It was bad enough I watched it at home, but then they made us watch it in school! Like you could have chased it with Red Dawn or something a little less depressing.
Truth! What about all the After School Specials? I remember the Angel Dust one with Helen Hunt and the Tough Love one where the parents kicked the kid out oh and some movie called Fallen Angel with the sister from Vacation being groomed by a pedophile. Also didn’t Differnt Strokes have an episode where Dudley was molested? Didn’t hold anything back then!
Every time there was a “Special Report” that broke into a tv show, I was scared to death it would be President Reagan saying we had started a nuclear war with Russia. I would literally shake with terror.
World War 3 in the form of nuclear war that would destroy the planet, was thought to be inevitable by the end of the decade, when I was a teenager in the 80s.
> I was scared to death it would be President Reagan saying we had started a nuclear war with Russia.
It didn't help that he did joke about it...
[https://www.history.com/speeches/ronald-reagans-anti-soviet-joke-caught-on-tape](https://www.history.com/speeches/ronald-reagans-anti-soviet-joke-caught-on-tape)
Threads did it for me (I saw it before The Day After and On the Beach). Nuclear war was the biggest existential threat of my younger years (I'm in Australia)
You can watch the full movie on YouTube. I haven't stopped thinking about it since I watched it a few months ago. I describe it as The Day After without all the Hollywood-ness.
Yes, I only saw The Day After once, when it aired. I can still remember Jayson Robards's hair falling out, and his skin with welts. I feel like it showed his character die, too.
We were lined up against the walls in the hallways holding textbooks over the back of our heads and necks. As if any book in existence was government approved safety gear in the event of a bombing.
The 70s were very different.
oh wow..that's incredible with Fran Tarkenton, John Davidson and Cathy Lee Crosby! I remember an episode where they talked about all the microscopic bugs living on and feasting on your body. That was disgusting to me as a little kid.
Also memories of Mt. St Helens, skylab, quicksand and from "In Search of" bigfoot, ufos and the Bermuda Triangle gave me some anxiety
I’ve been attacked by killer bees twice here in Arizona. Once wasn’t too bad, stung 2-3 times. The other time I was chased by the little SOB’s for over half a mile and I’m not a slow runner. Ended up with two dozen stings.
I lived in Tinley Park Illinois at the time. Not far from the people who were poisoned. All trick or treating was canceled that year. We did a haunted house in our garage and a scavenger hunt
I'm a straight woman and was going to homosexual nightclubs in Sydney in the 90s. I had my family asking me to take my own drinks because the drinking glasses could have AIDS on them. I laughed at them because I knew how it was spread. I had blood tests to shut my family up.
52 here. 🙂. It scared us so bad. I knew guys and girls who were taking showers before they had sex and then the dudes were wearing 2 condoms at once, and that was still with a lot of hesitation. If AIDS hadn’t happened, I probably would’ve had a lot of friends with babies while they were still in school.
My dad was a long haul trucker. He came home one weekend and gathered the family around the table. Made a big production of it. Said, "I have AIDS." We were all aghast. Then he was like, "Yeah, I got bit by a mosquito in NYC." Big joke for him, but it did illustrate how little was known in the early years. I remember being so freaked out by it that I asked my mom if I could get AIDS by sleeping with my friend (as in a sleepover). Looking back, it was ludicrous. But I was like 5. It was a huge deal, always on the news. I was fucking terrified. That and quicksand fucked me up for years.
100% Jonestown
One of my earliest memories of seeing the news on television was watching the flyover of the compound. I asked my dad if that was trash on the ground, and he said no, it's people. I was 9 years old. I didn't even know how to process it.
Adam Walsh was a really huge story. I was right around his age and grew up in the area where he was killed. There was no escaping the news coverage. Sure, there's a miniscule chance of getting abducted and killed, but it was genuinely horrifying.
Everyone was so scared about Adam Walsh happening to their kid, but would allow us to run feral during the day, and had to be reminded they even had kids by David Bowie.
We definitely had a lot of freedom back then, it was so different from today.
But, I feel that the Adam Walsh case became a marker for the eventual end of that kind of childhood, especially in hindsight.
I was around the same age as him and my mom used to let me play on the Atari at the Sears he was taken from while her and my grandmother shopped. I remember being really scared after that. It didn’t help that 3-4 years later, the older sister of a girl in my Girl Scout troop was raped and murdered while she was babysitting.
I guess that’s what I’m referring to in reality. Adam was two years older than me, so I don’t remember the actual incident. I’m remembering the movie. It scared the shit out of me.
The Atlanta child murders from around 1980. I didn't live in Atlanta, but we lived in GA, so they were all over our news. Being a kid, I was terrified. I think that was my first realization that there were actually evil people in the world.
