Do you hold any truly bizarre fears?

[Wnabtokio]

@Sierra Indigo

Though that could probably be traced back to my penchant for survival horror style games like Silent Hill and the like.

That game has led to many a sleepless night for me too.

“There was a hole here, but it’s gone now.”

[Viridiana]

@Excalibre

I don’t know if this is a fear per se - but I have an instinctive revulsion for surfaces with a certain texture. Anything that has lots of tiny, irregular holes in it just fills my soul with utter dread. Honeycomb is similar to what I’m talking about, but it’s more frightening if the holes aren’t in a particular arrangement but just sort of random. The best example of this - in a terrifying context - is a photoshopped picture you can find on Snopes of a woman’s breast with all these little . . . tunnels . . . in it; it’s clearly a fake but it’s supposed to be a picture of infection with some exotic parasite. When I saw that picture and read the story, I realized exactly why I feel such nausea at the site of surfaces with lots of tiny holes - because it seems like horrific worms or bugs or something must be hiding inside. My mother once bought this notebook that had a thick blue cover full of small, irregular little tunnels into the surface. And it made me want to throw up. Ugh!

I have this one too! Even my own fingers freak me out if they’ve been wet too long - when they’ve passed the ‘wrinkled’ point to the ‘lots of little holes in the skin’ point.

The difference is, though that texture puts a weird stomach turning fear in my stomach, I can’t help staring at it in fascination when I do find it. :smack:

[Oy]

About 30 years ago, I very suddenly developed a huge fear of driving on very high bridges, like the Delaware Memorial Bridge. I was convinced that somehow I would lose control of the car and drive off the bridge. This fear came completely out of the blue, and there was no incident that I’ve ever been able to link to it as a possible cause. I was 19 or 20, and I’d never had a fear of high bridges before.

This fear developed on a road trip I was making from NJ to North Carolina. I spent the 50 miles or so prior to the Delaware Memorial Bridge wondering if I could stop at the toll booth and beg some car carrying more than one driver to lend me a driver just to get across the bridge.

Well, I made it driving myself. And I’m not sure it would have been that much better if I’d been riding, after all. But it took years of very gradual decrease for high bridges to not continue to be a major fear for me, and truth to tell, they still cause a little anxiety. The odd thing is, I have no other fear of heights at all, other than the rational one that tells you that you really DON’T want to walk off the edge of a seven story building.

I still get creeped out by things that were used as establishing shots for the TV Show Twin Peaks: a traffic light swinging in the breeze in the dark, an owl hooting, a shot from the first floor of a ceiling fan at the top of the stairs. It’s the only show that ever really had that impact on me. When Lynch was on, he was on!

Huge flocks of birds making bird noises (a la The Birds) are still a little unnerving. When I was a little kid, that movie and Whatever Happened to Baby Jane were considered the height of scary movies.

[Corn_Syrup]

@Bobotheoptimist

Holy freakin’ cow! My only reoccurring nightmare, one that I’ve had since I was a wee lad and was often a sign that a couple nights in the hospital were imminent (terrible bronchitis as kid) was what I still call the “big-little” dream. Creeps me out just thinking about it. The two things are identical except for size - one big, and one, you guessed it, little. They’d just hang there in the dream, kinda floating side by side, and I’d wake up screaming. I don’t scream now, but just seeing a big and little thing together gets my heart racing and I have to get away from it.

That is the same dream I have from time to time. I could never describe the feeling, but I still occasionally wake up with my heart pounding. For me it’s played out with multi-colored blobs…

eeeep :eek:

[lizardling]

@Anaamika

You can add me to this, too. I know exactly where it came from - when I was very young, some kids in the neighborhood told me if I went in the bathroom and turned around three times chanting, Bloody Mary would appear behind me. I don’t know who Bloody Mary is - I have no idea. Doesn’t matter. I can picture her.
I’ve gotten much better with it, to the point where I have absolutely no problem going to the bathroom in the middle of the night and even glancing in the mirror. I won’t linger, though, and if for some reason I have to I turn on the light.

Me three. I blame it on seeing Poltergeist and Exorcist as a babychild. My houseparents had really crappy judgement about watching scary movies with the small children they were caring for, I’ll say that for them.