Childhood traumas

[Kitsa]

One time I went to the zoo with my parents. We were in the aviary building and I was passing a glassed-in area. It was dark and I was totally unprepared for one of these things popping up less than a foot away from me.



they're completely real, they're called Frogmouths, but they look like some sort of scary-ass muppet shit, don't they?



They just looked so wrong, like their eyes and beaks were too big for their bodies, and it was just staring at me. I went home and had nightmares for weeks.

[Fathom Zero]

15 years ago. Thanksgiving.

Wore a pair of socks that had been treated with formaldehyde. 3rd-degree burns on both feet. Skin grafts taken from my back. Massive scarring on back and tops of feet.

I have to go back in a month when I turn eighteen to make sure that the grafts have grown with my feet (they did) and didn't just stay and pull my toes upward. Still nerves never recovered, though.

[Kitsa]

Wow. Where did the socks come from?

[Fathom Zero]

Some Chinese joint. My family sued, but the firm fucked up everything. Karmic retribution, though, quite a few individuals involved were also convicted of something or another last year. You might know about it. Some guys in Cincinnati.

[Kitsa]

Never heard of it, but then again I'm not from here originally. Maybe the big flea markets in Monroe? They were busted last year for fake purses.

[Gato]

The wall between my room and my parent's is thin.

....I don't think I have to say much more.

[Otto]

Got my head stuck in a Little Tykes garage toy when I was 4. Then I got it stuck in the rails of the porch.

[Evil Robot]

When I was a child, somebody in my village was accused of trying to kill our dear leader, Saddam. When they came to the village to find out who was involved they killed all of us. Now I am dead.

[Fathom Zero]

And the frogmouths are cute, like squashed owls.

[Tadao]

My parents took us to see Sweeney Todd at the Dorthy Chandler Pavilion. I was like 7 years old. They had no idea what the play was about.

And yeah, those owls are awesome looking, I would be freaked out as a kid though. If those things are real, why wouldn't closet monsters be?

[Fathom Zero]

I could see that. The ones on the bottom look like something from Where the Wild Things Are.

[Zhukov]

When I was about nine I hit a cricket ball under the neighbour's fence, we lived on a farm in Woop-Woop so this fence happened to be electrified to keep the cattle in. I didn't know this, and needles to say I got stuck in between the wire constantly getting shocked in the back for a good five minutes. "Get mum OW! Get mum OW! Get mum OW! Get mum OW!" My sister thought I was just joking, so she didn't get mum.

Probably the most traumatic thing of my young life was when I was chased by Papua New Guinean Mud Men during Tribal celebrations. There was a lot of yelling, mostly by the highlanders, and also a lot of crying and running, mostly by me.



Reasonably frightening for a five year old.

[DevilWearsPrada]

Straight out of johnny quest

[kahljorn]

being brn was pretty traumatic :O

[Kitsa]

I watched all kinds of TV I probably shouldn't have. My parents got a cable box when it was a brand new thing and there was a lot of trauma to be had.

I watched one show where a guy was lured into a house by two beautiful blondes (twins) who fought over him, then finally solved the problem by telling him to pose for a picture. When he said cheese, instead of the camera going off, a big blade came out of the ceiling and chopped him in half. Had nightmares about that on and off for years. After much research once the internet was around, I figured out it was a Hitchhiker episode. (even found a site with pics)

There was another show I watched....I couldn't have been more than 5 or 6...where I vividly remembered some woman being taken from behind on a pool table.

[ZeldaQueen]

When I was a child, I was in the supermarket with my dad and brother. At the checkout line, I saw some random magazine (I can't remember the name), but the cover had a cartoon picture of a man and a woman in a movie theater with the Grim Reaper sitting in between them. There was blood all over both of them, I remember specifically that the man had a knife stuck in his chest, and the Reaper was laughing. That really scared me.

Also, I took a book called Scared Silly out of my elementary school library and had my mom read it to me just before bed. It was fine until we got to the final story, which was about a girl named Tilly, who was afraid of going to bed. Each night, she'd hear a voice that would call out "Tilly, I'm on the first step" or "Tilly, I'm on the second step". This goes on for some nights, and the girl is scared but her parents don't believe her when she tells them. At the end of the story, the voice says "Tilly, I'm in your room", and then "I'VE GOT YOU!" The final picture shows a green furry hand reaching into the picture and grabbing the terrified girl by her ankle. I spent many a night after that terrified that I'd hear such a voice.

Oh, and I just looked up that book now to see if I'm remembering it correctly. Apparently, the book was written to help kids get over nighttime fears. Mission accomplished.

[Tadao]

Yeah but come on, a napkin traumatizes you.

