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.

Sounds far more scary! Size and reality don’t fit into childhood imagination!

I was terrified of Mick Hucknall. I used to cover my ears and cry whenever Simply Red came on the radio 🤣

Oh I don't remember that one! The "Charlie says" and Tufty ones were bad enough 😂- probably just as well, I'd probably still be hiding behind the sofa back in 1977 if I'd seen it,

I'm lucky to be alive with all the quicksand the 1980's led me to believe was out there!

@Badhead
Perfectly normal response to him I cover my ears if he occasionally pops up now.

Oh and earthquakes! Not much of a problem in the midlands, but I once saw a crack in concrete and was convinced I was a gonna

And Woozels here too!

Going in my friends house. Her dad was a coal miner and I thought the 'hole' into the mine was under the living room carpet somewhere!!

There was an advert.. I think early 80s that showed a girl hooked up to life support machine and was a warning to not sniff glue. I remember being really freaked out that I'd accidentally do it at school and be hooked. 😂

A boy in my glass burst in to tears when a pritt stick wafted past his nose. Poor lad haha

I was petrified of the Witch in Chorlton and the Wheelies. It was the way she could just pop up wherever she wanted that was so terrifying. There was nowhere to be safe.

I wasn't very keen on Evil Edna from Willow the Wisp.

Yy also to SHC. There was a terrifying photograph in Arthur C Clark's World of Strange Mysteries of a really creepy room with blackened ceiling and just one leg remaining.

There was a dead tree in a front garden down my road and I was terrified of it, I had to look the other way when we passed it. The little girl who lived in the house with the tree knocked for me to go out to play once, I ran inside crying!

My dad bought me a kite and took me out to fly it but I was hysterical thinking it was going to fly away so we went home and it got put on a shelf in my bedroom. I could see it from my bed and I couldn't sleep because I was thinking about the kite blowing away, so my mum binned it (and I was fine with that). Dad wasn't happy when he found out mum had binned it - apparently it wasn't a cheap one and we weren't well off.

My grandparents lived on a main road. When sleeping in their front bedroom, I never associated the sweeping lights across the ceiling with the cars that passed It proper freaked me out!

Being attacked by trees. I had a proper terror of a particular oak tree poking “his” branch through my back and bursting out my tummy, but I really had a horror of all big trees and only really trusted the beech trees.

Also nuclear war and quicksand.

Our local pool had a wave machine and at the end of the deep end there were bars under water in front of what I assume was the area where the machine was but what just looked like an empty (waterfilled) recessed bit of the pool (in the wall not the floor).
I know now there wasn't a shark in it. I knew then there wasn't a shark in it. But I was still absolutely petrified and would dare myself to see how long I could poke my foot in before fear too over or the shark bit me.

I can honestly see that being sinister.

My mum surprised me when I was at school one day by redecorating my bedroom in a Pierrot / Ballerina theme, which was quite popular in the 80s. I suppose because I took ballet and dance classes she thought it would be nice, but I didn’t really like clowns of any kind. Part of the decoration was these two thin plastic Pierrot picture cutouts that hung from strings pinned to the ceiling and the light from the window shone through- as I had a high cabin bunk bed the bloody things were on eyeline level with me as I slept. One day I woke up in the night and one of them had moved closer to the window- I was terrified!! I suppose looking back, the logical thing is that it probably fell down at some point during the day and my mum found it and reattached it, and that I didn’t notice it at bedtime. To see the outline of it in the dark, clearly hanging about 30cm further forward than it was previously had me convinced that it could move itself and that it would get me whilst I slept. After that I always lay on the same side facing it so that it didn’t creep up on me, and even now I prefer sleeping on that same side (left) and feel really uneasy if I lay down on my right.

we also had a very large victorian wardrobe that I swore when I looked in the full length mirror on the front I could see people who weren’t there behind me in the reflection, just a movement out of the corner of my eye but I would try really hard not to look in that mirror. The wardrobe was located on the landing right outside my bedroom door so I would run past and shut my door quickly and always sleep with the door shut. Didn’t help that the stairs and landing creaked (old house) and it sounded like someone was walking past my bedroom. I was a quiet nervous kid, looking back at my childhood I’m not surprised why.

@GeorgeAndTimmyTheDog

Thank you

Yes that's the photo I carried in my head!! Just this charred leg. Also Edna was scary.

Quicksand and being invaded by the Russians. This was the 1980's.

We had a stone statue of a little boy standing by a man made "pond" (think basic and very small fibreglass structure) in the garden, I lived there from 0-5, and the snails / slugs (which I am absolutely terrified of anyway...) would leave their trails all over him.

Slimy David still chases me in my nightmares to this day, and I'm approaching 50... 😳

Slimy David

Honestly - we moved house when I was 5 and I begged my parents to leave him there. They didn't, they brought him with them, and he's moved with them since. 🫣

Club feet and built up shoes!! 🙈 There was an elderly lady in our village with a club foot and I was absolutely petrified of seeing her as a toddler! Any time she approached us in the street to say hello I'd scream hysterically, point at it and make my mother carry me.

A friend of mine still has nightmares of a childhood stone statue of a boy that her mum coated with yogurt, which then makes green moss grow on it.
Sometimes in her nightmare it's covered in yogurt, sometimes it's green and hairy.