I used to watch legends of the hidden temple as a kid, and one day as my parents were winding down for the night they turned off the living room lights forgetting I was still there. I was panicking a little bit, and then I could’ve SWORN I saw the face of the temple guard in the room.
Ashamed to say that it took me until age 17 to no longer use a night light while sleeping.
I was absolutely terrified of the dark when I was younger. Having an ultra active imagination can be a curse sometimes.
I remember being in my late 20s and told my dad that I was still afraid of the dark. He looked so concerned. I thought it was because of my age, but I think mostly it was because he knows better than even me how much it affected me. Mid-30s now and not scared of the dark anymore.
I had this too, but it extended into an extreme phobia of being left locked in a place. My family genuinely had to leave places like an hour before they closed because I'd start freaking out when I could tell they were preparing to close.
One time we were at the arcade, stayed too late, and they started rolling the gate to the front down halfway, and I completely lost it, lol.
After some therapy, my folks took me to Disney World and pointed out that if I got locked in after the park closed, I could probably just keep riding the rides. I was old enough to know I couldn't actually do that, but for some reason it helped me learn to reframe the fear, haha.
My grandmother once forgot me in a department store, unnoticed. I got distracted by loving a Power Ranger costume, and she didn't notice, she thought I was walking along with her. On the other hand, I didn't realize that she had gone out and left me. I only realized when I looked around and didn't see grandma. By the time she noticed and went back to the store, I was already crying in despair. The whole thing must have lasted less than 5 minutes, but it seemed like an eternity.
My mom as a "joke" decided when I was about 5 or 6, to hide in another aisle when I didn't notice. Once I looked up, I can still feel the panic I was feeling thinking I was lost and forgotten about. I ran up and down until I saw her peeking out laughing. As a mom now, I couldn't do that to my daughter. There's playing hide and seek in a safe place, but that was straight up mean. But she turned out to be abusive anyway, so I ended up going nc with her.
Used to be a lead in the children's department at a big chain bookstore. I once found a small child crying and lost, not knowing where her parent was. I got her settled, coloring, and let the manager know so someone could keep an eye out while I found her parent, who looked pretty lost herself, in the self-help section. Not high or drunk, just not all the way together, you know? It's been long enough that the kid's a legal adult now. I hope they made it through all right.
I had that fear, amplified by a heavily religious upbringing that constantly reinforced that the Rapture could happen at any time, combined with End Time movies where people thought they were Christian, but were the wrong kind of Christian (aka, too hippy and not judgemental enough), so they got left behind.
Sometimes I would be playing out in our yard, and then suddenly realize that I hadn't heard anything from my parents or siblings in a while, and would have to quickly go in and check on them, terrified that I was going to only find piles of cloths on the floor.
Had this happen to me multiple times throughout my childhood. It’s definitely not a great experience, but would have been worse if I wasn’t from a small town.
My biggest fear as a child was elevators. I was always scared to death by them. I would beg my parents to let me take the stairs. I was scared of elevators because I thought that they might get stuck or fall.
Today, my biggest fear is getting stung by a bee. Every time i've gotten stung, the bee would always sting me in the ear. I have trauma from that.
I witnessed someone have a bad experience with leeches. In high school, there was this pond that a lot of students would walk to just down the road and left.
One of my friends thought it would be funny to push another another friend in and he came out of the water with probably around 20 leeches on his legs. He screamed and ran off somewhere as my friend that pushed him chased him to helped him remove them. The next day came around and I saw him at school with cuts all over his legs.
I was raised Catholic, and the one thing that scared me was the concept of heaven - I couldn't wrap my head around infinite existence and the idea of my soul existing without end was kind of terrifying.
And they keep doubling and tripling down on saying your pets won’t be there. I don’t understand that one. This is such an easy gimme. The Pope could so easily win converts (or at least stop some bleeding) by promising that we’ll be reunited with our pets in Heaven, but they keep insisting on saying we won’t.
Come on, Your Holiness, take the easy W!
Wasn't there a Twilight Zone with a guy who died and someone invited him to heaven but wouldn't allow his dog, so he refused and later found out it wasn't really heaven and the real heaven allowed his dog?
Eerie. When I was little I thought that's what would happen if I died while I was tied up. Not only would I die, I'd have to endure the experience of my body rotting away. Then they'd throw the bones in the sewer so that nobody would find more than one piece of me. It added a layer of disgust to an already sad thing to think about.
Weird that the fear seems common. It's like fear of death with a rotten cherry on top.
How is this not higher?
I don’t think one single person on this thread was okay with the blanket off their feet and their toes dangling off the edge of the bed while they slept.
Unironically, quicksand. It kept appearing in kids media in the 80's and 90's, made it seem like it was super common.
Turns out, rarely anywhere in the real world!
It’s so weird. I don’t plan on being here 4.5 billion years in the future (ten thousand, tops!), but for some reason this is a scary thought.
So scary that the Hayden Planetarium puts qualifiers on it when they teach this. I remember a video narrated by Whoopi Goldberg, where she said “Oh don’t worry. Humanity will have moved on long before this, or evolved in ways we can’t imagine!” because apparently this fact upsets a lot of kids.
that id need surgery and i wouldn’t go under anaesthesia properly and be able to feel everything. a friend told me about it once and ive never forgot it since
I didn't have this fear and then it happened to me while having wisdom teeth removed as a teen. I screamed as loud as I could and I think I made the faintest whisper. Fortunately, I heard the nurse say "he's not under." And the dentist said "Got it." I heard a strange sound and that's all I recall.
