I was always really scared of someone coming into the house at night. It didn't have to be a monster, just a random person. And an animatronic monkey that spun round a bar in the window of a shoe shop of all places. I was reduced to tears ever time I saw it. The dentist was also terrifying. Still is.
Heights. Spiders. And Fire. I either have one reaction or the other: the first would be me freaking out, running for my life and screaming, or I just completely freeze up deny everything and force myself to think that such a fear is silly and that If i behave rationally it will go away. As for the intruder fear -we have a guard dog, seven cats, and four cows who do NOT like other people on our property. Ever see a full grown holstein bull come running at you? Scary as crap. They dont even put those suckers in rodeos. Yeah, pets are awesome, but thank god i have a boyfriend who can kill all the spiders for me... even if he tricks me into thinking theres a spider on my head every time >.<
Every morning I had to go and fetch the milk from the farm. It was not very far to walk to the farm, but the dogs roamed the yard. I had this little boy anxiety about confrontation with the sheep dogs. I walked through the farm gates, stepped over to the outhouse where the farmer left the milk. I put the milk bottles into the basket. Then I turned around, exhaled in my relief. Two dogs growled at my face, barked and nipped, chased me out of the gates about one time in five.
As kid, I was creeped out by basically 3 things: -jellyfish (esp. those that look a lot like metroids and can be effin massive -spindly insects like those huge male mosquitoes, daddy-long-legs etc. -weird plants as well as some bigger ones like cow parsley/Queen Anne's lace etc. Those were the ones that made my skin crawl, but they don't translate well into adulthood, so no longer an issue. They've been replaced with a couple others that are more about fear instead of revulsion, fears that are more rational and are things that either have happened or are possible if not the most likely of calamities.
Spiders. This is actually a totally and utterly rationally fear, as all spiders are giant spiders, even the really small ones. Also heights. But I keep forgetting I'm afraid of heights and do stupid things like accepting an invitation to go on a Ferris wheel, then thinking, 'ohhh shiiiiit' as soon as it starts.
Besides sharks and alligators, my biggest fear when I was young was looking up and seeing somebody outside standing at the door or a face in the window. When I was really young, my greatest fear was that one of the nightmares from There's a Nightmare in my Closet was going to come through my window. If you stare long enough at curtains in the dark, they start to move.
Woo. I bet you were a big fan of that witch in Snow White! I remember when she suddenly popped up at the window, clutching that apple. I nearly peed myself. I still don't want to know sharks and alligators (or their bigger cousins, the salt water crocs) but since I live in Scotland and don't swim in the sea, I'm probably fine. I have this thing about being eaten by something that isn't a mammal. If a tiger wants to eat me, fine. But a shark? Nope.
Some interesting comments in here! Spiders is a pretty big one of mine at the moment. I used to be afraid of three things mainly... 1. Balloons 2. 'The white van man' - I was always told to look out for strange men stealing children in a white van. 3. The 'naughty boys home'. My mum picked out a terrible, huge, haunted looking house and told me that it was for naughty boys to stay at. So if I was naugty, I would have to go and live there. It creeped me out in a big way. She once stopped outside when I was being naughty and told me that I was about to be given away to them! ._.
Spiders - still hate them now but much better than I used to be. Tarantulas still give me the creeps though. Darkness - but these days it's fine. As children my parents installed one of those adjustable lights for us so the room was only ever dim and not completely dark when we fell asleep. Trapped in an elevator or toilet - still have a mild form of this now. I almost always imagine myself stuck in one as I'm in it. I also hate public bathroom doors with an actual sturdy lock you need a key for, or those ones where you turn a knob. I always imagine they'd get stuck. Unfortunately those locks are the most common here in Prague and 90% of the time I actually just don't bother locking the door. I prefer the possibility of making a stranger scream and embarrassing myself than being trapped in a cubicle. Getting a ring stuck on my finger - I've never liked rings all that much cus I'm always freaked out I wouldn't be able to get it off. Clowns - cus they're just creepy. These days I don't find them scary per se but I still find them unpleasant.
Oh, yes, that. But for me the fear was of seeing a face out the window at night when I'm on an upper floor. It happened to me once. Really. Had an apartment on the third floor of an old building one summer when I was in college. The bathrooms had no view to the outside; their windows opened onto kind of a 4 foot square light-and-air well. I kept mine open because it was hot and there was no air conditioning. One evening after dark I was standing at the bathroom sink combing my hair, when I perceived movement over to my left. I turned and, Lord have mercy! there was a man's face grinning at me through the window! I screamed, but oddly enough, my first impulse was to put my head down and run towards the window to slam it shut. When I looked up, the face was gone. I have my theories as to what it was . . . My other big childhood fear was water bugs. It was something I had to get over when I grew up. My calico cat would catch them in the middle of the night and bring them to me in bed to teach me, her stand-in kitten, how to hunt.