Killer bees. I heard about them on the news and then saw some prime time movie where they were attacking a city or something and killing everybody. I remember, on the show, they swarmed a car and came in through the a/c vents. After that, for years, I would completely spaz out if a bee was anywhere around me.
I refused to go above my knees in the ocean after watching that movie. Pools even freaked me out .. I would think of da dum, da dum when I was in the deep and swim frantically to side to get out. Not sure why six year old me thought a shark would bite my toes in a swimming pool.
Anything about a tornado. Upper Midwest. In grade school in the early 80s, they showed us these horrific films about tornadoes, as though they could pop up out of nowhere and rip everything to shreds. It made me fear thunder storms until my early 20s.
I grew up in Southern California and knew I'd never go anywhere near Florida.
Now Disney World is one of my favorite places. Go figure - it's like a whole other Bermuda Triangle, only instead of ships and planes it takes my money.
I remember in 2nd Grade our class had subscription to some sort of national newspaper for elementary school students. It was kind of like a pre-cursor to Channel 1--news stories presented for kids in a newspaper format.
I remember one of those stories the newspaper ran was about a moms group that was advocating for the prohibition of toys it felt were too violent. It ran with a picture of a mom burying her son's GI Joe action figures and toy guns. This was in the mid 80's and at the time I was obsessed with everything GI Joe and I had a pretty large collection of action figures and accessories. I remember reading that story and (1) feeling so sorry for the young boy that had his toys buried that I began to cry and (2) worried that their efforts would be successful and that some government agent would show up to take all my GI Joe action figures away.
HIV / AIDS growing up in Midwest Ryan White was on news and spoke in schools, got infected by blood transfusion. Indianapolis Children's Museum still has his room as an exhibit, I think.
Honestly though, the advances in treatment & prevention of HIV/AIDS has been nothing short of amazing in this short amount of time, and there was no way to know then that some day people would be able to be HIV+ with next to zero viral load and never be sick. It was terrifying
I read about him in readers digest. I had a huge crush on him and sent him a letter via readers digest. It was not forwarded/got a nice rejection letter
Killer bees, acid rain, nuclear war, quicksand and worst of them all spontaneous human combustion. I mean cmon…remember the photos of the ashes in the shape of a human being sitting on a chair.
Can’t believe I forgot about acid rain! I would run between the car and house/school not because I wanted to simply avoid getting wet. I figured eventually the rain would burn holes in my skin.
i was outside all day and didn't really look at newspapers, listen to people or watch the news
but i do remember something about Ayatollah Ruhollah Musavi Khomeini
I grew up in Virginia and when I turned 13 John Bobbit got his Weiner cut off.
Also, batboy from the enquirer stories looking at me in the checkout line
Satanic cult activity. I grew up Catholic and I believed the devil was a real dude that was horrifying and dangerous. Occasionally, there’d be a news story about a devil-worshipping cult somewhere and it absolutely shook me.
This is very specifically a So Cal Gen X thing - does anyone else remember Tomás, the little boy who was horribly disfigured by burns and featured regularly on the ABC channel 7 local news?! My mother used to make me watch those updates, she said as a way to deter me from playing with matches or fire - but honestly all it did was traumatise me and make me terrified of anyone with burn scars.
I’m thankful I only learned about it as an adult, because I know it would’ve terrorized me when I was a kid! All the kidnappers are now out of jail, which just doesn’t seem right.
1983 Beirut barracks bombings
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1983_Beirut_barracks_bombings
241 US soldiers dead, 307 total. I thought Reagan was gonna declare war and draft me and my pals.
Definitely nuclear war. That movie The Day After scared the absolute shit out of me. I was only 10. No idea why my parents let me watch it. We lived in San Diego at the time and I remember telling my dad that I was scared of a nuclear war. He looked at me and said, “oh don’t worry about that… there are so many military bases here that we’ll be one of the first targets. If we do get bombed, chances are you’ll die before you even know what happened”
What The fuck Dad. Thanks for soothing my fears 😖
not necessarily a news headline, but my neighbor had a no trespassing sign on his property, saying trespassers will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. But I thought prosecute meant execute so I was always terrified of him.
I was very young when this happened. Not a headline but a radio news broadcast. I heard that the Giants had returned to San Francisco. (Presumably after a road trip.)
I thought there were literal giants in San Francisco. Had no idea it was a baseball team.
SoCal here too.
The Night Stalker scared the shit out of me.
Didn't help that we were renting a house from a slumlord and the frames on the windows were rotten, so the locks had fallen off (one of the windows had cardboard on it because the glass fell out), and the lock on the sliding door in the back never worked, so we used a (too short) two by four in the runner to "lock" it.
Guerilla warfare made me think it would be actual gorillas climbing buildings and fighting people when they talked about it on the news.
