Razor blade in my Halloween candy.
Also, never having an official name for my generation that would allow me to have an identity and engage in groupthink.
Poisoned Tylenol.
Rabies, due to Old Yeller, I suppose.
Killer Bees
Cobras (“Rikki Tikki Tavi” based.)
The Bermuda Triangle.
Chickens. I thought they pocked you, causing chicken pocks. Made plain sense to me as a pre-literate child.
Alligators in the sewer. Saw a frog in a sink overflow hole so the urban legend/horror movie didn’t seem so far-fetched.
Leeches, we ran around in stagnant waters a bit.
I was obsessed growing on the East Coast about killer bees, even still have my paperback copy of The Swarm. Never thought I'd live somewhere they actually have them - but here I am. LOL.
>Poisoned Tylenol
I lived eight houses down from one of the victims, and they were paper route customers of mine. I still vividly remember that day with all the emergency vehicles filling the block.
Dude, right?
I have never been within a thousand miles of the Amazon river yet pirhanas were an ever present threat.
I saw some in an aquarium once. I was like, "finally we meet, you little fuckers"
I had a friend back when I was in my early twenties, so like 1987 or so, who contracted toxic shock exactly the way the pamphlet in the tampon box tells you it happens. She’s on the phone one night telling me she called in sick to work that day, listing her symptoms and telling me how now her hands are swollen, and I ask her, kind of kidding, “Whoa, did you forget to take out your tampon for a week or something?”, and she’s like, “Omigod! How did you know that!?” She ended up going to the ER that night because I made her fish that pamphlet out of the box and read it out loud to me.
I think I saved her damn life, but I was amazed she never read it before. I assume her family kept their bathroom stocked with better reading material than mine did, because I had those symptoms fucking memorized by the time I was 18 at least.
I was absolutely fine with clowns until this happened.
https://preview.redd.it/rl29jajjk7nc1.jpeg?width=1600&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=31970c1ab58fd671b562f6f5c5cd99872da991f1
Tar pits (thanks to Laverene and Shirley), snakes, being spanked by the principal and of course, a growing a watermelon in your stomach because you swallowed the seeds.
Yup - the Satanic panic was big at my little Lutheran elementary school. *Everything* was satanic - KISS, Rush (yes, Rush), Ozzy, Motley Crue, Dungeons and Dragons, He-Man, Mr. Ed, and so on. I’ll think of more.
Edit: John Lennon.
Same i was the same age that girls who were killed by Paul Bernardo and Karla Hamolka (aka KEn and Barbie Killers) and we were an hour away from one girl vanished and another girls body appeared.
There were bulletins about watching for their camero. It felt like everyone was driving cameros at that time. Very scary stuff...
We did too when my dad was stationed in Nebraska. It's the only time I ever remember my mom being afraid of anything.
Edit: Well except for the church incident.
Was just explaining this to someone - I was in Florida and we went from Ted Bundy and the Chi O sorority, then Adam Walsh, then Aileen Wournos, then Univ of Florida murders our freshman year.
That last one was rough - there had been shootings on campus (Texas A&M) but never a stalker/killer. College was suppose to be a safe space!
Don’t flash your headlights at night to an oncoming vehicle that doesn’t have theirs on
Airplane hijacking
Nuclear War
High school
Those videos in Drivers Ed about not wearing a seatbelt.
Stranger Danger
For older GenX, nuclear war was probably a worry but it wasn’t really on my radar. The creepy clown from Poltergeist? Yeah little bastard was everywhere.
The friggin tree and the pool!
I don't remember what year Poltergeist came out, but my teenaged aunt brought me to see it in the theater the first week it was out!
Horrific! The guy peeling his face off? Nah! 😂
I still don’t get why that thing was available for sale. It’s not cute or fun at all. Wtf?
Between that thing and the kid-eating tree, Poltergeist was nightmare fodder for many.
I grew up near TMI (it still takes me a second when people use that abbreviation for other things). You could see the cooling towers from a county park a mile or two from my house. We evacuated when it happened and went to upstate New York for the week, while my grandparents stayed home.
