Irrational childhood fears

[mstattersall]

>Since it's Halloween season and time to talk of all things scary, 
here's a topic.  What basically harmless things scared you as a 
child?   

General Irrational Fear: When I was very small, I was out in the car 
with the P&M and we were forced to stop between two train tracks 
while trains whizzed by in both directions, in front of us and behind 
us. We were in absolutely no danger, but the noise and motion scared 
me half to death and I think I screamed loud enough to drown out the 
trains. I could not even approach train tracks, in a car, on foot or 
on a bicycle, without serious trepidation, until I was an older 
teenager.

Halloween-based Irrational Fear: At about age 9 or 10, around 
Halloween, I got some plastic models of the Mummy and the Wolfman 
classic film characters (the kind of plastic models you had to 
assemble, like cars or airplanes, with that delicious glue you can no 
longer buy). I put them together and admired my handiwork, then read 
the stories that came in the boxes with the plastic parts. The 
stories creeped me out so bad that I imagined that the Mummy and/or 
the Wolfman would come to life in the middle of the night and kill me 
horribly, like in the stories. I crammed the models back into their 
boxes and threw them into the storm drain at the end of the block.

When they crawl out of the Gulf of Mexico with 40 years worth of 
seaweed on them, they gonna be lookin' for me.
Ms. Tattersall,
watching her back!