WHAT terrified you as a child? This Saturday, Doctor Who is back, and it could be could be scarier than ever.

Not only does the new series introduce a new Doctor, Matt Smith, but its new head writer, Steven Moffat, has previously been responsible for some of the most frightening episodes in the revived series.

We asked Echo people to recall the things that terrified them – whether through TV, books or films – as children.

Hattie Miles: “I can remember the first Doctor Who with the Daleks with William Hartnell on our flickery black and white TV. I was so scared that I really did hide behind the sofa.”

Lorraine Gibson: “The Cybermen had me flying behind the sofa and fuelled many a nightmare. As a teenager, after watching the TV mini-series of Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot, I had to read a few chapters of my Saturday Night Fever paperback in order to get the images of the floating dead boy tapping at the window out of my head!”

Stephen Bailey: “A children’s book called Ghosts and Boglins, and the story about a witch called Black Annis, with a horrible picture of her running naked covered in cobwebs, and a face like Tubbs from the League of Gentlemen. My brothers and sisters and I still talk about it now. The worst thing was, we became convinced she lived in a black bin by the window of the landing on my nan’s stairs.”

Juliette Astrup: “The wheelies in Return to Oz were terrifying. Scary, mad creatures with wheels for hands and feet who were in the service of the wicked witch. I hid my face whenever they were on screen when I saw it at the cinema with my mum – they still give me the shivers now.”

Gavin Haines: “When I was a nipper I was scared of Diesel from Thomas The Tank Engine. Why, I don’t know. My mam has since told me that when he came on screen, I would run halfway up the stairs and watch from there – presumably because I thought he couldn’t get me up half a flight of stairs!”

Tim Saunders: “When I was a teen I watched a TV adaptation of a Fay Weldon novel, where an ex-wife stabbed her husband to death – it was quite graphic and frightening.”

Fiona Pendlebury: “When I was about seven I went to watch Star Trek The Wrath of Khan at the cinema. There was a scene where Khan puts these alien grubs into people’s ears which eat their brains.

“It terrified me so much that for months afterwards I was convinced that I had some of the grubs in my head eating my brain.

“I was also terrified by an old film of Great Expectations where Miss Haversham gets set on fire. I used to be scared by the video of Pink Floyd’s Another Brick in the Wall - the teacher popping out a chimney waving a cane.”

Chris Parnell: “There was a Hammer House of Horror (The Two Faces of Evil) where a hitchhiker took the place of the father of the family after a car crash. He had a long finger nail and was very frightening. And he looked quite a lot like my own dad.”

Angela Young chose Ghostwatch, the 1992 BBC drama which tricked many viewers into thinking it was a documentary. “That was the scariest thing ever! I was utterly sucked in, and genuinely petrified. I couldn’t understand why my father, who was watching it with me, wasn’t as scared as I was!”

Ed Perkins: “The scariest moment I can recall – though I can’t swear how much was in the film and how much in my imagination – was when watching the film version of Swiss Family Robinson at the age of eight.

“It was when the giant boa constrictor came to prey on the shipwrecked family. They were unharmed... but off-screen you knew that the braying scream meant the wild ass they’d tamed had been caught and was being crushed in powerful coils. There was no escape once it got you, you know.”

Lyndon Hogg: “In New Zealand in the late ‘70s Rolf Harris used to advertise British Paints by drumming his fingers on the top and using a rubbish play-on-words slogan. I was about three and, according to my mother, he used to scare the willies out of me.”

Editor-in-chief Neal Butterworth: “I watched the 1957 black and white horror film Night Of The Demon with my best friend Gordon when we were about 10 years old. He was staying over and neither of us slept a wink we were so terrified by the monster at the end. I showed the film to my daughter when she was about 12. She just thought it was hilariously rubbish with terrible special effects.”

Ian Wadley: “Staying with my grandparents on a Friday or Saturday night, Ken Dodd always used to be the prime-time entertainment on TV. They loved him, but that always meant it was bed-time for me because he scared the life out of me for some reason. And still does.”

Nicky Findley: “The character who gave me nightmares when I was a kid was the Phantom Raspberry Blower – the Jack the Ripper-style madman in that Two Ronnies sketch. I woke up screaming one night convinced someone had just blown a raspberry in my ear.”

Jane Reader: “It wasn’t the things on TV that scared us but the way my dad behaved when they were on. Without us noticing, he would sneak out of the room when we were watching something scary and jump out on us when we went to the loo or to get a drink from the kitchen, always thinking it was absolutely hilarious.”

Darren Slade: “In the opening credits of the 1970s TV series of Planet of the Apes, there was a shot of a gorilla’s face appearing out of darkness which terrified me every week. And as a pre-schooler, I had the wind put up me by a children’s serial called Cloud Burst, in which I seem to remember a ray gun made an Austin 1100 disappear.”

Faith Eckersall: “The Daleks… the Sea-Devils, especially terrifying as I didn’t live too far from that horrible fort in the Solent where they all appeared to live.

“The scary thing that had the most profound effect on me was a BBC serial called A Pin To See The Peepshow, which I saw when I was eight. It was about the true-life events leading up to the execution of Edith Thompson in 1923. It was so terrifying and so powerful I had nightmares for weeks. But it did give me a life-long abhorrance of capital punishment, which can be no bad thing.”