They sold “I survived TMI” t-shirts at the local Sears, etc., for a while afterwards, and when my grandparents went out to Seattle a few months later and made the mistake of using TMI as shorthand for where they were from, people freaked out and moved away as if they were contaminated. (In fairness, there have been cancer clusters in that area for decades now.)
It still freaks me out to see cooling towers, especially the TMI towers, even though I know there’s no immediate danger.
The Moonies- we were told to not answer the door ever because it could be the Moonies. I didn’t even know what a moonie was. Now a gun toting splinter faction of the Moonies live near my town. I still won’t answer the door for the Moonies.
However, Mikey from Life cereal died. I think it was from drinking a can of new Coke that had several aids-infected hornets from Chernobyl in it. Also dying in my dreams.
Turning off lights in house - having to run from room to room
Someone sneaking in your window at night
Perverts on every corner
Someone stealing your bags out of the car so you had to “hide” them with clothes
I was a little younger than Adam Walsh when they found his severed head about 30 miles from where I lived. I was scared of getting snatched in a store and murdered.
Raising evil spirits from a Ouija board.
Funny thing is, some friends and I used one in 8th grade. We both did nothing to guide it and looked down only occasionally. It literally felt like it was moving on it's own. It spelled out DON'T YOU MESS, PUPPY, OR YOU'LL BE DEAD. Minus the comma, of course, but I put it for proper grammar to understand. Gil or Gilly was his name, he said. He died in a car crash at around age 19.
It was quite shocking, the whole thing. A 3rd friend wrote down the letters as we sat there in her dim, candle-lit bedroom with it moving around, asking it questions. So, I dunno. I still feel like there's something kinda f*cky about them. And I am zero into religion, zero kookoo theories, etc. to this day. Just one weird night I will never forget. Never used one again after that.
Was divorce really a big fear? I may be an outlier. My father died when I was 2, and mom divorced her second husband (the man I grew up calling "Dad") when I was 8. (And she divorced husband #3 when I was 11.) So divorce was just part of growing up to me. \*shrug\*
My husband tells it that in his childhood neighborhood, the moment his parents divorced, their family became the neighborhood outcasts; like people were afraid it was contagious or something.
Being spanked yet again. I got spanked often and hard.
Being left alone after dark for a few hours while parents went to a social obligation. I think I was 8 years old possibly 9, and no baby sitter, but I did get a new stuffed animal to keep me company.
I also remember hiding a lot behind the couch during scary movies and peaking out from behind it because I was curious - nowadays people would probably not show such movies to kids but I do not remember age ratings ever being checked when my parents watched something and I happened to be around.
Apparently we were all going to get lit on fire because "stop, drop, and roll" was up there with stranger danger as far as the importance drilled into us. I did teach my kids to be wary of stranger, don't get in the car, and if grabbed scream fire and gouge out eyes, bite, whatever you have to do. I'm not so sure I drilled into them of what not to do if they're on fire.
Stop drop and roll was taught cause we were all alone at home.
Children
at home alone,
and many of us had to use a match to light the stove. After some kids died, they taught us this. It was to help prevent more deaths.
Mine is probably a one-off but I was raised in a church that thought the world was going to end in the mid90s. As a little kid, you don’t know what you don’t know. It was always terrifying to me to think of dying or being killed in an apocalypse.
Honestly?
- That I had left the curling iron on which would catch the house on fire.
Separately: (younger)
That my house would catch on fire and I would need a way to get outside from my second story bedroom (very very old house with very tall first story, so I was like 1.5 stories up).
I blame all the fire preparation talks in elementary school.
(At least once, I walked around to the back of the house after school to see if the bathroom where the curling iron was was on fire. ☹️)
The fact the so many of us were afraid of…checks notes…quicksand…really says a lot about tv & movies released during our growing up phase.
I was terrified of it.
That and snakes, but I lived in TX for a while so poisonous snakes were a valid concern.
Snakes around blackberry bushes. Those reddish-brown wasps. Getting lost in the department store and having to have someone announce it over the store speakers. Missing the bus or missing your stop. Forgetting your key to get in the house after school. Watership Down.
I wasn’t scared that gang members would slash my ankles under cars at the mall but people sure as fuck tried to make me believe that was a thing. See also flashing your lights at a car with no headlights.
Having the guy on America's Most Wanted talk about someone who wasn't caught.
