Category: Traumafessions

The first one being the episode of the rugrats "In the dreamtime" that episode used to make me cry when I was little and if I saw it was on I would run out of the room screaming, it gave me nightmares. It's an episode where Chuckie, one of the main characters, is having a bad dream, and at several points in the episode he comes across one of his friends or family (Tommy, Stu, Chaz) turned away from him, so he taps them on the back and they turn around and with distorted faces say "I'm not (insert name of who ever turned around here)!" Lots of Rugrats episodes spooked me, but that one I flat out hated, I'm 20 years old now and still don't like it.

Next being a couple of children's books, I forget the author, but they were called "There's a nightmare in my closet" and "There's something in my attic." I think. Anywho, these were straight up children's books about things that go bump in the night, it had pictures of the monsters, those are what scared me, I used to take them and hide them alot because looking at them scared me. I still have the books actually, though they reside in my little sister's room now, she's 9 and laughs when I tell her they used to scare me, she thinks the monsters are cute and the story is funny (Which, they really are cute stories, I was just a scaredy cat.)

The last one was a doll named "Amazing Amy" I thought this doll was evil and I was terrified of robotic things anyhow, I didn't like how this doll could talk and seemed to know when I would feed her the wrong foods or dress her in clothes she didn't want to wear. My big brother would often find her hidden in the house and would sneak her into my room at night and place her standing by my doorway facing my bed. Years later another doll named "Amazing Ally" came out, she was alright until she told me and my sister she needed new batteries. We taped her up in a box and stuck her in the top corner of the closet. Then just a couple years ago we got my youngest sister (she was 7 at the time, 9 now) the "Amazing Amanda" doll. Her robotic face has all these things under her doll skin that cause her to have facial expressions, but when we first turned her on she malfunctioned and all the robotics began to move at once causing her eyes to open and shut, her mouth to open and close, and her entire face to just move awkwardly as if she had something trapped under her skin. It made my sister cry and we had to take out it's batteries. Long story short, robotic dolls are spooky.

I hope these stories entertained, I just recently discovered your website!

When I was in the heart of my youth, I was fascinated by Unsolved Mysteries. Afternoons would never be complete without hearing that iconic theme play on the TV, soon followed by Robert Stack's deep, grave voice informing us of the latest case that had come his way. The show served as a sort of gateway into the strange and bizarre that I loved so much, but the dark allure of Unsolved Mysteries was that all the stories were true. They had happened in real places and to real people. Was that even possible? Could such things as alien abductions and hauntings really happen to people?

Well, according to Robert Stack, yeah, they could.

Those segments concerning said abductions and hauntings traumatized me plenty. The idea of being snatched away from this world, suddenly and inexplicably, to be studied and examined by cold, calculating hands was very scary for a kid. And the ghost stuff? Fuggedaboutit. I did and still am immensely disturbed by the notion that people who die can have the power to come back for… whatever reason. There was one segment in particular that burned its way into my memory and still stirs a shiver out of me when I think about it.

It was "The Devil's Backbone" story, and I will always see that dreadful apparition as I did that day from behind a shaking pillow. It was that damn cloaked monk-figure, standing outside a window, looking in at the occupant, at ME, with eyes of ice. And worst of all, there was this horrible scream, one that sounded like pure torture, the torture I would surely face if the ghost monk laid his dead hands on me. It was absolutely horrifying, and I've never forgotten it.

But it wasn't the worst part.

The real bad stuff was saved for the homicide and disappearance segments. There was no story or case in particular that clung to my mind. What was so terrifying to me at the time (and still now) were the pictures they showed of the victims. Smiling, cheerful portraits of mothers, of children at baseball games, old men who had been peacefully living in their Florida homes until they (suddenly and inexplicably) disappeared. Or were murdered, their bodies found in river banks, in the desert, or in their beds. Those pictures held so much terror for me… knowing that these people had been taken out of existence was my first introduction into just what a strange and bizarre world this really was.

There was a story I read in a childrens' book about scary legends that was about a nasty woman who, as a punishment by God, was swallowed up by the earth, never to be seen again. That's why those pictures were so disturbing to me. They were of happy and loving people… swallowed up by the earth.

