Solved Murders - True Crime Stories - Facing Childhood Fears Growing Up Haunted by Horror, True Crime, and Anxiety #72

Episode Date: July 18, 2025

#horrorstories #reddithorrorstories #ScaryStories #creepypasta #horrortales#childhoodfears #truecrime #anxietyhorror #hauntedmemories #mentalhealth  Facing Childhood Fears: Growing Up Haunted by Horror, True Crime, and AnxietyThis story dives deep into the lingering shadows of childhood fears, where the lines between real horror and inner demons blur. Haunted by true crime tales and battling anxiety, the narrator’s journey reveals how fear shapes us—and how confronting it is the key to healing.  horrorstories, reddithorrorstories, scarystories, horrorstory, creepypasta, horrortales, childhoodtrauma, mentalhealthawareness, anxietyjourney, truecrimehorror, hauntedpast, overcomingfear, psychologicalhorror, personalstruggle, fearandanxiety, childhoodnightmares, emotionalhorror, healingprocess, darkmemories, innerdemons

There's so much rugby on Sports Extra from Sky. They've asked me to read the whole lad at the same speed I usually use for the legal bit at the end. Here goes. This winter Sports Extra is jam-packed with rugby. For the first time we've got every Champions Cup match exclusively live, plus action from the URC, the Challenge Cup, and much more. Thus the URC and all the best European rugby all in the same place.

Get more exclusively live tournaments than ever before on Sports Extra. Jampack with rugby. Phew, that is a lot of rugby. Get Sports Extra on Sky for 15 euro a month for 12 months. Search Sports Extra. New Sports Extra customers only. Standard Pressing applies after 12 months for the terms apply. Don't let foot pain or discomfort hold you back.

At foot Solutions, we specialize in high-quality supportive footwear. And use the latest scanning technology to custom-make orthotics, designed for your unique feet. If you want to free your feet in joints from pain, improve balance or correct alignment, book a free foot assessment at footsolutions.com. Or pop-in store today. Foot Solutions, the first step towards pain-free feet. I'm aware no one will likely read this, but I'm doing this therapeutically to get Theses memories out and hopefully be able to move past them in a way that is healthy and productive, thanks.

Fear and anxiety in the 90s. The only way I can think to describe our unhealthy obsession with horror and true crime is passionate. But oh, what a word to use to describe the joyful lust for the macabre that I have. A need to stare into the void and feel that all too familiar sense of fear and dread. looking into the crime scenes, playing at being a detective, knowing full well I'm not. When I was a kid I remember gathering around the television and watching unsolved mysteries with the entire family. Litted with nonsense religious stories, alien abductions, family reunions, and more were the tales I sought out even then as a six-year-old. I wanted to see something that was horrifying, and I looked anywhere I could to satiate this desire.

A young boy murdered by another small child, Kool-Aid splashed on a backpack. No movie was scary enough, at least not until bedtime, when our developing brain would create elaborate scenarios of killers stalking me and our family. It was always our family I was worried about. Mom and Dad cut a loud figure through our home, screaming and arguing when the ability to adult escape them. My brothers and cousin, without whom I would have gone insane and ended up a drug addict or worse, did what they could to comfort me when it became too much to handle. A knife-wielding

grandmother whose eccentricities I could write an entire book about. Especially our brothers, though older than me, I feared for them most, for I knew what happened when shadowy men showed up at a family's home with ill intentions. I have never confronted the demons of our childhood directly, I fear they would win any metaphorical or real fight I picked with them. I know them, and that they are there, and will always be there. We would sometimes read a poem before bedtime called The Highway Man, a tale about star-crossed lovers and a violent and ultimately futile choice to save one's lover. This story haunted me, I could be used as a pawn to injure our family, so I resolved to remove that possibility, I would never be scared. Of course that was ridiculous because I was horrified most of the time, social anxiety got its powerful claws in me come elementary school and never relinquished.

On random nights I would be too nervous to go to sleep, so I would talk to our brother and we would get in trouble. Unable to contain ourselves, we would continue to speak and giggle nervously until our parents made me move to their bed so they could get some sleep. My brother would also talk to me nervously, but our parents would still make me go to their bed because he would just talk to them if he went. In 1993 I got our first job, as a paperboy. The route was in our brother's name because he was older and it was legal for him to work. Every morning in the summers one of us would drag ourselves through our impoverished neighborhood and pick up a stack of papers, along with the paper men slash women who worked the same job we did out of their cars to hand-deliver to about 60 houses in Germantown, a neighborhood

in Louisville, Kentucky. This was where the changing of our personality took place. Leaving your home in the dark, armed fully with the knowledge of what Dahmer, gacy and fish had done, what countless evil people had done to infinite victims was a test of strength or our resolve. I failed. I cried at points and ran like the devil was chasing me at the slightest sound. Picturing our eventual killers, I was certain that death had come for me each time I left. Tears streamed freely down our cheeks for the first week I went out on our own. My only thought was to move as fast as I can and get home safely. I saw death. I saw death. I was around every corner, perils down each dim alley and no hope to be found anywhere. I was utterly

