Just be grateful you're childhood wasn't like the poor folks in these stories. From whacky, weird, to just downright scary, these are the most disturbing childhood memories.
An Incredibly Awkward And Scary Experience
“In the middle of the night I woke up to seeing shadows from the window of people trying to break in, I was scared and tried to go to my parents’ room. My mom was making weird noises and I thought maybe she was having an asthma attack. My parents wouldn’t let me in their room (they were doing the deed). I couldn’t sleep hearing all the weird noises. The people never made it to the house but they robbed gym clothes from my dad’s car parked outside.”
PRO TIP: Don’t Live By Cultists
“My parents used to be neighbors with some cultists that believed in aliens or something like that. They said they were totally harmless and decent neighbors. Well one of them got the bright idea to try and blow up the mayor of the town or something. Well the FBI showed up to put an end to that biz real quick, and obviously were using my parent’s property to surround the house. My mom has to beg them not to shoot her German Shepard before she could get him inside.
I just asked my dad about the story. Apparently, a bunch of anti-IRS type guys moved into town and joined up into the Outer Dimensional Forces cult (ODF). Apparently, the leader Nodrog owned some choice property, and wouldn’t sell it. I guess there was some dispute over that, and a couple of those knuckleheads blew up the mayor’s car. That brought the feds in. He said it was kinda sad because his neighbor was actually a nice guy, but his girlfriend left him for another cult member and got mixed up in the bombing I guess. That’s why his house got raided from what I understand. Pretty interesting for a small town in Texas though.”
Home Alone
“I was often left home alone in the summer when I was middle school-aged. Lived in the country and my parents worked in town 30 minutes away. I was often left to do chores around the ranch and just do whatever afterward. Usually lots and lots of video games.
Our dirt driveway truly did look like it might be part of the road leading back to four houses behind us. Easy mistake other than all the ‘PRIVATE DRIVEWAY NO TRESPASSING’ signs on the open gate… however, people are dumb and did get lost often around there… so we had innocent visitors.
Like clockwork, three guys pull up in a Suburban right after my parents left for work. Slowly driving around. I go to greet them and ask if they are lost. I’m 12-13-years-old and these are some rough looking guys in their 30s. They say yes but cannot tell me where they are trying to go. The driver steps out and asks if I can show him on the map where they are (this was before cell phones). My spidey senses got all full alert mode. I quickly walked back to the front door and let our German Shephard out of the house. The guy was starting to follow me as I was walking to the door and asking what was wrong.
That good ol’ boy that was the nicest dog ever came running hackles up in a full-blown rage. And chased this guy back into his Suburban. They took off in a cloud of dust. I called my parents to tell them what had happened. Like you, I did not realize how terrified I was until after this happened… I think I was pretty calm and collected in appearance.
Two days later my mother went into town to get groceries. The Suburban pulls right in again. This time my dad went out with a .45 to greet them. They had another lame excuse about being lost and left. Never to be seen again.
We found out weeks later that some of our neighbor’s vacation homes had been ransacked. Part of me wishes I hadn’t noticed them and they got eaten by our German Shephard upon trying to enter. Would have saved our neighbors a lot of trouble.”
A Gag Worthy Memory
“I was at a friend’s house and we went to a deep creek to catch frogs and turtles. From the top of the bank, we spotted a swollen dead deer covered in maggots. My friend’s little brother pushed me off of the bank and I landed on the deer. It burst and kind of deflated under me, and I just laid there crying and throwing up until my friend’s parents came and got me. They hosed me down in the driveway and tossed me in their pool that they had just chlorinated. Super great.”
“I Just Remember My Dad Screaming”
“When I was about 5, my older cousin’s best friend killed someone. My cousin helped him hide for a couple of days. Cops got tipped off, a warrant was issued, and with my cousin being a multiple-time felon himself, decided to run as well. At one point, he came to my parent’s house to try talking with my dad. My dad didn’t want to hear it and threatened to call the cops. Cousin took off, got into a police chase, drove on the wrong side of one of our main roads, hit a car, then flipped his car over a guard rail into the river. I was completely oblivious to everything. I just remember my dad screaming at my cousin. Found out all this stuff later, and it was a huge what the heck moment. My cousin did like 15 years in prison.”
