Anybody out there remember the TV show “My Three Sons?” When I was a child, I was terrified of the opening theme (where the legs, feet, and hands were drawn in and the hands would open and close to reveal the credits). Even now, just hearing the theme song can make me feel a little queasy. I seem to remember thinking that there were monster’s faces above the legs…dunno why, but it scared me all the same.
Spiders–even the daddy-long-legs–frighten the life out of me. I am afraid to even try to kill them for fear that I’ll miss and they’ll come right for me. This stems from the time I ran straight through a spider’s web stretched between two trees and the spider landed on my head, then fell to the ground in front of me–I was about 10 at the time.
Claustrophobia–but not just being in a small space. If I can move freely about (like in an elevator), I’m OK. But restrict my movement (especially my arms) and/or get right up into my face where I can’t back away, and I freak out. I can’t stand to even think about being in an MRI machine. Once when my hubby and I were having a friendly wrestling match, he pinned my arms to my sides with a quilt and got directly up into my face–I totally panicked. I can’t even stand the oxygen masks they use in a hospital–I request the nasal canulas. This, too, I believe is because of a childhood experience. I had minor surgery when I was 7, and I didn’t know anything about the process of anesthesia. Well, they put that mask over my face and it stank, so I pushed it away. They had to pin my arms down and hold the mask to my face so they could proceed. I can still remember how scared I was–even though I don’t blame them for doing what they had to do. I guess I still react to that now the way I did then.
I remembered another fear of mine that has been mentioned, phones.
I will not answer a phone unless I have to (i.e., I’m the only one there to do so.) And if I have to make a phonecall, I try as best I can to get someone else to do it. I’m better now, I willingly call my friends and relatives if I need to talk to them. But try to get me to call someone I’ve never met? Fat chance. Ugh. Lousy phone. The only thing I like about them is that they are (well, were, anyways) necessary for the internet. But now, with high-speed service allowing quick and easy communication via IM, email, and whatnot, we can finally do away with those evil devices! Who’s with me!
(And oddly enough, I enjoy IM. Even to complete strangers. I guess I just don’t like people hearing my voice, and having to come up with replies on the spot, not getting to think about it.)
Man I hate phones. I won’t answer them. I won’t call people…not even my closest friends. It takes me ages to work up the nerve to call anybody. Even my husband. I have never called him at work, and I never will…even though it’s his job to answer the phone!
I also hate mirrors in the dark. The Bloody Mary thing didn’t help, but I’ve always been uneasy around them. I’ve never, ever been scared of the dark, except in the bathroom. It’s the weirdest damn thing.
Chickens, well fowl, terrify me. When I lived in Utah I was attacked my a giant rooster, and another time two turkies went after me.
I have a paralyzing phobia of snakes, heights, and clowns. I lose my breath, my legs shake, I turn alternately cold and hot, I even get dizzy if I stand on a chair. All I have to do is see a snake or a clown on TV and I almost lose it. Most times I’ll either go running and screaming out of a room, or I’ll just turn off the TV. Of course then everybody is pissed, “Hey! We were watching that!” Yeah well, fuck you.
no “got my shoelace cought in it”, i just, at some point around four, became unable to ride escalators.
in the last 12 years, i’ve managed to mostly reduce that error to the point where i can take some short down escalators and most up escalators.
Me too. I’m not scared of it, I mean, but I try to avoid the battlegrounds and such - which is hard sometimes, because I have family near Appomattox and Gettysburg, and friends from Vicksburg and places like that. I’m a little afraid of the battlegrounds. (This might be because of a horror story I read once about a boy scout around 1911 and a bunch of Civil War veterans at a reunion at Gettysburg and somebody who’d caused his men to get killed and holes in the ground that grew teeth from the men who were buried there or something and ate the bad guy.) When I visit places like that, the history of it just smacks me, and it makes me so sad. Actually, lots of old places do that to me. I used to get creeped out and sad in the pre-Revolutionary and Dutch-era buildings back home in New York, thinking of all the people who’d lived and died there.