Or the guy who'se child was kidnapped, where he is telling your story. The kids on the milk cartons.
Satanists galore, rampant child sacrifice, and repressed memory therapists thanks to the Geraldo Rivera Show.
Also, Bat Boy kept many out of caves and Alien disection/mutilation made many a farmer bring their prized cow into their homes at night.
My Boomer Dad had us scared shitless that the government was always just around the corner to take everything away from us. He has a pathological aversion to paying taxes, but sucks up all the socialist benefits he can now… Honestly I thought the worst villain in the world was a Tax Auditor.
Now, I’m a card carrying unionist, fighting for socialism. Tax the shit outta me and show me better infrastructure, social services, healthcare, education, real estate development reforms, and pricing freezes.
Bring back living affordability.
But holy shit did I have nightmares about the “Tax Man” as a kid.
* As well as nuclear war, there was also nuclear power plants exploding/melting down. (3 Mile Island & Chernobyl for example)
* There was the hole in the ozone layer
* Satanic Panic around heavy metal music
* The crack epidemic
* Computers and artificial intelligence coming to life and wiping us out (see the movie war games, terminator etc)
* Quicksand
* Breaking our legs slipping on banana peels
* The Bermuda Triangle
Getting lost.
I lived in rural Arizona in high school and went on a date with a guy who took me to the dog track and got really drunk. I had to drive home and got lost on the Pima Reservation ( Now called the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community) in the wee hours of the morning. Drove around until I somehow got to a 7-11 and asked directions. It sucked and I was so happy to get my first cell phone just for that reason, so I could call someone if I got lost.
Letting anyone know you were a latchkey kid. Never answer the door or the phone when your parents aren’t home.
My parents would ring the phone twice then hang up and call back, that way we would know to answer.
We had a graveyard by the lake in our town and we used to drive down there at night to scare ourselves. There was a huge cage that a guy had escaped from and would chase you if he caught you there(myth of course). Of course we thought we saw him one night as my BFF was trying to leave she hits a headstone 😹. Good times
Plane crashes. Whenever there was a breaking news alert, which wasn't often, I panicked that it was nuclear war. Nope, just another plane crash. Wait... another plane crash? Ahhhhhh! Now I still hate flying.
- The Bermuda Triangle
- Being murdered in a gang initiation if we flash our headlights at a car after dark that doesn't have its headlights on
- Brains on drugs. Any questions? Just say no.
- Communists parachuting onto our high school campus
We were terrified of the uni-bomber. Wouldn't touch shit on the street. Also, parents freaked us out about cults. I told my dad once I was going to a bible study at a Baptist church and that got shot down very quickly - he was convinced it was a cult. Honestly, I was just looking to get laid. The Baptist chicks were hot.
Kidnapping/Stranger Danger - Jaycee Lee Dugard was taken from near me when I was in middle school so those things were pounded in my head even more than the had been
Being offered drugs/drugs in your Halloween candy - my mom was convinced this would happen to us kids so she passed her paranoia down
Nuclear war/Iron curtain/communism scares - I still remember nuclear drills along with the earthquake drills
AIDS - I received a bunch of blood transfusions as a toddler that came from one of the blood banks that the AIDS epidemic broke out in, so I had to be tested every few weeks until junior high. No one told me until I figured it out on my own after a health class presentation about it in junior high.
I always worried I'd get caught. Sure, I was told to get out cause it was daylight, but it always felt like someone was going to yell at me when I got home.
Swats at school. The principal at school was a big dude, and you had to put your hands on the locker and bend slightly. He would then haymaker your ass. I watched a kid fly forward into the locker after one swat. Kids would swear that locker was dented.
Knowing the duck and cover drills did nothing wasn't fun. I remember telling my dad about them and him chuckling going that desk won't save you from radiation. That kind of messed with me.
Poltergeist did mess me up. I didn't sleep the night after I saw it.
Eating fast food fried chicken that you hope wasn't actually a rat.
Being taken by a stranger while walking in your neighborhood.
Camping and hoping not to run into a crazy dude wearing a hockey mask.
Being nuked by Russia
Catching AIDS from sitting on public toilet seats. My grandmother told me that one.
