I was afraid of a million things as a little kid, but a few things stand out:
I had a paralyzing fear of masks or coverings of the face. Not of animal or monster masks, but of masks whose only purpose was to just cover the face, or utilitarian ones like gas masks. At the video store, there was a box for The Crazies that scared the hell out of me. I was also terrified of the scene with the hazmat guys in E.T. for the same reason.
Once, when I was 6 or 7, I was at a museum with my family, and I saw a man wearing a surgical-type mask over his face - maybe he had severe allergies, maybe he was a hypochondriac, whatever - and I felt a wave of dread just wash over me. Quite literally, for the next two months, I was in a state of terror because of what I had seen. My parents would always ask me, “what’s bothering you,” and I’d say, “nothing.” They KNEW that I was terrified. I eventually confessed to them that I had seen a guy wearing a mask at the museum, and the fear disappeared.
When I turned 8 or 9, the fear of masks turned into an active fascination, possibly as some kind of over-compensating psychological response, and I started becoming obsessed with gas masks, even collecting a few of them from military surplus stores.
I was afraid of Asian people, especially the guys who worked at one Chinese restaurant that my parents and I always went to. These guys screamed out orders very loudly and aggressively, and it really shook me up. Chinese and Japanese people in general gave me the creeps. I didn’t have this reaction to any other ethnicity. Interestingly enough, I have a huge sexual and emotional attraction to Asian women - this also developed when I was about 8 or 9. I remember I used to watch Karate Kid Part II over and over again because of that Japanese girl in it.
(Why is it that I later became obsessed with the things that used to terrify me?)
As a kid, the guest room I always stayed at at my aunt and uncle’s house in Chicago had a stuffed moose above the dresser that always bothered me at night.
At my grandparents’ house, there was a giant collection of vases. One of them was tall, dark red, and shaped like a torpedo. It scared me so much that I asked my grandparents to put it somewhere where I couldn’t see it. I have no idea what it was about the shape that bothered me, but it really made me uncomfortable.
The idea of being trapped in a tight space horrified me. There was one room in our dungeon-like basement (the house I grew up in was a historical building, something like 80 years old) that you had to go through a narrow tunnel to get to, and was filled with old junk. Sometimes I would lie awake in bed just scared that this room existed!
I used to watch Are You Afraid Of The Dark, and the only episode of it that really scared me was The Tale of the Prisoner’s Past. In this story, a cell at Alcatraz is haunted by the ghost of a prisoner (“one-eyed Jack”) who supposedly escaped from it, and the people are trying to figure out why, if he had escaped, his ghost was there. Eventually the boys exploring the abandoned jail come across a loose brick behind the toilet, and discover a tunnel that they crawl through. At the end of the tunnel, they find a skeleton wearing prisoner’s clothes. Then the ghost of one-eyed Jack appears to them, and says something to the effect of “they thought I escaped…but I actually got stuck in this ventilation shaft and starved to death.”
:eek: :eek: :eek: :eek: :eek: :eek: :eek: :eek: :eek: :eek:
When it came to conventionally scary stuff like monsters, ghosts, and what have you, I wasn’t fazed at all. But when it came to the stuff I mentioned above, I was completely terrified.
