This Troper once found a talking Skin-Taker at a pawn shop once and decided to buy it. having thought it looked quite cool and having seen the show as a child. It even went "TO GRIND YOUR SKIN!". The terrifying thing was, Three days after buying it, his house caught on fire. That and the tophat and cloak felt way too much like real leather...

warning:So it wasn't just me? I remember buying a Pirate Percy doll off of some older kid (I '''think''') when I was about seven (There was definitely a doll, but I'm not 100% sure where the hell I got it). I had a really overactive imagination and I'm probably remembering it wrong, but I swear to God that thing's eyes would follow me across the room. I also vividly remember this one time when we were taking care of the neighbor's cat, and the critter took one look at the thing, made the most ungodly yowling noise you've ever heard and bolted out of the room -- when I tried to explain to my mother what happened, she kept saying "what doll?" and looking really confused and I thought she was just being mean at the time, but she would never do something like that! After a while I started to get really, really freaky nightmares -- and I mean FREAKY, like bad-acid-trip freaky -- and they always had something to do with the doll. I was also probably starting to suffer from sleep deprivation, because I started to feel like I was still dreaming or that I wasn't fully awake -- Things started to look "not right", and the doll seemed to slowly inch towards me when I wasn't looking directly at it -- but it would always be right where I had left it whenever I looked. The nightmares started to get worse and worse, and I was just a kid and I thought that the doll was somehow responsible so I took the doll out back and threw it as hard as I could into the woods. Of course, the nightmares persisted, and I had now lost what had gradually become my favorite toy. The nightmares eventually went away, though I never did find that doll :( Anyways, sorry about the long post, I've been wanting to tell someone for the longest time but I was worried nobody would believe me :( Anyone else have stories of Candle Cove merch they found? I'm getting curious.

I've never seen any of the Candle Cove toys, but a friend of mine in school claimed to have them. He said he'd show them to me, but before he could... well, he died. There's a pretty sad, fucked up story there and I still get kinda choked up thinking about it, all these years later. order of tl;dr, comin' right up!:The first I heard of it was this big announcement in class the next morning. All they said was that his house caught fire and he and his dad died in it, but a few days later, the rumors started spreading. That his dad had gone crazy and soaked the place in gasoline, or that he'd got in some kinda financial trouble and had to burn it for the insurance money, but he'd screwed up somehow. I couldn't believe it. I'd been over to his house once and his dad seemed like a great guy. I didn't find out the truth untill I was in my twenties, when I joined the volunteer fire department. While I was working there I met this old arson investigator guy and we got to talking. I hadn't thought about that kid in a while, but my new job had brought back memories, so I asked the arson guy if he knew anything about it. He just got this look on his face like he was about to throw up. He said it was the worst case he'd ever seen. Apparently some of the rumors were true. It was a murder/suicide. The father hadn't just torched the house, he'd beaten the kid to death with an aluminum bat first. They found fracture marks on the bones and the melted bat lying near the bodies. After he'd finished pouring the gasoline around and set it off, it looked like he'd just taken a seat in his recliner and let the flames consume him. But that wasn't the worst of it. See, my friend had been an only child and his mom was at work at the time, but in addition to his and his dad's bodies, they also found other bones in the house. A skull and part of an arm. Tiny ones. They checked DNA and dental records and found they came from two different babies who'd been reported missing a few weeks before the fire. Nobody's really sure how they got there.

I hope this isn’t too long, I just need to get it out with people who understand. I used to love Candle Cove, even if it gave me wicked nightmares after episodes that focused on the Skin-Taker. Anyway, when I was about 8, I found a little painted porcelain doll version of Janice once in a thrift store. She was like one of those baby dolls that close their eyes when you tilt them and cry when you press a button, but way more fragile. Her hair was kind of patchy, but mostly still there, and one eye didn't open. I didn't think much of it, since I got her second-hand. And when her button got pressed, instead of normal cartoonish crying, it sounded real, like she was in pain. I played with her almost every day, but I guess I was too rough, because her hair started falling out in little clumps, and her cry-button kept depressing even if I didn't touch it. She started freaking me out after a while, so I didn't leave her in my room when I went to sleep. I'd always put her in a closet in my basement that had sort of a cat door in it, so if we locked a cat by accident, it could get out. I guess I ate something bad one night before bed because I had a really bad nightmare. I dreamed that little doll Janice climbed up the stairs and into my room, crying. Her bad eye was open, but there was no little glass eye in the socket, it was just empty. She kept whispering "Help me, help me". I started screaming and trying to kick her away, but she climbed up the blanket onto the bed. She tottered over to me and fell into my lap and tried to talk, but her face was in the blanket. I turned her over, and she repeated what she said, and fell off the bed. She broke into a thousand pieces, and I suppose I must have woken up after that, because I don’t remember anything else. The next morning I looked for her pieces, but all I found was a stain next to the bed. I rationalized that maybe I fell off the bed and had an accident, so I tried to clean it up before my mother woke up, but I could never get all of it out. I covered it up with an area rug when I got older. My mother insisted that I go to therapy for years afterward, because of the extent of my nightmare and how much it scared me. I couldn’t watch television for years afterward, still don’t if I’m alone. Even though I met with a therapist until my freshman year in college, I never told him what Janice told me before I threw her off the bed. “Kill me.”

