What were your irrational fears as a child?

[virgocatlover]

I remember at 5 I was terrified of getting worms, as in the parasite. Some children at school had idiotic parents who told them they would get worms if they suck their thumb or put their fingers near their mouth. I was scared there were worms inside my stomach.

I was also very scared of the Bermuda Triangle (thanks to cartoons) as if there was a chance I will be visiting it on a frequent basis.

Exactly the same here! Though they showed us it at school..

Mirrors. Mum had to cover my dressing table mirror with a rug before I went to bed.

Nuclear war. Every time I heard thunder or saw a flash of lightning I'd freeze with fear. To be fair I was 6 when the Cuban missile crisis was happening and we had nuclear drills at school.

Edited to say that the nuclear war one wasn't exactly irrational!

This is a weird one. I was scared that my family might all actually be robots or aliens and I was the only real human. Also worried that I might have been adopted but no one was telling me.

Quicksand, the Bermuda Triangle and bridges collapsing while we were driving over them, I was terrified they would break and the whole family would drown.

Boarding school. I got threatened with being sent away.

Also the sound of the wind. I thought it was wolves.

Crane flies

Oh my lord I was absolutely terrified of them. I could not be in the same house as one. If I was walking through a field and they flew up I'd be screaming and waving my arms around and racing off that field like a bat out of hell.

Just a fly, with long legs.

I was scared of Thomas the Tank Engine. We had a big plastic toy Thomas with a smiley face and one day his face fell off (it was like a big disc that was stuck on). I was absolutely terrified of him. Still get teased by the family for that one, lol.

The four minute warning happening when I wasn't at home.
Going to prison for something I didn't do.

When I was about 4, a slightly older neighbour boy told me he had no belly button, which absolutely terrified me

Radiation poisoning
Stonefish
Sharks somehow managing to access the drainage system
Escalators
The foot-measuring machine in Clarks
Scorpions in my shoes
Poltergeist attacks
Dying of pneumonia following a sodden ride across windswept moors

Given that I grew up in a supremely average lower middle class family in the west of Scotland in the 80s/90s, the vast majority of these were, of course, completely irrational (bar the foot machine and escalators, which were very real sources of horror).

I think my parents may have been guilty of allowing me completely unfettered access to the library...

This bastard.

The Long Man of Wilmington.

It was about 50 miles from our house and I convinced myself he could get there in about ten paces. It didn't help that it was the time of power cuts in the 70s which also freaked me out.

We often visited South Wales when I was very little, and I was always frightened by the Big Apple at Bracelet Bay. There was something scary about a fruit being so unnaturally large. This was many, many decades ago but the apple is still there. Utterly terrifying.

Omg so many things. It’s interesting to read in this thread that some of mine are similar to others.

eg I was scared of something coming up the toilet to hurt me/grab me

sitting in the sofa in our lounge I was scared a knife would suddenly come out of it and plunge into my back

I was scared of the dark space under my parents bed and having to go upstairs by myself in the dark for bedtime

i have never worked this one out but I used to be able to hear a ticking in the wall and thought it was my life ticking down in seconds - god these sound so random when said out loud!

I was scared of spontaneous human combustion

showers! After I watched psycho

Ghosts! We stayed at a GM’s house where both a GF and a GGF had fairly recently died. GM didn’t help by saying she’d seen GF appear not long afterwards.*

They were both lovely old men, so I don’t know why I was so petrified of them appearing, but for ages afterwards, even back home, I was terrified of going upstairs alone at night.

*she said that he’d appeared beside her bed early one morning, and having forgotten that he was dead, she thought he’d come with the usual early morning cup of tea!

I told this story to dh very soon after we met. ‘So what did he say?’ he asked, and put on a dark and ghostly voice. ‘I’m sorry, dear, I’m afraid the tea’s COLD this morning!’ 😂

A very po faced neighbour and her 3 snuffling Pekingese dogs.

I used to be petrified when the wind blew the loft hatch up and you could see the dark black hole.

I’m still not a fan.

I have a list:
Vampires
Werewolves
Rabies (maybe from the Werewolves?)
CJD
Going to the loo at night (bed wetter until I was about 10-11!)
Spontaneous Human Combustion (read the Fortian Times too much)
Possession (as in I would be possessed overnight)
Parents dying and not understanding how taxes worked and ending up in prison (l was 13/14 at the time)
I was a rather scared child but bizarrely I am quite tough as an adult and very few things scare me now...maybe I got it all out of my system!

Werewolves, from being very small. I have absolutely no idea where that fear came from, I was never exposed to anything to do with them. No horror films, neither of my parents were into that, no scary books, just Beatrix Potter, Enid Blyton and my Rupert annuals. It was like I had a inbuilt feeling that they existed. I was well into my teens when I read The Howling and it terrified me!

Tutankhamen lived under my bed.

The dalek that lived in my grandparents kitchen (it was the hot water tank).

I'm sorry, I know these things probably traumatized some of you as kids but I am chuckling reading them as some of them are quite funny.

Mine was my GMs back room after GF had been waked from in there (Irish). I didn't understand that he'd been taken out after I'd seen him in the coffin so I refused to ever go in the room as there was, obviously, still a dead body in there. I cried for hours when I had to have a sleepover and GM said I'd be in the spare room as I assumed I'd be lying next to dead grandfather. She had to take me in to show me the nicely made up spare room. Sans dead body.

I still slept in beside her that night though. Dead ghost grandad was now a whole new thing.

From the age of 3-5 I was terrified of the sound our gas or electricity meter made - it had a little wheel that span around inside it and made a sort of whirring noise. I was, for some reason, convinced it was the sound of a wolf breathing in the cupboard under the stairs and therefore I ran as fast as I could between rooms 🐺

I was terrified of my older brother's Jaguar sports bag, he had to threaten to put it in my bed and said it would turn into a real jaguar over night and kill me 😧.

Although, OP, I'm not sure your example is a particularly irrational fear as threadworms are really common in kids and their families and they're annoying and hard to get rid of. The eggs are spread by scratching bum and them getting under nails or onto surfaces/bedding/clothing etc and then into the mouth through biting nails etc, where they hatch in the small intestine and become worms. Of course they're not harmful, they just give you an itchy anus, but I had them three times as a child and once as an adult. Horrible gross things, eugh!

Waking up and finding that somehow I’d been transported to the moon 🤷‍♀️. I could clearly envisage seeing planet Earth a looooong way away and being terrified,

I was a very over imaginative child……..

For some reason I always had a fear of being left on the bus and not being able to find my way home.

Also hated walking over bridges, I was convinced I'd fall through the see through parts.