When I was a little kid, I had this fear of walking through dark rooms at night, and also a fear of hearing the National Anthem played on television (it used to be played before stations signed off for the evening, now stations hardly ever sign off.) I think this had to do with a fear that I was up later than I ought to be, if I could hear the Star Spangled Banner blaring from my parents’ TV.
Fortunately I overcame this fear by the time I had to start playing the National Anthem in marching band
Nocturne, I agree with you. I hate drive throughs (aka drive “thru”). I don’t know if I’m scared of hitting stuff, getting ripped off, or not being able to understand the machine-like voices.
Clowns. (but this is not an irrational fear).
Looking ugly people in the eye. (Attractive people are no problem).
Black toilets seats. (Overcame this fear when the college dorms gave us no choice. Necessity trumps fear.)
Okay, so it’s a little more complicated than that. Windows at night, where someone might be able to peer in and see me but I can’t see them. Even worse than that, the fear of looking at a window at night and actually SEEING someone peering in at me. shudder
Long hallways (comes from the movie The Shining. another shudder)
Swallowing pills - I can’t swallow a pill to save my life. Okay, so maybe to save my life. Oddly enough, there are times when I don’t have a problem with it, but more often than not I can’t do it. I’ll get the pill in my mouth, take a drink of water, and the water goes down but the pill stays. Then there are times when I actually get the pill down but I can FEEL it going down…I hate that!
Fear of vomiting - I would almost rather die than throw up. 'Nuff said!
Fear of anything creepy crawly. This includes bugs of most types, spiders, snakes, crabs, lobsters, etc. The first time I ate crab legs, I had to have someone else crack them open for me because I couldn’t bring myself to touch them.
The possibility of getting trapped somewhere, with little or no chance of getting out before I starve. Or god forbid, run out of air. I think I can trace this back to when I was 11 and my (adult) cousin Floyd accidentally locked me in his camper. It was pretty darn hot in there, and when he finally heard me yelling and pounding, he couldn’t understand why I was “so upset”. Because he’d overlooked me like everyone else did! Putz! Also, when I was 21 or so, I very narrowly missed getting locked in an anteroom at the Carnegie Museum of Art. That pretty much sealed it. If you’ll pardon the expression.
Mr. Rilch and I have a compartment in Public Storage. We were there once and saw an empty, unlocked compartment. He wanted to have sex in it, and I refused. He was very scornful of my assertion that someone would come along and lock us in there, but it could happen!
Another time, I was cleaning a condo for a friend who was trying to sell it. He wasn’t there, and I was pushing the steam cleaner around the living room and had to close the powder room door. Afterwards, it wouldn’t open. Would not, no matter what I tried. I just couldn’t stop wondering if I could have opened it from the other side, had I been there. It didn’t help when he told me, the following Saturday, that he trusted me so much that he hadn’t gone back to check my work during the week. Which meant the condo had been empty for six days. Well, at least I would have had water…Well, Mr. Rilch would have sounded an alarm. But I wonder if anyone would have thought to look in the condo?
And I won’t even get into a couple of scenes from The Stand, or one of Bob Greene’s columns, or The Mummy…
I’m afraid of cows. Not looking at pictures or anything, but being near cows or touching them. Bulls, naturally, are somewhat worse – there’s actually a reason to be afraid of them, usually – but cows are still pretty bad. We have a farm that I used to have to go to when I was little (too young for my parents to leave me home), and if the cows were in the field I was in, I would refuse to get out of the car until they moved far, far away. One of my biggest fears when I was a small child was that I’d go down into the pantry in our basement, and a cow would come out and run after me. The odd thing is, I don’t think I’ve ever actually been within ten feet of a cow. Just the thought of it freaks me out.
I also have a fear of seeing blood on fingers or toes. Anywhere else is OK. I remember watching Schindler’s List, and I wasn’t frightened by the images of people getting shot in the head, but when the women started pricking their fingers with pins, I had to run out of the room shaking. Even if it’s just a cartoon finger with cartoon blood, I can’t watch it (The Simpsons has a surprising amount of such scenes).
