Spiders? Snakes? Germs? Small children? What's your irrational fear? Have you ever gotten over a fear that you knew was unjustified? Ever had to face one of your silly fears head-on? Did the spiders on your screen this morning give you the willies?

-- Anonymous, June 25, 2001

Answers

yes. The spiders on the screen gave me the willies. And now I'm itching all over. Sheesh.

-- Anonymous, June 25, 2001

I hate spaghetti tangles of on and off ramps on interstates. Where some of the ramps SOAR several stories above all the others. And are multi lane. And people drive very fast. And it feels like you're going to just take off over a canyon like Thelma and Louise if you match up to the spped of the rest of the traffic.

I'll do it, and I'll be okay. But my commuting route avoids ones of these, and part of the reason is the whole ramp thing.

-- Anonymous, June 25, 2001

I used to be deathly afraid of barking dogs. I never knew why until I started shaving and noticed that I had a 3/4" scar on my chin, very faint. I asked my parents about it, and they said that I was bitten on the face by our neighbor's dog when I was a toddler. I have no memory of this, but barking dogs always scared me, regardless of how puny they were.

-- Anonymous, June 25, 2001

Beth, a little off topic, but given your predilection for spider love, be glad you don't live in Tokyo. There are jumping spiders there.

No, really. I had to run around with a plastic cup to trap and move them outside. They're hard to catch.

-- Anonymous, June 25, 2001

Ugh. I would have to walk around Tokyo with a can of hairspray, a lighter, and rubber underwear...

-- Anonymous, June 25, 2001

I've said it before, but I'll say it again. Too many people aren't paying attention to my warning.

Clowns. It's not irrational, I swear. It's perfectly logical and reasonable. Clowns are evil, fright-wigged spawns of Satan.

Irrational fear? Snakes. (What a typically girly thing. Sorry.) Every once in a while, when my apartment is particularly cluttered, I get convinced that there is a cobra lurking in one of the piles.

-- Anonymous, June 25, 2001

Spiders in my bed. This is a real fear, from when I was about 12 and had decided that I wasn't going to get into bed with a running jump to elude the monsters. Standing *right next to the edge of the bed,* I threw back the covers, and in the middle was a one-inch spider. I hadn't been afraid of them before that.

Sleeping with the closet doors open. (I never do.)

The possibility that anyone breaking into my house would probably kill my cockatiel to make him shut up.

Umbrellas. They are bad and wrong and they all want to poke your eye out. Umbrellas are bad.

Anything I can imagine doing damage to my eyes. Oh, and thank you very much, this has just reminded me that last night I dreamed I accidentally knocked out one of Blake's eyes (see? combining my fears). Thanks. Off to sulk now.

-- Anonymous, June 25, 2001

Something scared the bejeezus out of me this weekend.

Saturday morning my husband and I drove down to St. Francois State Park to do some hiking. We took Loki Dog along (he even has his own backpack). We picked a 6.7 mile trail and set off into the woods. Hikes with Loki always go extremely fast because he pulls the entire way. Anyway, we're about four miles into the hike and I'm behind my husband. He suddenly sees something out of the corner of his eye and he says "Watch out!" I look down just a split second before I almost step on a TIMBER RATTLESNAKE!

I took a picture of it. From a safe distance, of course. I hope it turns out.

-- Anonymous, June 25, 2001

Sloths.

you know if one is hiding in your closet, 8 hours is plenty of time for it to creep up on you while you're sleeping.

-- Anonymous, June 25, 2001

Not to be a total freak, but....

Dark water. I can just barely manage swimming in the ocean and/or lakes without fainting. The Carribean was ok, as I could see, but not being able to see scares the holy baloney outta me.

And - here's the freakyness - I have borderline anxiety attacks if my wife is a few minutes late home from work, or if she hasn't called in a while. I have a demented & active imagination (thanks to King & Koontz) and start seeing horrible accidents and mangled body parts...or evil men lurking in the parking garage.... and I start to seriously freak. Seconds become minutes, minutes become hours... and when she comes in or finally calls I almost start to babble, letting off some of the adrenaline. I know, I know, it sounds awfully sexist; I feel that I have to "protect" my wife... but my wife is almost a full 10 inches shorter than me, 2 years younger and probably weighs 110 pounds soaking wet... so I sometimes feel that her small stature and youthful looks makes her a target.

-- Anonymous, June 25, 2001

Cockroaches! In the bathroom, especially, and at night when you get up to pee and turn on the bathroom light they fly at you. Ohmigod I hated that about living in Georgia, which I did for 15 years. I am so happy not to have to think about them now, that a spider or two has no effect on me. We have to worry 'bout bears, in the spring, before the salmon run, but hell, at least they don't fly and they usually don't hang out in our bathrooms.

-- Anonymous, June 25, 2001

I have become irrationally afraid of water over time. As a boy I enjoyed swimming, but sometime after high school I began to get mildly freaked by lakes and rivers. I remember when I realized that this had become a "thing" -- I cheerfully dove into a lake with my then-fiancee, and suddenly found myself wanting very much to get back on dry land. In the past few years this discomfort has grown until I have a near phobia about water. I can sail on it; I can swim in a chlorinated pool; I can wade in the surf; but I can't go into a body of water over my head without wishing very strongly to get back out.

Also, I dream frequently about standing on a narrow spit of land or sandbar between two bodies of water which are both rising. As the land begins to disappear, large prehistoric fish with giant teeth align with the sandbar, waiting for me to get within reach. Seriously, I do. So, we're all in agreement, right? Yep, I'm a little bit of a freak.

-- Anonymous, June 25, 2001

Snakes. Any time I have a nightmare there are snakes in it. Just thinking about snakes freaks me out.