This troper once bought the Candle Cove movie on VHS at a thrift store. I remembered seeing it in the theater as a kid. The spooky thing is, that theater burned down the day after I saw the movie. Contrary to how I'd remembered it as a kid, the movie on the tape was animated, instead of the live-action/puppet hybrid from the show proper. It was a pretty ordinary 80s licensed animated cash-in, although my VHS player caught on fire before I could eject it after it ended. The next day, after I got home from work, I saw that my house had burned down. When I drove back to work to tell my boss (the idea made sense at the time), I found that the offices I worked at bad burned down! Pissed off, I turned back to my car, only to find it had burned down in my absense. I walked over to a Motel 6 to spend the night, but they turned me down; when I asked why, the lady simply pointed to the old "No Shirt, No Shoes, No Service" sign. When I looked down, I realized that my clothes had caught on fire!

All I see is static. Ever since watching Candle Cove, all I ''ever'' see or hear is static. I've never owned a TV or a radio because they don't work for me. Neither do MP3 players, [=CDs=]...anything recorded is nothing to me. I can always tell when popstars are lipsyncing, so that's kind of nice. finally stopped screaming, but the show must go on. Forgive me. Forgive me. Forgive me. Forgive me.

This Troper remembers watching this show as a kid, which is quite weird because at that time she lived in Germany. She also remembers digging through yard sale after yard sale with her mother until she finally found a recording on tape. Sadly, that tape seemed to be broken and only showed static. Does anybody know where you can buy recordings of Candle Cove? This Troper has never watched the last episode (the tears I cried about missing that episode would probably be enough to flood a whole room...) and would love to finally watch the conclusion of this wonderful, altough sometimes quite scary series.

Caught this show once (I'm pretty damn sure), I guess re-running on public-access when I was a lot littler. Pretty much every detail I've heard matches up (from the general description anyway, they weren't showing the "famous" episode that day), except for those concerning the main character. I don't know if the "Janice" thing is due to one person influencing everybody else's memories or something, but the main character was a boy, and I am sure of it because the boy shared my name; Mitch. I only watched it once. I was more than a little angry to hear my parents couldn't remember anything about the show, and regret not memorizing the channel it was on myself to this day, despite all the alleged nightmare fuel that supposedly factored in. I personally saw nothing scary at all about the show; Skin-Taker came off like little more than an IneffectualSympatheticVillain in the episode I saw, the ship was amazing-looking, and the characters all had really funny/soothing voices.

I'm sure you'll catch the show again soon...''Mitch.'' me. Forgive me. For

The MusicalEpisode was awesomely bad. The tunes sounded like they belonged in CrazyBus. -OOZE

Oh, totally! Even though I was just a little kid, I spent most of the episode laughing until my lungs actually started to hurt (although the Skin-Taker's VillainSong was kickass, if terrifying). The episode seemed to act as a mini-BrownNote (probably due to a quirk with the budget recording equipment), though -- I had nightmares for five days straight after watching it.

It seems aw''f''ully ''o''dd that yo''u'' are o''n''ly now bringing this show up. It's deca''d''es old, and ''y''et only in the past year ''o''r two has anyone tho''u''ght about Candle Cove.

Hey, sometimes when you hear people talking about old shows from your childhood, lost memories just come flooding back. I mean, I never even thought about TheBigComfyCouch in the last ten or twelve years until I heard it again online.

This troper wasn't alive for Candle Cove, but as a young kid I used to get a lot of books from charity shops. It was this that got me interested in MASK, Transformers and a few other series from before my time, but the book that really stuck with me was a Candle Cove companion book. It was probably the oldest one I had. I absolutely loved it, but there was always one image that really scared me; this full-page picture of the smiling face on the front of the Laughingstock. It was looking straight at you, the water damage causing these long black chips in the paint. It's eyes always seemed manic to me as a child, staring out of the book as though it could have lept right from the page. I always averted my eyes whenever I got to that page because I thought it could see me. I...was an overimaginative kid. To be honest it's still a problem; despite being a lifelong horror fan I always freak myself out under my own steam, and I don't know what it was about that photo of the Laughingstock, but it really stuck with me. Sometimes I feel like I can see it out of the corner of my eye, in mirrors or out of windows, staring in at me, always with that same crazed glee. Even as an adult, it seems like I'm not fully in control of those things from my childhood.

