Your First Scary Childhood Memory?

My fathers family originally hailed from the west of Ireland. In the 1950s, when he was a young child, he would spend the summer at his Uncle John's remote farm, fishing mostly. Uncle John would tell him ghost stories at night-time and he used to recount them to us when we were small (in the 1970s).

This Uncle John, he said that one night when his own father was a young man, he had walked a few miles into town to sell or enquire about a horse on market day. It was night-time when he set back out for home, and he was on foot. The landscape was typical of those parts - steep hills in the distance, bleak and lonely moorland all around, the odd silent black lake, and lots of boggy marsh. Anyway, he was walking along the lane when the ground dipped down somewhat, creating steep banks on either side, and as a consequence noise was contained in the hollow, echoing along its reaches, when he suddenly became aware of a rasping, trundling noise, like a cart with loose fittings. For some reason this unnerved him tremendously because he knew that he had not been followed, and also that very few people used the lane. At a turn in the lane he clambered up the bank and hid behind a tree trunk or bush, and waited see what might be causing the clattering.

In the middle distance he could make out what he claimed was a shimmering light, all hazy and phosphorescent, pale and white like cold moonlight. As it grew closer he saw that it was a young boy, shoeless, pulling a rickety handmade childrens' train on a length of string. It was this that was making the trundling noise. As the boy drew level with the young man, he suddenly stopped, and turned sideways, and although both he and the train shimmered with an eerie irridesence, his eyes were jet black and glassy.

According to my father, Uncle John's father bolted across the marshy bog straight back home. When he told people what had happened to him, they believed him, the haunting being apparently well-known amongst the adults.

Naturally, I am very sceptical about the whole thing myself, as was my father, but apparently his Uncle John firmly believed in it, claiming that his father swore it be to true.

Anyway, whatever the truth of the matter, I first head this story when I was five or six, and I dreamt about it for months afterwards.

[G. S. Carnivals]

I recall dreaming of riding (I think) on the hood of my uncle's 1962 Pontiac Tempest. It was maroon. The dream involved some gigantic entity down the road. I awoke very frightened. This dream is vague, but has never left me. I was probably four or five years old.

[njhorror]

When I was two and my older sister was six she asked me to walk out onto a pond across the street from where we were living at the time, a rural area in what was urban northern New Jersey, to test the ice.

When I'd gone out maybe fifteen feet I crashed through the ice, face first, and disappeared from view.

My father heard my sister screaming from across the street, upstairs in my grandmother's house, and raced outside and ran out into the pond and fished me out of about three feet of water.

I don't remember any of it and never have, BUT a couple of years later I started asking people when we could go visit my friend who lived under the ice. When my family started puttting two and two together they figured out that it had something to do with that experience. When they questioned me further I told them that I had a dream where a giant rat came to me underwater and told me that he would wait with me until my father showed up. Supposedly I described a conversation between the two of us as if we were old friends.

That pond and the swamp leading out of it were where the locals used to set muskrat traps up to just before my birth.

Whenever I think of the story I get a little "turned around", because I don't know what to make of it, at all.

There is something peculiarly horrible about the idea of being trapped under ice. Not only does one have to contend with the notion of drowning but also of being buried alive, a la Poe. It's a double-death nightmare. Presumably the current is a key issue. Even if you are able to see the 'mystic portal' into which you plunged, a current could drag you away from it.

Wasn't there a tragic air crash in Chicago involving a plane overshooting a runway and plunging into an ice-capped river? The vast majority of fatalities involved people being swept away under the ice as opposed to sustaining injury during the initial accident.

There's an appalling image for you: a terror-stricken, wild-eyed face gazing up through a floor of impenetrable ice.

JK

Maybe it was this one:

Wikipedia (Links)

Air_Florida_Flight_90

Being a Brit I'm less familiar with recent US history than...well, a Yank.

[njhorror]

There was a movie whose story was told around that incident.

Maybe two.



One visual I have from that long ago dream is of staring up from this murky gray world into a dim light and the body of a large rat undulating past my field of vision and then returning to stare back at me.

[Daisy]

Quote Originally Posted by njhorror

When I was two and my older sister was six she asked me to walk out onto a pond across the street from where we were living at the time, a rural area in what was urban northern New Jersey, to test the ice. When I'd gone out maybe fifteen feet I crashed through the ice, face first, and disappeared from view . . . . I told them that I had a dream where a giant rat came to me underwater and told me that he would wait with me until my father showed up. Supposedly I described a conversation between the two of us as if we were old friends.

Dear njhorror,

This article, published in the New York Post on December 6, 2007, might be of interest to you:

http://www.nypost.com/p/news/regiona...dlO3nkbug0xu0M

It concerns recent sightings in the Jersey wetlands of the large, semi-aquatic rodent known as the nutria, or coypu. This creature can grow as large as two feet long and weigh as much as twenty pounds. Native to South America, it was introduced to the United States in the 1930s by fur ranchers and has been spreading northward on the East Coast ever since, reaching Maryland and Delaware about twenty years ago.

If by some off chance it was a nutria you spotted underwater and recalled in a dream, it would be no wonder that as a child you imaginatively imbued it with powers of speech, given its reassuringly gentle appearance:

Thank you for your excellent post.

Best,

Nicole

[njhorror]

Excellent Nicole, but it was fifty years ago and I don't think that there was a Nutria in the continental United States at that time.

I've read about their recent sightings though, and from what I've heard they can be somewhat destructive to native plant, and therefore, native animal species.

I was impressed with Julian's opening line of this thread . . .

Quote

My fathers family originally hailed from the west of Ireland.

It sounds like the beginning of a very interesting story, and it was!






Stephen

[bendk]

My earliest scary memory from childhood was watching our cat Mickey cough and blood spray on the wall. He was put to sleep shortly after that.
I also remember an early dream where me and one of my friends went into an elderly lady's house in the neighborhood and she shoved us in an oven. This had to be based on a fairy tale that was read to me or that I watched.

[njhorror]

That sounds like Hansel and Gretel, bendk.

http://www.ivyjoy.com/fables/hansel.html