Hi Kindertrauma!

It's been a while since I last sent in a traumafession (though by the looks of the comments to that last, I may have inadvertently traumatized someone's kidlet - sorry!) so I thought I'd share another one.

As in my first two, sound played a significant role in this one as well. If any other readers were watching U.S. public television in the late 1980s or early 1990s, they probably saw more than a few Canadian children's television programs. I definitely did, and I'm the happier for it. Most of these were pretty warm and fuzzy, and the source of much enjoyment for tiny me. There was one SIZE SMALL snippet that I could never entirely enjoy, however.

I know it probably sounds ridiculous that Miss Helen's announcement of, "It's cookies in the kitchen time!" left me dismayed, but it routinely did. The music has a lot to do with it; something about that synthesizer note buzzing in the background just plain gets under my skin to this day. The lyrics are quite innocuous, and taken on their own, they're really rather cute. But, being a neurotic little girl (haven't changed much either, only now I'm a bit taller) with a fear of hot and burning things among others, kindergarten-ish me subconsciously took the idea of an ovenful of baking cookies and ran with it. Figures I'd get a nightmare from something so harmless. In it, the "Ooh they're bakin'" line was followed by "Ooh they're burnin'", a smoke alarm, continued menacing music, and a whole host of other things as time went on--yes, this nightmare stuck with me and expanded as I got older! Brrrrr! ... I'm only now realizing just how big my issues with fire were as a child.

Sorry, Miss Helen, if you're reading this. I know you didn't mean to traumatize anybody. One sketch does not an otherwise delightful viewing experience ruin, I assure you.

-- Chanter

I love your site. I found it after reading Kris Straub's masterful creepypasta "Candle Cove" and finding your interview with him about it.

When I was little, I saw an animated TV movie, PUFF THE MAGIC DRAGON AND THE INCREDIBLE MR. NOBODY. It's about a boy named Terry who has an imaginary friend, an anthropomorphic duck named Nobody. Terry's active imagination is met with scorn from parents, teachers, and kids. He makes some art for class using spaghetti, but it's so well done that the teacher doesn't believe that he made it himself, so eventually he starts attributing his art and talent to Nobody. I think I must have been too little (probably five or younger) to cope with the many surreal sequences in the movie. It also traumatized me because I also was very creative as a kid, and adults and kids treated me like that all the time!

There is a crack under Terry's window and he says he sees a path in it. Everyone thinks he's totally weird. The scene where the crack transforms into a path leading to a trippy sunset was really disturbing to me as a kid. It's probably the thing about the movie that traumatized me the most. I realize that it was supposed to be this kid's happy fantasy, but it just seemed awful to me that you could disappear into a wall and walk along a path that seemed to stretch on forever. That image haunted me, and I even remember being scared of an actual crack on the wall of my house.

Then when Terry gets fed up with being misunderstood, he tries to run away, but Puff the Magic Dragon transforms the crack in the wall into an actual path, and the two of them go to a surreal fantasy world together. All sorts of bizarre things happen. One of the most disturbing was when Puff shows Terry some kids who are being very mean and evil. They also look at a large version of Terry's pasta art that really creeped me out, especially the spider-like trees. And the surreal sequence of musical instruments floating through the sky scared me as well. They made me feel threatened, like they were swarms of monsters or something. These images were so embedded in my subconscious that they still seem creepy to me now, even though other people seem to think it's a cute, heartwarming movie.

To the good people at Kindertrauma:

Assuming you're interested, this is a two part-episode Traumafession, connected only by my father and his Anglophilia. In hindsight, I realize that my dear old dad chose one of my Christmas gifts when I was eleven years old, a board game called The Dark Tower. The game featured a dark gray plastic fortress tower with crenelated edges and a black electronic display screen with buttons that, when pressed, would randomly determine your fate as you moved across the board. The object was to collect keys and conquer the tower, or something like that.

I remember two things about this weird remedial-Dungeons & Dragons board game with the mysterious revolving monolithic phallus (I was just about to enter puberty, so give me a break.) One was the playing card depicting enemies called the "brigands." (This has to appeal to my dad, so they can't be called "boogeymen" or "demons" or anything pedestrian like that.) These fiends were depicted as howling creatures bearing white soulless eyes, black thin bodies with sharp shoulders, fanged beaks, and gnarled goat horns on their heads. They freaked me out, but what was even worse, oddly enough, was encountering and slaying a dragon, a moment celebrated by the tower with an early electronic dragon-shrieking-as-it-dies sound. It gave me the willies, but of course, victory is always bittersweet. (Also jarring were the "plague," "lost," and "starvation" sounds, all of which can be heard HERE.)