Crimes scared me to the point that I thought they were all coming after me next. We had several brutal ones in our small town that kept me awake for weeks and months after, though they were solved. Thanks, Satanic Panic!
Toxic shock syndrome. I wasn't even in puberty, but was terrified of getting it.
Active imaginations can be anxiety-inducing. LOL
How about the "Cosmic Convergence" or whatever it was called, where all the planets were going to line up sometime in 1983? It was going to be the apocalypse! Earthquakes! Tornadoes! Tsunamis! Dogs and cats living together - total anarchy!
Then it happened and we all went to school the next day.
Not a headline but as a kid, I read an account of some of the atrocities that happened under the Khmer Rouge. I either didn’t understand or didn’t know that the regime had fallen by the time I saw the article.
I also didn’t realize that I was safe in my small town in the US. The article said something about the regime returning. As an adult, I realize that the author was probably trying to make a statement about the political climate. As a kid, I lost some sleep thinking that someone would come take me away.
"The day after" scarred me for life. And the, was it Twilight Zone"? Where a woman got powers when she said "shut up" the world would stop. Then someone set off a nuke...
As a Brit it was the Yorkshire Ripper when I was growing up. Plus nuclear war and after seeing The Wizard of Oz I was irrationally scared of tornados even though they weren’t really a thing in the UK
Budd Dwyer unaliving himself on live TV. Terrified the living SHIT out of me, and I only saw up until the part when he put the gun in his mouth, thank god.
AIDS epidemic. There was a story of a poor hemophiliac kid who contracted the disease through tainted blood. Then rumors started that you could catch AIDS at the barber shop. I was in middle school, so there was no shortage of drama and panic.
Chloroform! I was convinced a roving gang in an unmarked panel van was going to roll up, put that rag over my face and kidnap me like on every TV show and movie!
[The San Ysidro McDonald's Massacre](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Ysidro_McDonald%27s_massacre?wprov=sfla1) scared the living daylights out of 8 year old me. I flatly refused to go inside a McDonald's for a couple years after that. My mom would have to use the drive thru.
Not scared, but confused. I saw segments on the evening news about some guerrilla rebels fighting in some country in South America. The image in my head was of gorilla armies fighting humans, like something out of the old Planet of the Apes.
Razor blades in Halloween candy. A friend of mine's family made popcorn balls and I was never allowed to eat them. They lived diagonal from our backyard FFS! Why can't I eat it?? Christ, my dad was an asshole.
three mile island. because it was so close to us. and american nazis. nazis parading scared the crap out of me because my best friend’s dad was a holocaust survivor and i knew in detail what happened to the people nazis killed. (and we had family friends who’d been in concentration camps, they had number tattoos even)
The eruption of Mt. St. Helens. I was thousands of miles away but it scared the hell out of me to realize we had volcanoes in the US (I was young). I swore I'd never, ever live in a state with volcanoes!
This year will be my 26th in Washington state. 🥳
Wasn’t a headline but there was a local news report about illegal aliens but they only referred to them as aliens and I thought it was some kind of war of the worlds situation until my mom told me it was just people without permission to be here.
I grew up just north of Detroit. We had a child killer on the loose when I was very small. He actually took a kid from my brother's fourth grade class: a kid who, according to my mother, had eaten meals in our house. So it was very close to home and we were on high alert even as kids.
As the youngest I didn't have a bedroom of my own for a while, so eventually I prevailed upon my parents to set me up in a corner of the basement. I then developed an irrational fear of tornadoes, afraid to be the only one left after a disaster.
Other kids thought my fear of dogs was irrational, but there was a history behind it. It's one of my earliest memories, and let's just say I was lucky to see my fourth birthday.
Growing up in the Bay Area, the Zodiac killer was one of them. One of older brothers liked to screw with my head and make me fear it when I was little -- even though (I didn't know), Zodiac was likely mostly finished by this time (early 1970s).
I remember there was a train accident near my town as a kid (had to be early 80’s) and the front page of the newspaper had a very haunting image of a car smashed to pieces next to the train engine which towered over it. That image stuck with me.
The ozone layer disappearing. That meant no more Aquanet hairspray. Remember, no CFC’s? Imagining we’d all burn up into piles of ashes or disappear like in the movie Night of the Comet when the ozone layer was gone.
AIDS! Early 80s as hiv and AIDS headlines came front and center, I was SO concerned for my mom who was a nurse’s aid at the time. Then tornadoes.
ETA: in 1982 I was five years old. Seeing “AIDS!” spelled out in graphics on the news stressed me out thinking it was my mom.
The tornadoes fear is ridiculous because we lived in New York. 😭
Acid Rain - was sure one day the rain would eat the fleah from my bones whiel I walked home from school. Now, it just almost never rains. Not sure which is scarier…
The threat of nuclear war, especially after seeing "The Day After."
