about a year before telling my mum about it who managed to reassure me after I'd asked a million questions about how she could be so certain that I wasn't a junior vampire about to develop an insatiable thirst for blood...

@Mummyratbag "The Earth losing it's gravity" 😂

How random! Where did that come from?

this is interesting I found it eerie too. I think probably something to do with films where the apocalypse is signaled by TV not working. buy if I was watching cebeebees maybe I wouldn't have known about apocalypse yet.

I must have watched far too much Scooby Doo in the 70s as I really thought quicksand was everywhere and a genuine danger.

The Holderness Family on YouTube have an ongoing series of shorts about 80s Childhood Fears...
Quicksand is one of them!

We had a large brass plate hanging on the wall and when I was very young I was terrified of it. No idea why.
I also had an irrational fear of men in glasses. Not women, just men. Poor DM was mortified by my reaction when any of her brothers came to visit.

I remember a very specific nightmare where it happened..John Craven announced it on Newsround - we all floated up to the sun and fell back to Earth (presumably gravity returned) and looked like Tom and Jerry after an explosion (ragged clothes and smudged with soot). I may have watched too much TV 😂

I was terrified of the Salvation Army band.

Every Sunday afternoon they’d March down the hill and stop on the corner near our home and play a couple of hymns. It wasn’t the band themselves that scared me, or the music. They carried with them 5 large flags which were unfurled but held against the pole by the bearers. I still have nightmares about those flags coming down the hill at me 😳

This bastard. I reckoned he could reach my house in about ten paces.

I was worried that the car door would ping open and I'd be sucked out onto the motorway

I did not care for Chas one bit.

My cat caught a bird just as I was going off to work. I didn't have time to bury it, so I wrapped the body in tissue and put it in a (non-food) kitchen cupboard. When I got home, I opened the cupboard door and the bird flew straight into my face! I wonder if a similar thing happened during your childhood that has left you with that memory?

Missing trains. I can remember my mum insisting (sensibly) that we walk down the outside of the train to find our coach and being petrified the train would leave while we did that. I wanted to get on ASAP and walk down the inside. Neither experience (this happened a lot of times as we used to use the train to visit grandparents) nor my mum's explanations helped.

If I flushed the loo on an aeroplane, I'd be sucked down into the sky. Thanks Mum, i still think of this with every flush in the air

@Deanandthellhounds exactly that. Had little background info, I was only 2-5 years old but I was really scared and they’re still unsettling now. I find it weird how many others are equally disturbed!

Name changed for this because anyone who knew me as a kid would know it's me.

I was terrified that witches would come into my room and see my naked bum (I wore a nightie, but mum was one of the 'it's healthy to let air get to it' people so no knickers) But I thwarted them by making a protective circle of teddies under my bed, and sleeping in the middle of it

Yes also to toxic shock syndrome (made me terrified of tampons) sinking sand and the Bemuda triangle as well.
Now Barry Manilow is in my head.

My DD was absolutely petrified of Mr Pontipines moustache flying off in one particular episode of In The Night Garden. Like, screaming and climbing up the wall petrified

That my eyes were going to fall put and that I'd have to put them back in with a fish slice. 🥴

Reservoirs. I would Inexplicably fall in and be unable to get out.

Also, my daughter thinks that ghosts are real but that they hate singing so she sings all round the house at the top of her voice.

Quicksand….I was terrified of quicksand, and being sucked underground while Al king along….turns out it was a much smaller problem in real life than I anticipated as a kid!

I also once had a nightmare about a big green monster hand coming up the toilet and for a good 15 years afterwards i’d need to check/ keep looking in the toilet for monster hands.
I can still picture that dream vividly and the terror I felt at the monster hands in the toilet! 😂

Reading this thread I have remembered I was also terrified of volcanos (I grew up in Wales).

Also, my mum would listen to the six o'clock news on radio 4. Now, somewhere I'd picked up the idea that if radio 4 stopped broadcasting there would be nuclear war. (I think this was a garbled version of a truth - that an absence of BBC radio was one of the things that might indicate to nuclear submarine commanders that there'd been a devastating attack on the UK?) I would basically hold my breath in that pause there always was before (or after?) the final "bong", waiting to be annihilated.

I’m also a now elapsed catholic, but as a kid would make a cross on my pillow when I went to sleep, convinced that if I didn’t that my whole family would die in the night.

I blame my cousin for that one, I’m sure she told me it…😏