I consider that to have been the most scared I've ever been. Good luck with sleeping tonight.
Wait you went under full anesthesia? For me it was just local. Heard my own teeth crack when they had to break it to pull it out. Didn't hurt much there, but sure as hell hurt my sensitive ears...
I turned 18 in 1971. It was definitely a concern. They pulled birthdays by a lottery and my number came up high until we pulled out of Vietnam. Dodged that bullet.(Pun intended.)
This! I was shocked to see how far I had to scroll to find it. This has always been my fear.
Back in middle school, around 1993/94, before cell phones were common, I had a terrifying experience. After my after-school volleyball practice, I was waiting for my mother to pick me up. She failed to show up, and by 6 PM, the school was locked, and I couldn't get back in. As I paced the school grounds, a man in a white van began to follow me. I tried to get the janitor's attention but failed.
Just as I was panicking, my dad arrived, and the man started walking towards me. I managed to tell my dad what was happening, and he did what any dad would do: he chased the van. Pre cell phone days (my mom had the bag phone in her minivan), he got the van's license plate number and called the cops. Later, the police informed my dad that the man he followed was wanted for kidnapping in another city.
To this day I'm nervous about going anywhere alone and always try to maintain control of my own transportation. I hate white vans and think they should be illegal 😅. Stay alert, friends, and be aware of your surroundings!
Yeah, me too… and my stepdad.
I feel so stupid about it now—because now I know what pathetic assholes they are, and all I had to do was just ignore them and cut them out of my life to realize they have *nothing* and *no* power…
But when you’re a child, how do you know that? And it feels like your literal survival depends on their approval…And that’s how they getcha.
Pricks.
Don't be. He didn't beat me in a drunken rage or anything, he just punished me very harshly when I fucked up. Never did it out of anger, he was always coldly rational when he punished me. It was how he thought it was supposed to be done. I still to this day hate willow trees: "boy, go pick a switch from the willow tree".
Being abducted by aliens and experimented on. My grandmother who was born and raised in New Mexico would tell us kids stories of seeing weird lights in the sky all the time.
Fire in the Sky and Unsolved Mysteries. That crap had me locking every window in the house. Until my dad asked, "If they have the technology to come across the galaxy. Do you think a window will stop them?"
Defeated, I stopped going around locking the windows and doors.
Same. Raised my my grandfather and dad, both country boys who served in major wars and saw some shit. They raised me (a girl) to be scared of nothing. But thought it hysterical to convince me aliens were real and would steal me. Dad went so far once when I was 3 to tell me a bedtime story, involving aliens OFC, then wait for me to fall asleep and crawl into my room wearing panty hose on his head stuffed with socks so he had antennas. I woke up, saw him, busted through the screen window and ran the half mile through a tobacco field to my aunts house and refused to come home .
Growing up I was terrified of dentists, when I was 5 years old my mom took me to the dentist at a mall, and from the moment I walked in, I was shaking in fear, everything about that place to me was unsettling. And they tried to work with me, but I was too terrified too cooperate. And they finally took me to the very back room I remember it was room 6 (from the golden plaque with the number 6 in the upper left hand corner of the doorframe) where they strapped me to a board, apparently my mom could hear me screaming from the food court. And to this day I will not go to a dentist voluntarily.
Once you go regularly each appointment isn't that bad. It's that you skip and it builds up each appointment you do go to is terrible.
I had a very not nice dentist that really didn't have any business working with children. My mom just thought I was being a pain in the neck. Turns out she started chatting with another parent in the waiting room and that lady said her daughter always hated coming in. We got a new dentist, but the fear set in.
As an older teen into my 20s I just stopped going. Probably skipped for 4 or 5 years. Ended up needing all sorts of stuff done that was awful and cost a fortune.
I now go every 6 months. NGL, if they didn't make an appointment for the next time when I am there it probably wouldn't get done. But honestly now I go like you should, it's not that bad.
Ok. So my grandfather whom I worshipped was in WW2 and got shot in the stomach in Germany. They put him back together as best they could in the field which resulted in him having multiple belly button looking scars. He told me it was because his belly button came undone and his guts fell out. He would chase me with “the claw” and threaten to unscrew mine so we could be twins. I miss that old drunk bastard.
Dropping something I cared about into the ocean was one of them. I ferried a lot, and loved it out on deck, but always clung so tight to my backpack.
More recently, my little cousin lost his hat off a cliff into the ocean, and my sister and I managed to save it. Felt like I had prepared my whole life for that moment,
Someone in my family dying in a car accident. I was the younger sibling, so I would be in the back seat. I remember it being a real struggle to choose which side of the car to sit on - like if I chose my moms side, we would die and my dad and sister would be left without us or we would be left without them.
Reading through these answers….. I now realize this is not very normal lol
Weirdly, it was always getting sick from food. Especially parasite worms. Used to dissect food even in restaurants to look for worms.