OP again. I found the book! An old "Candle Cove Annual '71". It's been sitting in a box under the bed in the guest room. I flicked through it, and it's pretty much as I remember, except for that picture. In my memories, the photo was kind of far our, with the whole of the Laughingstock was in view, with quite a bit of the cave scenery visible. It must have been a shot from the show, because in the book, the face of Laughingstock is right up to the page, as if the camera was almost touching it. You can see so much more than I remember; even in the cracks in its face, you can't see splinters from the wood underneath the chipped away paint. It must have been black or brown, but the exposure of the photo makes it look like a dark red. Ahh, the days before Photoshop. Anyway, as much older as I am, I still feel uneasy when that page is open. The eyes still follow you around the room with that old wild gaze. What was weird wwas that even when I closed it, I still felt like I was being watched. That tension on the back of my head. Like there was someone else in the room. Breathing quietly, just betraying a hint of noise under the sound of computer fans. Someone behind you. I turned around. Of course there was nothing. Just that book, and my room. The shadows suddenly seem deeper.

This Troper had a model of the Laughingstock! It used to sit on my windowsill when me and my mother lived with my grandma. The weird thing was, it used to move around a lot; I'd often come home to find it on my pillow, but I guess I was eight and my grandma cleaned my room. She got rid of it anyway, after I started having nightmares. I'd be in the sea, wearing that dreadful dress of Janice's, and the toy would be in my hand, saying in that voice 'You have... to go... inside'. Sometimes, there'd be a cave, or something you could actually, you know, go inside, but most of the time I'd just be adrift in the sea. She swears she never threw it out - well, now she swears she doesn't remember the toy or the show - but I think it was to save my feelings. I think.

This Troper found a Paint By Numbers set of this show in her grandmother's attic. There were pictures of every character, even one containing the whole cast, but I decided to just paint the pictures of Janice and the Laughingstock, because the other characters looked quite unappealing. I was a bit disappointed when I finished the first painting: Janice had had a big smile on her a face in the original picture, but once I was done, she looked quite frightened instead of happy. The Laughingstock also didn't turn out quite as well as I had expected. The colours were rather bleak, except for those creepy red eyes. It didn't look at all like the pretty paintings shown on the box. I guess they mixed up some of the numbers or colours, but what would you expect of such a cheap franchise. My mother didn't like the pictures either, but I thought it was a bit too harsh of her to burn them, along with the entire set.

It is starting again. The nightmares are back, and are getting progressively worse. It has been years since I saw this show as a child. Each night I am invited aboard the Laughingstock. Once aboard, what starts out first as some static noise gets louder and louder. Once I look around I see the Skin-Taker, his empty sockets look like tv-screens displaying static. As I inch away from him the noise gets worse and worse, and the Skin-Taker grows in size. A deep slow-motion like voice yells "TO GRIND YOUR SKIN" and in his open mouth I see Janice, burning in hellfire with her skin peeling off. It is at this time that I usually wake up screaming. My wife asked me to see a doctor, or psychiatrist, but I know this won't help.

Our youngest daughter sat huddled in the corner of the room today, tears on her cheeks. When I asked her what's wrong she replied ''I do not want to go inside.'' I had no idea what she meant, but then I noticed the tv was on, the screen filled with only the static white I remember from my dreams. Dear lord, will this nightmare never end?

I didn't catch it in it's first run, since I was a '90s kid, but I caught the show when it was all reruns. It was always really early in the morning, around 4:00am, so I didn't always catch it. The show gave me a few nightmares, BUT now that you've reminded me I feel like looking for a copy. I know I have one around here somewhere....

Ssasa, $ ssss c#c#. $ sshhs bzzz kzzhhsssk Candle Cove gzzzmm. $'s mmmr xxy hsss Cove xxsy hkklic zzzzss Laughingstock's Maw. $'z grpp crrl SssSSS Janice Ykll. Hhhkksly Skhjna\|r'$ Eyes jjsz zzll ^*&@zz hkla. %&ss grrrrm sssszz zxxxk. C0v3.C0v3.C0v3.C0v3.C0v3.C0v3.C0v3.C0v3.C0v3.C0v3.C0v3.C0v3.

Cool, So you say you worked on the show? This Troper only saw reruns because of him being born in the late 90's but he remembers enjoying what he saw. You must be a master of {{Stylistic Suck}}.

