Last Call: What's Something That Scared You As A Kid For No Reason?

Happy Halloween, everybody! I was thinking I should watch a scary movie tonight, but I'm not really much for horror movies and jump scares (I prefer my thrillers to be of the psychological type, and am always open to recs.) As such, I got to thinking about what things I've seen in my life that truly scared the living crap out of me, and realized that no movie or TV show has ever rattled me in quite the way the Mathnet Terror did. For those of you too old or too young to remember, Mathnet was a serialized Dragnet-spoofing segment at the end of every episode of Square One, an after-school PBS show about—you guessed it—math. It was my favorite show, except for the last few seconds.

Each episode would end the same way: Something dramatic would happen, Kate Monday would share a concerned look with George Frankly, and then...it would happen. First, the scary music:

DUM, DA-DUM DUM. DUM, DA-DUM DUM DAAAAAAAAH... (I couldn't get the scary music to autoplay, so this will have to do.)

And then...the terror would appear onscreen.

The words TO BE CONTINUED. That's it. That's the terror. The words "to be continued" scared the crap out of me when I was a kid, and I still freak out a little whenever they pop up on TV. Why are they so scary to me? No idea, they just are.

Do you have any "scary" stuff like that from your childhoods?

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