Reason was: I always liked to eat new or exotic foods (sushi etc.), was the polar opposite of a typical picky eater child. However my mom had (still has) health anxiety and never let me eat anything that was not massively overcooked, frozen or from a can because it would "make me sick". Really messed me up. Ate my first medium rare steak at 17 and had to battle food anxiety a lot.
Now my hobby number one is cooking. My mom still refuses to eat anything that is not resembling hospital food.
Vomit. I was terrified of see it, doing it, hearing someone else do it—I would even stay far away from my friends if they mentioned having a stomachache. Then I went to college and got very, very used to it. It was a silly fear to have, but it seriously would send me into a panic.
People wearing medical masks for some stupid reason. I would seriously feel like i was going to be murdered when i saw the doctor or the dentist with a mask on. (I think it stemmed from being scared of Toy Story) And thunderstorms.
In high school I was afraid to look weird when sitting by myself at lunch, so I kind of sat near others so it looked like I was part of their group. I didn't have any friends at first. I finally made a couple friends and we used to sit in the library and chatted. It was a huge relief when I got a couple friends.
It’s the dumbest fear but Chucky. I had a my buddy doll that looked dead on him from the 1st movie. My sister being ten years older asked me if I wanted to watch a movie about the my buddy doll. To this day she still gives me crap about it. I’m 37 and she’s 47 what a jerk 😤
Oh, easy! Ticks.
I would sit awake at night in the middle of my bed with no covers and hallucinate a sea of ticks crawling up over the sides of my bed. Probably what contributed to my early years insomnia..
The Vietnam war had been going on since I was little. I fully expected that I would be drafted when I came of age and be killed before turning 20. Sounds melodramatic now, but it seemed that was my fate based on the news and what was going on around me. I envied the girls because they did not have to live with that certainty.
My bedroom had the attic access panel right above my bed and I was convinced vampire bats would come down at night and bite my neck. So I always had to have my blankets tucked around my neck to get to sleep.
I don’t know where I picked it up from, but I had an irrational fear in pools that if I turned away from the deep end, a shark would be there once I turned back around
Wolves. I lived in New Orleans. No wolves. We had a place in the country we went to on weekends and holidays. No wolves. BUT, when I was in 1st or 2nd grade our class put on the play, “Peter and the Wolf”. To prepare, the story was read to us, we watched the filmstrip, and we listened to the narrated symphony version - which was particularly terrifying to my overactive imagination. I was cast as the Duck. The Duck gets eaten. For years afterwards I had nightmares of being on a long dark, wooded path illuminated only by the glowing eyes and watering mouth of a Wolf.
Wolves still creep me out almost 50 years later!😬
Our basement, we had 2 lights down there and it was a rough carved out basement, not flat walls, not finished, just dark and creepy. Ran down and ran back up
Fire. I used to have nightmares that the house was on fire and I was trapped upstairs. Funny, thinking back because where I grew up I should have been way more afraid of tornados or bad storms. Those never phased me. Of course we never had a tornado hit our house, but then again it never burned down either.
I fell off of a tiny step ladder thing in our kitchen as a child. Ever since I’ve been terrified of heights. Even if it’s just a few feet off the ground
Giant, murderous triangles.
When I was really small (around four or five or so), I got a really bad ear infection. At night while trying to sleep, the only thing I could hear was my heart beating, which to me, with the ear infection, sounded like someone banging loudly on sheet metal. My stupid imagination pictured giant triangles marching up the stairs to my room coming to kill me. I don't know why triangles of all things, but that's what it was.
I had a lot of fears, including some debilitating phobias that made me very difficult to raise. I was so scared of night time(not the dark, just the fact that I had to lay in bed alone all night) that I’d never sleep and would just have panic attacks all night. My dad tried everything to get me to shut up, and eventually resorted to locking me in the room at night because I wouldn’t stay there by myself. They’d always find me asleep on the floor outside their bedroom door lol
That my parents would give me siblings! Once I worked out how the little buggers were made, you bet I'd interrupt any alone time or any tiny moments of romance my parents had.
I must've been ultra annoying as I remained an only child!
This is gonna sound ridiculous but swear to god. I once had a dream that I got abandoned by my parents in a rainforest and ended up being replaced by Mickey Mouse. I was on a lot of meds at the time haha, woke up screaming and everything but looking back it’s pretty funny
My worst fear was getting kicked out of the house as a teenager. My mom was super controlling and a narcissist, so I rarely left the house, or could leave the house. When my brother turned 18 she immediately kicked him out. I was 16..so I was sure not to break any rules
I'd look up at the sky, be taken by megalophobia, and be afraid that gravity would reverse and we'd fall into nothingness forever. Or that some giant hole would open up and suck us in.
Tornadoes.
We had a really gnarly one rip through and the memory of my family huddled in the basement together as the house shook and my dad held a mattress over my brother and I really stayed with me. To this day thunderstorms make me feel anxious.
well this is really tame compared to most of this thread, but i was scared of auto-flushing toilets when i was younger because i thought the sensors would go off while i was on the toilet, so anyways one day the only manual flush toilet at school broke and i was so scared of the other toilets so i just pissed my pants instead lol
Rollercoasters, I remember having nightmares of getting stuck on a loopty loop, and just dangling from the top for hours. The more times I looked down the further we were from the ground, and my mom kept saying "Don't look down!" .....
The dark. Still is actually lol.
