To think all children have strange fears and worries ( or was i just an anxious child)

[Mygotupandgowent]

Can anyone else remember having unreasonable ( but not at the time) worries and beliefs as a child?
I heard someone mention " the gates of heaven" recently and it brought back my fears as a child. I imagined the gates of heaven as like my dad's workshop with a small door inset into the bigger ones. It had a small hatch to look out of. I was afraid that Saint Peter would look out when I knocked and not look down and see me as I was ( and am) very small.i didn't tell anyone but I was so afraid!
I also thought that time passed faster as the hands came down the half hour on the clock and went slower on the way up to the hour. The teacher tried so hard to teach me to tell the time and I never once mentioned my theory.

At 2 I was scared of a hedgehog under my bed. A bit older I had to run downstairs after I flushed the toilet in case a shark came out. I was also scared of ice ages, wars and global warming. And pandemics.

Cats in Spain. I'd been shouted at sternly not to pet them as they may have rabies and for some reason I became scared to go to the loo in case they might pop out and bite me on the bum and give me rabies.

I was frightened of sleeping with my head outside of the covers (ie, like a normal person!). I decided I was ‘safe’ if I slept under the covers with just a tiny gap to see out of.
I did this until I was about 13 😂

Yes
terrible superstitions and OCD intrusive thoughts
a lot of counting
worries about a friend not giving a hook back and worrying intensely for months about the cost my parents paid for the book (£4) although my mum said it’s nothing

so much more. But it wasn’t nice

now I lay me down to sleep
I pray the Lord my soul to keep
if I should die before I wake
I pray the Lord my soul to take

My auntie as a child had embroidered this with a little picture and my sis and I ended up with it (can't think why auntie didn't want it). It seemed perfectly normal to us back then...

We did, however, send ourselves into paroxysms by spoonerising it. "Lay the prord" makes me snort even now, over 4 decades later...

Ghosts. I was petrified of going up to bed by myself at home or anywhere else, but particularly at a GM’s house, where both a GF and a GGF had not long died. Both lovely old men so goodness knows why I was petrified of the mere idea seeing their ghosts! But I was.
I never told my parents, so my DM didn’t believe me when I told her years later.

I was terrified of flushing the toilet and used to think a shark would come out. Id have to make the preparations opening door etc and then id flush and absolutely leg it 🤣🤣

The Dead Elf:

My grandad came round to take out an old gas fire in front of a working chimney. In the fireplace there a stragely shaped pile of soot that looked like a tiny, potbellied humanoid. Buried in black ashes.

"That'll be an elf who came down here to listen to you ahead of Christmas." said Grandad.

I believed him for about half a minute then he took a dustpan and brush to it and I realised it was just a joke.

That flattened and bloody duck he took care to point out to me on the way back from the park was real though.

God bless him.

I thought the flowers on my wallpaper were actually witches.... So would sleep under blankets always🤣 . I also watched invasion of body snatchers way too young but knew id know straight away if my mother was replaced as the replacement would be nicer🤣. I was an odd child tbf!

I had the Matthew, Mark, Luke and John cross stitch embroidery in my bedroom as well! And Sarah Kay wallpaper and duvet cover.

Mr Jeremy Fisher was the Beatrix Potter book I would just open from time to time to scare myself with.

I was not much of a worrier in childhood; I was the opposite, and I often sneered at the worries of my younger brother, of which he had many. On a plane, a nearby passenger asked him to stop talking about all the things that might go wrong, because he was making her nervous. I didn't worry about things, but I got angry about injustices a lot as a child, some of which had no bearing on me. With reading fiction, I knew (with pride) that it was fantasy, so I didn't worry about things in books really happening to me. I remember being made to watch the news regularly before starting secondary school, and I noticed how full of terrible things it was; again, I got angry about them, but didn't often worry about them happening to me.

However, I did have certain individual worries. I used to worry about being sent to prison. When I read Jacob Two-Two meets the Hooded Fang aged 7, I knew it was fiction, and really exaggerated, but I was able to imagine a "children's prison" after reading it. We saw a stage play of it as well.

@KeeleyJ At my school, they sat us down to tell us that the Gulf War was not going to be a war like we learned about with WW2, and the horrors that went with it. I was 11 at the time.

I was terrified of The Russians and Nuclear war. I was also terrified of electricity pylons and quicksand. A child of the 70/80’s

@Redheadedstepchild Ah, Jeremy Fisher. Are you thinking of the scene where Jeremy is almost eaten by a trout, who dives to the bottom of the pond with him, and only spits him out because he dislikes the taste of Jeremy's macintosh? I remember reading that as a child, but not feeling any fear at all. I almost feel I missed out on loving reading because I often didn't feel the characters' emotions, while reading a book. I didn't empathise with characters in a book until I was a young adult.

I had fears of certain odd things, though. Some of them were:
Seeing a toilet with the seat up: it looked like an open-mouthed monster, and right on my eye level.
Balloons, because they might bang. I'm still nervous of them.
I sometimes wore shoes without socks because I liked the way it felt, but I was nervous of the things people had told me might happen to my feet: my toes would disappear, or my shoes would walk away without me.

Child of the 70's. I saw a couple of really scary documentaries and TV dramas about this, mostly focusing on people smuggling animals in from abroad who had it. I wouldn't touch any animals when abroad (still wouldn't), and I didn't want to touch any strange dogs in the UK in case they had been smuggled in and had it.