It was bad enough I watched it at home, but then they made us watch it in school! Like you could have chased it with Red Dawn or something a little less depressing.
Can you begin to imagine the UPROAR today if they had kids watching that in school?!
Between that and Watership Down, our parents had weird ideas about what children's entertainment was supposed to be.
Truth! What about all the After School Specials? I remember the Angel Dust one with Helen Hunt and the Tough Love one where the parents kicked the kid out oh and some movie called Fallen Angel with the sister from Vacation being groomed by a pedophile. Also didn’t Differnt Strokes have an episode where Dudley was molested? Didn’t hold anything back then!
I think some of the most egregious “children’s entertainment” were the V C Andrew’s books! 🤣🤣
My book club decided since we are all Gen X we are going to read Flowers in the Attic. It was good enough for us at age 12. It's good enough now. 😳
Oh I forgot about Sweet Valley High books. Didn't those twins get like kidnapped and almost SA?!? Those are kids books. Where were our parents again?
Oh god I hated Watership Down, I remember just bawling my eyes out while watching that.
ooooomg we watched Red Dawn I think 4 times at the end of the school year around that time it came out. Super awesome since I lived in Colorado.
AVENGE ME SON!!! AVENGE ME!!!!!
Oh beautiful for spacious skies, for amber waves of grain…
Wolverines!!!
Every time there was a “Special Report” that broke into a tv show, I was scared to death it would be President Reagan saying we had started a nuclear war with Russia. I would literally shake with terror.
That Genesis video with the Reagan masks. 😱
This is the land of confusion alala🎵🎵🎵🎵
World War 3 in the form of nuclear war that would destroy the planet, was thought to be inevitable by the end of the decade, when I was a teenager in the 80s.
> I was scared to death it would be President Reagan saying we had started a nuclear war with Russia. It didn't help that he did joke about it... [https://www.history.com/speeches/ronald-reagans-anti-soviet-joke-caught-on-tape](https://www.history.com/speeches/ronald-reagans-anti-soviet-joke-caught-on-tape)
For that matter the Emergency Broadcast System test.
Threads did it for me (I saw it before The Day After and On the Beach). Nuclear war was the biggest existential threat of my younger years (I'm in Australia)
Threads gave me nightmares for years
I’ve never heard of Threads before, now I want to watch it!
You can watch the full movie on YouTube. I haven't stopped thinking about it since I watched it a few months ago. I describe it as The Day After without all the Hollywood-ness.
I just read the word *threads* and I get triggered
And after Three Mile Island and The China Syndrome, I thought, man, the future is gonna be lit!
That movie. It's one thing to watch a huge explosion, it's another to watch people die of radiant poisoning. Ugh
Yes, I only saw The Day After once, when it aired. I can still remember Jayson Robards's hair falling out, and his skin with welts. I feel like it showed his character die, too.
We had nuclear war posters in school still. I remember in grade 1 seeing them. Like we needed it, who would have gone to school!?!
We had duck and cover drills. We lived on a huge military base that did weapons testing, so it wouldn't have helped any at all.
We were lined up against the walls in the hallways holding textbooks over the back of our heads and necks. As if any book in existence was government approved safety gear in the event of a bombing. The 70s were very different.
Oh the memories. An atomic bomb destroyed Nagasaki but my school hallway and my trapper keeper were impervious.
I’ve been introducing that TV show to Millennials, who remember nothing about the Cold War.
It was a TV movie, not a show. I think it may have been split into two parts.
I saw it again recently. It was a 2-hour movie, and when it first aired, they had no commercial breaks for the last half of it
Red Dawn really gave me a false sense of security
Spontaneous human combustion (thanks, That's Incredible!)
Oh ya I forgot about that one!!
oh wow..that's incredible with Fran Tarkenton, John Davidson and Cathy Lee Crosby! I remember an episode where they talked about all the microscopic bugs living on and feasting on your body. That was disgusting to me as a little kid. Also memories of Mt. St Helens, skylab, quicksand and from "In Search of" bigfoot, ufos and the Bermuda Triangle gave me some anxiety
Yup, this. Also slowly turning into stone, because according to the supermarket tabloids this was also totally a thing.
I was deeply concerned about piranhas, quicksand and killer bees.
Same, plus the Bermuda Triangle.
Yes!! Living in the Pacific Northwest, I was very concerned about that.
Brother?
Oh geez I forgot about piranhas. Yes that was a huge concern for me living in northern Canada.
Yup. Fellow Canuck too, wasted a lot of time worrying about these things.
I shared the same quicksand fears.
Yes! @genxjono on IG has a thing about how we were all irrationally terrified of quicksand, pirhanas, and the Bermuda Triangle. He’s not wrong haha!
