I was forced to go to a charismatic church as a kid. We’re talking speaking in tongues, cast out demons, and all that bullshit. As such, The Devil was present in a lot of my childhood fears.

I was convinced I could feel him breathing on my face at night in bed whenever I did something “wrong”.

I hated this Santa Clause decoration that my grandmother hung in my bedroom window every year (we lived in first floor apartment facing the street). When the streetlamp outside of my window hit it at night it looked the head of the Devil in silhouette.

I hated it when my family watched Unsolved Mysteries or things like that because there was always a chance they would do a segment on demonic hauntings or shit like that.

Religious trauma is a hell of a drug.

My mom always kept an old ceramic vase shaped like a little girl painted in a blue dress. It creeped and my sister out it gave off such weird vibes. Its still in moms room today and at this point I’ll probably inherit it and keep it just for memories even if its still a touch weird.

Not really a thing a own, but definitely something I encounter a lot. It’s an instrument you often hear in classical music, and sometimes ballads, and even rock tracks. A lot of the ancient cartoons used it as well. It scared me as a kid, and I still feel physically uncomfortable every time I hear it.

It’s called a timpano, plural: timpani. It doesn’t really elevate a track at all for me, it just makes it more frightening.

I used to own one of these SpongeBob lamps…

My dad had this segment of a tree trunk about three feet high with a large knot in the side. Inside the knot was carved a super-realistic human face. That thing creeped me the fuck out.

My aunt collected painted ceramic clown dolls. Her house was a fucking nightmare, like some shit out of a horror movie. They were in every room. I only stayed there once.

My parent’s house has a long, dark hallway (partially lit by night lights). My bedroom was near the end with my bed positioned so when going to sleep the last thing I would see was the door at the end of the hallway. Pareidolia being a thing, child me saw the gap under the door as a mouth with the door knob as an eye.

That door became the big bad of a long series of nightmares. I only remember bits of the dreams, but it was out to get me, with unknown creatures securing me to a gurney and rolling me down the hallway (now longer and lit by torches casting creepy shadows) to the door as a sacrifice… really weird, kid nightmare stuff. But what still creeps me out, decades later was the last dream about the door.

My parents had renovated the attic to form a new bedroom and storage closet. At last I would be moving away from the door. One of the last nights I slept in the old bedroom, I dreamed the door was lounging on the stairs, and the message was clear “I can get you up there”.

My brother had a Buzz Lightyear toy. With the head sealed in a closed, unremovable dome, buttons to play catch phrases from the movie, and popout wings… not only would it randomly speak with no one around, but the head (sealed in plastic) slowly rotated over months to face backwards.

We took it apart, fixed the head, and weeks later it was backwards again… we threw it out.

We had a small animatronic monkey toy, similar to this one below, but in a sitting position snd with deep black eyes. We didn’t play with it (try to imagine why) so it was on the top shelf of the room.

When we used the A/C in the hot summer, because it was high in the room, its face was slightly lit, and because in the resting position the head of the monkey looked at his side and below, it would end up looking at me while I was sleeping, barely lit by a status LED.

It actually didn’t bother me always, but if I woke up from a nightmare it was the first thing I saw and usually meant not going back to sleep.

Bonus: I also hated mirrors. When going to the bathroom in the night, while cleaning my hands I was terrified of looking down from the mirror and look up back to it, I always imagined some horror creature like a ghost, or the girl from The Ring to happear behind my shoulders.

Kind of? Maybe?

Back when I was about five, I was walking with my grandfather and some cousins.

We came across a cow skeleton in a field.

For whatever reason, some of the cousins wanted bones. I ended up with a tooth, one of the molars.

By the time I got home, I had halfway forgotten about it. It freaked me out. In my head, the tooth was haunted by a cow ghost, and this was a scary idea.

But I couldn’t get rid of it. I had to hide it. Problem was I knew where it was, so it still creeped me out for over a year until I finally got up the nerve to take it back.

Weird as fuck, I know. What’s funny is that I ended up having a small bone collection lol; some skulls, some long bones, baculum, and an almost intact dog skeleton. That’s what I have left, I used to have more.

There was also the back room. That didn’t get creepy until I was a little older, and became aware that I had an older brother that died before I was born. I can’t say I was scared of the room, I wasn’t. But in my young brain, despite him never having lived in this house, that was “his” room. Why? No fucking clue, it was used for storage, my mom’s sewing, and the spare bathroom. There was nothing about it that pointed to a haunting or anything.

But I didn’t want to go in the room. Again, not out of fear, I just didn’t want to bother him. It was like going in the room would somehow interrupt his sleep or something.

What’s really fucking weird is that I’ve never believed in ghosts. Ghost stories never scared me, I never saw a movie and thought ghosts were anything but fiction. Despite that, my brain managed to find exceptions to that belief lol. The cow and my brother weren’t ghost ghosts, it was some other thing that I could only associate with ghosts, and I have no clue what the fuck my brain was doing other than its usual thing where I could wind myself up with imagination and the real world would drop away.

It isn’t like I really thought there was a ghost present, or that there was anything real involved, but it was still giving me that same frisson of the numinous the way deja-vu feels mixed with a sense of mystery.

I don’t know. I was a weird kid sometimes :)

I was freaked out by pool drains, lights, and jet holes, basically anything other than the water and tile. I’d have nightmares about them. Loved swimming, but I’d panic as I got to the deep end, and I couldn’t put my feet down on the floor without checking what was beneath me. I couldn’t even look at them.

My parents got me a toy anatomical body model thing for christmas one year. Idk why, I wasn’t remotely into medicine. But they put it at the foot of my bed, and so I woke up in the middle of the night to a skeleton zombie thing staring at me .

It was similar to this:

I didn’t have any objects.

What I did have was a seemingly inocuous video tape. It was called ‘Steps’, and it was a series of simple childrens’ songs for foreign kids who were learning english.

But there were TWO songs that really, REALLY freaked the fuck out of 5 year old me.

The first one was a song about how a kid went to school and had a red pencil etc. – Except it was sung in this very dramatic, very soulful voice that made it feel like we were supposed to mourn the death of this poor kid who had gone to school and never returned.

The second one was a song about eating your vegetables and shit. Think of any song like that, what you’re imagining is probably pretty close to what it was like in the tape. But the imagery consisted of some singing fruit. And there was a bit where an apple would look right at the viewer – And SMILE. With a set of (what seemed to be, it’s been 25 years) VERY REALISTIC HUMAN TEETH.

These two songs always had me running for cover behind the couch. Surprisingly I enjoyed the rest of the tape.

My babysitter was watching a movie where a lady in a car caught on fire and burned to death. When a guy opens the door her burned body lunges at him. Thankfully his sister made him turn it off so I didn’t see anything else. But it scared the crap out of 4 year old me. That night I couldn’t sleep and wanted to go to my parents room. But their room was at the end of this long hallway and there was a big hutch just before their door. Somehow my 4 year old brain was convinced that the “burned lady” was hiding behind that hutch. I was so scared I would not go near my parent’s room for months.

Attics at my grandparents. One had wasps every year. The other had a small dark room that wound up in your nightmare whether you wanted it to or not.

When I was maybe 5 or 6 my mom had hung a couple of “Cydney” clown prints in frames on the wall in my room. Feel free to look them up online for a whimsical taste of 60s-era coulrophobia fuel 😬.

Every time we went out of town to visit relatives the glass on one of them would be fogged over when we came back. It was creepy as shit and I would refuse to step foot into my room until my dad wiped the fog off the glass.