I was always threatened with being sold to the gypsies when I was wee. I was told I would be chained up under a caravan with the greyhounds and would have to make clothes pegs...
Clearly, my own vivid imagination is taken from my mother.
20 years on, my mother is still threatening small naughty children as she is a matron of a boarding school now. On one memorable occasion, she told me that the girls she looks after had just seen the Michael Jackson Thriller video for the first time and were all too scared to sleep in case the Michael Jackson came for them as the werewolf (When really it should have been the boys who were worried
)
She waited until they were all just getting off to sleep and started making howling noises in the corridor
And to think their parents pay for the privelege of my mother scaring the living daylights out of them!