Alt. Focus: What thought or idea or story scares the shit out of you? When I was younger I read in a magazine or something about how in some country there were these spiders that would hide in peoples shoes and then attack when people put them on. I have a severe phobia of spiders now and definitely didn't like them when I was younger, so reading that scared the shit out of me. I always remember sticking something in my shoes or looking in them (if I felt brave) to make sure that there were no spiders in my shoes to bite my feet off. These days I can't even stand to be around dead spiders without freaking out and almost crying. But it is definitely not my worst fear. The idea of wasps, yellow jackets, bees, fucking all that shit, literally makes me break down into tears. The spring time is my least favorite season because of this. I found out when I was younger that I am VERY allergic to them, so the thought of being around them and even possibly getting stung makes me cower in the corner and shed a river of tears. When I was in summer gym in 8th grade (we actually did cool shit like canoeing, ice skating, and going to water parks unlike gay ass gym during school), we had just finished our canoe trip and we were all hanging out by the bus. I had gotten stung by a wasp just above my collar bone. I almost died. My shoulders, neck, and throat swelled up so quickly that if the instructor wouldn't have had an epipen in the first aid kit, I definitely would have suffocated. This was how I found out I was deathly allergic, and will forever be my most terrifying moment. I got stung in the finger during cross country in 10th grade and my arm all the way to the shoulder swelled up to about 3x normal size. Luckily though, I was carrying my epipen by then so it didn't progress much further than the swelling and hives. Seriously though, fuck those things. No one needs them.
I have a recurring nightmare where I'm kidnapped by a group of strange men. No matter what I say or do they take me prisoner, bystanders just watch as I'm abducted, none of them dare to try to help me. For some reason or another the badmen are always wearing badges and they always rob me! I become retarded with fear everytime I hear sirens at night.
Shitting myself at work. You laugh. I am dead fucking serious. I keep an extra pair of boxers under the back seat of my car just in case. I work in the family business; have for years, will until the day I die. Quitting is not an option, which is what I'd have to do if I crapped my pants in front of those people. Almost a thousand employees, maybe half of whom know me on a first name basis. I am someone they like to gossip about. It'd be hell. Seeing them again after such an incident would not be possible; they would never let me live it down. This past weekend left my system a bit argumentative today. You know damn well I was scared... shitless.
Not so much Im scared of, but will probably be pretty disappointed in, is the "2012" thing. Now I dont care that the world could blow up, or get sucked into the sun or anything, but the real drag part is that I just spent my whole life in school. I graduate college in April 2012. So that means Ill have 8 months of freedom to do what I want (yes I call work freedom), which sucks. If there was a way to know 100% for sure that the shit would hit the fan in 2012 when I graduated highschool, I would have never went to college, and actually lived a life for awhile.
I cannot sleep uncovered. I have to sleep with something covering me no matter how hot it is because I am afraid that something will grab me while I am sleeping. Somehow a thin sheet of cotton is supposed to protect me.
Heights While I don't turn into a gibbering idiot when I'm working on a ceiling, I don't like it. I've had to work in an empty elevator shaft about twenty stories high but, it was dark, so not too bad. The worst for me is when I'm high enough up in the air that I know a fall won't kill me. It'll just fuck me up really good. Spiders & Cockroaches Fucking yucky nasty things. Drowning I can't imagine something scarier. Anyone who has run out of air while surfing can attest. Fucking scary.
Simians disturb me. I have to look away from the monkey cage when I take the kids to the zoo. They naturally are fascinated with the creepy fuckers. I hate movies with monkeys in them. Apes and gorillas don't concern me so much, it's the little screeching fuckers that throw shit and jerk off constantly. Dolls really bother me as well, like the ones that have eyes that blink.
Balloons: As far back as I can remember inflated balloons have petrified me. Not so much if they are floating around not touching anything. However, as soon as someone grabs it or it starts rubbing against something I cringe and run away like the Zodiac is behind me. In high school my friends found out about this and my birthday was a living hell.
For me, it's rats, even the pet store ones. Those beady eyed little fuckers with those nasty little naked tails are good for nothing but feeding D-Con to or feeding them to snakes. Them and tarantulas kreep me the hell out. Oh and zombies.
I live in a constant state of fear because I am terrified to get sick. And I don't mean in a germaphobe way, I mean get sick by vomiting. If I feel nauseated because I ate too much or I ate something that didn't agree with me, I will go into full-on panic mode. If I actually do purge, I sob before, during and after. I don't know why I'm like this, I don't know where it stems from, but I know it's a common fear so piss off if you think it's funny. When I was a kid, I was paralyzed by fear of our town's fire whistle. Ever since the whistle of doom went off when I was standing right in front of the firehouse (that fucker is loud and sounds like the death rattle of a gaggle of animals) at age 8, I still can't drive by the damn horn without breaking into a cold sweat. I flew home for the holidays and just the act of driving by the firehouse for all of two seconds made me hyperventilate. Okay, so, the fear persisted long after my childhood.
Probably my greatest fear is getting a paper cut in my eye. Just thinking about it makes me squirm. My mom was telling me about how she'd recently gotten a cut in her eye when a tree branch whipped across it and I had to tell her to stop talking about it. Ugh.
Easy. Owls scare the shit out of me. In my earlier years, I came home one night from work and drove up to find one of those birds of Satan perched out on our fencepost, just staring at me with its creepy death eyes. And it had a gun. Well, ok, it didn't, but it kept me petrified in my car for what seemed like an eternity, but was likely a little more than half an hour - until it decided to go find a small animal or child to devour and later cough up. As soon as it took off, I bolted inside, and had nightmares about that thing, attacking and clawing me. Swivel headed weirdos. Fuck owls.