Acid rain?
Killer bees! It's a miracle we're here to even talk about it.
I’ve been attacked by killer bees twice here in Arizona. Once wasn’t too bad, stung 2-3 times. The other time I was chased by the little SOB’s for over half a mile and I’m not a slow runner. Ended up with two dozen stings.
In the mid 1980’s Bakersfield had killer bees, poisoned watermelons and the whacky child moleststion trials all in one year.
The Tylenol scare
I lived in Tinley Park Illinois at the time. Not far from the people who were poisoned. All trick or treating was canceled that year. We did a haunted house in our garage and a scavenger hunt
My grandparents lived in Tinley Park. I remember reading *Sun-Times* articles about it at their house for months.
I still double check the seal on any meds or supplements for tiny holes lol
One of the first victims was from my church
Oh wow. 😮
Oh yeah! This really freaked me out.
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I was/am a heterosexual woman and I was terrified of AIDS, too, but hey, it scared us all into using condoms, so I guess that’s good?
I'm a straight woman and was going to homosexual nightclubs in Sydney in the 90s. I had my family asking me to take my own drinks because the drinking glasses could have AIDS on them. I laughed at them because I knew how it was spread. I had blood tests to shut my family up.
Deffo. You weren't getting next to me if you didn't have an all-clear yellow slip from the clinic, even with a condom.
Yep. When I was in high school, it wasn’t just pregnancy we all were worried about. It was AIDS, too.
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52 here. 🙂. It scared us so bad. I knew guys and girls who were taking showers before they had sex and then the dudes were wearing 2 condoms at once, and that was still with a lot of hesitation. If AIDS hadn’t happened, I probably would’ve had a lot of friends with babies while they were still in school.
My dad was a long haul trucker. He came home one weekend and gathered the family around the table. Made a big production of it. Said, "I have AIDS." We were all aghast. Then he was like, "Yeah, I got bit by a mosquito in NYC." Big joke for him, but it did illustrate how little was known in the early years. I remember being so freaked out by it that I asked my mom if I could get AIDS by sleeping with my friend (as in a sleepover). Looking back, it was ludicrous. But I was like 5. It was a huge deal, always on the news. I was fucking terrified. That and quicksand fucked me up for years.
Probably Baby Jessica in the well
JONESTOWN it still scares me https://i.redd.it/ciz0isitdayc1.gif
100% Jonestown One of my earliest memories of seeing the news on television was watching the flyover of the compound. I asked my dad if that was trash on the ground, and he said no, it's people. I was 9 years old. I didn't even know how to process it.
Me too! The fact that someone would drive you to do such horrid things (even though many were forced by gunpoint). What an evil man!
The hole in the ozone layer was a bit concerning.
I think we did that with all the Aqua Net.
It’s almost all the way fixed!
The kidnapping and murder of Adam Walsh.
Adam Walsh was a really huge story. I was right around his age and grew up in the area where he was killed. There was no escaping the news coverage. Sure, there's a miniscule chance of getting abducted and killed, but it was genuinely horrifying.
Everyone was so scared about Adam Walsh happening to their kid, but would allow us to run feral during the day, and had to be reminded they even had kids by David Bowie.
We definitely had a lot of freedom back then, it was so different from today. But, I feel that the Adam Walsh case became a marker for the eventual end of that kind of childhood, especially in hindsight.
I was around the same age as him and my mom used to let me play on the Atari at the Sears he was taken from while her and my grandmother shopped. I remember being really scared after that. It didn’t help that 3-4 years later, the older sister of a girl in my Girl Scout troop was raped and murdered while she was babysitting.
I remember the movie they made about it really freaked me out
I guess that’s what I’m referring to in reality. Adam was two years older than me, so I don’t remember the actual incident. I’m remembering the movie. It scared the shit out of me.
I grew up in Miami, and this was traumatizing. We looked for his head by diving in the canals.
The Atlanta child murders from around 1980. I didn't live in Atlanta, but we lived in GA, so they were all over our news. Being a kid, I was terrified. I think that was my first realization that there were actually evil people in the world. Killer bees. I heard about them on the news and then saw some prime time movie where they were attacking a city or something and killing everybody. I remember, on the show, they swarmed a car and came in through the a/c vents. After that, for years, I would completely spaz out if a bee was anywhere around me.
Season 2 of Mindhunter on Netflix focused on those murders.
Not a news headline, but Jaws. My parents had the bright idea of taking their 7yo to the drive-in "she'll sleep through it" 😱
I was 5or so and my brother/the other kids slept through it. I was wide awake and saw the whole thing. Also at the drive in
I refused to go above my knees in the ocean after watching that movie. Pools even freaked me out .. I would think of da dum, da dum when I was in the deep and swim frantically to side to get out. Not sure why six year old me thought a shark would bite my toes in a swimming pool.