His Brother Was Driven By Evil
“My brother was one of those kids that parents worry will kill them in their sleep. My parents put a reinforced door with outdoor locks on my room and every night they made sure my door was locked. I was 10 and thought my parents were being over cautious. One time around 3 AM I here my brother flipping out, glass breaking, furniture moving, screaming so loudly you couldn’t even understand what he was saying. Keep in mind this is completely unprovoked, he just woke up and decided to destroy the house. This wasn’t the first time but this time my Dad screams for me to not come out and call 911 all while hearing the very distinctive sounds of flesh hitting flesh (punching is a very distinctive sound.)
It was the police threatening to have me taken by CPS if they didn’t do something to protect me from him. So instead of arresting my brother and making him be responsible for his actions, they were threatening to take me away from my parents when they had begged them to take him. The ’90’s mentality was to fix your kid (regardless of the fact sometimes that just wasn’t possible) or we’ll hold you (parents) responsible.
The scariest part was the officer taking me and putting me in the back of a cop car while my Dad all beat to heck tried to stop them and my completely untouched brother just stood there smiling. It wasn’t mental illness it was straight up EVIL that drove my brother, he enjoyed the chaos
He eventually committed a crime outside of our home and it forced State to do something. We lived 13 years with a terrorist in constant fear of him and it was only when he became a threat to outsiders that police finally stopped treating my parents like criminals. Yes, he’s still exactly the same way, in and out of prison constantly, randomly shows up at the house as if I’d open the door without a piece… My childhood was a mix of Disney adventures with Hostel/Saw interludes… Yes, I have C-PTSD.”
“If I’d Gone Into That House, I Wouldn’t Have Ever Come Out”
“When I was 13 I was at a neighborhood park, waiting for a friend who never showed up. A man came out of his house across the street and stood on his porch and called out to me. The porch was deep and a bit shadowy, and I hung back in the street aways but I saw that he was cute. He started talking, telling me he was new in town, from New York, and other random bits of info. He told me he was 16 and that I was the prettiest girl he’d ever seen. I was a young 13, and very naive, but I just didn’t believe anyone who’d lived in New York and had all the worldly experiences he’d described wouldn’t have seen someone prettier. I also didn’t quite believe he was only 16; he hung back in the shadows by the door and he looked young, but not that young.
He kept asking me to come to the porch and sit with him, and the more he’d talk and flatter me, the closer to the house I’d get. Something felt a little off, but I was also the child of an abusive mother and emotionally neglectful father, so I was starving for love and attention, and here was the handsome, worldly guy, telling me I was funny, special, pretty, etc.
I was fully on the sidewalk at this point, and we were talking and laughing so I decided I’d just quit being a baby and join him on the porch. I started to climb the stairs and I suddenly heard the distinctive sound of my dad’s car. I turned around to see he had come down the street opposite and stopped in front of the house. He took one look at me and the house and told me to get in the car. On the drive home, he asked me what I was doing at that house, and I was silent. I couldn’t get any words out. It was like my head suddenly cleared and I understood how absolutely dangerous that situation could’ve been. He just looked at me and told me that he’d been sitting at home when suddenly he just had a sense that he needed to go check on me. My dad had never done that before and never did it after.
It wasn’t until later that it registered for me that when I’d been on the stairs and turned to see my dad’s car, I’d heard the door to the house shut. I’d glanced up briefly and the guy was nowhere to be seen. I’m fully convinced my dad saved my life that day, and that if I’d gone in that house, I wouldn’t have come out, or I wouldn’t have come out the same.”
Don’t Shoot!
“My mom was dating this dude and we were living with him, one morning I hear super loud bangs on the door and I run out with my blanket and I hear my mom screaming ‘Don’t shoot my dogs, they are friendly’ as I walked from the hallway to where the front door is.
So I’m standing there with my blanket around me and she opens the door and there’s a SWAT team pointing their ARs at me yelling for me to drop my blanket on the ground. Then they proceeded to tear the house apart including my room.
Scared the heck out of me, I don’t remember the exact details but my mom said he was an ex-biker gang or something and they were hitting a bunch of members.”
Hit Him With That Big Iron
“The neighborhood bully was big, somewhat pudgy, and mean. He was a little hellion and his parents could not give less of a car. He would beat kids up, including ones much younger than him, steal toys, break other people’s toys, you name it, he did it.
