There’s a good thread going on over at Fark.Com, about the TV (and movie) characters that scared us when we were kids…

the oompa loompas used to scare the shiat out of me…

The Sleestacks from Land of the Lost. Those things were farking creepy…

no kidding. i used to hide behind the couch when they showed up…

Banabas Collins, Dark Shadows…

The cybermen from Doctor Who.
When I was a wee pup my Dad took me to a Doctor Who Tardis in Blackpool, and as soon as we had set foot in the door I ran out. 

And The Twilight Zone freaked me out. Especially the one about the mannequin…

The Zantes from old Outer Limits…

Yes! Dear god, that episode scared the bejezus out of me when I was little. The Zanti..

…the floating vampire boy in the original Salem’s Lot…

The spaceman-ghost from Scooby Doo that lived in the abandoned airfield…

"My name is talking Tina, and you’d better be nice to me"

That freaky little doll in the original Trilogy of Terror…

The freaky little doll is getting a lot of votes in that thread.  So were the Zanti Misfits from the Outer Limits, and the energy beings in the episode The Production and Decay of Strange Particles got one vote which I was happy to see, not so much because they gave me nightmares as because when I was a boy I thought those were the coolest monsters I’d ever seen.  The Sleestacks got a lot of votes, which probably surprises me because Land of the Lost didn’t come to TV until I was well past the stage of being frightened by men in rubber suits.  But that vampire kid in Salem’s Lot really creeped me out and I was a grown man when I saw those scenes.  I can’t imagine any parent in their right mind letting a kid watch Salem’s Lot.

When I was a small kid, like 6 or 7, and we were on vacation, mom took me to a movie theater to see Darby O’Gill And The Little People. I guess she figured it would be fine for me to watch since it was a Disney flick. But some of those Disney films could be really scary at times, and mom always loved telling everyone later about how, when the banshee appeared on the screen my scream rocked the entire theater.

For the rest of that vacation I woke up everyone every night with my nightmares.

As for TV, again when I was very young, well before I’d even entered grade school, and they were still showing the old Max Fleischer black and whites on TV, it was this goddamned clown…

It’s interesting to note that clowns of one kind or another got a lot of votes in that Fark.Com survey.  I’d have nightmares about this one trying to get inside our apartment…usually to the sound of something going thump-thump-thump in the background and I’d wake up screaming. It wasn’t until I’d been long grown up that I realized that thumping sound I’d heard in those dreams was my little heart pounding.

I think I must have blocked all that out of memory as I grew up.  The clown eventually vanished from the TV screens as the old black and white cartoons lost their appeal to kids growing up on color TVs, and I never saw him again until well into adulthood, when the Max Fleischer cartoons experienced a revival.  I was browsing a video store and saw a copy of old Betty Boop cartoons and remembered I used to love them.  So I bought it, took it home and popped it in the player.  Back in Betty’s "garter belt" days, pre Hays Code, the clown was one of her constant sidekicks, and when I saw him appear once more on the TV screen I felt a sudden chill reach all the way from childhood and tap me on the shoulder.

Damn!  It’s that clown…I remember him…!

Same thing happened when I watched Darby O’Gill again after many, many years…but that time I knew the banshee was coming.  No, they don’t give me nightmares anymore.  Adult fears are different from kid fears.  The last time TV ever gave me bad dreams was when I watched The Day After and had a really bad dream about slowly dying of radiation poisoning while laying, weak and utterly helpless, in the middle of a pile of rubble that was once the apartment complex I lived in.  When you’re a kid, fear is much simpler and to the point.  The Bad Thing Is Coming To Get Me…!