One of my best friends growing up was, for some unfathomable reason, deathly afraid of sharks. Near Toronto.
If we were swimming in Lake Ontario, you could yell “Shark!” and he’d screeeeaaaam and run for shore. Playing in a creek? Just yell “Shaaark!” and he’d run home. Swimming pool? Oh, yeah. His brother (my other best friend) once got him to leap off the toilet where he was preparing to do serious business.
Looking back as an adult, he said he vaguely remembers seeing a commercial or trailer for Jaws and because it made it look like “the shark came out of nowhere” he felt that they could just materialize in any body of water.
And RunSilent, you weren’t far wrong. Wind is actually caused by trees sneezing.
I was pretty much bullsh!t-proof as a kid; I read a lot. But one time, my grandma, of all people, fished me in.
She arrived at Aunt J’s house announcing that she’d “smuggled in” some kosher salami. (She was old enough to remember Prohibition.) I asked her why she used that term, and she somehow convinced me that it was illegal for people who weren’t Jewish, which we weren’t, to purchase kosher foods. Aunt J backed her up on this, and I spent the rest of the visit terrified that the two of them, plus my mom (who wasn’t in the room, but did have some of the salami) and Aunt C, would go to jail.
My mom set me straight a couple weeks later after she brought home a loaf of Arnold’s Jewish Rye and I freaked.
[QUOTE=Rilchiam] What was it, then? The umbilical cord?
To this day, I have no idea. To be honest, I’m just as confused as you are - I actually thought for several years that I might have just been imagining the picture - that perhaps it was something my four-year old mind just invented and “remembered”. But just recently - as in, the past couple of months or so - I saw a program on television where a woman had a box full of old pregnancy books, and the one she held up looked vaguely familiar… the cover was pinkish, with a creamy colour on it, and looked very 60s or 70s style… and she was flipping through the pages, holding them up to the camera, and I saw that very same picture: baby eating Spam. I freaked out and pointed at it, yelling at my husband, “There it is! Spambaby! Spambaby!”
The lady on television didn’t seem to notice it, as she was riffling through the pages fairly quickly, but I saw it, damnit. My four-year-old self’s memory wouldn’t lie to me!
I really don’t know why it was eating anything, though. Maybe it was not meant to be a literal interpretation?
Now I have to find that picture. I don’t even know the name of the book. I’ll be Googling for my Spambaby all night.
I remember getting some sort of fire training when I was little about how, if you wake up and there’s smoke coming in under the door, check how hot the doorknob is before heading out because the fire could already be outside.
To this day, I heavily dislike sleeping with the bedroom door closed. If it’s closed, the fire is going to creep up and trap me. If it’s open I can still leap out despite the flames.
This phobia doesn’t approach some people’s fear of bees , but it’s still pretty strong.
That’s so funny the “dogs are male, cats are female” thing has been mentioned so many times. I believed the exact same thing.
I also used to be convinced that Indians took over the streets after everybody else went to sleep. I had a recurring nightmare/imagining/whatever it was that there was a pack of Indians, firing guns (?) and hooting and hollering riding horses on the street outside my window. It terrified me, for some reason. The worst was after we moved out of the apartment in which I grew up and got a new house in a different city. We’d been there a couple of weeks with no Indian attacks, and then one night I heard the horses and the hooting and hollering again – they’d followed me!
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I was absolutely certain that sparrows were the young of pigeons. Well, you’d always see them standing around on the pavement together, and I already knew that certain animals’ young looked nothing like their parents (tadpoles/frogs, caterpillars/butterflies) so why not sparrow/pigeon?
What was it, then? The umbilical cord?