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.

The war was in the UK, worse again.

Oh my God OP how long have you got?! Off the top of my head:

I was afraid of the windscreen wipers on my dad's old car (whiney noise and very quick)

I was afraid of my nans hoover (ancient Kerby)

I was afraid of my other nans cuckoo clock (even though i'd never seen it working!) I think it had antlers sticking out the top which was very awful.

I was afraid of bears. I would even freak out about the xmas carol 'The Holly Bears A Berry' because - and i quote 4 year old me - ''i don't like the holly bears!!''.

I was scared of the woods. Or even more than 3 or 4 trees all together because - bears.

I believed there was something living in my nans woodshed which only came out at night.

I could see 'bubbles' floating round my room at night. From even in my cot i remember this. I remember asking my mum about them and she (clearly not knowing what to say) said they were from her cooking downstairs. Which even as a 3 year old i knew was rubbish and really she didn't know. Maybe they were orbs?

I was massively anxious. Any situation I was in, I would be considering the ways that I could possibly die (e.g. the roof falling in or a car crashing through a shop window). I thought God was always watching me and could see me doing bad things so I felt guilty nearly all of the time (I’m catholic, if you can’t tell?). I would check underneath the toilet seat every single time because I’d once read that Black Widow spiders hide under there and that went on for years (I was in Ireland, nowhere near Australia!). I would tell my dad I loved him every time I even left the room because I was so scared he would die and he wouldn’t know I loved him. I once ran half a mile back to the house because I’d forgotten to tell him. All very deranged in hindsight but it felt so real and scary at the time.

Mainly, it was that evil spirits would snatch me away in my sleep.

Then, after watching the film The Fog where the ghosts came out between 12-1am, I tried my absolute hardest to get to sleep by 12, otherwise I was on high alert for ghosts and would be awake till 1am.

@Laiste my 5 year old dd has described seeing colourful bubbles. Mainly at night in her room. We have moved house since it started and it happens at our new house too. She said they aren't scary but a bit irritating.
did you ever work out what they were?

For ages after watching the Care Bears movie I was terrified of going upstairs (only had upstairs toilet) to the toilet on my own if no one else was upstairs as I was convinced that Processor Coldheart was going to be round the corner on the stairs.

Never told anyone this.

So many of these! Nuclear war, quicksand, the toilet flush at night.

@ContentedAlpaca there used to be a public information film that showed a car going into water, and advice about how to get out. Was pretty scary. Do you remember it?

As a teenager I was scared of my parents reactions to things.

Absolute terror at my mum & dad splitting up.
The fear came from ending up living with either of them because they were equally abusive & neglectful.
When they would fight & argue which was most days and nights, I would lay in bed hearing it all hours in utter terror.

I used to wonder why they couldn’t bottle the dark to examine it to see what made it so frightening!

The Yorkshire ripper scared the living daylights out of me s a child and also, and more so, the IRA. Bomb scares were frequent and scattered all over the country, could have been blown up any day of the week and any where.

My childhood was just day in day out terror, anxiety and being frightened of almost every adult I ever did or didn’t came into contact with.

Of course, in the 1970’s & 1980’s were completely and totally intolerant with zero awareness or concern with MH so I grew into an adult with these things in the past.

I don't think i was a particularly anxious child, but I had an overactive imagination and was scared of a LOT of things.

Apparently I used to get absolutely hysterical if a fly dared come into the garden.
I was terrified of men in leather, helpful in a family of bikers. My Dad and uncles used to have to remove their leathers in the porch before coming into the house.
Our local swimming pool had a wave machine, so the deep end had a grate rather than a solid wall. I was utterly convinced that a killer whale lived on the other side of the grate and refused to go anywhere near it.
I could hear the trains from my bedroom at night and always found them comforting. This was on the off chance everyone else in the world was dead, at least there was a train driver still alive.
I was scared of Guy Fawkes, in my head he was possibly Jack the Ripper, maybe a vampire, could be both. I think I learned about the 3 at a similar time so they became one entity in my head.

I hated walking through the local graveyard because my mum and brothers would tell me the ghosts would come and get me. I'd actually choose to walk around the graveyard on my own, even in the dark rather than take the shortcut through it. My mum actually still teases me about and can't seem to see that it was, in reality, quite abusive.

I'm sure there's more.

