What scared you most as a kid?

[Rapture]

I would hide behind my dad from this box art at the game isle when I was a little kid.

[Froge]

Remind me not to return to page 5 of this thread ever again.

[Tiger]

Remind me not to return to page 5 of this thread ever again.

What do you mean?

[VaeVictis]

Remind me not to return to page 5 of this thread ever again.

What do you mean?

-snip-

Oh, Lord. I remember the first time I saw one of these. I know they're harmless to people (they're also kind of good for your home as they eat silverfish and stuff), but they sure don't look it. Thing sped across the floor and I all but hit the ceiling.

[Nice]

Oh, Lord. I remember the first time I saw one of these. I know they're harmless to people (they're also kind of good for your home as they eat silverfish and stuff), but they sure don't look it. Thing sped across the floor and I all but hit the ceiling.

actually some of them have deadly venom (source: wikipedia) but very few

[Wooderson]

I love Aussie's but goddamn how are they even a country when you got all this shit out there to kill ya?

[Ghieri]

That reminds me of Geoduck.

[Tiger]

[Ghieri]

It's actually a species of clam, but I agree. Hard to look at that without thinking "penis".

[MrBehemoth]

Halloween 1992, the BBC aired a show called Ghostwatch. I was ten. It gives me the creeps to this day. It was kind of a precursor to Blair Witch and Most Haunted. Look it up. I think the whole thing is on YouTube.

Now, these days Ghostwatch would not cause a stir at all, but back then it kicked up all kinds of controversy, in a War of the Worlds kind of way. It was a drama, entirely fake and scripted, but while it never at any point said "this is true", it was presented as a documentary, a live, real-time investigation into a haunted house. It was hosted by actual TV hosts, not actors, who were on the serious TV shows of the day, with Craig Charles of Red Dwarf thrown in, for comic relief I suppose. It lasted a couple of hours, I think.

It started off fairly boring. There was a family, two daughters, single mum, living in a typical suburban house in a typical British town. They analysed some footage from security cameras and interviewed the family about poltergeist activity on location, cutting back to the studio where there was a parapsychologist who had been studying the family for months, as well as a sceptic. The family called the poltergeist "Pipes" because of the banging noises. Nothing much happened at first.

Eventually it got weird. Really weird. The children started getting hurt and were visibly terrified. Disturbing history was uncovered. A figure was seen in the house. The on-location presenter, Sarah Greene, ended up missing-presumed-dead and finally the ghost interfered with the broadcast itself.

A couple of hours after the show had finished, the BBC issued an apology and a statement that it had been fiction. It was discussed on the news the next day and people were really shaken and offended by it.

I think that, watching it back then as a child, there are a few reasons why it terrified me. To begin with, at first nothing happened. At one point they even seemed to prove that it was all the youngest girl banging on pipes. That really made it seem trustworthy, before they introduced the horror. The glimpses of the dark figure both on scene and in the security cam footage were horrible too, because it was always just standing there, Slender-like, at the end of a hallway when the cameraman turned around, or half visible in the corner of a bedroom. When they watched the footage back in the studio, you saw it for a second, then they were like "rewind, I saw something!" but when they played it the second time, there was nothing there, just a shadow of something obviously not a ghost, but the first time it had definitely been there. This was obviously before digital, so you couldn't rewind and check what you thought you'd seen. Mostly though, the children and mum were really good actors. They were not natural, they were like members of the public, awkward and not knowing how to behave on camera.

As an adult though, it still gives me the creeps, and now I understand why it bothered people so much. See, it turned out that the ghost was a dead child molester and that was why it was going after the little girl. Not in a cheesy Freddy Krueger way, but in an insidious, menacing way. Chasing, scratching, making her scream and watching from the shadows.

In my ten year old mind it was all real. I slept in my parents' room that night. My mum was working night shift and my dad, bless him, didn't have the gumption to see through it either. He said, "It can't be real," but I knew he didn't believe what he was saying. I was into the X-Files and suchlike, so it blew my mind to find out that ghosts were real. Here was definitive proof, on a reliable BBC documentary. But not just proof of bumps in the night or moved furniture - this was proof of real evil that would hurt you.

The name Pipes still sends a shiver down my spine.

Edit: Something I've just remembered, and which was a big part of the controversy storm, was that an 18 year old kid with severe learning difficulties actually killed himself after watching the show. True story.