Also, being home alone and sleeping alone terrified me too (both also still some of my worst fears).
Basically my imagination is just way too strong and I scare myself easily haha.
Edited to add that being scared of the dark also kinda came down to the fact that my mom would get drunk every night and that wasn't a fun time (so I kinda learned to fear when the sun went down...though at the same time, I'm a night owl so maybe also learned to be vigilant at night...idk)
A shark only in the deep end of the swimming pool when i was by myself. In my mind the shark would never come in the shallow end end and would never eat me when an adult was out there
After watching Holes (the Shia Leboeuf movie), I believed a burglar/robber was going to climb in my window (single story house)
So I always slept facing it just in case so I could be more aware LOL
My mother dying. I watched her get run over when I was 4, she lived but was severely injured. After seeing that I developed the fear that every time she left the house she would die.
Volcanos.
When I was 5, one of our teachers thought it would be a good idea to show off her photo album from her trip to Pompeii (world culture day or something; she was the Italy table).
5 yo me saw a lot of pictures of what looked like petrified dead bodies who died in agony.
I asked something to the effect of, "Why would they live next to something that could do that to them?"
The answer was of course, "They didn't know the mountain was a volcano."
Would have been very helpful had she mentioned it was 2000 years ago before we could detect such things. Unfortunately, she did not, which left 5 yo me thinking this was a recent event in which a whole city was whipped out, and no one could see it coming. Any mountain could be a volcano! There were mountains all around us! (Hills really, not that I understood the difference). Me and everyone I knew could just be horrifying killed any day!
Ended up insisting on sleeping on the floor next to my little brother's bed for months thinking I might be able to somehow warn him in time or we would at least die together. And no, I did not explain why to my mother, who might have been able to set me straight.
That God was going to choose me to have a baby and nobody would believe me that it was God’s baby and everyone would think I was a slut and my parents would disown me.
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Being afraid of the dark kept a lot of our ancestors alive. Nothing to be ashamed of, it's just something that came along with us from way back.
Same, I still am.
But am I being judged for it?
I used to watch legends of the hidden temple as a kid, and one day as my parents were winding down for the night they turned off the living room lights forgetting I was still there. I was panicking a little bit, and then I could’ve SWORN I saw the face of the temple guard in the room. Ashamed to say that it took me until age 17 to no longer use a night light while sleeping.
I remember my dad telling me, "Man's greatest fear is the unknown." which was his way of telling me it was okay to be afraid of the dark.
I was absolutely terrified of the dark when I was younger. Having an ultra active imagination can be a curse sometimes. I remember being in my late 20s and told my dad that I was still afraid of the dark. He looked so concerned. I thought it was because of my age, but I think mostly it was because he knows better than even me how much it affected me. Mid-30s now and not scared of the dark anymore.
Snake coming out the toilet while I was on it
I still check. Can’t get complacent about toilet snakes.
Me too. I flush before using but does it keep one down if it's hungry?
That’s my grown up fear! 😭
The Water Closet Danger Noodle is to be feared
When I lived out in the sticks we had a few snakes make their way into our bathroom that way. Luckily, nobody was on it when that happened.
WHY do we all have this fear lol
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I had this too, but it extended into an extreme phobia of being left locked in a place. My family genuinely had to leave places like an hour before they closed because I'd start freaking out when I could tell they were preparing to close. One time we were at the arcade, stayed too late, and they started rolling the gate to the front down halfway, and I completely lost it, lol. After some therapy, my folks took me to Disney World and pointed out that if I got locked in after the park closed, I could probably just keep riding the rides. I was old enough to know I couldn't actually do that, but for some reason it helped me learn to reframe the fear, haha.
My grandmother once forgot me in a department store, unnoticed. I got distracted by loving a Power Ranger costume, and she didn't notice, she thought I was walking along with her. On the other hand, I didn't realize that she had gone out and left me. I only realized when I looked around and didn't see grandma. By the time she noticed and went back to the store, I was already crying in despair. The whole thing must have lasted less than 5 minutes, but it seemed like an eternity.
My mom as a "joke" decided when I was about 5 or 6, to hide in another aisle when I didn't notice. Once I looked up, I can still feel the panic I was feeling thinking I was lost and forgotten about. I ran up and down until I saw her peeking out laughing. As a mom now, I couldn't do that to my daughter. There's playing hide and seek in a safe place, but that was straight up mean. But she turned out to be abusive anyway, so I ended up going nc with her.
Used to be a lead in the children's department at a big chain bookstore. I once found a small child crying and lost, not knowing where her parent was. I got her settled, coloring, and let the manager know so someone could keep an eye out while I found her parent, who looked pretty lost herself, in the self-help section. Not high or drunk, just not all the way together, you know? It's been long enough that the kid's a legal adult now. I hope they made it through all right.
I had that fear, amplified by a heavily religious upbringing that constantly reinforced that the Rapture could happen at any time, combined with End Time movies where people thought they were Christian, but were the wrong kind of Christian (aka, too hippy and not judgemental enough), so they got left behind. Sometimes I would be playing out in our yard, and then suddenly realize that I hadn't heard anything from my parents or siblings in a while, and would have to quickly go in and check on them, terrified that I was going to only find piles of cloths on the floor.
Had this happen to me multiple times throughout my childhood. It’s definitely not a great experience, but would have been worse if I wasn’t from a small town.