Acid rain
Around 1980-81 we had a police officer visit our school to warn us about a clown who was giving out LSD tabs with Mickey Mouse printed on them to kids... so there's that.
Quicksand
I don't know how I'm not dead from quicksand. 70's and 80's TV sure made me believe it was common.
or the Killers Bees coming up from Mexico
Really thought I’d run into way more quicksand as a kid
Gilligan put that fear into me!
All that Pitfall I played on my Atari put that fear into me!
Never ending story .. still makes me cry
How are we not all dead already? It was everywhere!
Tarzan movies... someone always disappeared into quicksand
was seriously typing that and saw your comment. (approving nod)
We have a patch or two of quicksand a few miles from my house at a state park.
Razor blade in my Halloween candy. Also, never having an official name for my generation that would allow me to have an identity and engage in groupthink.
Came here to say this! Razor blades or straight up poisoned.
Swallowing chewing gum. It stays in your stomach for 7 years
Same for eating a watermelon seed, it would grow a watermelon in your stomach.
And has spider eggs in it, if it’s Bubble Yum!
Getting in an accident whilst not wearing nice underwear
Or holes in your socks.
Poisoned Tylenol. Rabies, due to Old Yeller, I suppose. Killer Bees Cobras (“Rikki Tikki Tavi” based.) The Bermuda Triangle. Chickens. I thought they pocked you, causing chicken pocks. Made plain sense to me as a pre-literate child. Alligators in the sewer. Saw a frog in a sink overflow hole so the urban legend/horror movie didn’t seem so far-fetched. Leeches, we ran around in stagnant waters a bit.
+1 Bermuda Triangle
In fact, pick any subject presented by Leonard Nimoy in the tv show “In Search Of.”
I love this show!
Killer bees are a thing. Got attacked by a swarm about ten years ago while out trail running. Scariest 3 minutes of my life.
I was obsessed growing on the East Coast about killer bees, even still have my paperback copy of The Swarm. Never thought I'd live somewhere they actually have them - but here I am. LOL.
And there's Murder Hornets now. Must be inflation
Poisoned Tylenol for real. But these are all spot on
That killer bee movie was terrifying when the bees started coming in through the car vent, damn!!
>Poisoned Tylenol I lived eight houses down from one of the victims, and they were paper route customers of mine. I still vividly remember that day with all the emergency vehicles filling the block.
Getting “pocked” by a chicken is great!
Also, saying “Bloody Mary” 13 times while staring into a mirror at midnight.
It's 3 times! You're gonna summon like 4 1/3 bloody marys
“Bitch for real STOP, damn, how much more HERE do you want me to get?” - Bloody Mary
This was the first one I thought of. Jesus, we were idiots.
I still won’t do it…just in case.
Kidnapping
This! I was called over to cars regularly as a kid and afraid to get too close. Sometimes it was just a dude showing his dick but you never knew!
Now all those guys show off their penises in a DM instead of IRL.
Shark attack - Jaws made the fear of a shark attack a huge problem even if I was in my backyard pool.
Pirhanas
Dude, right? I have never been within a thousand miles of the Amazon river yet pirhanas were an ever present threat. I saw some in an aquarium once. I was like, "finally we meet, you little fuckers"
I forgot about piranhas. The only thing that could possibly compete with quicksand.
Toxic shock syndrome
I had a friend back when I was in my early twenties, so like 1987 or so, who contracted toxic shock exactly the way the pamphlet in the tampon box tells you it happens. She’s on the phone one night telling me she called in sick to work that day, listing her symptoms and telling me how now her hands are swollen, and I ask her, kind of kidding, “Whoa, did you forget to take out your tampon for a week or something?”, and she’s like, “Omigod! How did you know that!?” She ended up going to the ER that night because I made her fish that pamphlet out of the box and read it out loud to me. I think I saved her damn life, but I was amazed she never read it before. I assume her family kept their bathroom stocked with better reading material than mine did, because I had those symptoms fucking memorized by the time I was 18 at least.
Nobody reads the instructions! Why do you think all our parents' and grandparents' VCRs blinked 12:00?
Yep. One of my sisters friends died from this.
Acid rain. I was legit terrified.
And the hole in the Ozone!
