I have three main fears. I'm talking crippling fears here.
I used to think I had a fear of heights, but I can be at a great height and feel perfectly fine. Turns out that I suffer from Climacophobia. Which is one of the stupidest phobias a person can have haha.
Fear of stairs, climbing, or of falling downstairs. I'm not completely weird, I can climb the stairs in my house no problem. But I get terribly anxious if I have to go up an escalator. Just a simple shopping mall escalator and I go in to panic mode. Or narrow stairs. Or those awful stairs with gaps in between each step? Which crazy bugger came up with that idea?
My second fear is insects. I'm fine with ladybirds and such, but anything with more eyes than the devil or more legs than Sleipnir is just wrong. Flies are my greatest enemy. They are grotesque little bastards who just land on stuff and regurgitate. One time I watched the remake of The Fly and I've been having nightmares ever since. A MAGGOT BABY THOUGH.
Now my third fear is probably most common. Ghosts. The whole concept of the spirit world or otherside both interests and terrifies me.
Now I know there is and will always be a debate on whether they're real or not, but I'm a believer.
I grew up in a pretty big, old house. It had a basement which was divided in to three rooms. Though I guess it wasn't technically a basement but just another floor because it had two windows, and if you went out into the garden and down a little incline you could see inside. One of it's two windows was in a fourth room which had been boarded up. The man who owned the house before us used to keep tigers and that's where they slept. I have no idea why it was boarded up, or why he had tigers, nor do I want to. I also don't want to think about why there were loads of goat remains in one of the gardens.
They say that kids are more susceptible to spirits don't they? I mean that's the premise to a lot of horror films.
I can still remember how afraid I was to be alone upstairs. I hated sleeping in my own room, I would put up such a fight. Even when my mom sent me to bed apparently I would sit in the indent between the two flights of stairs and read my book until someone came up to bed. I actually believe I suppressed a lot of the weird little things that happened, until we moved when I was about 11 and my mom told us some stories. A few incidents included:
- My mom being alone in the house save for my sister, who was a baby at the time and was in her cot in the next room. My mom was getting some sleep while my sister was down and suddenly someone snatched the covers off her, but in the next moment had threw them back over her.
- On another occasion she heard someone walking around on the landing (we had those creaky floorboards) and when she went to look there was nobody there. Again my sister was asleep in her cot. She was too young to get out.
- On more than one occasion someone's heard footsteps running across the landing and slamming one of the doors when there's nobody upstairs.
So my mom believes in spirits and she had a friend bless my bedroom when I refused to go in there. I think she blessed the whole upstairs actually.
After that the spooky goings on were limited. The most vivid thing I remember was that if I woke up in the night (which I did often) I could hear noises from the kitchen downstairs. You know that sound of cutlery shaking when you open that specific draw? And all the knives, forks, etc rattle together? Yeah that would happen over and over as though someone were just opening draws. It would happen most nights and I wasn't the only one to hear it.
I know some of you reading this will disregard it. That's absolutely fine. I know how real it all felt to me though. I feel like I've been surrounded by it growing up. I live in an area that has a lot of original buildings. There's even an old folks home that has secrets passageways in the basement which were created by Guy Fawkes and his men. There are gunshots in the walls and everything.
And the main house at my local park was built in the 1600's and has a lot of checkered history. It's open to the public and I had a school trip there when I was a kid. I remember being freaked out by all the paintings. Like many old buildings it has it's fair share of ghostly sightings and grisly deaths going back through history. Many photo's taken on the grounds only to discover extra children and such in the background when they're developed. Or voices on recordings taken there.
The most tragic story is a Romeo & Juliet esque tale of a local lady who fell in love with a monk and when they were caught the monk was walled up alive in a passage. They were so forgiving back in the day :/
What are your fears? Do you believe in ghosts??
I'm not going to be able to sleep now. And yes, those were the only scary gifs I was willing to find. You couldn't pay me enough to search.