Who's Afraid Of The Big Bad Wolf?

I don't know where my irrational fears come from, but I have had plenty throughout my life time. When I was 11, I was afraid that if I stood too close to the road, the rear bumper of a passing car (when they used to be metal and just sort of hooked around the side) would simultaneously rip off both my knee caps. Yeah. Not like that's messed up or anything. Where does a fear like that even come from?

Then, along came my lovely fingernail/toenail phobia (which still exists today). Damaged, bloody, bruised, broken nails are just the epitomy of disgusting to me and cause me to start sweating profusely.

Somewhere between the kneecaps and the fingernails came my intense fear of birds or any winged things larger than a housefly. It's a combination of the unpredictable flight patterns and the fluttering of the wings that send me into similar movements of flapping my arms and shrieking while covering my head and trying to run for cover.

For the longest time, Bloody Mary ruled my world of fears. Some stupid girl in grade six told a bunch of us grade two girls (in the bathroom at recess) about Bloody Mary and how, when you turn out the lights and say her name three times, she appears. This stupid girl also told us how Bloody Mary is always watching you through the mirror...especially from the mirror on your dresser while you sleep and that she's just waiting and begging for you to say her name so she can step through the mirror and wreak havoc on our world. For the next two years, I slept with a massive stuffed animal (I'm talking the jumbo win-me-for-only-$100-worth-of-tries at the fair kind of massive) on my bed, protecting me from having to see the mirror. I even tucked this stuffed animal under my sheets so that it wouldn't roll off the bed. To this day, I cannot cannot cannot look into a mirror in the dark. Maybe someday I'll be able to say Bloody Mary's name into the mirror and finally discover whether or not that grade six girl was full of shit.

While some these fears are strange and unfounded, my weirdest fear has to be the ones associated with the outhouse at my parents' cabin. Although we now have an indoor bathroom, for ten years we all used the outhouse (or "biffy" as we call it). My first fear was that there was a skeleton hiding in the hole. But this wasn't just any skeleton - he was a skeleton wearing a black, feather boa around his neck and he was going to poke his finger into my bum cheeks if I took too long. Needless to say, my bid-ness never took very long.

My second fear was that there was a man standing to the right of the outhouse (the path to the cabin immediately goes to the left when you step out). But not just any man...he was wearing a black trench coat and a black fedora/wide brimmed hat. And as soon as the door would swing closed behind me, he would start walking up the path to try and catch me. So, in order to slow down this crazy trench coated man (because evil can never be stopped, right? It just keeps slowly walking behind you until you trip and sprain your ankle), I would open the door to a 90 degree angle and let the hinges slowly pull it closed while I ran like a bat out of hell back up the path. I am very pleased to say that the man in the trench coat never caught up to me...but I'm sure I felt his breath on my neck a few times :-)