From Lolita to Baba Yaga, who is the scariest woman you have ever known?

Mrs, Greer, 7th grade algebra. She would fly onto bizarre rages about things like wet shoes on a rainy day. We never knew what would set her off. That was my first awareness of scary unreasoned rage. Just thinking about her gives me the jim-jams, now I’m curious as to what might have happened to her…

My Urdu teacher. People call her ‘Duck Face’, ‘Toad’ and ‘Sasquatch’.
I feel bad for her.

Mrs. Severn, an old math teacher. She was truly terrifying. And evil. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn she went on a mass killing spree.

Why is it that the first three comments are specifically about female teachers? <cue Twilight Zone music>

Sister Steven. My second grade teacher. My parents thought it would be a good idea for my sister and I to get a taste of Catholic schools before sending us to public school. She was fond of closing books on small fingers.

My family is not Catholic.

My biological mother. She was fucking insane.

I know I was the first with this, but is anyone else horrified that so many teachers are listed?

My mother and ex-wife.

My mother – at times.

@JilltheTooth not really surprising. Most kids first authority figures other than their family are teachers. So it is most likely to be a teacher, sister or mother.

Honestly, an ex “friend” that I think is really psycho. lol

Her entire family is evil, all backstabbing, manipulating, lying trouble makers.

She was VERY good at concealing her manipulative side for a few years, but, the more I was around her, the more the duplicity became apparent.

The worst kind too, the person who sees themselves as an angel, but in reality, their grandiose false self image disguises some very dark stuff.

I am firmly convinced that entire family is psychopathic.

She would always refer to me as a “sister”, made me uncomfortable, the fawning and phoney display of ingratiating and flattering behaviors, and NOW I KNOW…she certainly ended up treating me exactly the way all those “sisters” treated each other! Aaaaagh!

Hahaha

Thanks for your answers, but—you’re all missing a big part of the question:

What did she look like?

I was just about to ask: scary as in a scary personality or a scary presence?
But now I know.
I’ll be back in a minute.

Maleficent. Seriously.

Amending my previous answer: My biological mother looked like an angel. Very beautiful, but stone fucking cold.

@rebbel, scary to you. For whatever reason. I asked:

Who is or was this terrifying woman? What role did she have in your life, what did she look like, and what made her so scary?

Repeating more of the details:

This means known personally —that is, not a fictional character, a celebrity, a political leader, etc. She had to know you and not just be seen from afar.

I have reviewed most of my life, elementary school, teen years, the whole time I was climbing the ladder for my career, college career and real life and the one that really comes to the top is my redacted. If you are interested I’ll share her relation to this woman in a PM, just don’t want it out here for all to see.

She is a fairly average looking woman in her 70’s. She would probably be considered obese, doesn’t leave the house without “her face on”, wears polyester pant suits, keeps the gray in her hair at bay, and has more medical issues than Baron Munchusen.

I find this woman frightening for many reasons. First, she has the remarkable ability to justify anything she wants to perpetrate on just about anyone. On the outside she seems to have a grasp of right and wrong, but it must be a facade because she has no problem doing anyone wrong, even attempting to destroy them, as long as she can justify it in her twisted mind.

She wields her love over anyone who dares feel it. She has used her motherly love as weapon against all of her children probably since the day they were born. They are constantly threatened with the loss of her love the first time they do anything she does not agree with. I watched her bring many people to their knees using this tactic and it is always in play as she controls those around her who love her. She doesn’t only use it for the big stuff, it is for everyday life to keep everyone in check and catering to her whims and desires.

She is sweet as pie to your face, but the minute you walk away she is sharing, exaggerating, and lamenting all of your faults with anyone who will listen.

She is a giant pile of psychosis tied with a big ugly bow and I thank God she is out of my life for good and a half a continent away from my children.

My mother back when I was little, short Asian woman with a terrifying temper. Too small to seem like someone who could do any damage but she’s the woman who beat me black and blue from head to toe when I was 6… 1996–1998 were the most traumatic and terrifying years of my life.

@Jeruba Oh! Sorry about that. Mrs. Severn was a tiny woman with fuzzy gray hair, sticking out at weird angles, creepy, squinty, black-looking eyes, pointy boobs, jeans/pants that touched her bellybutton and these loud-ass clacking shoes that heralded her arrival from more than five miles away. She was just freakin’ scary.