UNK SEZ: Thanks for this haunting traumafession Jose! Folks you can unearth more of Jose at his main hangout MEPHISTO'S CASTLE!

Hey, Kindertrauma! This is my first Traumafession and it's a little spontaneous. I just caught a glimpse of the cover to STAY OUT OF THE BASEMENT and it took me back, way back. I don't know if I even read this book, because the story I'd made up about its contents has only a few points in common with the actual storyline, or maybe seen the TV adaptation — the neighbor girl from across the street used to lock me in her basement with the lights off and the TV playing the television series, which beats getting abandoned at the park by older siblings for sheer sadism toward skittish younger children. I couldn't even reverse-Image Search the book's cover to double-check the title without covering my eyes with one hand. I was afraid of a lot of things as a kid (asphyxiation, JOEL GREY as the Emcee in CABARET, and everybody's favorite Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark) but none of them seemed as present and real as the fear reserved for the Goosebumps stories.

The cover image for STAY OUT OF THE BASEMENT is pretty distinctive, not as iconic as Slappy the Dummy but still viscerally memorable — a slimy, wizened green hand, gripping the edge of an ordinary-looking white door. In my memory until just now, it wasn't just slimy but dripping green blood. Six-year-old me didn't get that it was supposed to be some kind of human-plant hybrid, I mistook the gnarly buds and branches for some kind of horrible sores.

The actual plot of STAY OUT OF THE BASEMENT does involve dripping green blood at one point but the actual specifics are completely different than what I'd pictured. The dad in the story is some kind of botanist, experimenting on plants down there after getting laid off at work, but my own dad had a woodworking shop in our own basement and so I assumed that's what Dr. Brewer was up to. To me the dripping green blood wasn't because he was some kind of human/plant hybrid but because of some kind of horror movie plague — dad cuts his hand on a saw or a rusty nail, starts acting weird and pretty soon he's a pustule-covered monster who bleeds green and admonishes you to, "Stay out of the basement!" so you don't get snagged on a rusty nail too.

I'd been told about tetanus, the specter of infection or lockjaw was very real to six-year-old hypochondriac me. The thought that something like that could happen to my dad was much scarier than the thought that the resulting monster might try to infect me too or go on a rampage whereupon I'd be forced to discern my real father from the human/plant clone.

Hell, I'm still terrified of tetanus and lockjaw. Now I can be afraid of MRSA, too. And the really terrible thing is, I still can't go near our basement door without fearing that oozing green hand. And my dad's still hard at work in his shop down there.

— Alex

The most dramatic childhood horror moment for me occurred at age 13, back in 1992 during a Halloween party at my friend Charlotte's house in Selston (not far from Nottingham).

We'd all been out with her achingly cool older brothers (early 20's) to rent horror films (from memory, DOLLY DEAREST and POLTERGEIST 2), but having arrived back to the house at about 9pm, we switched on BBC1 to be met with a title screen for "GhostWatch", which I'm sure you're familiar with. Being 13, impressionable and a little immature for my age, the hour and a half-ish long mock-live "real" feed from the incredibly normal looking "haunted" house in London absolutely SHAT me up. What made it so scary was the squeaky clean presenters we all knew from kids TV – Craig Charles (of Red Dwarf fame) and Sarah Green being so incredibly convincing that the show was live.

The juxtaposition between the everyday and absolute horror was incredibly clever. We also had no idea it was a "play". That, and the fact that the titular ghost, which we screamed at as it was glimpsed and hinted at in incredibly quick camera pans and reflective patio doors etc, was a 6 foot, cross dressing, child-murdering pedophile name "Pipes" by the (at the time) convincing child actresses portraying the two daughters.

I have never been so utterly scared in my whole life, even surrounded by 10-12 prep school mates and my hosts older brothers, because it was portrayed as being live and utterly real. So real-seeming in fact, that it I believe it was banned by the BBC. I bought it a couple of years ago via their website on DVD (the ban apparently lifted) and even at the age of 32, it's still bloody scary. Yes, it seems hammier now, but the ghost itself, horrible cat scratching noises and the horrific croaking, gasping voice emitting from one of the daughters as she channels Pipes is still terrifying.