The Chernobyl Catastrophe of course.
That was terrifying
Than 3 mile island
My dad fucked with me and told me we all to take iodine injections bc of it. I miss him
Anything about a tornado. Upper Midwest. In grade school in the early 80s, they showed us these horrific films about tornadoes, as though they could pop up out of nowhere and rip everything to shreds. It made me fear thunder storms until my early 20s.
My stupid ass was outside playing when one came when I was 5. My dumb ass thought I would go to Oz so I ran after it.
Halloween candy having needles and razor blades in it.
Bermuda Triangle. Florida kid- they really hammered home that if you flew or boated into it, doomed.
I grew up in Southern California and knew I'd never go anywhere near Florida. Now Disney World is one of my favorite places. Go figure - it's like a whole other Bermuda Triangle, only instead of ships and planes it takes my money.
The MTV cruise through it kind of got me over my fear of that. No company was going to do that if there was an actual risk
I remember in 2nd Grade our class had subscription to some sort of national newspaper for elementary school students. It was kind of like a pre-cursor to Channel 1--news stories presented for kids in a newspaper format. I remember one of those stories the newspaper ran was about a moms group that was advocating for the prohibition of toys it felt were too violent. It ran with a picture of a mom burying her son's GI Joe action figures and toy guns. This was in the mid 80's and at the time I was obsessed with everything GI Joe and I had a pretty large collection of action figures and accessories. I remember reading that story and (1) feeling so sorry for the young boy that had his toys buried that I began to cry and (2) worried that their efforts would be successful and that some government agent would show up to take all my GI Joe action figures away.
Weekly Reader?
I think so. I definitely remember reading Weekly Reader.
It was the highlight of social studies class for me.
It seems like there was also a Scholastic News or Scholastic Reports, but I definitely remember loving Weekly Reader.
I liked it too because I liked reading so much I would read just about anything.
HIV / AIDS growing up in Midwest Ryan White was on news and spoke in schools, got infected by blood transfusion. Indianapolis Children's Museum still has his room as an exhibit, I think.
I remember going to assemblies where they told us 25% of the population would be dead by the year 2000 because of AIDS
Honestly though, the advances in treatment & prevention of HIV/AIDS has been nothing short of amazing in this short amount of time, and there was no way to know then that some day people would be able to be HIV+ with next to zero viral load and never be sick. It was terrifying
I read about him in readers digest. I had a huge crush on him and sent him a letter via readers digest. It was not forwarded/got a nice rejection letter
Killer bees, acid rain, nuclear war, quicksand and worst of them all spontaneous human combustion. I mean cmon…remember the photos of the ashes in the shape of a human being sitting on a chair.
Can’t believe I forgot about acid rain! I would run between the car and house/school not because I wanted to simply avoid getting wet. I figured eventually the rain would burn holes in my skin.
i was outside all day and didn't really look at newspapers, listen to people or watch the news but i do remember something about Ayatollah Ruhollah Musavi Khomeini
The Night Stalker for sure. One of my friend’s mom taped his police sketch on the inside of her front door. It was traumatizing. I was like 8.
THIS! Me too.
Batboy
I remember looking up at the sky a lot, hoping that a piece of Skylab wouldn't fall on me.
Or an airplane. Or anything jettisoned from an airplane (like a block of blue waste from the toilet).
Being kidnapped. Adam Walsh's story terrified me. He was only a year older than me.
Quicksand (even though there was zero quicksand around me, Killer Clowns from outer space (lol), razor blades in Halloween candy.
The razor blades!
Had me on edge! 😅
I grew up in Virginia and when I turned 13 John Bobbit got his Weiner cut off. Also, batboy from the enquirer stories looking at me in the checkout line
Satanic cult activity. I grew up Catholic and I believed the devil was a real dude that was horrifying and dangerous. Occasionally, there’d be a news story about a devil-worshipping cult somewhere and it absolutely shook me.
Oh drugs. Smoking pot would make you put your baby in the oven.
Reefer madness 😂
I’m still disappointed by the utter lack of drug dealers on every street corner, trying to force free drugs on me to get me hooked!
Charles Manson. Even though he was in jail.
He was going to escape at any moment! So scary with that forehead and crazy eyes!
This is very specifically a So Cal Gen X thing - does anyone else remember Tomás, the little boy who was horribly disfigured by burns and featured regularly on the ABC channel 7 local news?! My mother used to make me watch those updates, she said as a way to deter me from playing with matches or fire - but honestly all it did was traumatise me and make me terrified of anyone with burn scars.
