Scariest memory from your childhood?

Possibly shock rather than fear in my case

It's a memory that is crystal clear

I was about 4. We'd just returned home from a holiday to visit relatives in London.

I was sat on my parents bed. They were unpacking their suitcases. My father slammed the wardrobe door and let out an anguished cry

I looked and there, on the floor, was a blood stained thumb

I can still feel myself starting to sway as I was about to faint. I recall hearing my mother shouting at my father and he left the room, clutching the thumb. He reappeared later with a big, bloodstained bandage saying that he'd stuck it back on.

Mum by this time was shouting at him to show me what had happened and he laughingly presented me with the plastic thumb.

We'd been down Carnaby Street and he'd purchased some trick items which were quite popular . The thumb being one of them.

He also caused chaos at a restaurant at a later date. My mother had asked for the mustard. She opened it. This squealing plastic spring burst out. Mum jumped and screamed and the table tipped. Luckily it was saved by a passing waiter

Strange man, my father

I think I must have been about 7 and was standing in the sea quiet close to shore when a wave knocked me over. I remember floundering under water. Then a pair of strong arms lifted me out of the water, it was dad ?

P.S. it didn't put me off. I love swimming including under water.

It would have been 1949-ish, when my best friend and I cycled into the local park. At one point there were bollards with linked chains which my friend lifted so that I could duck under with my bike. When I was on the other side, from out of the spinney, a man wearing a boiler suit and exposing himself called me to join him. I shouted for my friend to stay where she was and scrambled under the chains dragging my bike with me. We told no-one. I still have an occasional nightmare in which I call out for help.

Interesting how many of these memories are related to fear of drowning. I knew I was sensible to avoid swimming!

I was frightened of various things, but don’t think I had any really serious scares in my childhood. One of the worst was being left alone in the house and someone trying to get in. (It was my brother!). Like a previous poster, I was 14 at the time so not a small child.

I was scared of the thick overhanging trees on my walk to school when I was about seven or eight. I thought hands would come out of them and grab me. I was also very scared of walking past a huge dog called Zena who was behind wire netting so couldn’t really do me harm, but ran up and down as if trying to get out.. My mother told me it was a Great Dane. I’ve never liked dogs since.

Going to see Father Christmas was pretty scary, too!

I don't have any scary memories from my own childhood but one incident when my son was about a year old will never leave me.
We were on the beach in Spain and my Mum had bought a little blow up dinghy and was walking along in shallow water pulling my son along in it. I was watching from some distance away sitting on the beach.
Suddenly my son decided to stand up and toppled over the side into the water. Mum screamed then fell over, completely disappearing from view.
I flew down the beach and dived into the water where I had seen my son go in. Thankfully i found him but the water at that point was quite deep so i was below the surface. I grabbed my son by the leg and held him above my head until i reached shallower water.
By that time a huge crowd had gathered and i got quite a long clap!
We hadn't known but apparently the beach shelved quite steeply, that was why Mum had fallen and it was unexpectedly deep.
My Mum was extremely shocked and was unwell for days afterwards. She has never got over it and often refers to it as the worst day of her life!

I was scared a lot when I was a child. Nothing bad ever happened but I was scared of ghosts and seemed to spend a lot of time rushing up steep staircases or along scary corridors loudly singing hymns in case of goodness knows what! Our house was an old Georgian one and one set of grandparents lived in a rambling victorian one. They were scary. My other grandparents suburban house was a haven for me. I was never scared there.

When I was about 8 I came home from Brownies . We had a shop which was still open , my mum at nightclasses so my dad asked me to go out and look at the dead cat lying beside the road to see if it was mine . How could he ?

I sang with a girl's choir and one dark night we were to perform in a church hall . Nobody explained to me that you could access the hall from a different road so I walked through the hilly churchyard to find the hall . I was terrified.

My dad had been a paratrooper and when I was about 8 he read out a letter about a reunion for all the family at a local hotel. It said. "Please do drop-in". I was so scared because I thought it meant literally!

When I was about seven, swimming in an open air pool, I dived down and came up under a raft. I couldn’t find the side and was desperate for air.
I got out somehow but remain afraid of suffocating or drowning.
I also remember being at the dentist’s, escaping from the chair and clinging to the pipes under the sink. Remember the slow grinding drill and no local anaesthetics?

I don't know how old I was, pretty small... I was in my parents' bedroom, mum was getting dressed when a huge house spider descended into her cleavage. She panicked, screamed and I have hated spiders ever since. It really scared me. But I resolved not to pass it on to my children so when a huge spider descended on my blind (aged 11) daughter's head I took a deep breath and told her it was there and plucked it off. I didn't want it crawling on her face. Oh oh oh...

I was 9 when this happened, and I still think about it more than I probably should.

In October 2019, my class went on a field trip to the Tampa Bay History Center. Nothing too special — it was a pretty normal museum trip at first. We took two buses: Bus 103 and Bus 77. I was on Bus 103.

The museum itself was kinda boring, but I remember this one part of the tour that felt… off. They took us down a narrow hallway near the back. One of the doors was locked but had an old sign that said “Staff Only - Archive.” A kid in my group swore he saw someone standing behind the door, even though no one was supposed to be back there. I remember how cold it got all of a sudden.

We left around 1:30.

Only Bus 103 came back.

