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?
We had a small animatronic monkey toy, similar to this one below, but in a sitting position snd with deep black eyes. We didn't play with it (try to imagine why) so it was on the top shelf of the room.
When we used the A/C in the hot summer, because it was high in the room, its face was slightly lit, and because in the resting position the head of the monkey looked at his side and below, it would end up looking at me while I was sleeping, barely lit by a status LED.
It actually didn't bother me always, but if I woke up from a nightmare it was the first thing I saw and usually meant not going back to sleep.
Bonus: I also hated mirrors. When going to the bathroom in the night, while cleaning my hands I was terrified of looking down from the mirror and look up back to it, I always imagined some horror creature like a ghost, or the girl from The Ring to happear behind my shoulders.