On September 17, 1951, Cassandra Peterson was born. Although her family eventually relocated to Randolph, Kansas, she was born in Manhattan, Kansas. Prior to Turtle Creek Reservoir flooding the Kansas Randolph region, she was raised there. She attended General William J. Palmer High School when the family relocated to Colorado Springs. She graduated from High School in 1969 and during the course of her education, she had her mother, who owned a costume shop, make whatever outfits she desired in her size, and wore them to school.
She was burned by boiling water when she was a child, and in order for her to recover, she needed transplanted skin to cover more than 35% of her body. As a consequence, she had to spend three months in the hospital.
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She claims that the drama started at one and a half years into her existence.
She narrated that they had a number of eggs boiling in a large cast iron kettle on the stove while her mother was dyeing Easter eggs, and she was outdoors. Peterson told WPR's "BETA that she dragged a chair over, got on top of the stove to see what was boiling there, and must have lost her balance because she grabbed the pot and turned it over on herself. Peterson remembered that she had third-degree burns covering 35% of her body. And a third-degree burn to 25% of your body at the time was thought to be fatal. She said that her survival was actually somewhat of a miracle.
In her book, Peterson describes how, with her burns and scars, she felt out of place following the event. But her love of horror was influenced by her sense of alienation. She was ridiculed, humiliated, and harassed by kids for having scars, which made her reclusive and timid. Peterson said that the first time she saw a horror film, "House on Haunted Hill," with her cousin Danny, perhaps between the second and third grade, it completely altered her