Even Charlotte's older brothers were shaken up, and as we all camped out in the sitting room to sleep – I was scared stiff despite being surrounded by my friends. Usually, I'd have been fine even if I had someone with me – not with GhostWatch, and in fact had to sleep in my brother's room on a mattress for at least a month following that night. And I don't mind admitting that!

— quick camera pan….HOLY SHIT DID YOU SEE THAT!!!!

Thanks so much for considering posting my experience, keep up the good work!

— Alex B.

UNK SEZ::Oh how I love GHOSTWATCH! It puts most faux-reality horror to absolute shame! Sorry about your trauma Alex but I stand here in utter jealousy that you got to experience GHOSTWATCH in the fullest way possible without completely loosing your mind! Kids, For more on this highly effective & influential program, check out its official site HERE! And if you'd like to watch GHOSTWATCH in it's entirety just jump on over and meet Pipes HERE!

Hi Kindertrauma!

It's been a while since I last sent in a traumafession (though by the looks of the comments to that last, I may have inadvertently traumatized someone's kidlet – sorry!) so I thought I'd share another one.

As in my first two, sound played a significant role in this one as well. If any other readers were watching U.S. public television in the late 1980s or early 1990s, they probably saw more than a few Canadian children's television programs. I definitely did, and I'm the happier for it. Most of these were pretty warm and fuzzy, and the source of much enjoyment for tiny me. There was one SIZE SMALL snippet that I could never entirely enjoy, however.

I know it probably sounds ridiculous that Miss Helen's announcement of, "It's cookies in the kitchen time!" left me dismayed, but it routinely did. The music has a lot to do with it; something about that synthesizer note buzzing in the background just plain gets under my skin to this day. The lyrics are quite innocuous, and taken on their own, they're really rather cute. But, being a neurotic little girl (haven't changed much either, only now I'm a bit taller) with a fear of hot and burning things among others, kindergarten-ish me subconsciously took the idea of an ovenful of baking cookies and ran with it. Figures I'd get a nightmare from something so harmless. In it, the "Ooh they're bakin'" line was followed by "Ooh they're burnin'", a smoke alarm, continued menacing music, and a whole host of other things as time went on–yes, this nightmare stuck with me and expanded as I got older! Brrrrr! … I'm only now realizing just how big my issues with fire were as a child.

Sorry, Miss Helen, if you're reading this. I know you didn't mean to traumatize anybody. One sketch does not an otherwise delightful viewing experience ruin, I assure you.

— Chanter

The "Satanic Panic" of the 1980s was in full swing in my small town when I was introduced to one of the main recruiting tools of the dark lord, Dungeons and Dragons. TSR's role playing game was a one way ticket to a steady diet of brimstone and piping hot Fresca for all eternity. A few of my older friends had mentioned that they were starting to play, and I was more than just a little interested. I had stumbled across a copy of the "Dungeon Masters Guide" at my local Waldenbooks and was captivated by the cover, a wizard or mage type person fought valiantly with a Paladin companion against a giant red devil wielding an equally giant scimitar. I remember glancing around the bookstore hoping that the devil or one of his minions wouldn't notice me as I dared to pick up the book. As if on cue a small black pamphlet fell out of the book and on the floor. It was the infamous Jack Chick tract, "Dark Dungeons."

Jack Chick tracts had already traumatized me for a few years prior to this point. The tract, "Bewitched" had exposed me to the horrors of drug use and the day to day battle that praying grandmothers had with Satan himself. The image of poor Ashley Wilson's face melting off as she looked into a mirror during a drug "Freak out" had insured that I would stay away from drugs until I was at least out of middle school!

"Dark Dungeons" is one of the mostly widely known and parodied Chick tracts. Poor Marcie and Black Leaf ! The horrors of role playing games were spelled out as people died with their characters, while other cast, "Mind Bondage" spells on their parents so they could play more. The reclusive Jack Chick spread his hysterical propaganda with a formidable output on many subjects, Halloween and Catholicism being rich and oft visited targets. It's debated whether or not Jack Chick is one person or a group of people writing under a pseudonym, but what is not debated is that his methods impacted readers.

I eventually learned by playing Dungeons and Dragons, that it wasn't a portal to hell and damnation, but rather a conduit for the imagination. How many people wrote stories about their adventures and went on to discover great fantasy literature or even developed the games that we play today. Dungeons and Dragons hysteria also produced the seriously awful movie, "Mazes and Monsters", starring a pre-fame Tom Hanks as a role playing fan that takes things a little too seriously.

