People can be incredibly weird about the people on TV. They develop these strange para-social relationships with people they've never even met before. It gets uncomfortable, to the point of stalking, freaky fan mail and harassment. This is especially true of women, all the factors involved plus men being creepy and possessive of them. Unfortunately, Little House on The Prairie star Melissa Gilbert had to deal with this unfortunate truth at a young age. Thankfully, she had young parents to help try and make her early stardom easier to deal with.
Videos by Wide Open Country
Recently, Melissa appeared on the Hey Dude... The 90s Called! podcast. There, she reflects on the times she spent on the hit TV show and the pressures of fame at an early age. However, her parents were also hellbent on making life as normal as they could for their young starlet. This meant protecting Gilbert from all the weirdos out there, the millions of people who tuned into Little House every week. She remains grateful to have that sense of relative normalcy, despite the freaks who slipped through.
Melissa Gilbert Recalls The Disturbing Fan Mail She Got As a Kid On Little House on The Prairie
"I didn't have a lot of incidents. They kept me very sheltered from a lot of that stuff," Gilbert recalls. "One time I was walking in New York City with my mom right at the height of Little House and I had my hair in pigtails for some reason, which I didn't do in public after this. And I got mobbed. And someone grabbed a chunk of my hair out, and it's like The Beatles, screaming, mobbing. I was, I don't know, 11 or 12 maybe. That was scary. So from then on, we took precautions to keep me kind of under wraps a little bit more."
When it comes to the fan mail side of things, the parents thankfully kept Gilbert out of it. "I didn't see any of that stuff until I was considerably older, which is a good thing because there was some creepy fan mail ... a lot of fan mail from prison, a men's prison," Melissa says.