There was this nurse in junior school, she gave all the boys a “medical” which as far as I can remember involved cradling our testicles & asking us to cough. Anyway yeah, she was a scary woman, all hairy knuckled & stern faced, Nurse Buttugly wasn’t her name, but shoulda been.

@Jeruba Aha, thank you.
Can’t think of one, really.
When I was young(er) most women were scary to me, but I think that was more to do with their being an other sex.

@SuperMouse

Sounds like the mother of my ex friend…she certainly dropped the perfect little wormy cloned apples off her twisted branches. lol

My mother. Now she looks, well, like those stereotypical socialites that have had a lot of Botox and other cosmetic treatments, so you can’t quite tell if they’re 20 or 120 (but the later seems more likely). But, even before then, she scared me more than anything else on Earth.

My mother. She is volatile, manipulative and emotionally unstable. She emotionally terrorized me and my father as well as physically and mentally abused my younger brother. I can’t go into too much detail without getting emotional but let it suffice to say that I still wake up at night with the memories of my brother screaming. Also let it be known that her rages can last for hours.

She is a short, overweight woman with blue eyes, a heart-shaped face, ruddy complexion and ashy-brown hair cut into a boyish pixie cut (although she used to dye it medium blond). She almost always wears tshirts but never jeans. She prefers cotton drawstring pants and slip on shoes. She wears glasses with plastic frames and rarely wears jewelry or makeup.

@Jeruba Oh. My mother is a tall black woman with short hair to her neck who is probably 5’10–6’0 and 220–250lbs. She also has glasses, so that makes her less intimidating, as well as her gentle, yet assertive voice.

My ex-wife was about 5’5, 180lbs with piercing blue eyes and long brown hair.

When I was a youngster, one of my friends in the neighborhood lived with her grandmother. Leslie’s grandmother, Mrs. B., was stout and bent over, with crooked teeth that gave her a permanent snarl. She had wild, flyaway white hair bound in a loose sort of bun that left most of it standing out all around her head like Medusa’s snakes. I was already into Bulfinch’s Mythology and knew what snake-haired Medusa looked like. It was easy to imagine Mrs. B. turning you to stone with a look.

I never saw Mrs. B. dressed in anything but one of those faded cotton housecoats we called “dusters,” and I never saw her outside the house. I also never saw her smile, not once.

She had a shrill, screechy voice, and when she would call for my friend to come home: “Les-LEE! Les-LEE!” you could hear her all over the neighborhood. Leslie would drop whatever she was doing, yell “Yes’m,” and race home as fast as she could go. There’d be hell to pay if she didn’t.

Mrs. B. beat Leslie with a hairbrush. Leslie showed me the hairbrush once. It had a sturdy wooden handle and a clump of wispy white hairs sprouting from the bristles. When Leslie explained that this was what her grandmother punished her with, I simply did not comprehend, although I remember her words and comprehend them now. Once I saw Mrs. B. wave the hairbrush at Leslie and scream at her, chasing her upstairs where I was never permitted to go and yelling at me to leave. As far as I could tell, Leslie hadn’t done anything.

Leslie was allowed to have only one friend over at a time, and that not very often. I was frequently the chosen one, and I went for Leslie’s sake (when she wasn’t allowed to go out or come to my house), but there wasn’t much to do in her small, claustrophobic back yard, and we weren’t allowed to play in the house. (I think “allowed” was the most common word in Leslie’s vocabulary, usually preceded by “not.”)

Leslie never did anything that I could recognize as naughty. She was as quiet and docile and dull as a cow, with big cow eyes and a phlegmatic personality, and obsessively concerned with obedience to her grandmother. But somehow Mrs. B. would go into rages at her anyway, and then I would be sent home and I would hear the screams behind me as I closed the gate.

Years later, I began to understand something of her fury, not that it helped poor Leslie any. I realized things I hadn’t understood at the time by reinterpreting explicit recollections. Now I know that her daughter, Leslie’s mother, was an alcoholic who lived with Mrs. B., spent her days lying in bed reading movie magazines and smoking cigarettes and paying no attention to her children, collected welfare, and had an absentee husband who came home every once in a while just long enough to get her pregnant. I saw him only once. Over the years Leslie accumulated three younger siblings who looked exactly like her and were all probably suffering from fetal alcohol syndrome. Mrs. B. eventually tossed them all out and they wound up in a derelict little apartment literally on the other side of the tracks, where my mother let me go to visit once or twice and then put an end to the contact.

We moved out of that neighborhood when I was eleven, and I never heard more of Mrs. B., but she still visits my nightmares. I often wonder what happened to Leslie, but it’s probably better not to know.

