For reasons, I was discussing fear this morning* and the things that used to scare us as children.
My mother told me there were sharks in the canal (this was to stop us swimming in it). While we all totally believed her, it just meant we went to look for sharks and dared each other to dive into the lock. She'd have done better by mentioning the outflow from the sewage works. So sharks were a bit of a meh-scare. But it was definitely possible you'd be eaten by a canal shark (the river wasn't deep enough for anything larger than a gudgeon).
Quicksand too, because that was in the clayhole. That was also more of a dare and entirely true, I once sank to my thighs in bright orange mud and it took three friends to wrench me out. When half of you is covered with bright orange mud there's really no lie that would cover 'you've been playing in the bloody clayhole again, haven't you?' Did every town in the 1980/90s have a clayhole (basically an abandoned quarry filled with water and mud) or were we special? They eventually filled it with landfill and it became The Tip, which was prime hunting ground for pram wheels and stuff, with the added thrill of killer seagulls.
They were modestly scary. I once completely freaked out after watching The Omen as a small child. I was lying there in bed about three am and suddenly it occurred to me what if I'm the antichrist? than I became increasing convinced that I was in fact the antichrist. Fortunately, the following morning I checked my scalp and couldn't find the 666 birthmark so I think I'm mostly good. I still check periodically, just in case.
Whirlpools and deep-water where I can't see my feet, that's genuine. Clowns are a cliche, but I always check wardrobes and the back seat of any car when I get in, just in case a homicidal clown is lurking. Why take the chance otherwise? One day you might have cause to thank me.
My biggest childhood fear though was spontaneous human combustion. I was sure it would happen if I thought about it too much and the peril of trying not to think about anything is that it's all you think about and the heat starts to build inside. All that would be left would be a single foot and boy-sized patch of seared kitchen lino which would have made my mum furious.
That and nuclear war, which I think hung over the heads of every 70/80s child as a very reasonable fear. I remember to this day discussing it with by best friend and our main concern would be how we'd all fit in the bath if the four-minute warning triggered (avocado-coloured baths being the only place you'd be safe from a thermonuclear blast). We discussed this a lot, there were ten people in his family and his mum was pretty large. More concerning, my family didn't have a bath, so we'd probably have to share theirs, which meant fourteen people for one bath and, like I said, his mum was pretty big so you didn't want to be at the bottom.
Anyway, I'm voting for SHC as my primary childhood fear, on account that I never thought that homicidal shark clowns might be hiding at the bottom of whirlpools.
*one of my subdeck minions is doing a PhD in Japanese scary movies, like that's an actual thing. Actually, I think it's Japanese cinema in general, she's just specializing in the scary.
