Sometimes if I sit and stare into my own eyes in the mirror after a while, I find my own reflection to be frightening.
Sort of. When I’m really nervous about something, like a job interview, or back in college, my senior year finals, or the results of a pregnancy test, or the way I felt when my mother was dying, it will be like I took an overdose of Ex-Lax. It’s not so serious that I ever failed to make it to the toilet, but just a serious case of the runs, and lots of gas pain, and Imodium doesn’t seem to help.
I think I came by it naturally. My grandfather was a reporter, and he had the crime beat for the Wichita Eagle for nearly 40 years. He started out as a reporter in New York, and it was the Depression (reporters were one of the few people with job security during the Depression), so there was a lot of crime to report. He worked the city desk, but ended up getting a lot of crime stories, and so when the Eagle was looking for someone to specialize in crime reporting, he had a lot of sample pieces, and he got the job.
He retired just before BTK became active, and they brought him in out of retirement to advise the new guy on this really unusual crime.
One of the things my grandfather had to do as part of his job was witness most of the executions that happened in the state during his time on the beat. He never talked about it, but once he took my father with him because he needed to for some reason-- made him wait outside the building, but my father did see them carry the body out on a stretcher, covered with a sheet. He was 10 or 11.
:eek: No, thank you…that’s a full-on panic attack waiting to happen…
Tight places don’t bug me as much as wide open spaces. I don’t like the loosey-goosey feeling, or how out of control it could be, especially where many people are. Wal-Mart parking lot freaks me out some days. I like tree lined lanes or small fields. I know it’s stupid. I am working on it.
Way back in the day of when Angry Birds first came out for mobile phones, I was obsessed in passing one got-dang level that I needed to get three stars on.
I came home after drinks at a bar. I live alone. No roommates or guests. Had another beer, smoked a joint. I saunter off to the toilet without turning the light on. The door is kept a cracked open for just some light and I continue playing as I sit down. After sitting and doing what the OP mentions on said toilet, I finish, stand up and continue playing this level. Still no three stars. Minutes pass while standing in my bathroom and playing the same level.
All of a sudden, the best thing ever at the moment happens: I beat the level with the three blessed stars. So in my drunk and stoned amazement, I look up from the phone while cheering… and I see another person staring back at me, in my own place. So I scream like a banshee, really. I scream like hell.
Until, of course, I realize the person staring back at me in my own bathroom is MY reflection in the bathroom wall mirror. The phone was almost cracked not because of dropping it, but because of squeezing it in terror.
So I suppose that if the latter events happened before I got to the toilet in the first place, I would’ve scared the shit out of myself as the OP mentions.
I blame that damn round bomb-shaped bird. It should’ve been the third bird, not the second! 
But only while you’re alive, eh? 
We lived in Queens when Son of Sam was active, which is to say, our house was there. Now, by dint of coincidence, we lived in the Soviet Union in late 76, early 77, and we came back in the middle of the Son of Sam killing spree. I did not know this at the time. When we came back, we flew into Kennedy, but didn’t go home. We went to my great-aunt’s on Long Island, on the excuse, according to my mother, that everyone wanted to see us after so much time-- it’s true that several other relatives did descend on my aunt’s tiny house, and my brother and I were sleeping on the floor in sleeping bags (which is fun when you are a little kid).
But after that, we still didn’t go home. We went to my grandmother’s in Westchester. Now, it’s about an hour’s drive from where we lived in Queens to my grandmother’s house, and I was anxious to see my pets again, but we didn’t go back to our house for a month. We stayed crowded into my grandmother’s little house. My parents told me it was because the people renting our house had leased it to X date, and we came back early, so we couldn’t go back to the house until the renters’ lease was up. I wanted to know why we couldn’t go visit, and see the pets. My mother said it would be confusing for them to see us until we were back for good.
I saw the Son of Sam case on TV at a friend’s house while at my grandmother’s, but I never saw it at my grandmother’s. My parents were always turning the news off before it was over, for some reason. No one talked about the case in the family.
I finally asked my mother when I was about 40 years old if the real reason that we stayed with my grandmother for so long was that she was waiting for Son of Sam to be caught, and she hemmed and hawed, but did finally admit that yes, they didn’t want to go back to Queens while he was at large. If it had gotten to the point where my brother and I needed to start school, they were going to return anyway, but fortunately he was caught before it came to that.
It seems our renters were gone a couple of weeks before we got back, and the pets were boarded. I knew they were boarded when we got home, but I thought it was just for a day or two, not weeks. The renters did extend a little, though. My parents called them and said they we going to be back late, and didn’t want the house vacant or the animals uncared for, and offered to let them stay there for free if they needed it longer than the end date of the lease, and they stayed a couple of weeks, but not whole time we were in Westchester. We were on Long Island a week, and in Westchester three weeks. Then Berkowitz was captured, and we piled into a rented van, and hauled home.
Eh. We live where Black Bears are a pretty common sight.
Once in a while, in the Fall when they are feeding like crazy and getting ready for hibernation, I give myself the willies. Perhaps it’s a good thing.
Ya see, we don’t have a garage, and I leave very early in the morning. It’s dark…
Black Bears rarely attack people. Rarely.
As someone else pointed out… it’d be really nice if panic attacks weren’t “real,” but I’ve had them. Completely irrational overwhelming feeling I was going to die, with no relief despite every kind of self-soothing, calming effort I could make for as long as an hour. The fact that your breathing speeds up and heart is racing because of the unwanted adrenaline rush doesn’t help the “I’m going to die of this” feeling, even when you can logically tell yourself it’s happened before, and you haven’t died of it once yet.
(It’s been years since I had a real panic attack; it seems they were being caused by a medicine I was taking, which the doctor subsequently changed out. But I wish to god it had been as simple as just a feeling of being freaked out that I didn’t try hard enough to calm away.)
As for the OP’s actual topic, I can freak myself out (but I’ve never given myself a panic attack ;)) if I’m walking alone outside in the dark. Other people around, even strangers, don’t worry me. It’s the ability to convince myself that there is something out there, watching me from the shadows unknown, waiting… I tend to walk fast when I take the garbage down at night, lest the goblins get me.
All I have to do is open a PM from the OP; you never know what that goombah is gonna say. And he’s a friend!
I’m an author, and when I’m writing a story with some scary scene in it, I definitely can and do scare myself, which is how I know what to write.
I was thinking about this thread a couple of nights ago, and I was thinking about a conversation my husband and I had about people building skyscrapers. Then I imagined a cinematic scenario where I and a bunch of other people were forced to walk out on an i-beam of an unfinished building and sit on one with nothing beneath us. We had to sit down. Then the person in charge would randomly pick people and make them come back by crawling over everyone else. If they refused, he’d start shooting people. I made it until he called my name then realized I was going to regret it if I didn’t change my mental subject.
So that was great. 
I can’t imagine not-existing. I KNOW it’s coming, but I just can’t visualize it. Like infinity, it is truly beyond imagining. And I don’t mean like Lovecraft, saying something is indescribable and then going ahead and describing it. I mean literally never ending, there is always another expanse just over the horizon. Or just beyond visible range.