The reason why I know my father decided to get this for me: I stumbled on a 1981 television commercial for this game with ORSON WELLES in dark cloak narrating a suitably histrionic tale of battle that one might enjoy in the process of playing Dark Tower. ORSON WELLES, of course, is American, not British, but my dad adored his Shakespearean gravitas, and he probably thought, "If it's good enough for ORSON, it's good enough for my son," possibly not realizing (or in denial about the fact) that poor penniless ORSON would whore himself out for frozen peas and cheap wine at this point. ORSON's enormous bulk takes up half the screen while the titular dark tower glows ominously in the background.

The following summer my dad treated me to a trip to England in order to follow my brother's rugby team on a short tour, during which the American teenagers would be repeatedly, methodically, and quite naturally annihilated by various English school boy teams (perhaps that dragon-slaying sound would be appropriate here). Anyhow, one of the London sites my dad and I visited was Madame Tussauds Wax Museum, including, of course, the notorious Chamber of Horrors. Keep in mind that my father would routinely take me to films that were not exactly... age-appropriate: I was nine during the legendary Summer of 1980, when he took me not only to see THE CHANGELING with GEORGE C. SCOTT, but also THE SHINING.

So here was the Chamber of Fricking Horrors at eleven: the Manson Family with shaved heads, some bespectacled freak named John Christie who dismembered women and secreted their body parts in various nooks and crannies of his home (you get a glimpse of these through a crack in the kitchen walls of the display), and on the staircase heading down to the chamber, there was a wax figure of Adolf Hitler encased in thick glass, probably because too many people would deface the bastard's image. Worst of all—for me, at least—was the display of Marat's body in a bathtub. He was the French revolutionary with a bad skin condition that required, for some reason, lots of baths; Charlotte Corday took advantage of his vulnerable position and stabbed him repeatedly with a knife. His body was immortalized by the French painter David, and this wax display was modeled after it. One had to mount several steps in order to look into the bathtub, as I recall, like walking ceremonially past an open coffin. Marat's head was swaddled in a towel, bearing a disturbingly peaceful look on his face, as if he were just napping and might bolt awake at any second.

Back at our hotel, the bathroom had a claw-foot bathtub that reminded me of the one in which Marat sat slumped in death. From my bedroom at night, I could see the dark form of the tub, and I imagined the silhouette of a toweled head slowly lifting above the edge. It was the first time in years that I joined my parents in their bed, and in the cold light of morning, I felt like a total wuss.

God bless the Internet, right?

Thanks for all your good work.

Cheers,

-- Greg from Oakland

No single event can top the lasting trauma induced by my childhood viewing of THE RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD, that film scared me so bad that it rearranged my chromosomes. However other events, smaller in individual scope but horribly disturbing in cumulative effect, deserve to be mentioned. Specifically, I confess my lasting, great fear of 1970's album covers.

In the ‘70s, album cover art was kind of a big deal. The cover for an LP was huge by today's standards and it presented a big canvas upon which the music and graphic artists could express themselves. In the race to make album covers memorable, the art quickly turned very weird. Parents would buy those albums and put them into their groovy record cabinets where they were inevitably discovered by curious tykes like me who would spend the next years trying to erase their psychedelic, grotesque and demonic images from our minds:

I have mentioned the first offender before: Queen's "News of the World." This one belonged to my aunt. Absolutely great album. Murderous cover. The interior fold-out was ten-times worse though, with its depiction of bug-eyed people fleeing the giant killer robot.

The Eagles - "Hotel California". Part of my parent's collection. This one is kinda controversial, because pretty much everyone denies that there is a screaming, illuminated face in the lower left-hand window of the "hotel" on the cover of this album. Whatever - I saw that screaming face right away the first time that inspected the album.The fact that no one else could apparently see it made everything that much worse.

Black Sabbath - "Black Sabbath." My uncle had this one. Ozzy and co. managed to scare the world into believing that Black Sabbath was in league with the Devil. This album cover convinced me that Ozzy WAS the Devil.

The Rolling Stones - "Goat's Head Soup." This was a fairly popular album and I'm surprised that more people don't recall being scared by the bizarre image of Mick Jagger's smiling head in a bag on the cover. This album made me consider the awful possibility that something called "goat's head soup" actually existed and that kids somewhere were being forced to eat it.

Funkadelic - "Maggot Brain." My uncle's collection. Hmmm. Screaming woman buried up to her neck a la MOTEL HELL. That's nice. The back cover dispelled any hope that the poor woman got out of there alive. I would remain wary of funk for years.

Elton John - "Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy." Not outright terrifying, but filled with lots of disturbing, freakish details. I was also intimidated when Elton John appeared on THE MUPPET SHOW. And on talk shows. Ok, Elton John just generally freaked me out.

This list is by no means comprehensive, but definitely hits many of the worst cases. I'll leave it to my fellow Traumaniacs to fill us in on any horrors from the record cabinet that I left out.