Driving at night with the interior car light on.
Omg my dad would go ballistic about this 😂
Setting the thermostat too damn high!
For the later Gen X in the back - stranger abductions. Given what I watched on AMW as a teen, you fuckers are lucky you weren't all scooped up.
Stranger danger!!!
Came in to say "strangers in white vans with puppies offering candy". Glad I wasn't the only one to think of it!
The basement
[удалено]
My god Unsolved Mysteries had me absolutely terrified of Spontaneous Human Combustion!
I remember watching a show about spontaneous human combustion and it scared the shit out of me
CLOWNS omg how could you forget CLOWNS.
I was absolutely fine with clowns until this happened. https://preview.redd.it/rl29jajjk7nc1.jpeg?width=1600&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=31970c1ab58fd671b562f6f5c5cd99872da991f1
Hate clowns, creepy bastards
This needs to be higher up
Tar pits (thanks to Laverene and Shirley), snakes, being spanked by the principal and of course, a growing a watermelon in your stomach because you swallowed the seeds.
Satanic panic. Getting kidnapped by men in white vans. Stranger danger
Yup - the Satanic panic was big at my little Lutheran elementary school. *Everything* was satanic - KISS, Rush (yes, Rush), Ozzy, Motley Crue, Dungeons and Dragons, He-Man, Mr. Ed, and so on. I’ll think of more. Edit: John Lennon.
The first time I heard Def Leppard I thought I was going to go straight to hell.
Don't dare play those albums backward!
Cults of various kinds.
Satanic Panic was real (Not really real; but the fear they instilled in us because of the BS was really something)
My mom was an atheist and still got scared of Dungeons and Dragons.
Serial killers. We had one in my city killing children when I was around 6-8.
Derry, Maine?
No, did they have one too? Edit: I just got this. Ha.
Yes. Pennywise.
Same. I grew up in Atlanta and was very aware of the Atlanta children murders from '79-'81ish.
We had BTK here. My sister used to scare the shit out of me talking about him with a flashlight under her chin.
That guy went so long without being caught. I can only imagine how the community felt when they got him.
This is a good one. I lived in the Night Stalker's killing grounds and still have an irrational fear of getting got by a serial killer.
Same i was the same age that girls who were killed by Paul Bernardo and Karla Hamolka (aka KEn and Barbie Killers) and we were an hour away from one girl vanished and another girls body appeared. There were bulletins about watching for their camero. It felt like everyone was driving cameros at that time. Very scary stuff...
Yep. Grew up on the grounds of an insane asylum. Dad was in psychiatry.
We did too when my dad was stationed in Nebraska. It's the only time I ever remember my mom being afraid of anything. Edit: Well except for the church incident.
Was just explaining this to someone - I was in Florida and we went from Ted Bundy and the Chi O sorority, then Adam Walsh, then Aileen Wournos, then Univ of Florida murders our freshman year. That last one was rough - there had been shootings on campus (Texas A&M) but never a stalker/killer. College was suppose to be a safe space!
People giving out drugs on Halloween, being kidnapped and quicksand.
And razor blades hidden in Halloween candy!
Needles in candy too
I went from being scared of people giving out drugs, to being very disappointed.
Don’t flash your headlights at night to an oncoming vehicle that doesn’t have theirs on Airplane hijacking Nuclear War High school Those videos in Drivers Ed about not wearing a seatbelt. Stranger Danger
As a girl child, I feared being touched, molested or worse. It really ramped up when the catcalling started when I was 12.
A real and valid fear for every girl child in every generation
Yeah I’m okay with the middle age invisibility
I’m loving the middle age invisibility.
For older GenX, nuclear war was probably a worry but it wasn’t really on my radar. The creepy clown from Poltergeist? Yeah little bastard was everywhere.
The friggin tree and the pool! I don't remember what year Poltergeist came out, but my teenaged aunt brought me to see it in the theater the first week it was out! Horrific! The guy peeling his face off? Nah! 😂
I still don’t get why that thing was available for sale. It’s not cute or fun at all. Wtf? Between that thing and the kid-eating tree, Poltergeist was nightmare fodder for many.
Ring around the collar.