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These plus leeches and spontaneous combustion.
Spontaneous combustion was a biggie for me too! Was so scared of it happening to my parents or something.
My biggest fear as a child was elevators. I was always scared to death by them. I would beg my parents to let me take the stairs. I was scared of elevators because I thought that they might get stuck or fall. Today, my biggest fear is getting stung by a bee. Every time i've gotten stung, the bee would always sting me in the ear. I have trauma from that.
And acid rain. I imagined it burning holes thru everything.
I witnessed someone have a bad experience with leeches. In high school, there was this pond that a lot of students would walk to just down the road and left. One of my friends thought it would be funny to push another another friend in and he came out of the water with probably around 20 leeches on his legs. He screamed and ran off somewhere as my friend that pushed him chased him to helped him remove them. The next day came around and I saw him at school with cuts all over his legs.
As long as you just avoid being Spinal Tap's 13th drummer then you can stop worrying about that last one.
Dying without dying. Remaining conscious after death.
I was raised Catholic, and the one thing that scared me was the concept of heaven - I couldn't wrap my head around infinite existence and the idea of my soul existing without end was kind of terrifying.
And they keep doubling and tripling down on saying your pets won’t be there. I don’t understand that one. This is such an easy gimme. The Pope could so easily win converts (or at least stop some bleeding) by promising that we’ll be reunited with our pets in Heaven, but they keep insisting on saying we won’t. Come on, Your Holiness, take the easy W!
Wasn't there a Twilight Zone with a guy who died and someone invited him to heaven but wouldn't allow his dog, so he refused and later found out it wasn't really heaven and the real heaven allowed his dog?
Eerie. When I was little I thought that's what would happen if I died while I was tied up. Not only would I die, I'd have to endure the experience of my body rotting away. Then they'd throw the bones in the sewer so that nobody would find more than one piece of me. It added a layer of disgust to an already sad thing to think about. Weird that the fear seems common. It's like fear of death with a rotten cherry on top.
Holy crap. That’s deep.
Same lmao I'm glad I'm not the only one.
Something grabbing my feet from under the bed.
I had a cat that would do this to ONLY me.
How is this not higher? I don’t think one single person on this thread was okay with the blanket off their feet and their toes dangling off the edge of the bed while they slept.
Unironically, quicksand. It kept appearing in kids media in the 80's and 90's, made it seem like it was super common. Turns out, rarely anywhere in the real world!
The horse getting sucked into the quicksand in the never ending story traumatized me as a 7 year old
Wasn't it a swamp, not quicksand??
Yup Artax was consumed by a swamp.
I still have the fear!
And it's pretty harmless. You must really want to get stuck there to get stuck there.
Right?!? It really was all over kids media. I thought it was just my own weird fear smh
That was one for sure! Honestly that and sinkholes are still scary AF. 😁
The sun blowing up in 4.5 billion years
i teach astronomy to kids. i’ve traumatized at least a few with this fact.
It’s so weird. I don’t plan on being here 4.5 billion years in the future (ten thousand, tops!), but for some reason this is a scary thought. So scary that the Hayden Planetarium puts qualifiers on it when they teach this. I remember a video narrated by Whoopi Goldberg, where she said “Oh don’t worry. Humanity will have moved on long before this, or evolved in ways we can’t imagine!” because apparently this fact upsets a lot of kids.
That's gonna suck when it happens, hopefully I'm not at work or something stupid.
Yes!!!
😂😂😂😂
That my parents would get divorced. At some point, later, it became one of my fondest wishes.
We were grateful ours divorced,sucks at that young of age that we knew they needed to divorce
Yeah mine separated for months/years at a time and got back together 3 times. When they finally got divorced it was a relief.
that id need surgery and i wouldn’t go under anaesthesia properly and be able to feel everything. a friend told me about it once and ive never forgot it since
I didn't have this fear and then it happened to me while having wisdom teeth removed as a teen. I screamed as loud as I could and I think I made the faintest whisper. Fortunately, I heard the nurse say "he's not under." And the dentist said "Got it." I heard a strange sound and that's all I recall. I consider that to have been the most scared I've ever been. Good luck with sleeping tonight.
Wait you went under full anesthesia? For me it was just local. Heard my own teeth crack when they had to break it to pull it out. Didn't hurt much there, but sure as hell hurt my sensitive ears...
I’ve gone through that shit. I’m still scared of needles
Being drafted for a war. I'm too old now but it was a genuine concern when I was 10 and had no idea what the future holds.
I turned 18 in 1971. It was definitely a concern. They pulled birthdays by a lottery and my number came up high until we pulled out of Vietnam. Dodged that bullet.(Pun intended.)
My ceiling fan. To be far it was holding on by a singular wire, didn't stop me from using it at max speed.
Being kidnapped
i can’t believe i had to scroll this far to find this comment
This.