I learnt the hard way about cooking naked. I once used to on a hungover sunday morning get out of bed head straight to the fridge and pull out a mass amount of greasey fryable food. That was until one particular morning using a little too much oil and I managed to burn myself when something that hot should never go. Only thing that really comes close to a phobia is when a flying insect of some kind lands on me. I'm extremely ticklish and it just makes me shiver until i get the thing off me and kill it.
I get wicked paranoid in the dark when I'm alone. Walking to my car, unlocking my door, even walking to the bathroom at night and I expect someone (or thing) to pop out and get me. I blame this partially on Dexter. The worst in at our New Hampshire house, because it's in the middle of the woods and different parts of the house are wicked far and isolated from the main parts. I hate going to the garage or poolroom because I have to go through several long, creepy hallways with poor lighting. The basement sucks too, there's a door in the wall that leads to a crawlspace that probably has some decaying bodies in it that the last owner left for us. I try to keep my knife on me whenever I can, though it won't do much good against the legions of the dead.
Focus: Bees and wasps: Actually fairly normal. Not only am I allergic, but those things are demon spawn and should be destroyed, especially wasps. They're much worse. I think the most horrifying thing I ever saw was a cicada killer wasp. (not so much "saw" as a friend of mine who loved insects captured one in a tupperware container and rattled it around 2 inches from my face *shudder*) Picture a wasp, then double the size <-- horrifying Motherfucking cicadas: I was 4 years old and living in Illinois when a 17-year group hatched. They were fucking everywhere. They fell on your head and arms from trees, you couldn't walk anywhere without stepping on at least 5, and the noise. God that noise was horrific and loud and kept us all awake. I had nightmares for years afterwards, both of the noise and of them dropping on me from everywhere and just covering me. I think when I was 4 I might have been alright with the cicada killer wasp.... at a distance. And for the somewhat ridiculous one: Ticking Clocks ... it's completely irrational and I can't really explain it, but the sound of a ticking clock makes me freaked out and incredibly uncomfortable. I flat out refuse to sleep in a room that has one before removing it in some way. An ex-boyfriend of mine had one and anytime I stayed over I took the evil thing and put that fucker in a stack of clothes so there was no way I could hear it. When not sleeping, it just freaks me out. I will have to distract myself pretty well or it is the only thing I can hear.
I can't be the only one that grew up terrified of about everything just because of the cheesy synths and Robert Stacks voice. I once watched the Gettysburg Ghost episode when I was younger and could not move off of my parents bed where I was watching it for a few hours. I was terrified of being alone in dark house for a while after that thinking I'd walk into a room where ghost where getting their limbs cut off Civil War style. I grew out of it but damned if the dog doesn't start going wild barking at 3 am and there is still is that little tinge of terror.
Not ridiculous at all, I swear I'm a little OCD but I can't stand to sleep in a room with a ticking clock. I'm not afraid of it but I focus on it to the point of distraction that it keeps me awake for hours after i should be asleep.
I was visiting home and went to see my aunt. She worked in a psychiatric facility that was a sprawl of bldgs. Her's looked like a normal house and was at the back of a cul-de-sac. I was getting out of my car when I looked up and saw a black guy in a hospital gown climbing over the brick wall of her bldg. The guy dropped down, stood up, and was at least 6'5". Then he bolted at me. I didn't know what to do and was freaking out. He got to the end of the grass, where he stopped on a dime, whipped his dick out and started pissing on the sidewalk. 2 bored orderlies came out the front, waited for him to finish before taking him inside. Later my aunt told me the guy was harmless. But he did have a penchant for escaping. Last time he got out he made it about 1-2mi off the property. A woman sunbathing in her backyard went in to get a drink only to find the guy sitting cross-legged on top of her fridge, eating out of a jar of mayonnaise with his bare hands.
I was living in Bahrain in 2001, working SatCom on the Navy base. We were working in three shifts, and I was working mid shift at the time, Midnight-eight. I was 19 and an E-3, so I didn't have a car, I rode a bicycle to work. It was about a mile and a half, through a Shiite neighborhood. Lemme tell you, they had a lot of stray animals in the area. Riding along, minding my business, when a large, mangy VERY loud dog starts barking his ass off three feet behind me. It startled me so bad, I screamed like a little girl.
When I was really young, after seeing the Simpson's Treehouse of Horror episode where Bart and Lisa accidentally wake the dead while attempting to bring Snowball I back to life, I had a period of irrational fear of zombies. Not a general "Oh shit zombies are going to come shambling through the windows and doors and I'll be fucked, zombie style." No. I had an extremely specific fear that any time I sat on the toilet to take a dump a zombie might pop out of the pipes and bite my ass, turning me into a zombie. The only way to stop this, I knew because I knew everything obviously, was to make sure I shat as soon after sitting down as possible, so that if a zombie did try to get through it would be trapped under my poop and unable to bite me. After a while this fear died down, but instead of disappearing entirely it evolved into a different fear. This time I thought that the toilet flushing was somehow related to a lion roaring, and if I flushed I had to wash my hands fast as fuck and run the hell out of there. If I was too slow and the toilet finished flushing while I had not yet run away, I would get eaten by a lion. I also had a fear that aliens were trying to poison me. Specifically while I was brushing my teeth. They'd be hiding in space somewhere perfectly angled to shoot some sort of invisible beam through my bathroom window and into whatever water I was putting in my mouth as I brushed my teeth. To combat this I became obsessed with tricking the aliens into thinking I was going to swallow the water then at the last second spitting it out. I tried to make the number of times I just rinsed and didn't swallow as random as possible so that they would waste their beams of poison and I'd survive another day of fearing the toilet to brush my teeth. EDIT: After reading some other posts here I'm going to clarify that by "little" I mean 5 years old.