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30 Of The Scariest Things People Believed When They Were Younger, As Shared By The Bored Panda Community
People are weird. But really. We tend to get some bizarre and random ideas in our heads, believing they are legit. The more imaginative we are, the stranger our thoughts are. And it starts with childhood. Kids are masters at coming up with something out of this world. Literally.
Thinking about that, I asked our pandas to share the scariest thing they believed when they were younger and received a lot of funny answers! What are your memories from your early years on this planet?
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When I was younger I thought the rhythmical thumping under the bedroom floor was the ghost of a long-dead slave beating a drum. I later found a dirty, broken chain in the yard and freaked out, convinced that it had belonged to the aforementioned dead slave. My mother had to sit me down and tell me that the thumping was actually the heating pipes, and that the chain had come from an attempt to secure our trampoline to the ground during a wind storm. I had a very active imagination as a child.
When I was a child, I was convinced that there were skeletons under my bed and was terrified that they'd come out at night and get me. I guess I must have seen something scary on TV involving skeletons or something. One night, I got so sick and tired of being scared of them that I decided to change the narrative. They didn't want to kill me at all. In fact, they were madly in love, and they just happened to live under my bed. They were so madly in love that they only had eyes for each other. To this day, they regularly go on cute dates, and they actually just got back from their 30th Honeymoon. I now have a deep fondness for skeletons. :)
When I was a first-grader I was told that there was a secret bunker near my school where they did all kinds of stuff to people. I obviously thought it was true and was afraid to walk alone around that area.
Also, I had a fear that mirrors might steal my soul. It was very unnerving to look at them at night.
To this day, I won't look in a mirror at night!!! I'm scared my reflection will be doing something else 😬😬
I was misdiagnosed as bipolar and prescribed medication to treat it. The meds made me incredibly paranoid, to the point that I thought the people in magazines and movies were watching me.
When I was 8 (until I was 12ish), whenever there was lightning without rain at night or the local radio station would go offline unexpectedly, I assumed it was a nuclear blast or EMP and that I only had 1 to 2 minutes to live before the blast wave would hit. This was in the early 70s.
I'm 64 and in 7th grade we read 1984 in our English class and I was petrified for 1984 to come.
I was terrified I was going to fall into quicksand.
When I was a little kid, I somehow got this idea that the toilet was a monster. I was scared it would eat me, so I always went pee super fast and was scared to poo because it took too long... To combat this fear I started randomly flushing toilet paper throughout the day thinking if I "fed" it enough TP snacks then I would be safe because it wouldn't eat me if it wasn't hungry!!
I was scared that a watermelon tree would grow on top of my head because I swallowed watermelon seeds while eating it.
I was paranoid that if not in bed, a monster would get me in the dark, unless there was a light on.
I'm terrified of demon possession. I'm 51 years old and I should know better!
When I was young I had an abnormal fear of being abducted by aliens in the middle of the night. Also, after learning from a fireman in school that most house fires happen between 2-4 am, I became deathly afraid and paranoid that my house would catch on fire in the middle of the night while i was asleep.
I promise to never abduct you. 😊 Also, yeah, I'd always be terrified that my house would be robbed between those hours or I'd get a stroke or something and my parents wouldn't be able to hear me.
I had a crippling fear of the upstairs of my house as a child. It started slowly, I was normally a very brave child, but I had read a Goosebumps book about a dummy that just got to me for some reasons. I became afraid of attics first. I would avoid going into the bathroom where the attic was at night by myself. Slowly I became more and more terrified. Eventually I would refuse to go upstairs alone at all. For three years every time I went to my father's house I would sleep on the couch. I showered only in the mornings since the only shower was upstairs. Sometimes I would sleep in the clothes I'd worn all day because I was to scared to go upstairs and change. So yeah, I guess the scariest thing would be that I thought a murderous dummy and a couple ghost lived in my attic and upstairs of my house.
Goosebumps is absolutely petrifying! I read one called "Say Cheese and Die! and to this day, I HATE having photos taken of me
I had a phase where I believed I had snakes under my bed.
I use to think there were crocodiles under my bed, I could never sleep because of it
i used to think that i would get sucked up by a black hole
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When I was about 3 my aunt tells me the story of how I had this belief that the vacuum cleaner was alive. (Probably because it made such a loud noise) One day I tripped over the vacuum and apologized profusely to it “Sorry Vacuum!” Still one of my family's favourite stories.
I was told that if I were bad, a monkey would climb down from our back yard tree and attack me. Scared the heck out of me.
