I am the youngest of four kids. My oldest brother is about 8 years older than me and I admired him greatly growing up. I was fascinated by everything he was fascinated by, I listened to the music he listened to, and watched the movies he watched. All I wanted to do was be him. He was always into horror movies and horror stories so I was surrounded as a kid.

This brings me to two major traumafessions. The first is in regard to the horror classic HALLOWEEN. It was my brother's favorite horror movie and Michael Myers was a major horror icon to him. He dressed up as Michael during spirit week in high school one year and actually scared a girl so much that she ran out of the classroom. Of course this led to me seeing HALLOWEEN at the age of five. This movie is traumatizing to people in their 40's and here was five year old me seeing Michael Myers stalk babysitters. It's not that I was a babysitter, I was still a kid being babysat which was much worse. For the longest time after seeing it I couldn't even hear the music without crying. I was convinced that Michael Myers was out to get me. I truly love Halloween and respect it as a movie fan but even now, as an adult, my only nightmares have Michael Myers in them.

The second traumafession actually comes from a book my brother frequently read when he was a teenager. It was a book called "The New England Ghost Files" that he borrowed from my grandfather. I was probably around seven years old when this occurred so I was a little older, a little wiser. Didn't make this book any less traumatizing for me. It's not that the stories scared me, I never read any of them. The cover of the book is what got me. It was an illustration of a ghost above a door and the ghost had these glowing red eyes. Every time I went in his room for something I would see the book and turn it over so those red eyes weren't staring at me. Seeing the cover now brings back all those feelings I had as a kid. I hope to find the book soon so I can actually read it but maybe it'd be better if I didn't.

I realize that a lot of my traumafessions stem from my brother but we're actually still incredibly close amazingly enough.

For as long as I can remember up until I was about thirteen years old, I had a recurring nightmare. I was being chased through a grove of trees on a stormy night by a man in a trenchcoat whose face I couldn't see. I ran through the trees to about the halfway point when suddenly, the man appeared in front of me at the other end of the grove! I decided to just run at him as fast as I could and tackle him. If I could knock him down, I could escape. So I started booking it towards this guy… when something dropped out of the trees onto my neck. This thing immediately began eating its way through my flesh and into my spinal cord. I tried to scream but couldn't. All I could do was sink to my knees while this horrible whatever it was ate its way into my spine.

Every time I had this dream, I would wake up in bed in full-on crab position. Arched back, flat palmed on the bed, with my head bent back as far as it would go as if I were trying to keep my spine inside my body. I would be confused, crying and terrified.

It wasn't until years later that I realized I was having nightmares about the WILLIAM CASTLE classic, THE TINGLER! The thing I felt trying to eat my spine was the parasite creature and the man I was running from was VINCENT PRICE. Now, here's the weird part.

I don't remember ever seeing that movie. I still haven't seen it. I just know that's what it was from research in books and on the internet.

What happened to me?

— Jeff Martin
Better Geek Than Never

I think this is a bit of an obscure one.

At some point in the early ‘90s, when I was about four or five years old, I saw a cartoon on Children's BBC (I think) called STOPPIT AND TIDYUP. Or rather, I saw about ten seconds of it, because after that I ran away screaming. I can't put my finger on exactly what it was that scared me, but there was something about the character designs that I found unbelievably disturbing.

I know it was a five-minute short, because that's what my mother told me in order to get me to come downstairs from my room ten minutes later, but apart from that, I know next to nothing. I remember that, for years afterwards, I was always a bit nervous whenever I was watching that channel, all prepared to bolt in case it came on again. Once or twice, it did, but I always managed to get away as soon as the title sequence started, so I never saw any more of it. I suppose I could go to the show's Wikipedia page to look up some information on it, but… there might be pictures.

Anyway, here's the strange part- from that day to this, every time I've mentioned STOPPIT AND TIDYUP to a group of people my age, someone has always said, "Oh, God, that terrified me as a kid!" And that's the only thing that they can remember. As far as I can gather, this show's entire legacy was to disturb an entire generation of four-year-olds. And considering that, a few years ago, I found out that it was by the same people who made THE TRAP DOOR (which is essentially cosmic horror for tinies), I'm starting to suspect that they did it on purpose.

(Also, when I was six, my Year One class were shown the cartoon version of ANIMAL FARM. I'd write this off as the teachers being a bit distracted and not reading the blurb, but then they showed it again two years later- both times in a double-bill with CHARLOTTE'S WEB, strangely enough. Apparently they were going for a "farm animals in peril" theme. Anyway, for about ten years afterwards, ANIMAL FARM was still the scariest film I'd ever seen. It kind of spoiled me for horror movies.)

Thanks,

— Kate