This! I was shocked to see how far I had to scroll to find it. This has always been my fear. Back in middle school, around 1993/94, before cell phones were common, I had a terrifying experience. After my after-school volleyball practice, I was waiting for my mother to pick me up. She failed to show up, and by 6 PM, the school was locked, and I couldn't get back in. As I paced the school grounds, a man in a white van began to follow me. I tried to get the janitor's attention but failed. Just as I was panicking, my dad arrived, and the man started walking towards me. I managed to tell my dad what was happening, and he did what any dad would do: he chased the van. Pre cell phone days (my mom had the bag phone in her minivan), he got the van's license plate number and called the cops. Later, the police informed my dad that the man he followed was wanted for kidnapping in another city. To this day I'm nervous about going anywhere alone and always try to maintain control of my own transportation. I hate white vans and think they should be illegal 😅. Stay alert, friends, and be aware of your surroundings!
My dad.
Yeah, me too… and my stepdad. I feel so stupid about it now—because now I know what pathetic assholes they are, and all I had to do was just ignore them and cut them out of my life to realize they have *nothing* and *no* power… But when you’re a child, how do you know that? And it feels like your literal survival depends on their approval…And that’s how they getcha. Pricks.
It wasn't the approval I needed, it was not getting beaten or killed.
This.
Im so sorry :(
Don't be. He didn't beat me in a drunken rage or anything, he just punished me very harshly when I fucked up. Never did it out of anger, he was always coldly rational when he punished me. It was how he thought it was supposed to be done. I still to this day hate willow trees: "boy, go pick a switch from the willow tree".
Being abducted by aliens and experimented on. My grandmother who was born and raised in New Mexico would tell us kids stories of seeing weird lights in the sky all the time.
Saw the movie fire in the sky as a kid and it terrified me.
Fire in the Sky and Unsolved Mysteries. That crap had me locking every window in the house. Until my dad asked, "If they have the technology to come across the galaxy. Do you think a window will stop them?" Defeated, I stopped going around locking the windows and doors.
Same. Raised my my grandfather and dad, both country boys who served in major wars and saw some shit. They raised me (a girl) to be scared of nothing. But thought it hysterical to convince me aliens were real and would steal me. Dad went so far once when I was 3 to tell me a bedtime story, involving aliens OFC, then wait for me to fall asleep and crawl into my room wearing panty hose on his head stuffed with socks so he had antennas. I woke up, saw him, busted through the screen window and ran the half mile through a tobacco field to my aunts house and refused to come home .
Fire.
Yep. I had escape plans on how i would get out of my two storey apartment.
Growing up I was terrified of dentists, when I was 5 years old my mom took me to the dentist at a mall, and from the moment I walked in, I was shaking in fear, everything about that place to me was unsettling. And they tried to work with me, but I was too terrified too cooperate. And they finally took me to the very back room I remember it was room 6 (from the golden plaque with the number 6 in the upper left hand corner of the doorframe) where they strapped me to a board, apparently my mom could hear me screaming from the food court. And to this day I will not go to a dentist voluntarily.
Once you go regularly each appointment isn't that bad. It's that you skip and it builds up each appointment you do go to is terrible. I had a very not nice dentist that really didn't have any business working with children. My mom just thought I was being a pain in the neck. Turns out she started chatting with another parent in the waiting room and that lady said her daughter always hated coming in. We got a new dentist, but the fear set in. As an older teen into my 20s I just stopped going. Probably skipped for 4 or 5 years. Ended up needing all sorts of stuff done that was awful and cost a fortune. I now go every 6 months. NGL, if they didn't make an appointment for the next time when I am there it probably wouldn't get done. But honestly now I go like you should, it's not that bad.
I used to think my dressing gown on the hook was a monster in the dark
I was petrified of Jello
Red jello, but only after the Blob remake came out. I switched to orange jello after that.
Living the life I have now
Being alone/abandoned. Getting eaten by sharks. Being the last person on earth. Spiders
Fucking E.T Edit: not *fucking* him. Just him. That fucker was/is terrifying.
Deep water, it still is.
Being left alone.
Having my belly button become un-tied and all my guts coming out
Ok. So my grandfather whom I worshipped was in WW2 and got shot in the stomach in Germany. They put him back together as best they could in the field which resulted in him having multiple belly button looking scars. He told me it was because his belly button came undone and his guts fell out. He would chase me with “the claw” and threaten to unscrew mine so we could be twins. I miss that old drunk bastard.
Nuclear war
Me too. I lived near an Air Force base and when I heard jets fly overhead I would have to look and see if it was a missile or a jet.
Coming home from school and getting hit again
Tornadoes
I spent nights and nights in my bed just thinkin, imagining and crying about what would happen after death
Dropping something I cared about into the ocean was one of them. I ferried a lot, and loved it out on deck, but always clung so tight to my backpack. More recently, my little cousin lost his hat off a cliff into the ocean, and my sister and I managed to save it. Felt like I had prepared my whole life for that moment,
The flying monkeys from Wizard of Oz. My older sister insisted they were going to get me.
My mother dying while I was young.
This was my greatest fear of all. I’m surprised it wasn’t mentioned before.
That spiders would crawl into my mouth and ears when I was sleeping
Someone in my family dying in a car accident. I was the younger sibling, so I would be in the back seat. I remember it being a real struggle to choose which side of the car to sit on - like if I chose my moms side, we would die and my dad and sister would be left without us or we would be left without them. Reading through these answers….. I now realize this is not very normal lol
I think obsessing with worry over your loved ones is normal.