alone and our mind worked in overdrive to remind me that life is not guaranteed. Rude co-workers who always stole extra papers for themselves and shorted me on our route weren't given a pass. As far as I was concerned they were every bit as capable of atrocities as anyone. I made a point to stay out of arm's reach of anyone, under the assumption that all adults are potential monsters. In the light perhaps I would have been more bold, the false comfort of the sun steadying our spine to speak out elegantly against their persistent slights. But instead, in the witching hour I alternately looked at them as little as possible and as much as I could, waiting in the shadows until they had gotten what they needed and stolen for me again before

approaching for fear that they would turn out to be the monsters I saw flashing on the television screens, the ones I read about in magazines. My obsession was punishing me in real time and yet we still exposed ourselves to as many horrors as I could, positive it would strengthen our resolve, make me bolder somehow. Once, while at the drop-off site for our bundle of newspapers, after the other paper men and women had left, the same car drove by three times. I ran all the way home without doing our route. I hid beside our house knowing if I went in and said I hadn't done the job out of fear that

I would be chastised in the least and made to go back out and do it in the worst. There's so much rugby on Sports Extra from Sky. They've asked me to read the whole lad at the same speed I usually use for the legal bit at the end. Here goes. This winter sports extra is jam-packed with rugby. For the first time we've got every Champions Cup match exclusively live, plus action from the URC, the Challenge Cup, and much more. Thus the U.S.C and all the best European rugby all in the same place.

Get more exclusively live tournaments than ever before on Sports Extra. Jampack with rugby. Phew, that is a lot of rugby. Get Sports Extra on Sky for 15 euro a month for 12 months. Search Sports Extra. New Sports Extra customers only. Standard pressing applies after 12 months for the terms apply. Don't let foot pain or discomfort hold you back.

At Foot Solutions, we specialize in high-quality supportive footwear. And use the latest scanning technology to custom-make orthotics. Designed for your unique feet. If you want to free your feet in joints from pain, improve balance or correct alignment, book a free foot assessment at footsolutions.i or pop-in store today. Foot Solutions, the first step towards pain-free feet. As I crouched weeping into the side of our house, picturing that car, seeing them grab me and force me into it,

I had a realization that I was going to have to go back and finish our route. The fear and anxiety, the running at the sight of something more than twice, a personal rule of mind that I believe helped me more than I want to admit, the agonizing moment when the front door closes behind you at four in the morning, the somehow equally terrifying moment when your house was no longer in view. I hated it, and our knowledge along with it. I started, for the first time in our life, to hate ourselves. It was for a simple reason, I was a coward,

I wanted everyone to think I was a person who was capable, tough and brave but this thing had exposed me. Lane bare the fact that while I could read on an eighth grade level I was still a baby at heart, a loser that talks like a young adult with a streak in his underwear, a speech impediment and a bad attitude so scared he had to run into bushes and duck behind cars while weeping to avoid these imagined predators. Over the next two summers we picked up paper routes each year and each year the fear the fear

returned, a pain sitting low in your stomach that feels like you have a rock the size of a pumpkin in your guts permeating nausea coupled with a stomach cramp, growing more still when I started delivering papers to unfamiliar neighborhoods. We subbed on a route once an eye, pitiful sissy, was delivering a paper to the rear and of an upstairs apartment. I heard the noise before I saw them, but as soon as we saw each other they were completely silent.

A group of friends having fun drinking and smoking marijuana. Every one of them froze, I in turn froze as well. We thought we was going to urinate on ourselves, this was our worst nightmare. Instead of being in the shadows I stood in the bright light pouring out of their open door,

staring without moving, a paper in our right hand. Surely if they had wanted to they could have seized me, taken me to a dark place where unimaginable, ironic isn't it, horrors would be perpetrated against me. I felt like I stood there for years, going over all the horrible things these monsters were going to do to me. Then, one of them said something time has eradicated from our memory. I audibly inhaled for the first time in what seemed an eternity and tossed the paper in front of me and ran down the steps. I hid behind several trash cans for an unknown length of time, shaking and fighting back tears before continuing our route. We chastised ourselves for being scared, a normal human response to darkness and unsafe situations. We considered ourselves to be less than everyone around me because of our fears and inability to cope with our life situation.

Still our obsession with true crime was voracious and never-ending. I would consume articles, watch the news, and read books about it. We convinced ourselves that somehow if we knew exactly how depraved, violent and scary life had been for others it would make me stronger, gird ourselves for the inevitable violence that life brings people that are out in the dark. I remember collecting our dues during the day. The amount of people that invited me to their house was unnerving. One man tried to reach out and touch me, I fled from his house and horror and collected it on another day. The older customers were the best, effusing praise and giving me their generous 50-cent tips.