The teachers acted like it was just a delay. But after an hour, things got weird. Some parents started showing up looking panicked. One of the office staff was crying. Then a teacher snapped at a kid for asking where the other group was.

By the next morning, a bunch of desks were empty. Their names weren’t on the board anymore. It was like they were erased. I asked about one of the missing kids and my teacher just told me, “That’s not something we talk about.”

Later, I overheard my mom on the phone saying:

"They found the bus driver from Bus 77 walking barefoot outside a rest stop three hours north... but no sign of the kids. He just kept repeating: 'It wouldn’t stop changing. The building moved.'"

The local news never covered it. Not even once.

And every year on October 17th, someone anonymously drops off an envelope at the school’s front office. It’s always unmarked, always sealed. Inside? Student ID cards. Seventeen of them. The exact number of kids who were on Bus 77. They're ice cold, like they’ve been in a freezer.

No one talks about it.

But I remember.

Two things come to mind. I’d be about five we’d gone to the seaside, we were staying in a small b and b my parents knew the owners. I was only about five and I’d been put to bed with the door slight ajar.
I was woken with something crawling on my bed, I was absolutely terrified, I’d no idea what it was, of course i screamed and in came mum to rescue their cat 😱
The other was when I was sixteen. I’d just got into bed when a lady ghost sat by my bed smoking a pipe, she sat for what seemed ages, I screamed out and she disappeared.
Apparently it was my Great Great grandmother who was well known for smoking a pipe. Never saw her again.

How very strange hellokelly for the disappearance of so many kids not to have been covered in the news.
Was there ever a police investigation carried out and an explanation for what happened?

Having teeth extracted when I was about 7 - the dentist gave me gas and seeing that black rubber mask coming towards my face sent me off into hysterics. I'm sure I can still smell the awful rubbery aroma after all this time.

Living in Port Said during the Suez Crisis and having to be taken to school with an armed guard, don't know if I was scared or secretly excited.

When I was 4 my best friend was a boy aged 8 who lived nearby. I was in awe of him and tried to be big and brave like him. One day he suggested we go into the church tower and ring the church bells. I was terrified but followed him into the tower. He reached for a bell rope and at that very moment the church clock struck. I really thought he had done it and fled for my life back into our house where I hid behind a chair as I thought someone was coming to get me.

I had a recurring dream/nightmare from age 8 until about 10. My teddy bear turned into a carcass of meat such as you see hanging in a butcher`s shop, and it chased me everywhere. I even got on a ship to go to my auntie in Australia, but it followed me. I was afraid to go to sleep at night.

there were plenty unfortunately, all brushed under the carpet and a reminder from those who should have cared that I should toughen up.

Easy. r a ts
I had to go into a building quite often.
If you couldnt see them, you could hear them.

Another near-drowning: we swam at an open-air pool which had a big wooden raft for people to dive off. When I was six I swam underwater and came up under the raft, had run out of air and couldn’t find my way out from under it.
I don’t know how I got out.

Being taken to see a film called something like " 12 Men to the Moon". A scene shows one or two(I can't remember) of the astronauts disappearing into sinking sand in their astronaut suits (helmets and all) and being overwhelmed by and disappearing beneath the sand.
Given that most of my childhood days out were at the beach I identified very much with the dangers of " sinking sand" that my late father warned against.
Gave me terrible nightmares !!

When I was 10 my school closed and I had to go to another school for just the summer term before I started at senior school.

My new school was very scary, nearly every lesson somebody would be caned in front of the class. There had been no caning in my previous school.

One day the teacher was writing stuff on the board and we were copying it down, not sure why. Her writing was nor easy to read so I put my hand up and asked what a word was supposed to be. This, apparently, was very rude and the teacher started shouting at me and I thought I would be called out for a caning I was so scared that I did a little wee. Fortunately I was not caned.

Me and a friend stole a Thames river punt, it started drifting off down the Thames and towards the weir. Luckily we were rescued. My cousin lived in Westcliff on sea & it had lots of empty derelict Victorian houses there at the time. We broke into one& found piles of those horrible chain letters that were a thing then, creepy collages of eyeballs and weird stuff then in the lounge was a huge weeping willow tree uprooted on its side and inside it something moved, it was an old lady like a crone or hag in a nightie with wild long grey hair. We screamed and bolted. Very strange experience.

AGAA4 - what were your parents thinking, leaving you and your sister alone while a murderer was on the loose?

I had two scary incidents as a child. Firstly, I was about 9 and walking through a wooded area with a friend when a man came out from behind a tree and exposed himself. Terrified we ran as fast as we could to her Grandma’s house, with whom she lived. Breathlessly we told her what we’d seen and the response was “you shouldn’t have looked”!
The second incident happened in my last year at school. The school had been fundraising for a swimming pool for years and it finally opened and I was one of the first to have a swim. Not a very good swimmer, I stuck to the shallow end but what I didn’t know was the pool steeped suddenly on the middle. I went to put my feet on the bottom and it wasn’t there! I was thrashing around trying to get to the surface and all I could hear were the teachers messing about sitting on each other’s shoulders and shrieking with laughter. Terrified I was sure that I was drowning but somehow I managed to get back in the shallow end and climb out. It wasn’t until I was a mother many years later that I eventually became brave enough to put my head under water.