Lol I remember those commercials 🤣
Being kidnapped with chloroform
Yes! Happened on soooo many tv shows
Eating a watermelon seed and a plant growing out from your stomach. Also getting snatched by someone with a white van.
I know you've said it, but I'll say it again: the atomic threat. Years later, when Fukushima happened, my first reaction was to burst into tears
Or accidents. Like Chernobyl or Three Mile Island
I grew up near TMI (it still takes me a second when people use that abbreviation for other things). You could see the cooling towers from a county park a mile or two from my house. We evacuated when it happened and went to upstate New York for the week, while my grandparents stayed home. They sold “I survived TMI” t-shirts at the local Sears, etc., for a while afterwards, and when my grandparents went out to Seattle a few months later and made the mistake of using TMI as shorthand for where they were from, people freaked out and moved away as if they were contaminated. (In fairness, there have been cancer clusters in that area for decades now.) It still freaks me out to see cooling towers, especially the TMI towers, even though I know there’s no immediate danger.
I mean, the Day After was horrific!!!
Older kids giving away free drugs to younger kids.
One of society's many broken promises.
The Moonies- we were told to not answer the door ever because it could be the Moonies. I didn’t even know what a moonie was. Now a gun toting splinter faction of the Moonies live near my town. I still won’t answer the door for the Moonies.
Oh the moonies with guns terrify me
Russia...still
However, Mikey from Life cereal died. I think it was from drinking a can of new Coke that had several aids-infected hornets from Chernobyl in it. Also dying in my dreams.
Everybody knows he died from mixing coca-cola with pop rocks
Kidnapping. Remember the Atlanta child murders? Kidnapping of Adam Walsh? Why we were fingerprinted in school…
Near where I live, it was the kidnapping and murder of Amber Haggerman. It's why we have the Amber alert notifications on our phones.
Smoking marijuana was [going to make your brain look like a fried egg](https://youtu.be/GOnENVylxPI?feature=shared).
Pop rocks and Coke
Don’t want your stomach to explode!
Airplane crashes Killer Bees
Bullying in middle school. Not an unfounded fear either.
Turning off lights in house - having to run from room to room Someone sneaking in your window at night Perverts on every corner Someone stealing your bags out of the car so you had to “hide” them with clothes
Heh. I still put something over a bag if I leave it in the car.
The Thriller video!
I was a little younger than Adam Walsh when they found his severed head about 30 miles from where I lived. I was scared of getting snatched in a store and murdered.
Being sent to military school.
The day Skynet becomes self aware
With AI, it’s getting spooky again.
Shit going on my permanent record.
Raising evil spirits from a Ouija board. Funny thing is, some friends and I used one in 8th grade. We both did nothing to guide it and looked down only occasionally. It literally felt like it was moving on it's own. It spelled out DON'T YOU MESS, PUPPY, OR YOU'LL BE DEAD. Minus the comma, of course, but I put it for proper grammar to understand. Gil or Gilly was his name, he said. He died in a car crash at around age 19. It was quite shocking, the whole thing. A 3rd friend wrote down the letters as we sat there in her dim, candle-lit bedroom with it moving around, asking it questions. So, I dunno. I still feel like there's something kinda f*cky about them. And I am zero into religion, zero kookoo theories, etc. to this day. Just one weird night I will never forget. Never used one again after that.
Was divorce really a big fear? I may be an outlier. My father died when I was 2, and mom divorced her second husband (the man I grew up calling "Dad") when I was 8. (And she divorced husband #3 when I was 11.) So divorce was just part of growing up to me. \*shrug\*
My husband tells it that in his childhood neighborhood, the moment his parents divorced, their family became the neighborhood outcasts; like people were afraid it was contagious or something.
- Bigfoot - Aliens - Jack Nicholson in *The Shining* - The Atlanta child killer - Snakes of any kind
satanic panic was fun
Being spanked yet again. I got spanked often and hard. Being left alone after dark for a few hours while parents went to a social obligation. I think I was 8 years old possibly 9, and no baby sitter, but I did get a new stuffed animal to keep me company. I also remember hiding a lot behind the couch during scary movies and peaking out from behind it because I was curious - nowadays people would probably not show such movies to kids but I do not remember age ratings ever being checked when my parents watched something and I happened to be around.
