Saturday, May 10, 2014

Creepy childhood games

I don't consider myself old at 30 but I am old enough to remember a time before the internet and when cell phones looked look a brick.


We couldn't afford cable so what was a kid to do? Come up with your own creative games. Apparently my creativity style was more Tim Burton than Disney.

Here is a list of some of my favorite games to play:

Helen Keller
cripple kids
orphanage

Helen Keller involved my friends and I wandering around in the back yard with our eyes closed trying to find the other person without seeing or speaking. My mom was really confused when she saw this and asked what we were doing. I told her I couldn't talk because I was playing Helen Keller.

Cripple kids was a game where we went to a school for "cripple kids". It's ok to shake your head and go "WTF Ginny!" We used plastic baseball bats as crutches and tricycles as wheel chairs. I don't even know where this idea came from or why my friends went along with this game.

Orphanage was a game where we were "kidnapped" from our parents and had to escape from the orphanage. To escape the orphanage you had to make it into the basement without my friend's father noticing. He was usually working down there with drills and saws which we pretend were orphans being disposed of if they got caught.

When I volunteered at the local hospital when I was 13 I would have wheelchair races past the morgue with other candy stripers.

I had a pretty good childhood so I'm not sure where these weird ideas for games came from. I've also learned to be a little more politically correct. Thank God for that.

6 comments:

  1. And I thought I was disturbed!

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  2. HA! I used to play some creepy games as a kid, too. My friends and I had our version of pretending to be orphans (I think we'd been reading too many books about orphans) that involved us being rescued by some rich old lady at the end. My sister and I used to play this weird game where one of us would lie on the ground and pretend to be dead and the other would be a vulture and jump off the swingset ladder and peck the supposedly dead one. (Yeah, I know.) And we had two versions of Ghost in the Graveyard- one was the normal version where you count down one o'clock, two o'clock etc. while the ghost hides and then chases everyone when someone finds her, but this was the other one. One person would be the dead person and the other people would make up some weird eulogy about how she died (like from eating worms or stepping on a nail or something) and then yell, "Goodbye, Worm-y!" or Nail-y or whatever other -y we thought of, and then the ghost would chase everyone and the person they caught would be the next ghost.

    Kids can be strangely morbid.

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    1. I'm glad I'm not the only one! The eulogy thing is kind of funny.

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  3. I can't remember what the premise was - but my sister and I played Orphanage with our cousins! I think it was because of our love of the movie Annie! Glad we aren't the only ones!

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    1. Apparently orphan games are popular for kids ha

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