Eventually I, at the tender age of 6, got sick of it. I happened to watch an old cowboy movie on TV and saw the protagonist deal with one of the villains (who, much like the neighborhood bully, was much larger than the hero) by bonking him on the head with his piece. As it just so happened, I also had a toy six-shooter that looked almost exactly the same. Only this was not one of the new plastic toys; this was an old toy six-shooter from the 50s and had an actual iron button on it (pretty sure it was a hand-me-down from my Dad or Grandfather). I quickly put two and two together and realized I already had all the tools I needed to solve my problems.
Absent a holster, I settled for tucking the six-shooter into the waistband of my pants, grabbed my finest Tonka truck (the one said bully had already tried to steal), and headed out to the park in the middle of our neighborhood to play. Sure enough, a short while later, along comes the bully with his eyes on my truck. Words are exchanged, he makes his approach, hands balled in fists, and I immediately spring into action. I rise to my feet, smoothly draw the Colt, and whip him right on the forehead with it.
The effects were not as advertised. He fell down, just like the villain in the cowboy flick, but the movie somehow left out the loud shrieking that ensued, along with the copious amounts of blood. Panicking, I quickly grabbed my truck and fled, dashing back to my house and hiding under my bed for the next hour.
The kid needed something like 30 stitches to suture up the injury I gave him and wound up with a pretty gnarly scar down the middle of his forehead. On the upside, he never bothered me again.”
Not The Only Incident
“My mother suddenly screaming in the middle of the night then dragging my sister and me from our beds into the bathroom and locking the door behind her, slamming her bible against the door and turning off the light then squeezing the two of us to her chest while telling us we all had to pray because a demon was outside, roaming around our apartment, looking to drag us into the lake of fire. Hysteria, tears, frantic prayers, bone-deep terror… I was 10 or 11, I think. Still get shaky remembering it, wish I could erase it from my head.
There was no demon or anything supernatural, though my sister and I didn’t know that at the time. My mother’s mental illness got worse and there were other incidents like this. We ended up homeless for a year or so before my sister and I moved in with our grandparents. Life got better, decades passed, and we are functional and mostly happy adults now.”
His Parents Thought It Was Just His Imagination
“I saw someone jump off this bridge somewhere in upstate New York when I was 4 or 5-years-old. We were on a camping trip, I don’t remember where, I just know it was anywhere between the cities Albany and Syracuse. the bridge is quite a ways above the ground, not sure how far but far enough that it would be a miracle to survive, I made a big deal about it to my parents and they thought It was just my imagination, which was a common thing for me to do tell wild stories. The next day my father noticed it was in the newspaper he was reading the next day. He was talking with my mom about it, but they never talked to me about it because they didn’t want to freak me out, despite being in earshot of them without them knowing.
I don’t recall how I handled it other than being a bit shocked and completely dumbfounded that people could kill themselves. I think it helped me understand our mortality at a young age in a rather morbid way. I wasn’t able to ask my parents about it or bring it up for some reason, and I was an outspoken child. I don’t believe it traumatized me in a negative way but definitely makes me feel some sort of way every time I decide to think about it…who was that guy, what made him want to jump, what was his rock bottom, what drove him to suicide, I’ll never know and that’s the only thing that I ever think about, especially when I got older and understood emotions alot better than a kid who was close to starting kindergarten.”
Whatever Happened To Him?
“When I was 8 I was walking to a basketball court to meet up a buddy of mine. When I was walking down the wooded path to meet him up, I stopped and jumped into some bushes. A man was running for his life and I didn’t know what from so I was scared and hid. The man tripped and fell, I had finally seen what had been chasing him. It was a gang of 10 guys wearing all blue and white. I watched in fear as they began to give him a brutal beating. After what had felt like an eternity watching them beat him to near death, they all ran off before anyone came to investigate. When the coast was clear I walked up to the man who had been beaten to a pulp. He grabbed my hand and told me to call an ambulance. I rushed to my friend’s apartment which was just around the corner. The ambulance came after 25 minutes. My friend’s mom was upset about the delay. I never found out what happened to that man who was beaten.”
The Worst Babysitter
“When I was six, my neighbor’s daughter would babysit me. She was around nineteen or twenty. She wasn’t particularly nice to me. Sometimes I had to go over there very very early and would sleep. I was a bedwetter and she refused to get up to help clean me off and would get furious if I tried myself so I would just lay on the floor in my own pee until she woke up. She would also tell me we were going to play hide and seek and then I’d hide and wait and wait and wait, and then, thinking I’d really bested her, I’d come out from my hiding spot and she’d be painting her nails or some such.