[Babs]

I was about 7 and I was playing with that sweet bat mobile that came out, you know the one where the sides came off like in the Batman Returns so he can fit into the small alley way, well yeah anyways I was playing with that and my step brother and his friend were just playing magic and this guy came up to my step brothers friend and just pulled a gun right to his face (mind you we were outside when this took place). That was pretty intense as well as seeing a motorcyclist drive right underneath a semi truck when he ran a red light, that happened when I was roughly around the age of 11.

Not too traumatic.

[Kitsa]

My mom was in a school bus accident as a kid and still remembers the person in the other car (quite dead) half in and half out their windshield, bloody, brains everywhere.

She also had a kid in her Junior High commit suicide by drinking random chemicals in the chemistry lab.

I don't know if you'd count this as traumatic, but it was my first run-in with a really bitchy girl. My parents had just moved and I'd left the only home, friends, and family I'd ever known for strangers, cold and hostility 12 hours away. This was early 80s. My mom told me if I was lonely to go play on the front step of the apartment and maybe some kids would come over.

So I took my Return of the Jedi action figures and went down to the front to start building treehouses for the ewoks (favorite activity back then). Two little girls a little older than me came over and started talking to me. I was lonely-stupid and didn't detect the bitchiness, I thought they wanted to be my friends.

We started talking about jelly bracelets, which were the big thing at the time, and I had tons of them. They said they'd go get theirs, told me to get mine, and we'd come back and trade some. I was all excited and ran back up to the apartment for my bracelets, telling Mom I'd met two other girls. Then I ran back down and waited. And waited. And waited.

Yeah, long story short, they never made an "appearance", but I heard giggling in the bushes on the other side of the street. At that point I fucking gave up and I think I've hated people ever since.

[RaNkeri]

My friends pushed and locked me into girl's changing room when I was like 7 or 8. I was beaten by few of the girls, they all were on my class, before my friends let me out. We all had a laugh at it later, I wasn't traumatized, neither did I start to hate the opposite sex, which begs the question why the fuck did I bother writing this.

[Kitsa]

Oh, here's a good one I'd forgotten.

About a year after the jelly bracelet incident, we were in a new house, 2nd school in 2 years, and my parents had gotten us a yorkie puppy. We were all running around and getting ready for school. The puppy had a vet appointment, so she was leashed to the leg of the kitchen table, ready to go as soon as we got on the bus.

Yeah, well, my mom tripped over the leash, which snapped the puppy's neck, and we all got to watch her die in slow motion right then and there on the kitchen floor.

That was definitely pretty fucking traumatizing.

[b_squared]

I worked at the zoo for a little bit. One of the runs I worked was the birds. I used to feed the frogmouths. They are cute.

I remember the TV show outer limits used to scare the crap out of me when I was little. Not the show itself but the opening where they show a static filled screen with horizonal lines and the voice says,
"There is nothing wrong with your television set. Do not attempt to adjust the picture. We are controlling transmission. If we wish to make it louder, we will bring up the volume. If we wish to make it softer, we will tune it to a whisper. We will control the horizontal. We will control the vertical. We can roll the image, make it flutter. We can change the focus to a soft blur or sharpen it to crystal clarity. For the next hour, sit quietly and we will control all that you see and hear. We repeat, there is nothing wrong with your television set. You are about to participate in a great adventure. You are about to experience the awe and mystery which reaches from the inner mind to... The Outer Limits"
The thought that something...I thought it was aliens..was controlling my TV really freaked me out.

[Shrubfest]

Dav Pilkeys book, 'A friend for Dragon'.

It makes me cry. I don't cry. Ever.

Except at this.

[Gato]

When I was about 7, the family took a trip to Houghton Lake. There we went to a haunted house. It was your typical corny stuff, but, in one hallway they had glass displays with spiders and lizards and snakes crawling about, and, if you stepped on a certain part of the floor it would vibrate like something was trying to come get you.

I had the fortune to step on said piece of floor and completely lost it. My dad had to carry me out.

[ZeldaQueen]

In Kennywood (an amusement park near where I live), there's a ride called "Noah's Ark". Basically, it's like a funhouse themed like the ark. You walk through it and see various exhibits of animals. It's gone through a lot of renovations though. One summer, it was changed and we didn't know about it. So we get in line and enter the ark. One of the first rooms we come to is an entirely new one that has a glass-covered pit filled with fake skeletons that guests had to walk over. I freaked, shut my eyes, and told my mom to lead me through. My mom, meanwhile, didn't know that there was glass over the pit so she was uncertain as to how to get across it for a while (she figured it out eventually). Later, I was further freaked by an exhibit of a stuffed gorilla, programed to lurch forward whenever a guest walked by it.

When I went to see the movie Shrek, I also saw the preview for the comedy Evolution. In the Evolution trailer, there's a part where an alien bug literally gets into a guy's body under his skin and some doctors try to figure out how to remove it. The actual scene was hilarious (they wind up getting it out rectally), but at the time it scared the holy heck out of me.