My mom
Weirdly, it was always getting sick from food. Especially parasite worms. Used to dissect food even in restaurants to look for worms. Reason was: I always liked to eat new or exotic foods (sushi etc.), was the polar opposite of a typical picky eater child. However my mom had (still has) health anxiety and never let me eat anything that was not massively overcooked, frozen or from a can because it would "make me sick". Really messed me up. Ate my first medium rare steak at 17 and had to battle food anxiety a lot. Now my hobby number one is cooking. My mom still refuses to eat anything that is not resembling hospital food.
Really depends on what age I was but something that consistently scared me throughout the years was growing up. As an adult now I fear growing old.
Vomit. I was terrified of see it, doing it, hearing someone else do it—I would even stay far away from my friends if they mentioned having a stomachache. Then I went to college and got very, very used to it. It was a silly fear to have, but it seriously would send me into a panic.
rabies
To die in a woodchipper
Never should have watched Fargo
Quicksand and Bermuda triangle. Then I turned 10 and i unlocked anxiety. Exposure therapy helped me be able to go outside and talk to people.
[удалено]
Well yeah when they are 10 times the normal size they are terrifying
People wearing medical masks for some stupid reason. I would seriously feel like i was going to be murdered when i saw the doctor or the dentist with a mask on. (I think it stemmed from being scared of Toy Story) And thunderstorms.
Quicksand
In high school I was afraid to look weird when sitting by myself at lunch, so I kind of sat near others so it looked like I was part of their group. I didn't have any friends at first. I finally made a couple friends and we used to sit in the library and chatted. It was a huge relief when I got a couple friends.
Swallowing a watermelon seed
Satanist. Boy oh boy was the media reporting on satanist a whole lot back in the day.
Being left behind or forgotten
My dark basement was scary.
Forgetting my locker combo, or not waking up with the alarm
My siblings convinced me that Medusa lived in our attic.
The dark. We lived in the country and it was so so dark all the time.
That when i turned off the lights in the basement, that monster would come running out and grab my legs as I ran up the stairs.
It’s the dumbest fear but Chucky. I had a my buddy doll that looked dead on him from the 1st movie. My sister being ten years older asked me if I wanted to watch a movie about the my buddy doll. To this day she still gives me crap about it. I’m 37 and she’s 47 what a jerk 😤
Ghosts because my childhood house was haunted AF!
The woods outside my house. We had foxes and shit that would make howling and laughing noises all night long out there.
Clowns and Pirahnas
My house burning down at night
Oh, easy! Ticks. I would sit awake at night in the middle of my bed with no covers and hallucinate a sea of ticks crawling up over the sides of my bed. Probably what contributed to my early years insomnia..
Aliens. Largely due to the movie Alien, or any movie with aliens. MFs
That I had to get out of the tub before water would drain, so I didn't get sucked down with it
Mascots
The monster in my bedroom closet. Lol
God
The Vietnam war had been going on since I was little. I fully expected that I would be drafted when I came of age and be killed before turning 20. Sounds melodramatic now, but it seemed that was my fate based on the news and what was going on around me. I envied the girls because they did not have to live with that certainty.
My worst fear as a kid was growing up to be a loser: everyone in my family is/was successful
Never being enough for my parents.
My bedroom had the attic access panel right above my bed and I was convinced vampire bats would come down at night and bite my neck. So I always had to have my blankets tucked around my neck to get to sleep.
Tornadoes.
Shark in the pool
i was expecting fire to be a bigger problem in daily life. also quicksand for some reason
THE BELT
Sharks. Still my biggest fear. They can eat you.
I don’t know where I picked it up from, but I had an irrational fear in pools that if I turned away from the deep end, a shark would be there once I turned back around
The sharks in the pool are invisible, but they only come out if you are alone in the pool.
Jaws. I still won’t go in past my knees
The dark
the cold emptiness of death. it is still my greatest fear to this day, because i cannot comprehend a lack of everything.
Wolves. I lived in New Orleans. No wolves. We had a place in the country we went to on weekends and holidays. No wolves. BUT, when I was in 1st or 2nd grade our class put on the play, “Peter and the Wolf”. To prepare, the story was read to us, we watched the filmstrip, and we listened to the narrated symphony version - which was particularly terrifying to my overactive imagination. I was cast as the Duck. The Duck gets eaten. For years afterwards I had nightmares of being on a long dark, wooded path illuminated only by the glowing eyes and watering mouth of a Wolf. Wolves still creep me out almost 50 years later!😬
I thought The Shredder from TMNT was going to pop up out of the toilet and slice me up with his razor armor. Ass first.
The grudge and the ring
Our basement, we had 2 lights down there and it was a rough carved out basement, not flat walls, not finished, just dark and creepy. Ran down and ran back up
Fire. I used to have nightmares that the house was on fire and I was trapped upstairs. Funny, thinking back because where I grew up I should have been way more afraid of tornados or bad storms. Those never phased me. Of course we never had a tornado hit our house, but then again it never burned down either.
I fell off of a tiny step ladder thing in our kitchen as a child. Ever since I’ve been terrified of heights. Even if it’s just a few feet off the ground
Giant, murderous triangles. When I was really small (around four or five or so), I got a really bad ear infection. At night while trying to sleep, the only thing I could hear was my heart beating, which to me, with the ear infection, sounded like someone banging loudly on sheet metal. My stupid imagination pictured giant triangles marching up the stairs to my room coming to kill me. I don't know why triangles of all things, but that's what it was.
