Your odd childhood fears

Darn, this is the one I was anticipating.

 

It seems really perfect that this...

...was followed by this:

 

Frogs, the big green bird that lived in the bush outside my brother's window (OK, it wasn't big or green, but it scared us), the Exorcist, flying monkeys, big dogs, bulls with horns, dragonflies, dad's closet where he "hid" his gun.

 

The death penalty

I was always asking what states had the death penalty and what type. I didn't want to live in a state with the death penalty because I was sure I'd kill someone. If I had to live somewhere with the death penalty, I wanted to make sure I got the lethal injection and not an electric chair or firing squad.

 

Now THAT's an odd childhood fear!

 

Rubber insects.

And my dad abused this liberally. He would fill our stalkings up with them at Christmas time. On Halloween they were usually worked in somehow, usually popping up when I least expected it, like waking up with fake tarantula staring me in the face. Not so funny when you are four and five years old. My dad would laugh his ass off though. Sick bastard.

I eventually got over my fear of spiders by the time I was seven or eight. And then when I was about 12 I saw the movie Arachniphobia. Can't get me near them now. Doesn't matter the size. and this includes pet stores and the zoo. The worst is at a pet store and they put the Tarantulas and other creepy fucking archnids down one isle with the fish and then you come across them not expecting them. I generally panic and get the hell out of Dodge.

Also didn't help when our shop teacher in high school was telling us all about his times in Australia on a work exchange program back in the day. And apparently over there there are these red spiders that like to hang out in the cool shade, preferably somewhere where its moist. They love outhouses. and they are very poisnous. Apparently a few people every year die from getting bit on the ass by these spiders. It took me another six years to actually use an outhouse again. I would rather dig a hole in the woods than sit in an outhouse.

Oh, and I hate snakes. Nothing to like about them. Thankfully about as big as we have up here are garder snakes.

 

Now THAT'S a creepy Christmas. Gives new meaning to "he sees you when you're sleeping, he knows when you're awake."

 

My one-armed uncle, earthworms....bridges.


I outgrew the first two. I have a phobia of big bridges, the ones with lots of infrastructure and and some problems with heights... we were on lookout mountain two weeks ago and being within 50 feet of lover's leap made the whole world tilt that way. Didn't, quite, get vertigo, but I have.

 

Nazi Zombies [/Crossthread]

 

That's been my fear since I was 8. At the day-care place I used to go to, I remember seeing this black widow the size of a fucking plate walk out of this hole in the wall in the backyard. Freaked me out big-time. To this day, I can't handle spiders of any size or disposition.

My weirdest fear happened when I was 12. I was in a bookstore in our mall reading the New York Times volume of the greatest headlines of the 20th century. You all know the book I'm talking about, the one with the front pages of the Titanic sinking, Pearl Harbor, the JFK assassination, etc.

Well, one of those was of the Leopold and Loeb kidnapping case from 1924. It had a picture of Bobby Franks, the young boy L&L kidnapped and killed. Franks was my age at that time, he had dark, wavy hair like I did and his father owned a pawn shop -- like mine did. So for the better part of the next six months, I lived in fear of being kidnapped and never wanted to go near Chicago.

 

The mole men from Superman.

 

The killer from "Terror Train":



This was one of the first horror movies I ever saw, and the mask the guy wears in the final scene is really creepy. For a while as a kid, I'd see him out of the corner of my eye and come running down the stairs to safety.