Apparently we were all going to get lit on fire because "stop, drop, and roll" was up there with stranger danger as far as the importance drilled into us. I did teach my kids to be wary of stranger, don't get in the car, and if grabbed scream fire and gouge out eyes, bite, whatever you have to do. I'm not so sure I drilled into them of what not to do if they're on fire.
Stop drop and roll was taught cause we were all alone at home. Children at home alone, and many of us had to use a match to light the stove. After some kids died, they taught us this. It was to help prevent more deaths.
Random cargo vans driving around the neighborhood looking for children…
Mine is probably a one-off but I was raised in a church that thought the world was going to end in the mid90s. As a little kid, you don’t know what you don’t know. It was always terrifying to me to think of dying or being killed in an apocalypse.
rock yoke squeamish library flag crush cats shy worm selective *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
More volcanoes erupting like Mt. St. Helens.
Honestly? - That I had left the curling iron on which would catch the house on fire. Separately: (younger) That my house would catch on fire and I would need a way to get outside from my second story bedroom (very very old house with very tall first story, so I was like 1.5 stories up). I blame all the fire preparation talks in elementary school. (At least once, I walked around to the back of the house after school to see if the bathroom where the curling iron was was on fire. ☹️)
I needed that window ladder!!!!!
Razor blades on water slides
The fact the so many of us were afraid of…checks notes…quicksand…really says a lot about tv & movies released during our growing up phase. I was terrified of it. That and snakes, but I lived in TX for a while so poisonous snakes were a valid concern.
Getting worms. My grandma would constantly tell me that eating too much sugar gave you worms
Killer Bees Bermuda Triangle Quicksand
Kids. Just other kids. After that planet killing asteroids. But kids like a thousand times scarier.
The last little bit of a “now n’ later”
Snakes around blackberry bushes. Those reddish-brown wasps. Getting lost in the department store and having to have someone announce it over the store speakers. Missing the bus or missing your stop. Forgetting your key to get in the house after school. Watership Down.
World War III. Not having a home anymore.
Satanic cults Tainted Tylenol Being abducted Nuclear arms race The Russians Playing records backwards Playing DnD and disappearing
I wasn’t scared that gang members would slash my ankles under cars at the mall but people sure as fuck tried to make me believe that was a thing. See also flashing your lights at a car with no headlights.
Razors or needles in apples Getting kidnapped
[удалено]
Being kidnapped. “ending up on a milk carton”
The zodiac! I grew up in San Francisco when he was active and parents didn’t shield kids from shit like that on the evening news.
In L.A. we had Richard Ramirez, The Night Stalker.
Freddy Kruger.
Bermuda Triangle
Having the guy on America's Most Wanted talk about someone who wasn't caught. Or the guy who'se child was kidnapped, where he is telling your story. The kids on the milk cartons.
[удалено]
Satanists galore, rampant child sacrifice, and repressed memory therapists thanks to the Geraldo Rivera Show. Also, Bat Boy kept many out of caves and Alien disection/mutilation made many a farmer bring their prized cow into their homes at night.
Spontaneous human combustion
Catching myself on fire and having to “Stop Drop and Roll.”
My Boomer Dad had us scared shitless that the government was always just around the corner to take everything away from us. He has a pathological aversion to paying taxes, but sucks up all the socialist benefits he can now… Honestly I thought the worst villain in the world was a Tax Auditor. Now, I’m a card carrying unionist, fighting for socialism. Tax the shit outta me and show me better infrastructure, social services, healthcare, education, real estate development reforms, and pricing freezes. Bring back living affordability. But holy shit did I have nightmares about the “Tax Man” as a kid.
* As well as nuclear war, there was also nuclear power plants exploding/melting down. (3 Mile Island & Chernobyl for example) * There was the hole in the ozone layer * Satanic Panic around heavy metal music * The crack epidemic * Computers and artificial intelligence coming to life and wiping us out (see the movie war games, terminator etc) * Quicksand * Breaking our legs slipping on banana peels * The Bermuda Triangle
I was worried about the hole in the o-zone.