When I was like 5 I watched the Thriller music video and for a good 4 years I would have to sleep with my legs tucked towards me in fear that all the creepy things I believed in would put a wart on my foot and turn me into one of them. I'm 12 right now and to this day I'm scared of so many things, I think I'll be scared for life. So a great tip is to never watch creepy movies and absolutely stay off TikTok and YouTube, that stuff is messed up.
You will not be scared for the rest of your life. You will find your inner strength, and become an independent you lady. I was the same at your age, I'm 67 now, and nobody dare rile me up.
I believed that if you are stuck in a lift, you would either die or get trapped in there forever. I heard the lift beeping and I thought it would break down and I would be stuck there, but it was actually because the doors were open for too long. Our sensor thing was broken and I stuck out my hand, and my hand was stuck. There is still a scar from that time. I am 12 now, and that incident happened when I was 3. Still brings tears of joy to my sisters and parents when they recall the memory
now i am almost terrified to use the lift in my house
1st grade, I learned that the sun was going to explode one day and on that day I swore I would never go outside again. Broke that promise in like 20 minutes.
I saw a Tales From the Darkside movie (I think?) when I was a little kid and there was a part about this monster that lived under the bed and would reach out and grab your ankle. So for a few years I would get a running jump onto my bed to avoid getting nabbed.
Santa. Think about it, he slides down your chimney, techically committing a crime, and leaves you a "present"
when I was young I thought the gateway to Hell was under my sidewalk...I was terrified of it
I believed that Earth was going to be hit with an asteroid and I used to stay up wondering if I was going to die by space rock
When my brothers and I were little my father told us that the devil kissed our eyes when we slept. That’s why we have dry tears around our eyes when we woke up. Let’s just say we were always so scared to sleep and also rushed to wash our faces in the morning.
I believed when I was 3 or 4 that if I got hungry and didn't eat right away, I'd start to disappear. (Thanks, Dad and Uncle John!)
I was terrified of Yoda and if I faced the wall whilst in bed, he wouldn't attack me.
Two things. The first was that when I looked into the mirror there would be something behind me that I couldn't see, sometimes a monster, and sometimes the creepy mom from Coraline. The other is that something was in the toilet or bathtub when I was using them, like a hand coming out of the drain, or a dead floating head in the toilet that would come to life if I looked at it.
After I watched The Lion King, I was convinced that there were hyenas in my closet. I was terrified to be in my room regardless of the time of day. I managed to convince myself that they would only come out at night. The fear only stopped after we moved.
i used to think that one day i would forget to get dressed and go to school naked
That if I sat on the toilet for a “long” time a bunch of tiny men would crawl up the toilet bowl and give me painful shots in my butt. I actually injured myself forcing my pee out as hard as possible so I could get off the toilet quick enough. I did this for years. Held my pee for as long as possible and then tried to get rid of it as quick as possible same with going number 2. I have no idea where this idea came from. Then it just became a habit til I gradually stopped doing it by around age 10.
When I was little I was addicted to watching both the local and national news and read the local newspaper cover to cover, so I was only too aware of the existence of true crime. One of the first neighborhoods I ever lived in was in a very high crime area near a major gang hub and my bedroom window overlooked a darkened alley.
When I was little I would lie awake while looking out through that window, terrified that a roving gang somewhere would wander through the alley, climb our cyclone fence, and target our house for some bizarre gang initiation that involved breaking through my bedroom window, having some of the gang members wander into my parents' bedroom to kill them while the rest restrained me, then having them kidnap me to torture me elsewhere before killing me as well. I remember trying to make myself look as invisible as possible in my bed so no one would think a little girl was lying there and that's how I would fall asleep most nights.
When I was little, I took the phrase "there's a first time for everything" quite literally and lived in fear of my first broken leg, my first time falling down stairs, my first gunshot wound, etc..
When in second grade, I was scared of my sister for a few straight weeks because I had a dream in which she declared to me that she was a ghost and had come to eat me.
I had a dream that my sister was a ghost in high school. It made me feel very uneasy. In the same period of my life, I had a dream that I cut my head off and ate it (don't ask me how) which was the worst dream experience ever. I had a feeling something's going to cut my head off whole day after. Yuck, it's still making me feel awful.
When I was 5 my mom took my two older sisters and me to a double feature movie. The first was Sasquatch, I live in the Pacific NW so the whole movie looked like places I knew, I'd been, I'd seen in my neighborhood as a kid. The second movie was Food of The Gods w giant rats and I remember giant mosquitoes flying after men riding horses in the woods, catching one and sucking him dry and flat! At night I would lay in bed w my blankets up to my nose waiting for Sasquatch, Big Foot, to come down the hall into my room, shared a bunk bed w my oldest sister, he would see her eat her first then he wouldn't be hungry for me! Terrifying! I still have problems sleeping to their day, extreme insomnia. I am now 51 yrs old. Thanks Mom
OMG!! FOOD OF THE GODS!! I remember that movie!!! Remember the MAGGOTS??!