Her mother’s boyfriend also held me over a toilet by one leg with a lit lighter in front of my face. Told me he’d kill me and my mom and dad if I ever said anything.
My babysitter’s boyfriend would also be around sometimes. One day, I was coloring on the bed with the two of them, when she got up and left to use the bathroom.
Her driver’s license was lying on the bed, and he picked it up and chewed it. When she came back, he told her I did it, and I got in trouble. It really unsettled me because it was so bizarre, and I knew it even then. He did other weird things that I can no longer remember. I knew grown-ups were not supposed to act like him, and I tried my best to stay away from him after that.
Not two weeks after that, he smothered my babysitter, killing her and her unborn child. I was not there, but I could have been. And I wonder what would have happened to me if I had been.”
Nothing But Bad Memories
“When I was about 7 or 8, standing on the back porch with my parents on a summer night. My dad had one of those big home cameras from the 80s and was using a VHS to record our next-door neighbor beating his third dog to death. Despite having it on video, the deranged maniac wasn’t charged with anything by the cops … until a year or two later when he broke all three bones in his girlfriend’s arm, then the cops got off their butts and arrested him. He killed like 5 or 6 dogs. The local shelters stopped letting him adopt .. after his arrest.
When I was about 5, I forget exactly what I did wrong (I think left Legos out on the floor?) and my mom threw a volume of my children’s encyclopedia at my head. So, you know, standard textbook-sized hardback slamming into the back of my head.
When I was 14 or 15, my mom got mad at my little brother. He was doing his homework, then going to school and throwing it away in the cafeteria instead of turning him in. She got so mad at him she put a hole in the hallway drywall the size of his head. Not entirely coincidentally, he went to live with a recently divorced dad shortly after this.”
A Terrible Reoccurring Memory
“I used to live in Guatemala. One day while I was waiting for the school bus, I noticed my friend and his sister, along with their mom, on the other side of the freeway. They rode a separate bus but it usually arrived around the same time as mine. I could see the bus coming down the freeway and knew my friends were probably going to miss it if they tried to walk down to the pedestrian overpass a quarter of a mile away.
The mom grabbed both kids, one in each hand and I knew they were going to try and run across the freeway. In a moment they took off but suddenly the mom stopped and pulled back to the curb. Her son pulled back as well. Her daughter, my friend Susan, kept going.
I can still see it in the theater of my mind. I can still hear the god awful sound of the first car hitting her. She suspended in mid-air for what seemed forever before she fell to the ground, only to be run over by 3 more cars. I can still hear her mother’s blood-curdling screams. She ran into traffic with both hands up begging the cars to stop. She reached down and picked up what I already knew was her lifeless body. Limp and unmoving. My aunt was with me and I can still remember how loudly she cried at the sight. My sister and I were in absolute shock. My school bus arrived just as the first ambulance was stopping across the freeway.
I didn’t see my friend for two weeks. The day he showed up at the bus stop, he was alone. All doubt removed, Susan didn’t make it. After that day I never saw him again either.
After 25 years of not thinking about that day, I had a dream about her. Forever young, she looked just as I last remember. When I asked her why she was in my dreams she said she did not want to be forgotten.
She is the only recurring dream I still have.”
Always Look Both Ways
“2004.
Bowling Alley. Every Friday it was converted into a dance party for the local middle school. Kids would sneak off across the street where the road curved, forming a gnarly blind spot for the driver. Beyond that was a field where kids would smoke cigs and drink spirits they stole from their parents.
One night while high on the adrenaline of sneaking out of the rink to cross into the field, a car flew around the curve and hit my friend Melissa about 10 feet in front of me.
I will never forget the sound of the car impacting on her body, her forward flip over the car, and the unforgettable sound of her 99-pound body smacking into the payment like someone dropping a big heavy bag of cement mix from a balcony.
A light rain had begun to fall and I remember her laying on the ground with her mouth open and a light trail of blood pooling from her mouth.
To make things worse, the driver and passenger of the car got out screaming and it took about 15 minutes for the passenger to realize that our friend laying in the street was her cousin. She had ridden up front in the very car that hit her. I’ll never forget her screams mixed with our own.
The paramedics put a blanket over her, making us believe she was dead.
She lived albeit being in a medically induced coma for two weeks.
She still to this day is infertile as her pelvis completely shattered and had to be reconstructed with synthetics.
I still hesitate crossing streets to this day.”