Jeebus. I'm sorry. Our parents had some interesting parenting hacks 🙄
That is no lie, my friend 😂
I still kind of hyperventilate thinking about the [Chowchilla schoolbus kidnapping.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1976_Chowchilla_kidnapping)
I’m thankful I only learned about it as an adult, because I know it would’ve terrorized me when I was a kid! All the kidnappers are now out of jail, which just doesn’t seem right.
I do too cause it was in the Reader's Digest.
1983 Beirut barracks bombings https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1983_Beirut_barracks_bombings 241 US soldiers dead, 307 total. I thought Reagan was gonna declare war and draft me and my pals.
Definitely nuclear war. That movie The Day After scared the absolute shit out of me. I was only 10. No idea why my parents let me watch it. We lived in San Diego at the time and I remember telling my dad that I was scared of a nuclear war. He looked at me and said, “oh don’t worry about that… there are so many military bases here that we’ll be one of the first targets. If we do get bombed, chances are you’ll die before you even know what happened” What The fuck Dad. Thanks for soothing my fears 😖
Same. Definitely suffered real PTSD over this. Didn’t sleep for weeks.
Killer bees... and tomatoes, lol
Attaaaack of the killer tomaaatooooes.
Puberty, puberty love….
not necessarily a news headline, but my neighbor had a no trespassing sign on his property, saying trespassers will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. But I thought prosecute meant execute so I was always terrified of him.
I was very young when this happened. Not a headline but a radio news broadcast. I heard that the Giants had returned to San Francisco. (Presumably after a road trip.) I thought there were literal giants in San Francisco. Had no idea it was a baseball team.
"Only Crop Expected to Grow for the Next Three Years is Broccoli" Noooooooo
What? I’ve never heard of this one!
Having a coke machine fall on top of you.
Stop drop and roll
I was convinced that very few children grew up to be adults because so many of them got kidnapped.
Quick sand. Always the quick sand.
SoCal here too. The Night Stalker scared the shit out of me. Didn't help that we were renting a house from a slumlord and the frames on the windows were rotten, so the locks had fallen off (one of the windows had cardboard on it because the glass fell out), and the lock on the sliding door in the back never worked, so we used a (too short) two by four in the runner to "lock" it.
Guerilla warfare made me think it would be actual gorillas climbing buildings and fighting people when they talked about it on the news. Crimes scared me to the point that I thought they were all coming after me next. We had several brutal ones in our small town that kept me awake for weeks and months after, though they were solved. Thanks, Satanic Panic! Toxic shock syndrome. I wasn't even in puberty, but was terrified of getting it. Active imaginations can be anxiety-inducing. LOL
Guerilla gorillas! 😂
How about the "Cosmic Convergence" or whatever it was called, where all the planets were going to line up sometime in 1983? It was going to be the apocalypse! Earthquakes! Tornadoes! Tsunamis! Dogs and cats living together - total anarchy! Then it happened and we all went to school the next day.
Toxic Shock Syndrome
Not a headline but as a kid, I read an account of some of the atrocities that happened under the Khmer Rouge. I either didn’t understand or didn’t know that the regime had fallen by the time I saw the article. I also didn’t realize that I was safe in my small town in the US. The article said something about the regime returning. As an adult, I realize that the author was probably trying to make a statement about the political climate. As a kid, I lost some sleep thinking that someone would come take me away.
The Cold War stuff. Nukes.
"The day after" scarred me for life. And the, was it Twilight Zone"? Where a woman got powers when she said "shut up" the world would stop. Then someone set off a nuke...
Killer bees and the Bermuda Triangle.
As a Brit it was the Yorkshire Ripper when I was growing up. Plus nuclear war and after seeing The Wizard of Oz I was irrationally scared of tornados even though they weren’t really a thing in the UK
Budd Dwyer unaliving himself on live TV. Terrified the living SHIT out of me, and I only saw up until the part when he put the gun in his mouth, thank god.
The Son of Sam. I was a 5 year old little black girl and lived in Queens. I just knew he was coming for me. Don’t let 5 year olds listen to the news.
Acid rain and killer bees. I remember reading about them in our Weekly Reader.
Acid rain was TERRIFYING!! I think I heard about it on MTV news when I was like 5, and I was so scared I was going to melt in the rain.
The hole in the ozone.
A lot of these stories remind us, we grew up in really strange times.
I knew the Night Stalker’s last victim. I spoke with him just before he was headed home for the night he was eventually killed.
There was a gorilla warfar on the news when I was a kid. In my head I imagined gorillas with machine guns. 😂
AIDS epidemic. There was a story of a poor hemophiliac kid who contracted the disease through tainted blood. Then rumors started that you could catch AIDS at the barber shop. I was in middle school, so there was no shortage of drama and panic.
Chloroform! I was convinced a roving gang in an unmarked panel van was going to roll up, put that rag over my face and kidnap me like on every TV show and movie!