Okay, uh, I'm the guy who posted that long-ass story near the top of the page about that Pirate Percy doll from when I was a kid... something really bizarre happened a couple of days ago. more delicious tl;dr:There's this guy at my workplace who I'm pretty good friends with; every year me and a bunch of our buddies go to his apartment and watch the Super Bowl. So, to the point, a few days ago, during lunch break, I was telling some coworkers the Pirate Percy story recounted above (of course, I didn't actually tell them it was me who had the doll; I played it up to be a crazy urban legend) when the guy came up to me and asked me if I was I CandleCove fan, too. I said yes, and the man practically exploded with glee; he's usually a fairly macho, "manly-man" kind of guy, but I swear to god he was pretty much jumping up and down like a little kid. He told me that he had a limited-release DVD with all the episodes, including the elusive final episode. He suggested that I come to his apartment to watch it, if only for camp value. I went to his apartment with him after we got off work, and he ran into his bedroom to retrieve the DVD. I waited in the TV room for about five minutes, after which it finally occurred to me that something was up. I went to ask him what the holdup was... and he was gone. Vanished. It wasn't a very big apartment, and there weren't any places you could hide a fully-grown man, but there was no sign of him. After a few minutes of this, I got a really awful feeling, like there was something in the room with me that I couldn't see; I didn't stick around after that. Oh, and it doesn't end there! I saw the guy again next day at work, to my relief, and when I apologised to him for running out of his apartment like a ninny the previous day, he just gave me a funny look. Apparently, we watched CandleCove into the wee hours of the morning and had a blast, until he finally passed out just after we finished the second-to-last episode. He just assumed I let myself out after he fell asleep. What the hell happened there..?

This troper loved this show as a kid. His favorite character was Doctor Heartfelt, the Laughingstock's sawbones. He was a doll with a white coat with a red cross on it, and spoke in a soft voice with a slight accent, although this troper can no longer remember if it was a German or a Russian accent. When Janice felt ill, he'd open up his coat and these long needles would slide out of his pink cloth body. After hugging Janice, she'd cheer up and the adventure would continue. He always muttered something like, "Oh, child. Mother is the cure" whenever Janice went down to visit him. Does anyone else remember him? He only showed up a couple of times.

Thanks alot, Tropers. I am never watching this show.

Why ever not? This show is certainly watching you...

OP here, I recently found old tapes of the show in my basement, so for curiousity's sake I decided to go through with watching it. Later that night, I started having nightmares about the Skin-Taker, and in the morning, the skin on my arm was missing when I woke up. People insist that it's still there, but as time went on, I kept having the nightmares and more skin kept disappearing...And another thing, every night, the Skin-Taker gets more and more clothing, as though he was getting more skin from somewhere...Just a coincidence...Right...? I might not sleep tonight...I need to find help...Oh god...HE'S COMING FOR ME! HE--

Okay, so I was doing some research into Medieval/Early Renaissance folklore today, especially as relating to things that preyed on children. Turns out that all across Europe there were legends of a traveling theatre company who put on shows for children. These shows would involve a rotating cast of characters, but there would always be a human host who invited a child from the audience to go on an adventure with him. There'd be a melodramatic bad guy, sort of like a pantomime villain, who would try to kidnap the child and take her to his master, a death-like monster who wore an elaborate leathern outfit that was supposed to be made of the skin of children from towns the theatre had already visited. Children apparently loved these shows, but strangely no adults could ever remember any of the content, besides what their children remembered. According to the stories, after the theatre visited a town the child who had been invited to participate in the show would go mad with "screaming sickness", while other children would vanish. Sometimes remains would be found, flayed alive and "partially eaten." The author suggests a long, complex sociological explanation for these strange stories involving the high infant mortality rate at the time along with scarcity of food meaning that some parents were forced to consume their young, and also laments that we don't have more records of the theatrical troupe itself, since it sounds like they pioneered the "audience participation" that became a hallmark of children's theatre and entertainment. Weird thing is, the human host's surname was always the local word for "Candle."

{{@/Tidal_Wave_17}} here. I was babysitting my cousins one day. I had left them in my bedroom to watch TV while I made sandwiches. I was almost done when my oldest cousin, at seven years old, started screaming. When I came in, the TV was static, he was hollering, and my other cousin, a four year old, was just looking around confused. When I asked him what was wrong, he said "He ''ate'' her!" and pointed at the screen. I figured something must have happened to the signal, but then I realized that I had hit the Input button before I had went to make sandwiches. They had been watching static the whole time. For weeks after that, he had horrible nightmares. My aunt told me they involved a pirate made of dolls, a little girl who looked like my younger cousin but ''wasn't'' her, and a ship with a smiling face that ate her. Apparantly, in the background was a skeleton with skins for a cape that watched the entire time. The nightmares are now just a memory, but whenever I look for the show online, its always static.

This Troper recently watched Episode 4 of Candle Cove on YouTube (Here if you're interested). At somewhere between 5-6 minutes into the episode, he thought he saw something odd in the background. He paused the video and backtracked to the moment he saw it, and he saw the Slender Man standing right between the last two trees on the right. It was chilling to say the least.

One time, I was watching Candle Cove, and it made my dog explode. The end.