Scary Old Sports Mascots to Keep Away From My Kids

Sports mascots are an essential part of the spectacle, and we can't really imagine watching a game without them, whether they dance alongside cheerleaders, fire up the crowd, or simply goof around. But it wasn't always like that, because sports mascots could be really creepy at times.

The first mascots were created in the late 1800s, and, as you can probably imagine, costumes weren't all that great back then. Teams were still figuring out a lot about mascots, what they represented, and what people wanted to see in them, so there was a lot of trial and error, and not the cool kind. Unsettling faces, disproportionate costumes, and choices that nobody could explain brought a lot of nightmare fuel in mascot form.

Some of these crimes against mascoting are still around, but the fact that most of them are gone is proof that they were creepy and could actually harm the team's image.