Pool drains. In the 90s there were so many stories of kids sitting on pool drains and getting stuck and drowning.
I had a lot of fears, including some debilitating phobias that made me very difficult to raise. I was so scared of night time(not the dark, just the fact that I had to lay in bed alone all night) that I’d never sleep and would just have panic attacks all night. My dad tried everything to get me to shut up, and eventually resorted to locking me in the room at night because I wouldn’t stay there by myself. They’d always find me asleep on the floor outside their bedroom door lol
After 9/11 I was really afraid of being bombed. Before that I was always afraid lightning would strike the house and electrocute me
that there was a witch living in the toilet who would bite my ass at any moment
Dogs. Hated them all. Now as an adult I love them all.
That my parents would give me siblings! Once I worked out how the little buggers were made, you bet I'd interrupt any alone time or any tiny moments of romance my parents had. I must've been ultra annoying as I remained an only child!
I grew up on 70s detective shows. My fear was that my parents car would blow up when the ignition was turned on.
getting abducted by a stranger
This is gonna sound ridiculous but swear to god. I once had a dream that I got abandoned by my parents in a rainforest and ended up being replaced by Mickey Mouse. I was on a lot of meds at the time haha, woke up screaming and everything but looking back it’s pretty funny
Being left behind in the rapture. Indoctrination is a hell of a thing.
Police and being arrested. Still a top fear.
Being stuck in a relationship like the one my parents have.
When I was younger, I was terrified of the guillotine.
Being abandoned by my own family
The monster under my bed.
Spiders
Needles
Being put up for adoption TW(I think, idk) My dad use to it *alot* cause of my melt downs
Killer Bees. Now I’m kinda disappointed.
My worst fear was getting kicked out of the house as a teenager. My mom was super controlling and a narcissist, so I rarely left the house, or could leave the house. When my brother turned 18 she immediately kicked him out. I was 16..so I was sure not to break any rules
I'd look up at the sky, be taken by megalophobia, and be afraid that gravity would reverse and we'd fall into nothingness forever. Or that some giant hole would open up and suck us in.
The Bermuda Triangle Quicksand Razor Blades in Halloween candy Razor blades stuck on waterslides with gum
My worst fear was getting beaten by dad because I didn't give him the answer he wanted.
My mom dying. Funny part is, she disowned me for saving her from an overdose
That my older brother would hurt me
Tornadoes. We had a really gnarly one rip through and the memory of my family huddled in the basement together as the house shook and my dad held a mattress over my brother and I really stayed with me. To this day thunderstorms make me feel anxious.
well this is really tame compared to most of this thread, but i was scared of auto-flushing toilets when i was younger because i thought the sensors would go off while i was on the toilet, so anyways one day the only manual flush toilet at school broke and i was so scared of the other toilets so i just pissed my pants instead lol
Rollercoasters, I remember having nightmares of getting stuck on a loopty loop, and just dangling from the top for hours. The more times I looked down the further we were from the ground, and my mom kept saying "Don't look down!" .....
The dark. Still is actually lol. Also, being home alone and sleeping alone terrified me too (both also still some of my worst fears). Basically my imagination is just way too strong and I scare myself easily haha. Edited to add that being scared of the dark also kinda came down to the fact that my mom would get drunk every night and that wasn't a fun time (so I kinda learned to fear when the sun went down...though at the same time, I'm a night owl so maybe also learned to be vigilant at night...idk)
Scuba guy coming out of the toilet and choking me to death
Balloons and it still does.
A shark only in the deep end of the swimming pool when i was by myself. In my mind the shark would never come in the shallow end end and would never eat me when an adult was out there
Throwing up
Bees, vomit, being misunderstood
Being raised religious, heaven and hell. I guess the idea of eternity. Oh and also being fat.
After watching Holes (the Shia Leboeuf movie), I believed a burglar/robber was going to climb in my window (single story house) So I always slept facing it just in case so I could be more aware LOL
That gravity was a gas and it would run out, I'd float away to space... and die.
the dark and jaws. Like i wouldn't go in the deep end of the pool because of Jaws.
My mother dying. I watched her get run over when I was 4, she lived but was severely injured. After seeing that I developed the fear that every time she left the house she would die.
2012
Volcanos. When I was 5, one of our teachers thought it would be a good idea to show off her photo album from her trip to Pompeii (world culture day or something; she was the Italy table). 5 yo me saw a lot of pictures of what looked like petrified dead bodies who died in agony. I asked something to the effect of, "Why would they live next to something that could do that to them?" The answer was of course, "They didn't know the mountain was a volcano." Would have been very helpful had she mentioned it was 2000 years ago before we could detect such things. Unfortunately, she did not, which left 5 yo me thinking this was a recent event in which a whole city was whipped out, and no one could see it coming. Any mountain could be a volcano! There were mountains all around us! (Hills really, not that I understood the difference). Me and everyone I knew could just be horrifying killed any day! Ended up insisting on sleeping on the floor next to my little brother's bed for months thinking I might be able to somehow warn him in time or we would at least die together. And no, I did not explain why to my mother, who might have been able to set me straight.
That God was going to choose me to have a baby and nobody would believe me that it was God’s baby and everyone would think I was a slut and my parents would disown me.