The younger people were all enemy combatants in our book and I died every time I had to expose ourselves to someone bigger, stronger and faster than I was. They could just open the door and grab me, how was I to win in that scenario? I felt distinctly unsafe in apartment buildings, in our head they were death traps meant to be avoided. A customer complained that I threw his paper against his door each day. I would take one step into the foreplex and chuck it straight upwards and slightly to the right, indeed hitting his door every time. My boss complained to me so I explained that as a child I didn't want to be trapped in an apartment because anyone could be in there. I explained, in detail, some of the more

graphic scenes I pictured happening in these situations that thankfully only existed in our head. She looked at me like I was a crazy person but she didn't prod me again to stop doing it. I remember going to work and being accosted by a group of teenagers dressed in all black and one of them following me and asking over and over if I wanted any beef. Eyes cast as downward as I could get them while still keeping track of this group he walked briskly over to me and showed me a bag filled with some red liquid and something that could have been beef. I dropped our paper bag and took off running, they gave chase for a bit but stopped after a block or something. so. I ran to our dad, who we were now helping with his own route and he went looking for them but we didn't have any luck. Secretly I was happy we didn't encounter them. I just wanted to

be able to relax and play video games but now our mornings were non-existent and our nights were filled with worry about the morning. I feared the times I would be walking down the street and see the silhouette of a person walking towards me. Fear would grip me, turning our legs into sandbags wrapped in basketball shorts, I would shake as if freezing in spite of the warm summer air. My stomach would hurt most of the time, but especially on nights I knew I had to deliver papers. All the while I never spoke to anyone about what I was feeling. Heal the wound, hide the scar that I was told our feelings were invalid in the least and hysterical often. Crying was met with questions rather than embraces, something I'm still working on. My mask was a smile,

suspected anything was amiss. So I smiled, and when I didn't someone would ask why I wasn't. I felt like I couldn't let the mask slip, they would see our pain and it would cause them pain. So, I smiled. No emotion meant no fear, so I walked out of the house with the certainty that our number was up, today was the day I die. When I returned each morning I felt I had cheated death, bent this horrible world to our will to live. Then I slept, often until new, establishing a pattern I struggled to break for decades. When I think back on that time I feel dread, like I'm going to have to start waking up and walking out of our house to deliver papers again.

I feel angry and resentful. I was a difficult child and maybe our parents felt that something like this was best for me. They threatened to drop me off at the home of the innocence, and tried to check me into a psychiatric hospital, further confirming to me that I was irretrievably broken that I lashed out in all directions, feeling every bit like a failure to our parents, brothers, and cousin. It became such that our mind was guarding against any emotional response, rerouting them into the churning stomach of our emotional turmoil. I felt consumed by something similar to grief and as strong as rage.

Had I not been a good child? I bought groceries when I got money. I paid bills with our paper route funds. I tried to hug everyone in our family every night before bed, time, something that stopped soon after I got the job and became this cold version of a person that avoids anything that looks positive, something I was sure I didn't deserve. It felt like I was abandoned each time I left the house under our own volition. I speak about this time each day, perhaps so I don't forget the nuances. My partner has heard me for 20 years, she says I'm bitter.

She's right, of course, I see now that our musings on the subject are exactly that. Maybe I'm cursed to have these memories of being completely vulnerable, small, weak and scared, but I didn't want them. They were forced on me like most of the lasting trauma we suffer in this life. I thought if I wrote about it I would find some humor in it, but instead I find myself sweating, remembering the fear I felt each day, the absolute certainty of death approaching. Yet, I operated anyway, dutifully marching into the void once more. Driven by some biological need to please those around me I walked forward even though. though every fiber in our being told me to flee to safety. A testament to familial loyalty,

something preached but not exactly practiced by our parents. I, despite the ever-growing certainty that life has nothing to offer besides fear, pain and eventual death would leave and return every other morning. I still consume true crime at a rapid pace, but now our worries lie in the future and fates of our children, who are unemployed currently and will stay that way until late in their team years. As ridiculous as it sounds to even type, we have forgiven ourselves for being scared at that time. I recognized how much danger I was truly in and an obsession with staring into the void was not helpful. I have talked to therapists and mentioned this offhand. It's not the leading trauma but it was a defining moment for sure. That's not to say there

wasn't fun to be had, when we delivered together ourself, our brother and cousin had fun. I found out I was a crack shot with rubber bands and used that to annoy our brothers as much as possible. I even started to look forward to Sunday, because it was all hands on deck. Everyone in the family would help stuff papers together and the delivery would be done by at least three people. But those times were overshadowed by the lurking reality of dark lonely mornings and blank checks of fear written by our nine-year-old mind the END.