Every once and a while I feel like pulling the dice out of storage and dusting off my trusty cleric character sheet, but then I realize that there is real life to attend to, and that Greyhawk has passed me by. Hopefully my son will gravitate towards role playing games and exercise his imagination with me on a campaign someday.

— Eric J.

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I love your site. I found it after reading Kris Straub's masterful creepypasta "Candle Cove" and finding your interview with him about it.

When I was little, I saw an animated TV movie, PUFF THE MAGIC DRAGON AND THE INCREDIBLE MR. NOBODY. It's about a boy named Terry who has an imaginary friend, an anthropomorphic duck named Nobody. Terry's active imagination is met with scorn from parents, teachers, and kids. He makes some art for class using spaghetti, but it's so well done that the teacher doesn't believe that he made it himself, so eventually he starts attributing his art and talent to Nobody. I think I must have been too little (probably five or younger) to cope with the many surreal sequences in the movie. It also traumatized me because I also was very creative as a kid, and adults and kids treated me like that all the time!

There is a crack under Terry's window and he says he sees a path in it. Everyone thinks he's totally weird. The scene where the crack transforms into a path leading to a trippy sunset was really disturbing to me as a kid. It's probably the thing about the movie that traumatized me the most. I realize that it was supposed to be this kid's happy fantasy, but it just seemed awful to me that you could disappear into a wall and walk along a path that seemed to stretch on forever. That image haunted me, and I even remember being scared of an actual crack on the wall of my house.

Then when Terry gets fed up with being misunderstood, he tries to run away, but Puff the Magic Dragon transforms the crack in the wall into an actual path, and the two of them go to a surreal fantasy world together. All sorts of bizarre things happen. One of the most disturbing was when Puff shows Terry some kids who are being very mean and evil. They also look at a large version of Terry's pasta art that really creeped me out, especially the spider-like trees. And the surreal sequence of musical instruments floating through the sky scared me as well. They made me feel threatened, like they were swarms of monsters or something. These images were so embedded in my subconscious that they still seem creepy to me now, even though other people seem to think it's a cute, heartwarming movie.

To the good people at Kindertrauma:

Assuming you're interested, this is a two part-episode Traumafession, connected only by my father and his Anglophilia. In hindsight, I realize that my dear old dad chose one of my Christmas gifts when I was eleven years old, a board game called The Dark Tower. The game featured a dark gray plastic fortress tower with crenelated edges and a black electronic display screen with buttons that, when pressed, would randomly determine your fate as you moved across the board. The object was to collect keys and conquer the tower, or something like that.

I remember two things about this weird remedial-Dungeons & Dragons board game with the mysterious revolving monolithic phallus (I was just about to enter puberty, so give me a break.) One was the playing card depicting enemies called the "brigands." (This has to appeal to my dad, so they can't be called "boogeymen" or "demons" or anything pedestrian like that.) These fiends were depicted as howling creatures bearing white soulless eyes, black thin bodies with sharp shoulders, fanged beaks, and gnarled goat horns on their heads. They freaked me out, but what was even worse, oddly enough, was encountering and slaying a dragon, a moment celebrated by the tower with an early electronic dragon-shrieking-as-it-dies sound. It gave me the willies, but of course, victory is always bittersweet. (Also jarring were the "plague," "lost," and "starvation" sounds, all of which can be heard HERE.)

The reason why I know my father decided to get this for me: I stumbled on a 1981 television commercial for this game with ORSON WELLES in dark cloak narrating a suitably histrionic tale of battle that one might enjoy in the process of playing Dark Tower. ORSON WELLES, of course, is American, not British, but my dad adored his Shakespearean gravitas, and he probably thought, "If it's good enough for ORSON, it's good enough for my son," possibly not realizing (or in denial about the fact) that poor penniless ORSON would whore himself out for frozen peas and cheap wine at this point. ORSON's enormous bulk takes up half the screen while the titular dark tower glows ominously in the background.