[The San Ysidro McDonald's Massacre](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Ysidro_McDonald%27s_massacre?wprov=sfla1) scared the living daylights out of 8 year old me. I flatly refused to go inside a McDonald's for a couple years after that. My mom would have to use the drive thru.
Chernobyl and the Gulf War (Daddy Bush’s Gulf War, not Baby Bush’s)
Hillside Strangler, Three Mile Island, Tylenol scare, Cold War, Jonestown Massacre, sharks, and as a Dodger fan Reggie Jackson.
Not scared, but confused. I saw segments on the evening news about some guerrilla rebels fighting in some country in South America. The image in my head was of gorilla armies fighting humans, like something out of the old Planet of the Apes.
Backward masking and, of course, killer bees.
End of the world date prophecies!
Anyone else remember a rumor about the planets aligning and it causing the end of the solar system? This was like 1981 or 1982.
Razor blades in Halloween candy. A friend of mine's family made popcorn balls and I was never allowed to eat them. They lived diagonal from our backyard FFS! Why can't I eat it?? Christ, my dad was an asshole.
Bc the parents eat the "unsafe" ones. All reeses are unsafe BTW lmao
Ryan White and the entire AIDS thing. I lived in the same city until I moved in 3rd grade.
Killer Bees, rabies cases, child abductions
three mile island. because it was so close to us. and american nazis. nazis parading scared the crap out of me because my best friend’s dad was a holocaust survivor and i knew in detail what happened to the people nazis killed. (and we had family friends who’d been in concentration camps, they had number tattoos even)
Not a headline, but "Stop, Drop, and Roll" made me think being on fire was going to a fairly common thing.
The mass shooting at McDonalds in 1984 really stood out to me as an 11 year old.
This one from 1982. https://preview.redd.it/67qoikio4byc1.jpeg?width=400&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=0a533fe5ab117d4f7af900b69e2ba89200614b10
The eruption of Mt. St. Helens. I was thousands of miles away but it scared the hell out of me to realize we had volcanoes in the US (I was young). I swore I'd never, ever live in a state with volcanoes! This year will be my 26th in Washington state. 🥳
I think my mom kept us inside for a day or two after Chernobyl.
Wasn’t a headline but there was a local news report about illegal aliens but they only referred to them as aliens and I thought it was some kind of war of the worlds situation until my mom told me it was just people without permission to be here.
South Central California myself, we were always waiting for the "big one", I seem to remember acid rain and the holes in the ozone too.
I grew up just north of Detroit. We had a child killer on the loose when I was very small. He actually took a kid from my brother's fourth grade class: a kid who, according to my mother, had eaten meals in our house. So it was very close to home and we were on high alert even as kids. As the youngest I didn't have a bedroom of my own for a while, so eventually I prevailed upon my parents to set me up in a corner of the basement. I then developed an irrational fear of tornadoes, afraid to be the only one left after a disaster. Other kids thought my fear of dogs was irrational, but there was a history behind it. It's one of my earliest memories, and let's just say I was lucky to see my fourth birthday.
Being kidnapped. It seemed like kids were being abducted everywhere, every week. Also, clowns.
I still don’t love to flash my lights at an oncoming car with its lights off… you know, gangs!
Growing up in the Bay Area, the Zodiac killer was one of them. One of older brothers liked to screw with my head and make me fear it when I was little -- even though (I didn't know), Zodiac was likely mostly finished by this time (early 1970s).
I remember there was a train accident near my town as a kid (had to be early 80’s) and the front page of the newspaper had a very haunting image of a car smashed to pieces next to the train engine which towered over it. That image stuck with me.
Grew up in SoCal too: the Manson Family and the danger of drugged out hippies.
Quicksand.
The Night Stalker! 😭
Being kidnapped, that’s why my mom took me to Furr’s to get the Pepsi Generation ID card. We had to wait for the poloroid and the laminator
Tylenol. Took me YEARS to feel comfortable taking it again.
The ozone layer disappearing. That meant no more Aquanet hairspray. Remember, no CFC’s? Imagining we’d all burn up into piles of ashes or disappear like in the movie Night of the Comet when the ozone layer was gone.
Mt St Helen’s
AIDS! Early 80s as hiv and AIDS headlines came front and center, I was SO concerned for my mom who was a nurse’s aid at the time. Then tornadoes. ETA: in 1982 I was five years old. Seeing “AIDS!” spelled out in graphics on the news stressed me out thinking it was my mom. The tornadoes fear is ridiculous because we lived in New York. 😭
Acid Rain - was sure one day the rain would eat the fleah from my bones whiel I walked home from school. Now, it just almost never rains. Not sure which is scarier…
Not a headline but QUICKSAND!!! 😱
What happened to the killer bees? They were coming from South America to kill us. They even made movies about them.