I thought swearing on someone's life would actually kill them, like a magically-binding oath.
There was a person/monster under the stairs that would cut at your Achilles’ tendon when you would walk down or up them in the dark.
When I was a kid I used to poked my brother's eye (not hardly, just gently tap it to annoy him), so, he told me that that was pretty dangerous, cause if you'd poked an eye a certain number of times it would retract itself back to your skull and never emerge again. He said so with such confidence that I completely believe it and lived terrified of poking my eyes by accident and never get them back. I believed it for much longer than I should.
when I would sleep I would believe that my toys would start moving in my room
When I was little I thought that the Animatronics from FNAF were real and roamed the dark places in my elementary school.
I was in grade school in the US when the Cuban missile crisis erupted in the early 1960’s. We were forced to practice “duck, roll and cover” under our desks in the event of a nuclear attack, which would be triggered each day by air raid sirens blaring. Then we would be marched down into the school basement for shelter. What a bunch of horrible, horrible trauma to subject little kids to in the name of a Cold War with what was then the Soviet Union. But in my later years I gained a deeper understanding and appreciation for what most of Europe had to endure during my parents’ lifetimes.
Bloody Mary. Bloody Mary. That girl, you know who I mean.
My mom was a professional makeup artist at one point in her life, even did some work on the Incredible Hulk TV show in the 80s. So naturally she did the makeup for the Haunted House at our Moose Lodge (Papa, her dad, ran the place.) I honestly believed that the monsters were real, because Mom always did such a great job. I remember one year, AFTER Mom made sure to show me the process of how she turned a friend into the wolf gal, I still wound up hiding in the Alley with some boy I had met that day. When said friend came to play pool after the haunted house was over, the pool room being connected to the alley we were hiding in, we got stuck out there.
When I was a kid, there was an episode of The Hogan Family called "Burned Down" where they accidentally set the attic of their house on fire by leaving a defective lamp plugged in and turned on. That episode freaked me out so much that I started unplugging lamps when they weren't in use because I was afraid they were going to spark, catch fire, and burn the house down like what happened in the show! I was a very impressionable 6-year-old, clearly.
"Burned Out" was the episode title, my bad! Also, the show was still called Valerie's Family at that point, even though they'd offed the title character the previous episode.
I thought that alarms were only for waking up. One day when I was 3 a fire truck was passing by and i started crying hysterically. Why? i thought the driver was asleep and would kill somebody.
I saw the movie Twister very young. I believed that Tornados were murderous monster storms that absolutely would kill you. We had a tornado warning once and I just lay down in my bed and waited for death.
I stayed a week with my grandparents when I was 6 or 7 and got the random idea that alien monsters had taken over their bodies and they were going to kill me. I had never seen a scary movie or read a scary book at that age and had felt completely safe around them before and for the rest of their lives after, but I was so relieved when my parents came to get me. Years later, when my son was that age, he stayed with my in-laws a couple times and both times thought that bugs were all over him for a week afterwards. Have other people had extreme fears at that age?
My mom always told us there was a troll in the bottom of the outhouse and if you sat there too long it would pinch your bum. Still to this day... 40 + years later, I still get the whim whams when using an outhouse while camping.
Still can't use a long drop. Got told there was a man sleeping down there
My brother showed me a movie monster book when I was young, and as a result, thought vampires were real. I would like awake terrified at night that they were coming to get me. My form of protection was to make sure my sheet covered my neck because, you know, vampires can't get through cotton.
... They can't? All I know is that they "Can't get into your house without being invited".
Everything the Catholic Church pounded into my 7 year old head from, "Gosh, I'm going to burn in Purgatory for an untold amount of time because I stole another kid's toy then 'confessed' it" to trying to explain Jesus Christ's "circumcision" without mentioning the dreaded word "penis".
I became so scared of going to school on Monday that Sunday became a day of dread!
Fortunately, I got better.
Mirrors were portals for bad spirits & ghosts to come through and torment you at night.
I would sleep with a pocket knife next to me, in case someone broke in. I didn't not live in a dangerous neighboorhood. I also beileved in christianity, so scary
I truly believed I could be kidnapped at any moment. I lived in the country and was supervised pretty much constantly, too, so looking back it 1) makes no sense and 2) created an anxious and overly cautious adult. Thanks, overprotecting mom!
