Mom hung a mass produced art print on my bedroom wall when I was about 8. It's of a little girl holding her puppy.
Cute, right?
Thing is, this painting terrified me. And I was raised in the time where you just kind of swallowed any complaints and didn't bother mom or dad with kid foolishness.
Here is a copy of the thing I actually had hanging on my wall. This same frame. Probably came from Service Merchandise or some such.
What in the everloving hell is lurking just over her shoulder?!?! To me it always looked like a skull wearing a hat on the side of his head, like a little old timey jaunty hat a clown would wear.
It's a wonder I got any sleep. I was too afraid to tell mom I hated it. I never considered that I possessed the agency to take it off my wall and hide it at the bottom of the closet.
I think of this cursed painting still.
Did you ever have something in your childhood that unnecessarily scared the bejeezus out of you?
Kind of? Maybe?
Back when I was about five, I was walking with my grandfather and some cousins.
We came across a cow skeleton in a field.
For whatever reason, some of the cousins wanted bones. I ended up with a tooth, one of the molars.
By the time I got home, I had halfway forgotten about it. It freaked me out. In my head, the tooth was haunted by a cow ghost, and this was a scary idea.
But I couldn't get rid of it. I had to hide it. Problem was I knew where it was, so it still creeped me out for over a year until I finally got up the nerve to take it back.
Weird as fuck, I know. What's funny is that I ended up having a small bone collection lol; some skulls, some long bones, baculum, and an almost intact dog skeleton. That's what I have left, I used to have more.
There was also the back room. That didn't get creepy until I was a little older, and became aware that I had an older brother that died before I was born. I can't say I was scared of the room, I wasn't. But in my young brain, despite him never having lived in this house, that was "his" room. Why? No fucking clue, it was used for storage, my mom's sewing, and the spare bathroom. There was nothing about it that pointed to a haunting or anything.
But I didn't want to go in the room. Again, not out of fear, I just didn't want to bother him. It was like going in the room would somehow interrupt his sleep or something.
What's really fucking weird is that I've never believed in ghosts. Ghost stories never scared me, I never saw a movie and thought ghosts were anything but fiction. Despite that, my brain managed to find exceptions to that belief lol. The cow and my brother weren't ghost ghosts, it was some other thing that I could only associate with ghosts, and I have no clue what the fuck my brain was doing other than its usual thing where I could wind myself up with imagination and the real world would drop away.
It isn't like I really thought there was a ghost present, or that there was anything real involved, but it was still giving me that same frisson of the numinous the way deja-vu feels mixed with a sense of mystery.
I don't know. I was a weird kid sometimes :)
I kind of get that. "Ghosts" were silly things on Scooby Doo, or the scary things in grown up movies (my dad let me watch Poltergeist when I was about 7). But they weren't real. Then there were the scary/creepy/other things that felt real but had no definition.
Exactly#