I'm back,
After an unsuccessful attempt at uncovering my previous trauma I submit a new challenge!!! Please help, I don't know if these are imaginings from the dark recesses of my mind or just TV shows/films whose images still plague me to this day!!! Ok, both would have been televised in the eighties:

First up,
Could have been a from a series or film – I recall some kind of evil playground, no obvious horror that I can remember but more an air of menace. For some reason I think the main character which could have been a young boy was fully aware that the playground held some secret but it wasn't until dusk that this was fully realised? Could have been some kind of supernatural gang involved who frequented said 'evil playground'!!!

And secondly,
I'm edging towards what could have been a ghostly children's TV programme – all I remember is a girl and her family driving down some long and winding roads eventually passing what I remember as some kind of clock tower. I think the sighting of the clock tower triggered some kind of repressed memory in the girl like she knew she had seen it before regardless of what her parents told her? Again, another menacing secret. Did this happen to me or are these shows/films out there???

Thanks for the help with the last trauma but it still remains unearthed – It involves an architect, his female lover with red hair (a nude bath scene reminiscent of ophelia), a curse and some hallucinations of a scary individual appearing in a car windscreen or on top of car!

HELP, I'm still TRAUMATISED!!!!!

TRISTAN R.

There is a book that I read almost 20 years ago…I think I was 8 or 9, so it was 17 or 18 years ago to be more specific. Though, I don't think the time-frame matters much because I'm pretty sure the book was not a new release and had been out for some years before I read it.

It was a collection of ghost stories and superstition, I think… I am hoping that someone can help me here.

These are the stories that I remember…

One story had a woman buying a house and one of the bedrooms was haunted by the ghost of a little girl who had died because her bed was underneath a window and she caught a draft and died of pneumonia or something like that.

Another story had someone, a family, maybe, but it might have been just an individual, staying in a hotel, and they were being disturbed at night by a child and kept complaining about it to management, but the management kept saying that there were no other kids staying in the hotel. It turns out the child was a ghost who was haunting the hotel and had died in the room the family was staying in, or something to that effect…I think I remember that they might have found a skeleton in the closet or in the wall or something at the conclusion.

Another story detailed the Black Dog of Death, the superstition that some people see a big black dog as a harbinger of death to come. This one terrified me and gave me an irrational fear of dying every time I saw a black dog around, which I would see, or imagine I was seeing, quite often, hahahah.

This might have been from a different book, but I THINK it also contained the old legend of the newlywed couple who were driving to a town and getting lost because it was dark, so they had to stop for the night and they asked an elderly couple if they could sleep in their home. The elderly couple invited them in and fed them and gave them good company. In the morning, the couple left an envelope of money on the table to thank them for their hospitality and continued on their way to the town. They mentioned the old couple to someone and the person said that the old couple was long-dead and had died in a fire, I think, and the house wasn't even standing anymore so it was impossible that they had spent the night there. The couple went back to investigate and found that there was indeed just a pile of rubble where the house had been, but among the remains of the house was the envelope they had left that morning, just sitting there among the rubble.

As far as I can tell, it was a collection of 'true' ghost stories and legends and superstitions and things like that, and I would REALLY love to read it again if someone could help me identify it!

Thanks for the help!

– Liz

There was a Hewlett Packard printer commercial that I saw at Christmastime when I was three or four if I recall, where an old man tries to cheer a baby up by shoving dolls and pictures in his face. I don't remember it fully, but I really, really hated it.

Another strange thing happened to me around Christmastime when I was three of four. I remember walking downstairs in the middle of the night and seeing an advertisement on the TV, which my dad was watching. In the ad, It showed a snow globe full of figures of happy children standing next to a snowman holding an umbrella. As I recall, the kids then flipped over into the snow, letting out a loud "Oof!", and the snowman's umbrella popped open. It then panned to show a creepy old man staring into the snow globe and smiling.

Perhaps I may never see these ads again, but they still reside in my brain. If anyone has pictures or videos, please put them up.