My fears include some mentioned above, including the emergency broadcast signal on TV, though I wouldn’t call that a full blown phobia. I don’t panic. I used to have trouble with making phone calls/answering the phone but I got over that.
I do have a big fear of passing cars on 2 lane highways. I am usually fine passing cars on the interstate, but even if I can see that it is perfectly clear and no one is coming, it terrifies me to cross over the dotted yellow line. I have stayed behind cars going 35 mph rather than pass them. When I do finally muster the courage to go around them, my heart is pounding. I used to be a pretty phobic driver in general. I honestly don’t know how I passed the driving test at 16 and after I got my license I would let anyone drive so I wouldn’t have to, including my 13 year old brother and friends without driver’s licenses. Now I’m fine except for the passing thing.
When I was little, I had the “Technical Difficulties” fear, but that was because I though “stand by” meant the same thing as “stand back” and the TV was telling me to get out of the room.
Now, my main fear is for the posters that are hanging from the ceilings of the trains in Tokyo. The bottom edge hangs just at my head level (but above everyone else’s), and I keep picturing myself getting a paper cut along the top of my scalp. In most of these visualizations, I don’t even notice what’s happening until the blood comes pouring down in front of my face.
I had a bad experience with strong winds/a storm in Las Vegas some years back while trying to cross the street (this was before the age of walkways). My umbrella was nearly turned inside out and I had to walked hunched over at a 45 degree angle to keep from being knocked down. I was shaking, not just from cold, by the time I made it into the nearest casino. Now, I don’t mind a breeze or even the Santa Anas, but high winds really bother me.
Another one of my phobias came to mind the other day, and it’s not because of any anthrax panic: I am afraid of mail carriers! I live in an apartment complex where the mail is delivered to a centralized unit, but when I lived in a house, I would always wait until the mailman was waaaay down the street before going out to the porch to open the mail box. I never wanted him to see me actually get the mail out and look at it. And people that stop and talk to the mailman every day…AACCKKK!!! I always run in the house and hide if my friend is talking to the mailman. I guess I didn’t want him to know who I was so he couldn’t make fun of the mail I get…Like he would say: “Oh, so YOU’RE the one that bought those CD’s from Columbia house and never paid for them, huh??”
There’s a couple of aquariums that I won’t go near. Like the one in Monterrey. It has a wall of glass 40’ high.
But it’s sitting on the San Andreas fault!
I’ve got a phobia of touching unfamiliar plants. I attribute it to reading about all sorts of carnivorous plants at much too young an age, and imagining large versions of them. Also reading about plants that do weird stuff when touched, like leave difficult-to-remove burrs or grow rapidly… shudder. Not to mention the fact that I once accidentally touched a cactus as a kid.
As long as I know that a specific plant is harmless or can avoid touching it, I’m fine. Otherwise, I generally deal with it as quickly as possible and because of social pressure. Even walking through high weeds or whatever, even in long pants, is terrifying for me. Strangely, I actually enjoy hiking, but only on well-established trails.
Lawnmowers. Hate them. Hate them. If I’m walking down the street and someone’s mowing the lawn, I have to cross the street at least twenty metres before I get to the place where the lawn’s being mowed.
Warning - this story can squick some people a little.
There is a reason for this. When I was a kid, Dad was mowing our lawn. I was sitting on the verandah. The mower blades threw up a stone and it hit me square between the eyes which hurt. A lot.
Fairly unlikely, you’d think. Nope. Only a few weeks later, I got hit with another lawnmower-propelled rock - except this one hit me in the eye. I still have that eye & it has near-perfect vision, but it tore out part of the iris, so I have two pupils in my right eye. The “normal” pupil is actually oval (the muscles act unevenly on it) while the “unnatural” pupil is ragged, at the edge of the iris. Opthalmologists love me since, through the gap, they can see the muscles that focus the lens and adjust pupil size in action, which you usually can’t do.
