Questions #116: Childish Fears
What lived in your closet or under your bed when you were young? (i.e. boogie men, generic monsters, robbers, evil clowns...)
*Bonus: What did you do to protect yourself?
Thursday, August 30, 2007
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Wolves. I thought they ran around in a pack outside of my house and would jump in my bedroom window at night to eat me. I'm still terrified of them and have to look away if I see them on tv. I especially get freaked out if they show their teeth. It's horrible.
I was deathly afraid of a "Medusa" or "Bloody Mary" a classmate told me about in the first grade. The lore was the evil snake-headed lady lived in every bathroom mirror and would attack little girls while they were peeing. (Does it count if she didn't live in my closet or under my bed?)
To protect myself, I would never shut the door whenever I used the bathroom , which annoyed my entire family until I told them what was going on. (I ended up having to tell them what was going on when I stopped using the bathroom at school and kept peeing my pants instead.)
Thanks, Ariel, that was cathartic!
I'd heard of Bloody Mary, as well. But the one I heard of wasn't gender-biased and would only come out of the mirror if all the lights in the bathroom were off. I think it also helped to say her name three times.
My brother used to tell me, every day, in a completely serious and terrifying whisper, that he was going to shave my head while I was asleep. I believed him. So I wore a hat to bed every night.
It wasn't so much under the bed, it was the blanket that I swore had snakes in it. All the little wrinkles were snakes.
to save you the trouble:
"Snakes! Why does it always have to be snakes!" -Indiana Jones
since i was an only child, and bored at times, i would dress up as a guy named Fred- who wore a trench coat and black sunglasses. now that's scary.
First Grade was totally fucked for me. I went to a Catholic school, and those "holy" women fucked up my little mind through various means of mental terror and control. My parents caught on and yanked me out about 2/3 of the way through the school year. For every month I spent in the Catholic school, after I was pulled out, I spent an equal amount of time at the psychologist's office.
During this time, naturally, I was having lots of nightmares and seeing all sorts of demons (and prolly nuns!) in the dark. My mom gave me anti-monster spray, which i would spray around the room each night before bed. I found out later this was a few drops of vanilla in a spray bottle of water. It worked tho.
When I was 8 years old I saw there was this Tales from the Darkside episode that terrified me. This young girl had some creature with bug eyes living under her bed. It would reach out for her feet when she would step into her bed. Something happened to the girl and she ended up dying because of the creature. I don't remember how she died. It turned out that the creature was the son of her weird neighbor.
I still have fears about that little bug eyed creature.
All of my dolls scared me after seeing Chucky movies way too young... I always thought they were blinking at me even though their eyes didn't move. I made my doberman sleep in my little twin bed with me with the lights on & I locked all the dolls in the toy box at bedtime.
I was afraid of a picture of some spooky aliens on the cover of a book. Sometimes this book's cover was visible from my bed. I'd protect myself by lying very still and never ever looking at it.
I often was concerned that alien creatures would be doing a sweep of the whole house killing everything that was moving but that if I stood still I'd be overlooked, but then I'd be an orphan.
i was always afraid of ghosts at night... i still am! i was always scared to get up at night to go to the bathroom, cuz i thought that if the ghosts knew i that was awake, they'd come for me(like when the bad guys die in the movie Ghost.)
i would creep across my house as quietly as i could, and when it came time to pee, i would aim for the side of the bowl so i could avoid the clamor of my stream hitting the water directly. it seemed to work too.
I was/am a pretty bad sissy.
Things that would keep me up at night when i was a kid:
What if a monster was chasing you like in scooby-doo but when you went to take the mask off it wouldn't come off because it was real.
All dolls (i shared a room with my sister)
Evil portals to other dimensions
The dark path I had to walk on to get from the main house* to my house (high school)
The main house at night because of ghosts (also high school[but verified later that a woman hung herself around the turn of the century in one of the rooms])
Main ways I protected myself:
Articles of clothing as sort of protection talismans placed around me in a circle.
Slept in the hallway.
Lit all the gas and oil lamps (main house[didn't really work/made it even more creepy])
*I lived in a commune apple farm. The "Main House" was an old farmhouse from the 1800s where all the families came together to eat dinner/socialize etc. There was no electricity so it all had to be lit with white gas lamps or oil lanterns. It was/is also hella scary at night.
I was convinced of two things: one, that my house was going to catch on fire, and two, that jaws was going to come through my window. To protect myself from the first, I put a bell beside my bed so that I could warn the rest of my family that the inevitable fire was here, and I also put all of my toys on the bed and slept on the floor, so that I could quickly grab the four corners of my blanket and escape with my material possessions intact. To protect myself from the second, I never went in the ocean again. But if the fucker was going to swim in my window, there wasn't much I could do.
I had general, generic monsters who lived under my bed and in my closet AND in the toilet. If I went pee with the lights out, they'd be sure to grab me and suck me down into hell. Up until I was 13 probably I slept all wrapped up, dead to toe, and I created this little overlap of sheet so I could put my nose through and breath. But I slept completely covered for years.
In 4th grade ish I saw Poltergeist, and then things moved into my TV. *shudder*
After seeing Drop Dead Fred, I was terrified that some hand was going to reach out from the depths under my bed and smack me on the forehead. Either that, or when getting up in the middle of the night, said hand would grab my ankle and it would all end there.
So I watched Poltergeist when I was way too young. I was convinced if I got out of bed a clown would drag me underneath it. I also though the tree in my front yard wanted to eat me. It looked like it had a face an everything. It didn't help that the branches would tap and scrape against my bedroom window. My blankets were magical, and hiding underneath them would protect me from anything. Otherwise I would scream for mom.
vampire in the bathroom. only when walking by in the hallway.
i would ass-clench and hop-run.
"They" lived in my closet, which was a nice place until "they" came.
I slept withg a gun under my pillow.
I have to share that I remember the monster spray that my brother brought up. It was genius. I thank our Mom for that sense of security.
And then I figured it out, the recipe wasn't entirely effective when I sprayed it all over the book "Where The Wild Things Are" and none of the monsters disappeared from the pages!
Monster spray...that is very impressive parenting right there.
My older brother's best friend Jason Moore told me that the world was going to end in 1985 because of a nuclear war. This comment made me do some research into when the world could actually end and the whole idea of the sun dying and the world going black really got to me. My solution, I spent a lot of time counting the days and trying to campaign for Mondale in front of the Ukiah Safeway. In addition to this early activism, my mother used to make me do deep breathing exercises in my bed at night in order to ease the worry. Since then my mother has confessed that she really didn't know how to help me with such an exsitential fear at a young age. She was used to my bro and his scary goat on the ceiling.
I was scared there was a bad guy hiding in the closet or under the bed, or wherever. Before we went to bed, my dad would walk around and search the room with his shotgun.
I was always a pig, so when my mom finally gave up on making me keep under my bed clean, when I got scared, I'd just remember there was too much shit under there for a bad guy to fit, haha.
Now I sleep with a .45 in the headboard, and a shotgun in the closet.
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