Lady Elaine Fairchild. The evil puppet from the museum in Mr Rogers Neigborhood. I had nightmares about her all the time. I would be walking down a hall and my ears would start ringing. The next thing I knew, Lady Elaine would pop out of the wall and try to strangle me. So I guess I had 2 fears, because I was terrified every time my ears rang thanks to that puppet.
I was terrified of Diane Downs. She shot her three children, killing one, in 1983 and when she briefly escaped from prison in 1987…she was coming for me. I was convinced.
This was a brief respite from fearing Bigfoot was coming to get me.
The buzzsaws that the neighbors in our neighborhood always used invariably made
me think that a huge dinosaur (Godzilla) was rampaging through the city, just out of
sight, and I had better stay inside the house where I would be safe.
Trunks or large boxes.
I think my mother had told me some sort of cautionary tale about a child who was playing a trunk and the lid shut and latched and the child couldn’t get it open and was left to a horrible fate.
Somehow I missed the point about the child getting in the trunk willingly and thought the moral of the story was that a trunk or large box could suck you in (like a black hole) from all the way across the room. I remember going to visit friends of my parents who had an old steamer trunk that they used for a coffee table, and I was shocked, I tell you, at how irresponsible they were. To have such a dangerous item sitting right there in the middle of the room!
I was even afraid of large boxes, like cardboard boxes. It seems obvious now that even a child could kick her way out of a cardboard box if she really had to, but again, another point lost on me.
And was there possibly a (sadistic) kids’ show that had some kid goofing around with a magician’s trunk? Not Lidsville, because that was a hat, but along those lines.
Oh, I was also afraid of bigfoot coming to get me, which is irrational because we didn’t live in the Pacific Northwest, and Lady Elaine, which I hardly think counts as a phobia because CLEARLY that puppet is evil and any rational person would avoid it at all costs.
My brother was afraid of squirrels. My mom had explained to us that if a squirrel let us get too close, it might be sick and we shouldn’t try to pet it or play with this; he translated this to mean ‘you must chase away all the squirrels or they will bite you and kill you.’ As we lived in the suburbs, this meant a year or so of him spending a lot of time running and yelling towards any squirrel that got within 30 feet or so.
The Mistletoe Bough is an old folk song on this theme–a bride playing hide-and-seek with the groom getting locked in a chest and not being found for years. P.C. Hodgell’s Sherlock Holmes story “A Ballad of the White Plague” was partly inspired by it. Even Sluggy Freelance has done a riff (if you’ll pardon the expression) on it.
The story seems like it’d be pretty good nightmare fodder if you’re a bit claustrophobic.
This wasn’t me, but my sister used to be terrified of the black painted lines on the bottom of swimming pools.
And another pool related phobia, this time mine, I never used to like the decline on the floor of a pool where it went from around 4 feet to 12 feet deep. I had no problem with the deep water itself, I was always on the diving board and had no problem swimming, it was just that one angled area I didn’t like. I think because it felt like you could slide down it and what if you slid all the way to the bottom and got stuck to the floor! :eek:
#1: my mother had a print hung over my bed, called “The Locket” of a sad-looking little blonde girl wearing, of course, a locket necklace. I was utterly convinced that the little girl was trapped in the painting, perhaps because of the locket (I think I thought a “locket” was a locking device of some kind.) The little girl was looking straight ahead, so no matter where in the room I was, she seemed to be looking right at me, as though imploring me to release her. I’m pretty sure that when this first occured to me, I was aware that it was a fanciful idea, but as time went on, I became more and more wigged out by it.
#2: my grandfather had an ape mask, very similar to the one I have since seen in a famous clip of Ernie Kovacs. I was not at all afraid of my grandfather on Halloween when he was wearing the mask, but I later discovered the mask folded on a windowsill in my grandmother’s basement laundry room and freaked right the f*ck out. I KNEW it was a mask, I knew my grandfather’s face was just fine and in the kitchen with the rest of him, but seeing that face folded up gave me the worst case of the willywams ever. I hated going into the basement after that, even years later (and yes, the mask stayed there on the windowsill for probably five years, 'tl my grandparents moved.)
When I was about 8 or 9, I went through a short phase where I was afraid to sleep for fear that I would die sometime during the night. It might have been because I was really, viscerally, getting what death was and that it was universal, or it might have been because of that stupid kids’ prayer: “. . . If I should die before I wake/ I pray the Lord my soul to take.”
I had one episode where I freaked out about getting a tetanus shot that I needed because I sliced my finger pretty badly. The finger didn’t bother me, but the shot did. I still have no idea what the hell that was about since I’ve never really been bothered by injections since, and even when I was younger didn’t mind them that much.
Reading about all these weird ideas kids get in their heads really makes me wonder what my kids have worried about! Most of our parents probably thought they were raising nice normal children. 
I have one recently-started phobic reaction in the condo I purchased 4 years ago. In the master bedroom it has a row of sun windows on the top of the arched ceiling that are in total about 20 feet by 2 1/2 feet.
When I am in my bed facing the sun windows in the daytime and a bird crosses them “vertically” from my perspective, I see little enough of it that it looks like a bomb coming down to hit me! I still can’t shake the initial reaction whenever I see it.
