To ask what scares you /freaks you out that you would not consider common? Mine is a children’s book!

[elm26]

My 3 year old is obsessed with “We’re Going On A Bear Hunt” after having it read to her at preschool, she knows all of the words and we bought it as one of her gifts for her birthday.

We read a book every night at bed, whenever she reaches for this it gives me such bad goosebumps!

I don’t know if it’s the way it’s written, the pictures, I genuinely feel panic when they’re trying to get away from the bear and he’s in the background of the pictures and then at their front door and they’ve forgotten to lock it. I absolutely detest it 🥴 it gives me the right creeps!

This is baring in mind that all I read myself is psychological thrillers and I’ve watched so much true crime I could probably commit the perfect murder 😂 why do I have such a panicky/spooked response to a children’s book fgs!

I've been trying to Google it, but I can't find it, and I can't remember who the author is.

Years ago, I read a USA fiction book about a woman who had a physically and mentally disabled brother. He was murdered by being bound and gagged, tied to something, and then systematically tortured to death.

A female detective was helping the woman, but I found her terrifying! She was so creepy! I got into the first couple of pages of her character and couldn't go any further!

I've no idea if the author added that in intentionally or if it was just me being freaked out!

I've just YouTube'd the bear hunt book and I have to admit I find the entire thing really weird!

When my DD was very little there was an Australian children's programme on TV at lunch time. This was early 90s. It was about a group of kids and the adventures they had had. It also had a 'doll' toy who's head was made of what looked like polystyrene and it was white, no colours painted on it at all. I have no idea why it was in the programme and can't remember what the programme was called my DD was fascinated by it , but it totally creeped me out.

There’s a children’s book illustrator called Hans Arnold who was very popular when I was a small child. All books illustrated by him used to scare the heck out of me and I can still feel the stress response in my body just thinking about the pictures, even the ones that were supposed to be cute. (Look them up at your peril.)

(I also have megalophobia, trypophobia and submechanophobia but they all seem very common judging by this thread 😆.)

Similar to that but my fear is e fits of criminal suspects.

I clearly remember clearly when this started. It would have been the early 90s as I was about nine and had been allowed to stay up to watch an episode of crimewatch. They were appealing for information about a man who had stabbed a woman to death as she was getting in her car by a man in a sou wester hat.

I wasn't scared of the reenactment of what had happened but when the e fit of the suspect was shown in his creepy hat I felt absolute terror. I still can't see e fits without extreme anxiety.

I don't like bridges (high ones over dual carriageways/motorways) or elevated roads. Gives me jelly legs. It's not the height on its own because the ones over railways don't bother me and my office has floor to ceiling windows and I can look out of those and am happy to sit next to one (we're quite high up in a tower block).

I've thought of one I didn't like as a child - seahorses. I think it was because the video of them had sad background music too.

My mum doesn't like clowns and I was really into the Pierrot stuff in the 1980s. My poor mum! Now I understand why she said no to curtains though I had a pillow case, lamp shade etc,

I'm kind of ok with that. I tend to close the window when the plane is over vast ocean without land in sight. I just don't dwell on it. That's why I find the google earth thing is so peculiar.

Return to OZ. Traumatized me as a child. Even typing it out made me shiver. I hate that film 😂

Gawd that's scary!!

At six years old or so I read a discarded copy of Toby Twirl and the Magic Wishing Well. There's a segment where Toby's friend, the Teddy, falls asleep beneath an enchanted tree...which lowers its branches over him and forms a cage around him, then lifts him up high into the air. The "cutesy" illustrations were in fact utterly terrifying and I had some sleepless nights afterwards.

At least 50 years later I mentioned it in passing to my DH. It turned out that as a little boy he'd read the exact same book and had the exact same unnerved reaction.

Decide for yourselves:

looseandleafy.blogspot.com/2014/02/the-most-frightening-book-in-world.html

When I was about twelve, my friend’s big sister told us the plot of Rosemary’s Baby. Ever since I’ve hated built-in cupboards that are back-to-back with next door’s cupboards.

In my house now, all the cupboards that share the party wall are kept locked, and in the one downstairs which shares the subfloor with next door I’ve put sandbags on the floor to stop them bursting through.

Now I’ve given myself the willies

Children of the Stones was terrifying! Really not sure how it was commissioned for kids!

I am shit scared of tin foil

Just writing that makes me want to throw up

It stems from when I was tiny and my mother made a guy Fawkes and kept it in the bath

It put my toilet training back by a good few months

Years later I asked my father what it was made of and he was like 'straw for the hair,tin foil for the face,my old shirt...'

Years ago,in either bounty or mandy magazine (my mother bought herself both and I got to read them afterwards) there was a storyline about a haunted spoon (I'm 99% sure it was an evil and haunted spoon with a young girl in the story)

That gave me the willies so badly,I refused to go upstairs by myself for years (which was a problem as the bathroom was upstairs)

Years and years later,dd was the same over the spooky spoon from the numberjacks (I had to ban it from the TV)

She would rather wet herself rather than go upstairs by herself

I spent years holding her hand around the loo door so the spooky spoon wouldn't appear and 'get' her

Thankfully she did grow out of it as I'd have to refuse to hold the hand of an almost 19 year old if it was now rather than her being 4

I hate wind up toys, particularly flying ones. When I went to Paris as a teenager there seemed to be flying plastic doves on every corner - awful! Also can’t stand certain dolls. I had one that could eat but the mechanism got stuck & it would make a nightmarish noise. And don’t get me started on walkie talkie dolls!

I’m the same. I also have it with big satellite dishes, lighthouses, pylons and looking at big ships from underneath. Shudder.

About 70 years ago I was watching a black and white version of Jane Eyre, a Sunday teatime serial, and I recall being terrified in the first episode where Jane is locked in the Red Room by her evil guardian. It must have been 30 years before I plucked up courage to watch another version of it, in glorious colour, with a cushion at the ready in case I got scared again.

Going downhill fast. Not big dippers or anything, just on foot or in a car.. ugh, scary. Also a fear of catching my ankles on anything & slicing a vein. I have NO idea why.. no books or films???
The most recent one, although understandable, a tiger in a zoo.. bit of thin plasticky stuff between me & it. My God.. I'd always liked tigers but it just looked like a killing machine.. big teeth & rippling muscle.. visceral reaction!

Pet Sematary has an ankle slicing scene!

@CelticSilver I did read Pet Sematary when it first came out, but don't recall that!

The sound of the tardis in Dr Who used to make me hide behind the sofa when I was little.

Morph.
Freaked me out.
Even worse was his little grey friend who looked like a dead morph.
I used to hide behind the sofa when he came on the tv.

Mine is the Heffalumps and Woozles from Winnie the Pooh. Freaked me right out as a kid. Thought I could handle it as an adult when my kids watched it. Nope! Just as terrifying lol. And Mrs Mangle that was in Neighbours.she scared the life right out if me!

Daleks - terrified me as a child, I used to hide behind the sofa, and they still do. The voices saying “exterminate” - horrible!

Oh yes where Zombie Gage unalives Jud,