I have an unnatural fear of tape being put over someone’s mouth. I really have a hard time watching such scenes in movies or on TV. That recent pit thread about someone taping babies’ mouths shut gave me the creeps all day.
I think it started when I was a kid, and a group of prisoners came to my high school to give us their “Don’t make the same mistakes we did” speeches. One lady was in jail for murder because she and some friends broke into an old man’s house, tied him up and taped his mouth closed while they robbed him. It turned out the old man had a “medical condition” that prevented him from breathing through his nose, and he suffocated.
It later occurred to me that the “medical condition” could have been a simple stuffy nose, and since then the idea of suffocating because you can’t breath through your nose has freaked me out.
Dead things–ie. roadkill, trapped mice. Global apocalypse. Global warming (same thing). Closed spaces. Elevators. Flying. Something horrible happening to my family. Heights…
Wow, three pages in, and no one has mentioned Clowns?
They scare me more than any self respecting 40 year old should be scared.
I actually had to change rooms at Circus Circus in Vegas one night, due to the overwhelming clown motif in the room. When I went down to the front desk and explained, the gentleman just smiled and said “No problem, we get that all the time. This room I’m giving you is just circus animals and acrobats.”
I was also trapped in a bathroom at a restaruant because four rodeo clowns came in while I was in the bathroom, and were between me and my table.
Being tortured and then killed. Raped, beaten, whatever.
Being trapped anywhere with no hope of escape. Doesn’t necessarily have to be a small place. It could be a building with no food or water in it that I couldn’t get out of. Or a desert, or an open boat on the ocean. I know that I would insane long before starvation/dehydration over took me. Heck, they might accelerate the mental breakdown. Oh, and always the thought in the back of my mind that help might come…and the longer it didn’t, the worse it would get.
German Shepherds. (Alsatians, for you Euros.) Not all dogs, just German Shepherds.
Utility rooms. Or whatever you call the room at or below ground level with all the works for the heating, plumbing and so forth. I think it’s partly the physical danger, and partly knowing that you’re in the heart of the building. Or is it the brain? The sounds you’re likely to hear in there don’t help, either. I don’t have a problem in basements, unless I hear thrumming. Then you won’t see me for dust.
That’s odd - I’ve heard that a lot of people like rythmic thrumming. The whole ‘return to the womb’ thinking. I know I liked the sound, without ever thinking about that, at the time. And the best place I’d ever heard that was in a void aboard ship, with limited access, and no emergency egress.
Depends on the context, I suppose. If I was on board ship, trying to sleep in a bunk, the rhythmic thrumming probably would lull me to sleep. But in a room where everything was at least twice my height, and some of it had gazillions of volts of electricity running through it, and some had fatal amounts of steam just barely contained, and then you add the sounds, I would feel like Jonah in the belly of the whale. And that story freaks me out too. (I also could never read that chapter of Pinocchio.)
ETA: And then there’s the additional fear that the lights will go out and I won’t know the way out, and Og knows what might happen if I tried to find my way out. There was that college kid who fell on a transformer in a mini-utility room in his dorm. Last year, I think it was, or early this year. You just don’t eff around with electricity.
Being tortured without knowing the reason why…heck, just being tortured period.
Snakes and clowns. Nuff said.
And Zombies–just because the thought that something as simple as a bite or saliva in a wound could turn me into a zombie myself. Zombie nightmares have freaking kept me up many a night.