Me too, I was about the same age. It gave me nightmares for years and years and I wished I had never seen it. I was absolutely terrified of seeing him somewhere.

i still have a lot of childhood fears, due to very serious and complicated medical trauma I experienced.
For example the last thing I do before I go to bed is go for the toilet so I won’t wet the bed.
I am scared a black skeletal hand is going to come from under the bed and pull me out of bed to the darkness. Even if there’s stuff under there and even if I’m in bed with DH. I have to wrap the duvet around the edge of myself and basically lie on it.
I have a massive fear of the dark, especially up stairs, so if I have to go somewhere in the dark and only have a torch, I can totally freak out and have a panic attack.
But, as I said, mine is all connected to 3 year old toffee and her medically induced nightmares and invisible friends due to serious trauma

Honestly? <my tin hat is firmly on> with 40+ years of life behind me now i think they were orbs.

They looked exactly like a soap bubble would, but a bit bigger, tennis ball size? with gentle swirling colours sound a very very palely glowing clear globe. They would be moving slowly around the cot and later my bed. 3 or 4 at a time maximum. Sometimes just one or two. I wasn't afraid.

I hesitate to say this as it attracts the non woo thread police, but i've had A LOT of very odd (woo) things happen to me through my life. Maybe your DD, like most kids are IMO, is open to seeing orbs 😊

I did have some strange ideas as a child.

as an adult, I’ve noticed that none of the things ever worried about ever came true. Which might suggest that worrying was preventative or completely wasted

i mostly go for completely wasted.

My dad brought us all out to the back garden and set an old chip pan on fire to demonstrate how quickly it went up and how to extinguish it.
He was a bit of a pyromaniac and on another occasion he accidentally set fire to his own arm with petrol and was running around the garden in flames while we watched from the kitchen window in shock.
I remember him cursing at me for being too scared to hold a sparkler.
For some reason I had a terrible fear of going up in flames 🤨

As a young child, I most certainly did not believe in ghosts; I thought they belonged very strictly to fairy tales. However, I was astonished to learn (aged 10) that many people do believe very seriously in them, or claim to have seen them. My brother loved programmes such as "Strange but True", and had an Usborne book "All about ghosts", which discussed them very factually indeed. I did actually find some of the stories on "Strange but True" quite scary, and the reconstructions really convincing. After that, I kept an open mind, and I still do.

Well, if we are having a woo moment on the thread, there was a man in my GPs walk in cupboard where they kept the games. Every time I went in to get a game, there'd be someone there. Only just long enough for me to clock it, then it was gone. Every time I thought it was one of my uncles, even though there was no way it could have been, as I'd just left everyone to get the game.
It never scared me as such, I got the same jolt you get if you go in a room and aren't expecting anyone in there. I never mentioned it to anyone, never thought of it as a ghost, but years later, I have wondered. It was so long ago, I couldn't honestly say it happened every time I went in there, but I know it happened more than once.

What was your method? In our house it was a damp tea towel over the top of the pan.

@ObelixthegaulI do love a woo moment 🤣

And, while it might seem a bit of a thread derailment (sorry OP), for those who are not complete sceptics it's interesting to wonder how many childhood experiences dismissed as 'childish anxiety' were in fact a little bit real woo. The more open mind of a child.

I was absolutely terrified of a big cat escaping from a zoo or circus. I would live in fear of a circus coming to the area.

I spent a year when I was 10 convinced that I had some kind of brain disease and too scared to tell anyone because I could see slightly different colours with my left eye. It was the beginnings of short sightedness and astigmatism.

I used to run past bungalows on the way home from school because I only felt safe walking past houses. In those days Daleks couldn’t climb stairs so I reckoned I’d be able to run into the houses and go upstairs if they landed nearby.

Hmmm, there were scary things going on in my 70s childhood too, the Cold War and energy crises being 2 of them. I had nightmares about nuclear war as a child. I’m not a particularly anxious adult.

In my childhood, we had the very sad situation that a family my parents knew well had three children die in a house fire; at the time, there was a lot of publicity about smoke alarms, and this tragedy was in all the national newspapers. Of course, and with good reason, my parents went all out on smoke alarms, and fire escape plans. But oddly enough, I didn’t lose sleep worrying about fire at all; I was more frightened of the smoke alarm going off accidentally when food was burnt. Childhood priorities! I tend to worry about things like that as an adult instead.

Yes, the damp tea towel. That’s what the public service ads used to advise.
I think now they say you shouldn’t try to put it out yourself.