@SuperMouse This woman you speak of sounds very much like my momster, especially using the loss of love as a weapon. That was one of her favorite tools in her arsenal.

I’m relieved to hear that you and your family were able to move away from said crazy lady. No one needs that kind of person in their life.

A neighbor of ours when I was about 7 yrs old. She was convinced I was a witch and one day tried to drive her car beside me while I was on a bike close enough to push me over against the sidewalk curb where I crashed. She would yell at my parents to keep me away from where our two yards met when her kids were outside. Thing is, her kids were weird and we never talked or played so I never knew what was wrong. My parents never reported her to police or anything, they’d just yell at her to mind her own business and called her crazy. I was terrified everytime I’d see her car on our street.

@Neizvestnaya

Wow! That IS crazy! At least it’s the kind of crazy you can see, I always get the passive aggressive crazies. lololol

@Coloma: At first we joked about her, we didn’t think she was serious. Yeah, I prefer the ones you can see coming.

6th grade subsitute teacher Mrs. Hudson (i think was her name).
She had been a regular teacher, before her problems with drinking made her leave.
When she came back, she heard I had gotten in trouble for drawing a cartoon about her. She was put in charge of my class when my regular teacher broke a hip in the halloween parade, and her replacement washed out.
She focused on me so hard, and did everything she could to make me suffer, and I did. I still have shoulder issues from that.

Lorie Bell, 1968, the tough girl at junior high school, long brown hair, small brown eyes close together, black leatherish jacket and jeans. I was 12 and she said she was going to beat me up. My dumb, dumb friend threw a pancake at her from the home ec room window. I looked out to see, after, and Lori thought it was me. She chased me after school with such hate in her face!! My little group never ran so fast! She was sent to a ‘bad girl’ school within a couple of days, coincidentally, thank gawd.

Miss Macdonald. She was my high school cooking and sewing teacher. She freaked me out. Thin is the word that most aptly describes her. Her body was tall and thin. She had a spindly body. She also had thin, pinched lips. Her hair was thin and dark and lacked body. She looked like something out of a Roald Dahl book. Horrible make-up. Too much eye liner and cakey foundation. (Hope she reads this!!!). She wore clothes that were too young for her too.

She was mean and cruel. She liked to bully people (including me). She would publicly humiliate you for making an error. One day she stood at the other side of the table, picked up a bowl with two whisked eggs in it and held it above the table before slamming it down again and screaming at me “WHAT IS THIS!!!!!” I said eggs. She said “WHERE SHOULD THEY BE”. I said in the pastry… (that I was rolling out). “PICK IT ALL UP AND MIX THE EGG IN!!!” Far out. Horrible woman. Ugh… some people should not be allowed near young people.

So, Miss Macdonald wins the “Scariest Woman I have Ever Known” award. There are others who come close though.

You know, it’s more than a little creepy that so many teachers have been named on this thread and on the “scariest man” thread. Disturbing.

@WillWorkForChocolate Maybe. But when you’re young, and more likely to find the scariest person ever, other than your parents and teachers, you don’t have many relationships with adults (especially ones who’ll be authority figures, and so even more likely to be scary).

I never thought of the women in my life as particularly “scary”, but several (yeah, teachers, for the most part) could be pretty intimidating.

Mrs. Cawley, the principal of my first elementary school (we moved when I was in fifth grade), was about 4 feet tall in heels. By third grade, most of us were taller than she was, and heavier, too, I’d bet. And she spoke quietly – I never heard her raise her voice in anger or frustration – she actually spoke more quietly than almost anyone I knew. And she never used or condoned corporal punishment, either. She was just… a powerful, dominant ‘force’. Even the teachers were entirely respectful of her and any judgment she made. No one wanted to get into trouble with Mrs. Cawley and have her speak quietly to them.

Mrs. Morrissey, on the other hand, was my sixth-grade English teacher – and she was the polar opposite in many ways. She was large, loud and brilliant. She commanded her class with a voice like a whip, and a wit to match. She terrified all of us. I think I might be the only student in my class who actually liked her – but I didn’t dare let on, to either her or any of my classmates.

@Bellatrix your description reminded me of a female Professor Snape.

Yes, that fits @SuperMouse. I think Snape had redeeming features though. Miss Macdonald… no, pure evil. She used to get students to do her washing and ironing. She never told me to do that. I would have proved my incompetence by burning her clothing.