I can't remember. I googled a scary fish, looking for that particular picture. It scared me shitless as a kid, so it's actually pretty funny that it's also floating around the internet like I just can't escape it. Do you live in tornado country? I think they're cool from afar, but I wouldn't want to get in the way of one. You probably wouldn't have liked Stephen King's It, the movie anyway. Sure, there's the scary clown staple, but also BALLOONS. I get nervous when in public bathrooms cos I'm also worried that the lock of the cubicle jams. Mostly because this happened to me once, although, thankfully it happened at my friend's house (the entire lock had to be destroyed to get me out), but there're cubicles with similar locks and doors in some public bathrooms... Yikes! I'm glad I live on the second floor. It was intentional, actually. Hubby and I are a bit paranoid, and as long as we can avoid it, won't move in to a first floor apartment.
@KaTrian - oh gosh the entire door had to be destroyed? How long did it take? Funnily enough it's never happened to me, but I've seen/heard it happen to people. At my pastor's house, I remember his wife specifically told everyone NOT to lock the bathroom door cus the lock is dodgey. Another friend told us of her experience when she was locked home alone in the bathroom - it's one of those horrid Czech toilets where there's really only room for you, the toilet, and that's it. The sink is usually in the separate bathroom. And it's always cold. She got in, locked the door, and when she had to get out, she found the handle was loose. When she pulled, the handle on the other side of the door fell away, meaning she couldn't turn the handle to open the door. She was trapped for 3 days and then she claims a miracle happened - she had this strange feeling that she should try the door again and through the keyhole she claims she saw the handle on the other side back where it should be and turning of its own accord. Anyway, she got out alive, but severely dehydrated because there wasn't even a sink in that toilet, so she hadn't been drinking all that time. I think she could have actually died if it'd gone on any longer. And then with the elevator I remember once we heard these horrific screams and panicked banging on metal. A little boy was crying and another teenage boy was shrieking like he thought he was gonna die. Turns out they got stuck in the lift in our building. *shudders* I didn't use that lift again for a few months. This nearly happened to me once, but in another lift. Stupid Czechs sometimes label their ground floors with letters rather than numbers - equivalent to seeing G for Ground Floor sometimes. But for some bizarre reason you might get 2-3 different buttons all with different letters, and then also the numbers 1, 2, 3 etc above it. So you're like, well which one's supposed to be the floor I need!? I pressed 1 - and it was one of those where the lift had its own electric doors, but then there's a second door you manually open or close. The manual door of Level 1 said "out of order". So I was like, fine, it's not this one. So I tried one of the lettered buttons. Got to whichever floor that was. I opened the door to find myself in a storage cupboard! So I closed the door and pressed another button. Only the lift won't move. I was pretty calm actually but I was like, "You've gotta be kidding." I found out why - there's a little knob that sticks out from the wall of the lift that prevented the manual door from shutting properly. But STUPID STUPID Czech designs meant this stupid old lift didn't have any form of door handle on the inside for you to pull the door close (I mean, seriously, wtf? Who designed this?) There's a safety mechanism that prevented the door from slamming too - how sweet and safe and clever. And I was like, "All right, how do you close the (bloody) door?" Thankfully I actually was very calm at the time, surprisingly so, so I did the next most logical thing. I pushed on the little knob with my hand - you know, like you press a button - and thank God the knob retracted easily and the door shut. Then the electric doors nearly ate my arm when they shut with a whoosh. There was once when I was certain I was gonna be trapped underground - in an underground station. I decided to take the stairs rather than the scary-looking tiny metal lift, not knowing I was in the deepest underground in all of London (Hampstead). There were something like 200+ steps - there were labels throughout the staircase that indicated which floor you were on and there were 20 of them in all. I'm not very fit - by the time I got to 10 I was exhausted and felt like I couldn't walk anymore. Then I was like, "shit no if I can't walk anymore, then my husband will have to go get help cus he can't carry me, I'm too heavy. That means leaving me alone on these stairs and that'd make it even worse!" In the end I chanted to myself in my head saying "One step at a time, one step at a time..." and telling myself "These are stairs, which means as long as you keep walking, you'll get out of here just fine. Just don't tire yourself out so much that you can't walk, and you'll be fine. One step at a time, don't rush, don't rush..." Cus my heart was leaping and it was only getting faster and faster even when I was stopping to rest. Anyway, obviously I got out. Then I sat down on the side of the street - didn't even bother looking for an actual place to sit - I just sat down on the curb of the road and cried and cried and cried, shaking all over, for like 30min. Hey btw, good thing you don't stay on the ground floor because it's really, really noisy! You hear everyone who ever leaves the building or enters it, and all the doors slamming, plus the lift pinging. It's horrific. I lived on the ground floor once and it was very dark - cus other buildings blocked out the light. Very cold - cus it's the ground floor. Very noisy, as I already said. Plus, we had the excellent view of the rubbish bins right outside our window.
