CHILDHOOD FRIGHTS

Reddit asked, “What is the silliest thing you were scared of as a child?” Some of the responses:
– “Tree sharks. Don’t know where that came from.”
– “The leg lamp from A Christmas Story still creeps me out.”
– “My granddad was blind. I was scared that I would catch blindness.”
– “I was scared I’d catch white hair if I slept on a pillow my great grandmother slept on.”
– “Ugly haircuts, and the people wearing them by extension. I cried on the first day of kindergarten because a boy with a bowl cut sat at my table.”
– “My mom told us the hazard lights button on the dashboard was a child eject button for kids fighting in the car.”
– “The scene in Look Who’s Talking, where he’s potty training and the toilet starts talking. I was terrified to go to the bathroom at night for years.”
– “I thought sniffling with a runny nose would fill my head with snot and kill me.”
– “Spontaneously combusting.”
– “When I was really little I thought skim milk was ‘skin milk’ and thought there would be lumps of skin in it.”
– “There’s a superstition in my home country that says if someone steps over you, you won’t grow anymore — and that person must step over you again to reverse the curse. I used to freak out if someone stepped over me and would chase them down to make sure they stepped back over me.”
– “Our great-grandmother lived with us as a caregiver, she was Slovenian. She used to tell us to behave or the dzaba – pronounced Jabba- would get us. We were genuinely afraid of this thing. Gramma died, my older sister went to college and signed up for Slovenian as an elective. First day of class, she told the above story and the professor told her dzaba means frog.”
* PHONE TOPIC: What were you scared of as a child?