Mom hung a mass produced art print on my bedroom wall when I was about 8. It's of a little girl holding her puppy.
Cute, right?
Thing is, this painting terrified me. And I was raised in the time where you just kind of swallowed any complaints and didn't bother mom or dad with kid foolishness.
Here is a copy of the thing I actually had hanging on my wall. This same frame. Probably came from Service Merchandise or some such.
What in the everloving hell is lurking just over her shoulder?!?! To me it always looked like a skull wearing a hat on the side of his head, like a little old timey jaunty hat a clown would wear.
It's a wonder I got any sleep. I was too afraid to tell mom I hated it. I never considered that I possessed the agency to take it off my wall and hide it at the bottom of the closet.
I think of this cursed painting still.
Did you ever have something in your childhood that unnecessarily scared the bejeezus out of you?
When I was six years old, I was afraid of the sound of flushing the toilet. I still flushed after using the bathroom, but I'd run out of there after pushing the lever. At one point, my dad and my younger sister found out about this and so of course they trapped me in the bathroom and kept flushing the toilet over and over.
I'm jealous that you can boil down your childhood trauma to one specific event...
Heh, who said I only experienced one event?
I also had this fear. It lasted later than six years old, too. I don't like the sound even now as an adult. I never questioned it until recently when discussing sensory issues. It was pointed out that while I keep saying I have none, there's actually a a list of things I've mentioned that are what other people call sensory issues.
"Sensory issue" might be the right way of describing it for me too. I wasn't scared that a monster would come out of the toilet. I just didn't want to hear the sound of the flush.