I was afraid of seeing a face on the window glass, ever since I read Agatha Christie's "The Mysterious Mr Quin" when I was a kid. The second story, "The Shadow on the Glass", was about a woman and her lover seeing a face on the window watching them as they ran away from the house. The face belonged to the woman's husband they just killed... The image could only be seen from the distance, and no matter how often the house owners would replace the glass, the face would always reappear. Creepy...
Just the lock. Though I guess, by proxy, the door was rendered pretty pointless too 'cause afterwards the dogs could get in while you were doing your business . I was something like 13, so I only have fuzzy memories of it, but I think I was stuck there for mere hours. It was a big bathroom, so it wasn't too claustrophobic and I didn't panic, but the fact that locks can do that, apparently without prior warning too, has made me wary of bathrooms, heh. But the chances of it happening again are pretty small. Yikes! Yeah, I think even in the best scenario a week without drinking water would be the limit. Good thing if that happened at my home, I could just climb out of the window, fetch the hidden extra key, and get back in. I wouldn't have either! Most elevators and buildings in Finland are brand new, but I did take a ride in a very old one in Bulgaria. It shuddered and creaked and looked like it'd fall apart any minute now, but I guess it's one of those contraptions that would actually survive a nuclear blast... Sorry, I laughed a little... Just imagined accidentally ending up in a storage cupboard. If that happened in a novel, I'd crack up. But good thing you stayed calm and everything turned out well in the end. If that happened to me, I'd be convinced I had been sucked to the Twilight Zone, doomed to climb those stairs forever! That sounds pretty crappy. I used to live on the ground floor as well but it was in a nice sub-urban area. I actually quite liked it 'cause I could sneak out of the window at night without Mom noticing.
Most lifts in Prague, unless you're in a new building, were installed after the building was built, which means there's often actually no room for a lift in the first place. The one in our building also creaks and shudders and can fit about 3 people max - and that's a pretty "big" lift for most standard buildings. I was in a lift once that was triangular and barely fitted 2 people. Although speaking of getting stuck in lifts, the ironic thing right now is the stupid door (another manual one) for the lift won't close. You'd close it, and the door would spring open again, meaning the lift won't ever move I was almost late for my physio appointment because the damn lift wouldn't close!!! Unfortunately there're no lifts in my WIP, it being fantasy and all. But if the opportunity ever arises, I'll totally write that in Oh I was convinced I'd be stuck there forever - it was a spiral underground staircase with dim yellow lighting and tiled walls like you see in horrid public bathrooms... and the only sound was the echo of your own footsteps and your increasingly laboured breathing... Haha nice! Did you ever get caught?
I live in Florida, which gets quite a few of them. I've never actually been hit by one, though. One did go through our neighborhood once, but all it did was grab my tent off of the front yard (I got it back) and damage someone's roof a little. Another started to form but fizzled out before it could do anything.
Being buried alive. I'm not scared anymore, but I'm still not being buried. Cremation became my plan after that and has been ever since.
My family's arguing when someone came home plastered and just in general when people were arguing. I'd go in the basement or outside to hide. Even today I have trouble dealing with people who are drunk.....it was rough XD Seeing my mother cry or in pain and all the time my dad would like go all ....well nasty. As for less serious ones Roller coasters Dolls Exorcist or mainly being taken over my some entity Noises in the house at night Child kidnappers or anything like that and the neighborhood bullies who wouldn't let me buy the toys they had.
Do you remember when a book had one scary page you didn't want to see, a single picture? This is one of two images that used to frighten me at bedtimes whilst perusing nerd manual, Readers Digest: Strange Stories, Amazing Facts. http://www.mistsofmystery.com/ghost_photos/faces_of_belmez.htm Quite a spooky story - I didn't stay on the website very long.