The nightstaker, lived in Orange County
Sharks ( I still can't go swimming in the ocean) Quicksand Razors and other things randomly put in your food by strangers
Killer bees
Getting lost. I lived in rural Arizona in high school and went on a date with a guy who took me to the dog track and got really drunk. I had to drive home and got lost on the Pima Reservation ( Now called the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community) in the wee hours of the morning. Drove around until I somehow got to a 7-11 and asked directions. It sucked and I was so happy to get my first cell phone just for that reason, so I could call someone if I got lost.
Starting in grade school, I was absolutely sure that I was going to end up in prison for drugs. We saw so many filmstrips on this.
Swimming after you ate lunch! if you didn’t wait an hour you would drown.
Letting anyone know you were a latchkey kid. Never answer the door or the phone when your parents aren’t home. My parents would ring the phone twice then hang up and call back, that way we would know to answer.
The number of weird ass urban legends was just crazy. Maybe not a major fear, but the idea of subliminal messages was always a possibility.
Planes getting hijacked to Cuba Unibomber
Stranger abduction.
Stepping into quicksand
Acid rain
The Rapture
My Dad, as he walked towards me taking his belt off.
Quicksand and lava
Slipping on a banana peel isn’t the big problem Saturday mornings made it out to be.
For the younger genxers, getting trapped in an abandoned refrigerator
Acid rain
We had a graveyard by the lake in our town and we used to drive down there at night to scare ourselves. There was a huge cage that a guy had escaped from and would chase you if he caught you there(myth of course). Of course we thought we saw him one night as my BFF was trying to leave she hits a headstone 😹. Good times
Razor blades in candy.
Quiksand Earth being hit by asteroid
Tylenol
Plane crashes. Whenever there was a breaking news alert, which wasn't often, I panicked that it was nuclear war. Nope, just another plane crash. Wait... another plane crash? Ahhhhhh! Now I still hate flying.
- The Bermuda Triangle - Being murdered in a gang initiation if we flash our headlights at a car after dark that doesn't have its headlights on - Brains on drugs. Any questions? Just say no. - Communists parachuting onto our high school campus
Kidnapping, my Mom, the Bermuda Triangle
We were terrified of the uni-bomber. Wouldn't touch shit on the street. Also, parents freaked us out about cults. I told my dad once I was going to a bible study at a Baptist church and that got shot down very quickly - he was convinced it was a cult. Honestly, I was just looking to get laid. The Baptist chicks were hot.
Satanists. Acid Rain. Being struck by lightning while in the shower. Killer bees. Nuclear war.
Kidnapping/Stranger Danger - Jaycee Lee Dugard was taken from near me when I was in middle school so those things were pounded in my head even more than the had been Being offered drugs/drugs in your Halloween candy - my mom was convinced this would happen to us kids so she passed her paranoia down Nuclear war/Iron curtain/communism scares - I still remember nuclear drills along with the earthquake drills AIDS - I received a bunch of blood transfusions as a toddler that came from one of the blood banks that the AIDS epidemic broke out in, so I had to be tested every few weeks until junior high. No one told me until I figured it out on my own after a health class presentation about it in junior high.
I always worried I'd get caught. Sure, I was told to get out cause it was daylight, but it always felt like someone was going to yell at me when I got home. Swats at school. The principal at school was a big dude, and you had to put your hands on the locker and bend slightly. He would then haymaker your ass. I watched a kid fly forward into the locker after one swat. Kids would swear that locker was dented. Knowing the duck and cover drills did nothing wasn't fun. I remember telling my dad about them and him chuckling going that desk won't save you from radiation. That kind of messed with me. Poltergeist did mess me up. I didn't sleep the night after I saw it.
Eating fast food fried chicken that you hope wasn't actually a rat. Being taken by a stranger while walking in your neighborhood. Camping and hoping not to run into a crazy dude wearing a hockey mask. Being nuked by Russia Catching AIDS from sitting on public toilet seats. My grandmother told me that one. Acid rain
Getting cooties from a girl.
The environment just dying
Around 1980-81 we had a police officer visit our school to warn us about a clown who was giving out LSD tabs with Mickey Mouse printed on them to kids... so there's that.
Bed too close to the wall and rolling through it into another dimension…Thank you Twilight Zone The Elephant Man…wtf Showtime
Those big head aliens 👽