When I was little people in character costumes used to really freak me out as well. (Not halloween costumes...those costumes with the huge heads like at disneyland or disneyworld.)

-- Anonymous, June 26, 2001

"I have borderline anxiety attacks if my wife is a few minutes late home from work, or if she hasn't called in a while." You know, I don't really think that's sexist, because I have the exact same fears related to my husband, and he's even bigger and stronger than I am. But if he is late, and hasn't called, or if I can't get in touch with him for a long time, I get really worried that something happened, though I focus more on stuff like car accidents than stranglers.
I fear venomous critters (snakes and spiders and strong-stinging jellyfish and what not) because I grew up somewhere where there weren't any (well, the odd be or wasp, that's about it) and so the very concept that I could just get bitten or stung by something and then DIE HORRIBLY is scary to me. I like non-venomous snakes *and* spiders though. I really hate it when people bring in books to trade at my store and there are SPIDERS IN THE BOXES because I never know what kind they are until they already could have bitten me. And jumping spiders suck because they are so much less predictable than the scuttling kind.
I have a recurrent fear (banishable type) that all my friends don't really like me and are just putting up with me to be polite; relatedly, that new people I meet couldn't POSSIBLY want to be friends - this fear usually crops up either when I've been self-isolating or when I actually have a ton of evidence to the contrary.

-- Anonymous, June 26, 2001

I'm deathly afraid of boats. Not so much rowboats or canoes you take out on a small pond where you could easily swim to shore, but boats that go so far from land that you know if you sank you'd be eaten by a shark or a walrus or something.

-- Anonymous, June 26, 2001

Snakes.

A couple of weeks ago, I was working in my office (at home) where I face a floor-length window out to my front porch. I saw a cute frog hopping by along the endge of the porch and I stopped to watch it. I thought it was odd for him to be out there (it was hot, middle of the day) and then, about a foot behind him, I saw something move. A black thing, then I realized, it was a snake head rising slowly over the edge of the porch. Then about a foot behind that, I saw the rising hump of the snake body, which was at least two inches in diameter. I wanted to scream, "Run little frog, run," but I think I just squeaked. The snake head part rose more and more and the little frog was blissfully pausing, sightseeing, and I freaked when the snake lunged and then there was no frog. I think I screamed. I know I ran and got my 18-year-old-son, who sort of said, "Yeah, that's a snake," and rolled his eyes and left the room. Didn't he know that because he was male he was supposed to have the snake-killing bazooka handy at all frigging times? I have failed as a mother. They all (all being the males around here) tried to convince me that it was a "garden" snake... (since it disappeared off into my ground-cover out there), but I wasn't buying. Finally, a neighbor killed it (two houses down, same snake, exactly the same, and no, there's no possibility whatsoever that there could be two alike, and like Beth, shut up, I need this theory to live)... and said it was a cotton-mouth, which is poisonous.

I think letting all the plants on the front porch die is a reasonable solution.

-- Anonymous, June 26, 2001

Dark water, or actually any kind of water that isn't a pool or the ocean. I won't swim in a lake - who knows what might be on the bottom? Leeches and other horrid things, surely.

Edges - that is, I'm not afraid of heights but I can't stand next to a drop if there isn't a rail. Even if there is, I'm very nervous.

Open spaces - I can't go out in a sailboat, for instance.

Those swoopy overpasses - I feel like the car is going to fly off the side.

I don't fight my fears very much, except for the driving ones.

-- Anonymous, June 26, 2001

OH!!!!!! I forgot the very worst one. I am scared to DEATH of stairs that you can see through (ie the wooden 'slat' type). Not once I've been up or down a particular set several times, but the first once or twice is always absolutely terrifying to me (I fell through a floor up to the hips when I was about 5). This was a big issue in Montreal, not so much an issue here in Colorado. However, I found out a few months ago that this fear also apparently extends itself to concrete walkways over interstates. I mean, The THing Was Made Out Of Concrete and yet I was terrified the whole way across that I would fall to my doom. I had no real reason to expect that since I love bridges (real bridges) and had crossed plenty of non-interstate pedways before.

-- Anonymous, June 27, 2001

Last night, we watched Vertical Limit (I think that's what it's called - the mountain climbing movie), and I spent nearly the whole thing just curled up and cringing in my seat.

I've become deathly afraid, in theory at least, of falling. It's odd, I'm not afraid of heights when I'm actually there (no prob looking out of tall windows, or anything), but when I see pictures of standing next to a cliff (or hanging off of one - ai!) or the roof of a building or whatever, I sit there getting vertigo and keep 'seeing' myself just falling.. I have a lot of dreams about it too, and that movie had too many scenes where the ground just slid away from where they were standing. Ugh, vivid dreams last night.

I could not even imagine getting on a rollercoaster these days.

-- Anonymous, June 27, 2001

I've got that dark water fear, too. After all these decades, the fear of swimning that Jaws instilled in me (saw it when it came out - I was a teenager) is slowly going away, but I still get all squicky and panicky about water I can't see through.

And I don't ever watch movies in which people are killed by stalkers or serial killers or whatever because any hint of that sort of thing renders me unable to be outside alone at night, for a very long time.

I can usually control my fear of the dark until I finish what I'm doing and start to go back toward the house, then suddenly I have to squeak and run.

-- Anonymous, June 29, 2001

I was a little kid when Jaws came out, and I've never seen it, but just the commercials gave me that dark-water fear. Hell, for a few years after the movie came out, I had to check under the covers for sharks before I could get into bed.

-- Anonymous, June 29, 2001

That damn haunted painting on ebay! People have posted to that message just recently. Now, I'm scared to death. Supposedly there is a haunted ouija board for sale on ebay. Dammit.

-- Anonymous, July 02, 2001

People who take this website seriously.

-- Anonymous, August 12, 2001