I remember in the late 70s that killer bees were going to take over the country and kill us all.
They are in the US now and still spreading, but it does not seem to be the scary crisis that I was lead to believe from those 70s horror films.
I actually knew a woman who was killed that way. She put her car in Park and got out to open her garage door. The next thing, she got impaled between the car and garage door. Perhaps she actually left the car in Drive, but surely she would felt the car creep as she got out.
I haven’t read this whole thread but has no one mentioned swimming right after a meal. We were taught this was dangerous (you’d get cramps and drown), but that apparently was a fiction.
My mother was deathly afraid of bees and I learned this behavior from her. It lasted until the first time I got stung. Since then bees don’t bother me at all.
My mother was a huge proponent of this theory. Even in a public pool with a life guard (and my mother watching too) we weren’t allowed back in the pool after lunch for 30 minutes. It was an eternity.
Nothing. I wasn’t a nervous child and really wasn’t scared of anything irrational. I never thought there were monsters under my bed, wasn’t afraid of the dark. I’m not much afraid of anything now except animals that will kill you (snakes). But I live in northern Illinois and there aren’t many rattlesnakes in my neighborhood.
This is so true. And this is so sad.
I knew a woman who was killed in a similar manner. She left her new Nissan Xterra in Drive and got out at the end of her driveway to get the mail. After she got out the vehicle slowly started to creep forward with the driver’s side door wide open. She then apparently tried to get back into the vehicle to stop it, but by then it had continued forward and brushed up against a tree, forcing the door closed and crushing her to death. 
Ditto. I remember counting down the minutes at the public pool as a kid.
Cramps after eating can be sort-of true. I knew a guy who ate a huge Snickers bar right before a swimming race after being dared to do so. (It was a formal swimming meet between two high school swim teams.) Halfway through the race, he stopped dead in the water and made a beeline for the side (disqualifying himself) and puked up a Snickers bar on the pool deck.
During swim practice once, I got a severe muscle cramp in my lower calf. Fortunately if you’re on a swim team you’re pretty comfortable in the water so I didn’t panic or anything. I just worked it out myself and never even got out of the pool.
That wasn’t a stomach cramp, he was just sick.
Also not a stomach cramp. The idea was that swimming right after eating would lead to stomach cramps. If you ever had one you would realize that it doubles you over, you can barely move, and out in the water you could easily drown. Swimming after eating doesn’t lead to stomach cramps though, don’t know why people ever thought that would happen.
I remember in elementary they spent a lot of time teaching us that if your clothes ever catch fire, don’t run, you should stop, drop, and roll. And that’s probably good advice in the event that that happens, but the fact that they spent so much time teaching it to us led me to believe that people’s clothes bursting into flames was a really common occurrence. Although now that I think about it, maybe it was more common back when more people smoked and modern flame-retardant fabrics hadn’t been invented yet.
The big reason why they drill it into you is that if you are getting burnt by a fire, your instinctive response is to run away from it. This is good if you’re near a burning branch, but if it’s you, your clothes, or something attached to you, then you’re just giving the fire more oxygen to burn you with and a bit of breeze to help it spread farther and faster. Burns are really nasty injuries, and a few seconds can make the difference between ‘ice it’ and ‘skin grafts’; having the phrase drilled into your head is so that you quickly recall it and override your instinct, rather than because it happens routinely.
As a teenager, I set my hand on fire while trying to start a fire with kerosene, and learned why they drill it that way. At first I panicked and jumped back (good), but then with adrenaline rushing all I wanted to do was run, which would just make my hand worse. When ‘stop, drop, and roll’ popped into my head, that’s what I did, and the fire was out quickly. I only ended up with ‘ice it for a few days’ level of burn, but I could have easily gotten something that would require a hospital trip if I had run around until I calmed down.
Well, it obviously had something to do with the exertion of a swim race right after eating, because if he had waited a while, he wouldn’t have gotten sick.
Note that the definition of stomach cramps seems to be fairly broad.
Obviously a leg cramp is not a stomach cramp. I was simply commenting on the one experience I’ve had with a cramp in deep water.
I’ll add that it definitely took me by surprise. I can easily see someone drowning from a cramp.
I think you are drawing a narrow definition of what constitutes a stomach cramp. Per the definition above, it actually seems to be a fairly broad, nonspecific term for various causes of abdominal pain.
I think describing the competitive swimmer who threw up after eating a Snickers bar as having experienced “stomach cramps” due to the exertion of a race right after eating is an accurate enough description.
The difference here is that most recreational swimmers, whether they just ate or not, are just splashing around in a pool. The competitive swimmer I mentioned, on the other hand, was an athlete swimming at near-maximum exertion with a heart rate up around 170 bpm. At that level of exertion, your body starts diverting blood flow from lower priority organs, like the stomach, which could lead to “stomach cramps” and vomiting.
A final point is that a very inexperienced swimmer often exerts a great deal effort to even swim a short distance, like the typical novice dog-paddling to the side of the pool after jumping in. A novice swimmer is thus more likely to experience issues in swimming after eating than your average recreational swimmer or competitive swimmer (unless the competitive swimmer does something stupid like eating right before a race).
This is one of the most terrifying things I’ve ever read in my life.
My abusive father. As a kid, I was terrified of him, to the point of fantasizing about killing him. As an adult, I came to realize that he had an abusive father too, and was in his own way a scared kid.
Ditto this. When I was 16, things were awful…but by the time I got to age 35, I was able to have ten or so really good years, palling about with dear ol’ paw. (There was a quantum jump when I got so big and strong I could pick him up and hold him over my head. Funny how the physical abuse stopped all of a sudden!)
Same with me. When I was about 13-14, I was suddenly bigger than him. One day he shoved me, and I SHOVED HIM BACK. The verbal abuse continued, but he never again laid a hand on me.
Heights. Wait, no, I am still terrified of precipices. Planes, though, not a problem, probably because of the window.
But are you OK with giant hornets?
Wikipedia says they’ve been seen in the Pacific Northwest of North America by now…
Cell phones were going to destroy our brains with microwave radiation.
There were serious scientific studies that measured the radiation levels emitted by cell phones and claiming that brain damage was likely. Especially for children whose skulls are thinner and more vulnerable.
I remember seeinlg plastic earpiece attachments for sale which you could attach to your phone to keep the phone 2 inches away from your head.
The rapture was going to come and I would be left behind.
That’s a lot scarier now because I’m afraid it won’t happen and those insufferable people will never go away.