Someone taught me that silly prayer when I was 4 but when I got to the line:
If I should die before I wake". I freaked out and decided that I shouldn't sleep
because then I might die. 60 years later, still have raging insomnia
I had nightmares for weeks after watching The Prisoner of Azkaban.
i was always hot so i had my ceiling fan on 24/7 and one day it started making noises that sounded like an old man saying 'hey girl' over and over and over again and my brother told me santa was stuck in my fan and i cried
In second grade we would go to the playground everyday and there was a dugout there. There was also a storage closet in the dug out and I was in 2nd grade in 2016 so during the whole killer clown thing
I have to finish my story so the fifth graders took this to there advantage and told us that there was a killer clown in the closet. They also told us that it eats second graders. The next day we found what we thought was bloody hand prints but it was just with reddish mud on the wall. To this day I'm still scared to go near even just that playground. I don't even go to the elementary school anymore I'm in middle school 6th grade but still the same district so we can see the elementary from our school. So yeah that was fun
I believed that a man made of shadows with red eyes would watch me sleep, i for some reason decided he was my friend
I watched Ghostbusters as a kid and was truly afraid of that one monster who came out of the bath faucet. Yep, bathtime wasn't the most pleasant.
When I was about six my older sister convinced me that the devil was after me. She showed me a tea stain in her cup that was shaped like a hoof and then we went to see the stable being for my aunt's horses and she pointed out where a horse had stepped on the iron and said: "Look he was here looking for you!"
When I was younger I had this dream about a woman who was going to come to our house with muffins. In my dream, everyone was really scared of Mother Muffin (that was her name) and my parents were freaking out, pacing, everything. I wanted to hide or something but Mum said no, it’s no use. And when Mother Muffin actually came, my family just changed and were really nice, sucking up to this woman and accepting her muffins while I’m just trying to hide behind a chair wondering why she was smiling so creepily and why my siblings and parents trusted her. For a while I was scared of Mother Muffin.
Watched too much Twilight Zone. I believed that if you fell off the bed between the bed and the wall, you could fall into another world or time zone, so I always pushed my bed against the wall... even as an adult.
That scenario is based on a real event in which the author's very young child did exactly that. She was so tightly stuck she couldn't move, and so small her parents couldn't see her, tangled up as she was. My neighbor's kid had a penchant for squeezing into tight places, like into the crack of the sofa or into pillowcases to nap when she was two or three. She scared us more than she did herself doing that, but hey, life, you're weird!
After seeing, "The Watcher in the Woods," I was sure I'd see Karen asking for help if I ever looked at a mirror. I went over a year without looking at any mirrors - I'd close my eyes and run past them in the school bathrooms, I'd cover reflective fixtures when taking a shower, brushed my teeth in the kitchen to avoid the bathroom mirror at home, etc. I was in 3rd grade, must've been like like nine years old.
I thought everything was paused until I looked at it. Like everything was a machine centered around me. Very scary.
My mom and her friend went into business together. There was this unused office for storage in their building. My mom's friend found me in there one day playing "school" and asked me if had written in any of the big old books lying around. I said no (I did) and she said "I hope not because if u did, they'll take your mom to jail"
I was 8. Too scared to tell anyone, and I would lay in bed at night praying that nobody would discover the writing in the books.
That's a terrible thing to say to a child! Hope you've got over it now.
My mom told me that I shouldn’t flush the toilet while she was in the shower (because it would make the water cold). I thought that if I flushed the toilet while my mom was in the shower, the water would get too hot and burn her alive. Had a fun experience with that one.
That demons would come and rip our guts out and spread them along the streets for revenge for building on a dead body or smth.
when I was in the 3 grade some told me that in the storage cleaning closet there was a man that took kids inside and gave them pieces of candy and then he would take a knife and stab them the do it over and over later they told me it wasn't true but 4 years later I would still be scared to sleep or turn my back in the dark
I had a couple of older relatives die when I was pretty young and my family brought me to the funerals. For some reason the one thing I noticed at both of them was that their hands were folded across their chests. Somehow my stupid kid brain came to the conclusion if you fell asleep with your hands folded on your chest you would die. For years there was a lot of nights of me laying in bed terrified that I might fall asleep and fold my hands on my chest and die.
I think it is important for kids to get the opportunity to go to funerals to help them understand what has happened, but I've never understood open caskets. I refused to see either of my brothers once they had died, though I said goodbye to them just beforehand. Even as an adult, I haven't wanted to go to any viewings,, but it's not common where I live anyway.