The following summer my dad treated me to a trip to England in order to follow my brother's rugby team on a short tour, during which the American teenagers would be repeatedly, methodically, and quite naturally annihilated by various English school boy teams (perhaps that dragon-slaying sound would be appropriate here). Anyhow, one of the London sites my dad and I visited was Madame Tussauds Wax Museum, including, of course, the notorious Chamber of Horrors. Keep in mind that my father would routinely take me to films that were not exactly… age-appropriate: I was nine during the legendary Summer of 1980, when he took me not only to see THE CHANGELING with GEORGE C. SCOTT, but also THE SHINING.

So here was the Chamber of Fricking Horrors at eleven: the Manson Family with shaved heads, some bespectacled freak named John Christie who dismembered women and secreted their body parts in various nooks and crannies of his home (you get a glimpse of these through a crack in the kitchen walls of the display), and on the staircase heading down to the chamber, there was a wax figure of Adolf Hitler encased in thick glass, probably because too many people would deface the bastard's image. Worst of all—for me, at least—was the display of Marat's body in a bathtub. He was the French revolutionary with a bad skin condition that required, for some reason, lots of baths; Charlotte Corday took advantage of his vulnerable position and stabbed him repeatedly with a knife. His body was immortalized by the French painter David, and this wax display was modeled after it. One had to mount several steps in order to look into the bathtub, as I recall, like walking ceremonially past an open coffin. Marat's head was swaddled in a towel, bearing a disturbingly peaceful look on his face, as if he were just napping and might bolt awake at any second.

Back at our hotel, the bathroom had a claw-foot bathtub that reminded me of the one in which Marat sat slumped in death. From my bedroom at night, I could see the dark form of the tub, and I imagined the silhouette of a toweled head slowly lifting above the edge. It was the first time in years that I joined my parents in their bed, and in the cold light of morning, I felt like a total wuss.

God bless the Internet, right?

Thanks for all your good work.

Cheers,

— Greg from Oakland

No single event can top the lasting trauma induced by my childhood viewing of THE RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD, that film scared me so bad that it rearranged my chromosomes. However other events, smaller in individual scope but horribly disturbing in cumulative effect, deserve to be mentioned. Specifically, I confess my lasting, great fear of 1970's album covers.

In the ‘70s, album cover art was kind of a big deal. The cover for an LP was huge by today's standards and it presented a big canvas upon which the music and graphic artists could express themselves. In the race to make album covers memorable, the art quickly turned very weird. Parents would buy those albums and put them into their groovy record cabinets where they were inevitably discovered by curious tykes like me who would spend the next years trying to erase their psychedelic, grotesque and demonic images from our minds:

I have mentioned the first offender before: Queen's "News of the World." This one belonged to my aunt. Absolutely great album. Murderous cover. The interior fold-out was ten-times worse though, with its depiction of bug-eyed people fleeing the giant killer robot.

The Eagles – "Hotel California". Part of my parent's collection. This one is kinda controversial, because pretty much everyone denies that there is a screaming, illuminated face in the lower left-hand window of the "hotel" on the cover of this album. Whatever – I saw that screaming face right away the first time that inspected the album.The fact that no one else could apparently see it made everything that much worse.

Black Sabbath – "Black Sabbath." My uncle had this one. Ozzy and co. managed to scare the world into believing that Black Sabbath was in league with the Devil. This album cover convinced me that Ozzy WAS the Devil.

The Rolling Stones – "Goat's Head Soup." This was a fairly popular album and I'm surprised that more people don't recall being scared by the bizarre image of Mick Jagger's smiling head in a bag on the cover. This album made me consider the awful possibility that something called "goat's head soup" actually existed and that kids somewhere were being forced to eat it.

Funkadelic – "Maggot Brain." My uncle's collection. Hmmm. Screaming woman buried up to her neck a la MOTEL HELL. That's nice. The back cover dispelled any hope that the poor woman got out of there alive. I would remain wary of funk for years.

Elton John – "Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy." Not outright terrifying, but filled with lots of disturbing, freakish details. I was also intimidated when Elton John appeared on THE MUPPET SHOW. And on talk shows. Ok, Elton John just generally freaked me out.

This list is by no means comprehensive, but definitely hits many of the worst cases. I'll leave it to my fellow Traumaniacs to fill us in on any horrors from the record cabinet that I left out.