I have not admitted this one to many, but when I was a child, probably between the ages of 3 and 6 I had an actual phobia of adhesives. Specifically tape, but glue and tar as well. I am not sure how it started but seeing a roll of tape was enough for me to start hyperventilating and freak out. By just looking at it I felt it cutting off my oxygen, getting stuck to my nose and mouth, etc…somehow… Same with buckets of roofing tar or spilled glue (glue in containers wasn’t that bad). I have no idea how it started and I don’t remember how it went away. I don’t even have a trace and can easily put a piece of duct-tape over my own mouth (and that’s not something I usually do but I was curious about the phobia). Does this one even have a name?
So what weird phobias (big fears as well) did you have as a child that passed?
I don’t know if this counts as passed but…when I was little and my parents first tried to explain to me about “bad strangers”, my wee imaginative brain translated their cautions into the fear that “bad men” would come into my room while I slept and drip poison into my mouth. Out of a syringe. This started when I was under five. I resolved to sleep with my mouth closed.
I now read way too many true crime novels, check locks and stove burners obsessively, and still sleep with my mouth closed. Oh, and I work with syringes.
One time when I was maybe 5 or 6, an object spontaneously fell off a table in bedroom while I was trying to sleep, and I was sure it was ghost. Then I had a very realistic dream where I kicked a ghost’s ass: He was a “redcoat”, spoke with a British accent, and the only way I could punch him was if he was against the wall.
Monsters… well they lived in the closet, under the bed, outside the window, etc… But they couldn’t touch covers. I can thank Bill Cosby for that bit of wisdom, which helped me sleep at night.
I went through a vampire stage where I had to wear a cross at all times even to bed in case a vampire came after me. This one went on the longest.
I had to sleep with my covers over my ears thanks to the earwig episode of The Twilight Zone and a nun telling us a story about a kid that had a cockroach in his ear.
I had to jump into my bed from about a foot or so away so the monsters under the bed couldn’t grab my feet.
I was absolutely terrified of ventriloquist dummies, again thanks to The Twilight Zone (or a similar show), and the fact that my brother and I shared a room for a while and he had a Jerry Mahoney doll that sat in a chair on the other side of the room. I swear that thing would watch me at night.
For me it was crabs. When I was just learning to read, I had a picture book of the alphabet, with each letter standing for something that the author must have imagined would be appealing to small children.
Well, “C” was for “crab,” and the accompanying illustration of the most hideous, terrifying monster I had ever seen traumatized me. Whenever we were going anywhere, I needed reassurance from my parents that there would be no crabs there.
Not so much as a phobia but a compulsion that I had to cross cracks in the sidewalk such that each foot went over the same number of cracks first. No recollection if I thought something bad would happen if I didn’t work it out but it was Very Very Important.
Had nothing to do with “step on a crack, break your mother’s back.”
Mr. Creosote. I’ve been emetophobic all my life, but when I was a child, I lived in fear that I’d wake up to see Mr. Creosote standing over my bed. The funny part was, I’d never even seen The Meaning of Life, but I heard my mother and uncle talking and laughing about it one day. That was enough. I feared him for years after that.
I used to be afraid of my grandfather’s picture as a very little kid. It was just a regular portrait, but since 1. It was in black and white, and 2. I’d never met him (he died when my mother was a baby), I was sure he’d come out of the picture and “get” me. I flat out refused to be alone in the room where the picture was hanging. He was, by all accounts, a loving husband and father, so there was no rational reason to be afraid of him. Not that it would have been logical to be afraid of him if he was a jerk, since he was long dead.
I was also afraid to sleep uncovered. You had to be under a sheet or blanket to be protected from the ghosts/monsters. This seems to be a common little kid fear.
My mother was really big on teaching my siblings and I to swim (since swimming was and still is one of her favorite pastimes - we were at the beach everyday in the summer when we were all off school). Swimming lessons were given at the middle school’s indoor pool and I was terrified of swimming pool drains. I thought I’d get sucked down - I was sure of it.
I’m not sure if this is a weird phobia or a normal one, but even to this day I don’t like drains that much. Toilets don’t bother me and never have.
– Swimming in the outdoor pool if a cloud passed over the sun. For some reason, my irrational, childish mind though that was when the sharks would come out. I always scurried to the deck whenever it happened.
– A doll my sister had. It was one of those rubber dolls which is supposed to look like an infant, with a giant, hairless head and huge, staring eyes. That doll scared the shit out of me for some reason and I can remember refusing to sleep in the same room with it.
– Clowns. (Of course. And I had it long before Stephen King’s It.) I never completely outgrew that one. Actually, it’s more than just clown phobia-- it also includes those giant animal costumes. I still shy away if I see a guy in a panda suit coming toward me at an amusement park or somesuch. I think it’s the exaggerated, aggressively jovial movements they make.
– The “well”. When I was a kid, we got our drinking water from a well. I was always warned to stay away from the wooden cover built over it. They must have stressed this warning too much because I made exaggerated efforts to avoid it. I had never seen inside the well and I pictured this huge, gaping hole like the old-fashioned stone wells you see in movies. If I got too close (and my childish mind deemed a dozen yards to be “too close”), the ground around it would cave in and I would fall down into its icy black depths, never to be heard of again.
That phobia died a swift death when I finally saw it with the cover taken off. It was actually a five-foot-deep cement lined pit with a pump in the bottom.
Whether it was a full-blown phobia or just an unusual sense of dread, I was afraid of being bombed by propeller aircraft that would fly over where we lived. The rather loud sound they made as they passed over reminded me too much of the similar sounds in war movies. We lived fairly close to a couple of air bases, so there was a frequent flyover. If I was trying to doze off and a plane came over close to the ground – close enough for its engine to sound really loud – I would even count the seconds I figured it would take for a bomb to hit nearby.
This was before the “duck and cover” phenomenon and I imagined all this for myself without parental cautions. Just fear.
Akin to this fear is the one of being struck by lightning, and I still count the seconds between lightning flashes and thunder to tell how close the storm is. The closest I’ve come thus far is the almost instantaneous flash/clap when lightning hit a tree in the back yard a couple of summers ago. Fried a modem it was so close.
Walking into dark rooms. I had no problem sleeping in one, or waking up in one, but I would flatly refuse to walk into my room until my parents had turned the light on, and it was part of the nightly ritual that they would walk into my room first, show me that there was nothing waiting to eat me, wait until I got into bed, and then turn out the light.
After seeing Poltergeist as a preschooler, I became terrified that my stuffed clown, which I’d had since birth, was going to come to life and kill me. I used tie Jack up with shoelaces and put him in the closet at night. But I dreamed all the time that he’d get loose and come after me.
This fear went away when my brother was born about a year and a half later. I think I figured Jack would eat him instead, since he was smaller.
The inside of toilet tanks. Revolving doors. The feeling of flour. That our house would burn down–I kept my books in paper bags by my window so I could save them, and I kept $2 for the bread we would need to buy after the fire. That a burglar would carry a ladder through the neighborhood and put it up to my window and come in and stab me.