@scalt Well, you've told me more about the storyline of Jeremy Fisher than I can remember. I just disliked him from the first.

As regards the Gulf War, by the time that happened, I had completely forgot that I was supposed to go blind and was doing CCF at school as part of the RAF section. Of course, flying a Tornado jet aircraft would require a certain amount of visual acuity but I wasn't going to let details like wearing bottle glasses stand in my way.

They have operations for that. Lasik. Oh yeah, here comes the Red. With her wonky eyes and not being able to tell left from right, I was clearly an asset to NATO. I'd been in Gypsy Moth in Southport without throwing up.

I just really wanted to fly a Tornado.

I once thought a poster of a cartoon animal on my wall turned into the image of an old man with a monocle. I was so scared, for the rest of my childhood (and well into adulthood) I had to sleep facing the other way. At night I also had to hold my breath, close my eyes and stay very still when I heard an aeroplane go overhead until the sound had completely faded away. Same with going through tunnels in the car - I would have to hold my breath till we got out the other side. I can’t remember why and I never told anyone, but it was very important at the time. I was also terrified of mannequins in shops, but that’s more understandable I think. I was also a bit scared of the angel that ‘watches’ in the prayer ‘there are 4 corners to my bed’ even though I did appreciate that my kind mum would say it to me at bedtime to help dispel my fears.

One which is not mine, but I've seen it on other threads: nuns or priests have told children that they had a "calling from God" to become a nun or vicar; and children are then afraid of being "called" in the same way.

I used to arrange my teddies on a bed like a display (bed literally covered with teddies organised carefully and neatly according to size etc) and then slip very carefully in under the covers, arranging the teddies on top of my body, and sleep completely covered like that. So that if a murderer came in, he would think it was just a spare room/play room with an empty bed that someone had displayed their teddies on.

I used to search in my wardrobe, behind curtains and under my bed before I could sleep.

I learned about WW2 at school and packed an emergency bag with some clean underwear and snacks and a toothbrush and hid it in the woods near my house so I could go and live there should Nazi Germany ever decide to bomb my hometown.

I was terrified of comets hitting the earth and couldn't look at the sky at night at all. Convinced that if I looked up, i'd see the comet plummeting towards me.

I used to leave notes for the ghosts in my house to gather if they were friendly or not. "Are you a ghost? Yes / No. Are you friendly? Yes / No."

Spontaneous combustion! How did I forget this? I was absolutely petrified of spontaneously combusting. Convinced the chances were pretty high. I worried about that a lot.

I never saw Braveheart but a kid at school told me there was a scene where a man on a horse leaps through a window into a house? (Still never saw the movie so can't confirm if this happened). I lost sleep for a LONG time, laying awake staring at my window, terrified that a man on a horse would burst through. I remember that so vividly.

As a young child my fear was War. I knew there was ‘war’ in Ireland and Ireland was very close so it was only a matter of time before we got it too. It astonished me that no one else seemed concerned about this, no matter how many times I tried to alert them to the absolute certainty that it was going to happen.

Then as a teenager in the late 70s/early 80s, it was nuclear war. For some reason my school seemed very set on showing us terrifying films (‘Threads’ anyone?), and I vividly remember being in an upstairs restaurant in Plymouth looking out and knowing that everything I could see would soon be obliterated. We were given facts like how the people within a certain distance of a nuclear bomb would die instantly, but those within a further distance would have their eyeballs melt and pour down their faces, that sort of thing. Thanks, school.

@Lucieintheskywithdiamonds yeah I forgot about spontaneous combustion! Same with me. I’d always see that photo of that old woman’s leg that was the only thing to survive the flames

Falling in to a deep sleep and being buried alive! This was after reading that some burials (admittedly a couple of hundred years ago) were premature and scratch marks were found inside coffins 😮

A parent passing out at the wheel and me having to steer the car to safety. I practised in my head a lot.

Ditto the car driving into water and having to escape.

Yes, I remember teachers being graphic about it. I remember being shown footage of a mushroom cloud and then the teacher telling us about how, if we survived the blast, we'd die slowly of radiation poisoning. It would be a nuclear winter anyway, nothing would grow, so if the blast and radiation didn't get you, you'd starve to death.
And then Chernobyl happened and I realised we didn't need a war for the nightmare nuclear scenario to happen. Great, now I lay awake wondering if Hinckley Point was going to blow up...

I had a copy of Baba Yaga that terrified me so much I hid it face down under the middle of my bed, to prevent it being read to me. It made me shake and feel physically sick when I saw it.

I was also genuinely convinced, aged about 6, that there was a witch who lived under the big bed of the caravan we lived in, who would grab and eat me should my feet touch the floor of the caravan. I made way way about it by climbing for months until my mum sold it for something different. Honestly and truly believed it.

Then thought there was similarly a monster in my grandparents bedroom when we moved in with them, so would sprint past it without looking at the doorway (it was oddly fine if my grandparents were in there. And fine in the tiny adjoining room. Just the empty bedroom doorway).

I also had monster delusions when I was under extreme stress as an adult. I did have a very stressful life as a child, and I can pinpoint times of trauma to these delusions. I have often wondered if it was childhood whimsy or an actual mental health issue that was missed. My mum was a violent addict and kept nearly dying, so there were lots of things that were missed...