30 Of The Scariest Things People Believed When They Were Younger, As Shared By The Bored Panda Community

When I was younger I thought the rhythmical thumping under the bedroom floor was the ghost of a long-dead slave beating a drum. I later found a dirty, broken chain in the yard and freaked out, convinced that it had belonged to the aforementioned dead slave. My mother had to sit me down and tell me that the thumping was actually the heating pipes, and that the chain had come from an attempt to secure our trampoline to the ground during a wind storm. I had a very active imagination as a child.

When I was a child, I was convinced that there were skeletons under my bed and was terrified that they'd come out at night and get me. I guess I must have seen something scary on TV involving skeletons or something. One night, I got so sick and tired of being scared of them that I decided to change the narrative. They didn't want to kill me at all. In fact, they were madly in love, and they just happened to live under my bed. They were so madly in love that they only had eyes for each other. To this day, they regularly go on cute dates, and they actually just got back from their 30th Honeymoon. I now have a deep fondness for skeletons. :)

When I was a first-grader I was told that there was a secret bunker near my school where they did all kinds of stuff to people. I obviously thought it was true and was afraid to walk alone around that area.

Also, I had a fear that mirrors might steal my soul. It was very unnerving to look at them at night.

I was misdiagnosed as bipolar and prescribed medication to treat it. The meds made me incredibly paranoid, to the point that I thought the people in magazines and movies were watching me.

When I was 8 (until I was 12ish), whenever there was lightning without rain at night or the local radio station would go offline unexpectedly, I assumed it was a nuclear blast or EMP and that I only had 1 to 2 minutes to live before the blast wave would hit. This was in the early 70s.

I'm 64 and in 7th grade we read 1984 in our English class and I was petrified for 1984 to come.

I was terrified I was going to fall into quicksand.

When I was a little kid, I somehow got this idea that the toilet was a monster. I was scared it would eat me, so I always went pee super fast and was scared to poo because it took too long... To combat this fear I started randomly flushing toilet paper throughout the day thinking if I "fed" it enough TP snacks then I would be safe because it wouldn't eat me if it wasn't hungry!!

I was scared that a watermelon tree would grow on top of my head because I swallowed watermelon seeds while eating it.

I was paranoid that if not in bed, a monster would get me in the dark, unless there was a light on.

I'm terrified of demon possession. I'm 51 years old and I should know better!

When I was young I had an abnormal fear of being abducted by aliens in the middle of the night. Also, after learning from a fireman in school that most house fires happen between 2-4 am, I became deathly afraid and paranoid that my house would catch on fire in the middle of the night while i was asleep.

I had a crippling fear of the upstairs of my house as a child. It started slowly, I was normally a very brave child, but I had read a Goosebumps book about a dummy that just got to me for some reasons. I became afraid of attics first. I would avoid going into the bathroom where the attic was at night by myself. Slowly I became more and more terrified. Eventually I would refuse to go upstairs alone at all. For three years every time I went to my father's house I would sleep on the couch. I showered only in the mornings since the only shower was upstairs. Sometimes I would sleep in the clothes I'd worn all day because I was to scared to go upstairs and change. So yeah, I guess the scariest thing would be that I thought a murderous dummy and a couple ghost lived in my attic and upstairs of my house.

I had a phase where I believed I had snakes under my bed.

i used to think that i would get sucked up by a black hole

That hell was a real thing.

When I was about 3 my aunt tells me the story of how I had this belief that the vacuum cleaner was alive. (Probably because it made such a loud noise) One day I tripped over the vacuum and apologized profusely to it “Sorry Vacuum!” Still one of my family's favourite stories.

I was told that if I were bad, a monkey would climb down from our back yard tree and attack me. Scared the heck out of me.

When I was like 5 I watched the Thriller music video and for a good 4 years I would have to sleep with my legs tucked towards me in fear that all the creepy things I believed in would put a wart on my foot and turn me into one of them. I'm 12 right now and to this day I'm scared of so many things, I think I'll be scared for life. So a great tip is to never watch creepy movies and absolutely stay off TikTok and YouTube, that stuff is messed up.