I used to believe that if you stared at your reflection for too long, it would crawl out of the mirror and eat you. Then it would pretend to be you and take your place, and eventually eat the other members of your family so their reflections could take their places.
That Freddy Kruger could shoot his fingernails off at me under the closet door where I would hide from him.
There was something under my bed that could reach up and grab me. I lined all of my dolls & stuffed animals along the side of my bed against a wall. It would get them first! I likely was breaking Olympic records at the age of 4, the broad jump! From bedroom door to my bed not a single foot hit the floor.
I read a kid's book about kid who found a volcano in his basement. I also watched a lot of old disaster B movies and I was already terribly afraid of lava.
Nobody pointed out in the book that volcanos don't form in people's basements (especially in the US Midwest). I did a daily inspection of the basement for quite a few weeks, then weekly for a while. (I still take a look around while I'm down there, and I'm 53 and know better now ;-)
I read the same book as a child. It was called The Finches' Fabulous Furnace.
I was deathly afraid of creatures I myself had come up with, they were star shaped pillows that wore overalls, no faces or other distinguishing features. I called them Wimpy-Dimples.
Write some stories about them. you created them, so you can change their appearances.
The scariest thing I believed in was Mr.smilemouth. Mr.smilemouth is a creepypasta about a boy's imaginary friend named Mr.smilemouth who tells the boy to do things that kill you also he was the only person that could see Mr.smilemouth.
I was convinced I was going to be kidnapped.
For a while I lived at the end of a long dirt road and had to walk about a mile to and from the bus stop. One day I was walking home in the rain and a car came slowly creeping up behind me. The driver rolled down her window, but only a little bit because it was raining and asked me if I wanted a ride. I ran home as fast as I could, never looking back. I ran in my house and hid under my bed crying. I was so scared I didn't even tell my mom. Later at dinner my mom told me that our neighbor had stopped by. She asked me if I wanted a ride home but she felt horrible because she saw the fear on my face and wanted to tell my mom what happened so she wouldn't worry. My heart starts to race a little even now when I think about that.
When I was 5 we had a house with stairs that had an open space between each step. I believed ET lived under the stairs, and when I went up and down the stairs he would try to grab my feet and eat me so I had to RUN hysterically every time. 30 years later I know who ET is but I still can’t watch the movie he freaks me out lol
When I was small my uncle (Michael) told me that the humps on the country roads in Ireland were dead famine babies and they couldn't dig them up so they just paved over them. I was 15years old before I realised this was not true, and when I was in my 20's we were having a family outing, I told my other uncle (John) what Michael had told me, it turned out Michael still thought it was true as John had told him that when he was younger!
I lived to stay with my aunt in the summer, until her girls told me there was a witch in the attic that ate little girls that they didnt like. They went as far as to make it look bloody on the attic door which was just above my head since I slept on the top bunk. At 43, I am still terrified of attics. I found my dream house and didn't buy it because it had an attic. Traumatized for life.
That's so sad! You should just have bought it and remodeled the attic into your personal relaxing room, your own secret hideout!.... Was what I wanted to suggest but then I remembered my own fear of dark cellars and realized that this is much easier said than done. I'm very sorry it kept you from buying your dream house and I totally get it.
Load More Replies... The local children would play in a rosehip community garden which acted like a maze, with our routes creating passages ways between the thorns. When it was getting darker, we were told the wolf was coming, in my mind this was a hybrid man wolf in tweed and dead set in feeding on the children. I would run home as fast as my legs could carry me.
i have this fear ( still do ) that if i go to the bathroom a snake would have crawled up the pipes and into the toilet and bite me
I lived to stay with my aunt in the summer, until her girls told me there was a witch in the attic that ate little girls that they didnt like. They went as far as to make it look bloody on the attic door which was just above my head since I slept on the top bunk. At 43, I am still terrified of attics. I found my dream house and didn't buy it because it had an attic. Traumatized for life.
That's so sad! You should just have bought it and remodeled the attic into your personal relaxing room, your own secret hideout!.... Was what I wanted to suggest but then I remembered my own fear of dark cellars and realized that this is much easier said than done. I'm very sorry it kept you from buying your dream house and I totally get it.
Load More Replies... The local children would play in a rosehip community garden which acted like a maze, with our routes creating passages ways between the thorns. When it was getting darker, we were told the wolf was coming, in my mind this was a hybrid man wolf in tweed and dead set in feeding on the children. I would run home as fast as my legs could carry me.
i have this fear ( still do ) that if i go to the bathroom a snake would have crawled up the pipes and into the toilet and bite me
