Scariest memory from your childhood?

I was about 6 when my sister 11 burst into the room and said President Kennedy had been assassinated and WW3 was about to start .

I was very young when my cousin asked me if I wanted him to teach me to swim. We were at the deep end of the pool in Southend. I said yes & he pushed me in! So scared but after a bit of thrashing about learned how to swim! He said he was watching & if I hadnt swum he would have jumped in & pulled me out! Another scary thing, my brother squashed a large garden spider crawling on my leg. Didnt worry me until he squashed it & yeuk! Dinner over the garden! The scary bit was a couple of nights later heard a scratching on the wallpaper at the side of my bed! Light on & the largest house spider I have ever seen 2-3 inches from my face! Another yeuk moment! Still dont like spiders!

Peace had been declared , but we weren’t used to it yet ! My siblings and I were put to bed in a downstairs bedroom , I think it was so we could be monitored from the garden ,
I woke up , no sound from the garden, but someone had put on a light in the room ! I heard a plane going over ! Out curtains were open , heart beating I jumped up ran and put the light off but then I couldn’t find my way back to bed !
I was terrified that the plane was going to bomb us , or my mum would find me out of bed !
Dad found me in a gap between the wall and the wardrobe,
I was then paraded round the garden , I was so ashamed that a big girl like me , near.y 8 , was crying but I couldn’t stop

I was 8 and my sister was 6 we were at school , I went out to the loo and when I came out I heard the headmistress talking to my form teacher about my mother who had been rushed into hospital and was not expected so survive and that she was to tell me that my mother had some important business to deal with and we were to be taken to the headmistress office and she would look after us until we could be picked up. My father picked us up much later that afternoon and carried on with the same story , we went to my Grandma's and again she stuck to the same story , I was so scared I didn't tell my sister and had no one to talk to , eventually I broke down at school and told the teacher my mummy was dead , she phoned my father and they sat and told me that my mother had been very ill but was going to be ok ,I have never forgotten how scared I was and how no one thought to just sit us down and tell us the truth .

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.

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.

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.

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 !!

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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...

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?

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 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.

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.

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!

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!