Does anyone else remember a cartoon panel in a series on gruesome childhood games? One kid is opening an old refrigerator (the kind that doesn’t open from inside) and you see a child-size skeleton inside pushing on the door. That image stuck with me for awhile! Googling Image “cartoon skeleton refrigerator” was a little creepy. 
It wasn’t Edward Gorey I don’t think, but it was the kind of macabre thing he would do.
I don’t recall any major phobias - I was a relatively impassive little kid. My brother was scared shitless of ceiling fans, though, I think due to an actual unfortunate incident involving one.
I, too, was rather nervous of toilets. Actually using them wasn’t a problem, but I remember that in this house we lived in for a year in the Eastern Townships, the bathroom was so positioned that the toilet was the first thing you saw when you came up the stairs, and that always creeped me out. It didn’t help that my dad had a home repair book I would sometimes read, and the page on toilets said, “Don’t let a toilet scare you!”
However, I think the big fear – and I have trouble even calling it a fear, it’s so very physical in nature – was the fear of damaging my glasses. I hated playing baseball or any kind of game with hard objects moving at high speeds toward my face for exactly this reason. I also have, like, no depth perception so I thought I wouldn’t be able to get out of the way in time. I also had a creepy feeling about looking over bridge ramparts, the gunwales of boats and the like – not of the heights so much as out of the fear my glasses would just slide off my face.
Trust me, that’s one idea my parents never had about me, starting from at least the time I got into my mom’s medical books, then asked her, “Mom, was I a footling breech?”
You’re not thinking of “Timothy Pilgrim” are you? He hid in an antique trunk to get away from a bully (who was extorting him for “five bucks!”). It turns out that the trunk, belonging to (magician?) Zachariah Gibson, is actually a time portal. Zachariah Gibson lives 100 years in our past and had no idea that the trunk was magical until Timothy popped out. The show was a TV Ontario program back in the early 70s.
So yeah, lots of people going in and out of the trunk.
When I was very young I was afraid to look at the ceiling in our Volkswagen bug. The ceiling had a series of small indentations or holes, which I simply called dots. They were arranged in a diagonal pattern. When I stared at them my vision would go out of focus and make the dots look like they were swimming or moving. This visual perception freaked me out and I could never look at the ceiling again. My parents didn’t realize it at the time, but in retrospect thought that it might have been an early indicator of vision/focusing problems (I got my first glasses at age 6).
I haven’t thought about thi in I don’t know how many years, but I had read a book that took place in the Elizabethan era, and it mentioned that when someone died mysteriously, it was often attributed to poison, and believed to have been administered by means of a little potion in the perfume used to scent gloves, that kind of thing.
I went through a phase of worrying that everything I touched might be poisoned, and was pretty obsessive about hand-washing along with it. I even remember walking with my arms out slightly more than usual for fear of touching certain clothes (how I determined which items were likely to have been poisoned is lost to the ages now).
this might not be considered entirely unusual of a fear for a child to have but the response I had to the topic at the time was EXTREME.
Aliens/U.F.O.s.
I think it might’ve come from a book on U.F.O.s I skimmed through when I was younger (maybe around 5? 6?).
If Unsolved Mysteries was on and the topic of alien abductions came up… Oh dear God… PARALYZING FEAR. Couldn’t move. Would cover head with whatever I could and just go blank.
I don’t think this absolute shock type fear went away until I was at least 10.
Earthquakes. Not an irrational fear for many, but I lived in NE Ohio. I looked at an earthquake map and saw one dot on Ohio. That was enough to convince me that I was not at all safe.
Insanity. I saw a show about children with all manner of psychoses when I was 10, and spent the next year or two terrified that I was going to completely lose it.
Wow, I bet that’s it. Right time frame, and I grew up in Buffalo NY and we got a lot of Canadian TV.
Ever since I was a little kid, I have been terrified of mold. I still have vivid memories of things I saw that were moldy when I was a kid–memories that torment me to this day. I started the habit of refusing to eat leftovers when I was a small child, on this basis alone. I didn’t understand how people could see it and not fear it. I didn’t understand how people could look at it without puking. When I was in high school I read “The Cask of Amontillado” by Edgar Allen Poe and it only served to intensify my fear–because it really COULD kill me given the right circumstances!
Unfortunately, this phobia has not gone away. I am incapable of looking at anything in the fridge if it is more than three days old. If something’s been in the fridge a week, I can’t even check to see how it is… I just throw it away without looking at it, usually still in the container. If god forbid I actually SEE SOMETHING MOLDY then for the rest of the day I’ll have little traumatic flashbacks and waves of nausea. I can’t even handle joking references to mold or the mention of mold without losing my appetite. Right now I’m feeling nauseated just for having written this. My outright terror is completely irrational… from a biological perspective, mold is interesting… but when I see it I feel like it has malevolent feelings of ill will, like evil has entered the room and it wants to get me. I acknowledge the ridiculousness of this…
Or maybe not so ridiculous? I am, after all, allergic to penicillin and mildew and anything remotely mold-related. puts on Freudian slippers Very early in life I got a very serious illness called scarlet fever, and I had to spend the night in the hospital while they pumped me with penicillin and observed me in hopes that I didn’t die (FWIW, I didn’t end up dying.) Maybe my subconscious secretly knows that mold can kill me. takes off Freudian slippers
Or more likely, I intuitively understand that it’s really flippin’ gross.