What were you afraid of when you were young?

Oh Brad,What a great topic!With me it was more a case of what wasn't I afraid of. I remember when I was about 3 my dad got me a wind up hillbilly. He only wound it up once. It scared my feet out of my socks and I cried for ages.At around the same age we went on holiday to a Scottish island called Gigha (or something like that) and in our cottage, upstairs, behind a weird little curtain, was a pipe. That's right: I was scared of a piece of plumbing. I think it was the curtain that did it - somehow it was like it was hiding. Whenever my parents want to remind me I'm a weirdo they bring this up.When I was a bit older I found out about vampires. These were the bane of my life until my teens. When I was about eight it seemed as though every nightmare was about my friends and family being "turned". I also developed an unhealthy idea that one of my parents siamese cats was a vampire, and so I was always rather careful around him. Also I used to mentally draw lines out from my parents copy of Dracula on the shelf (vertically, horizontally and in-and-outally) and when I was going around the house by myself I used to duck, jump and sidestep so that I wouldn't cross any of the lines, and presumably, wake the beast.I was really afraid of the dark, because I had got a ghost book when I was about eight, which had this very specific photo (probably quite famous in ghost hunting circles, and probably also a fake I realise now) of a hideous looking monk ghost in a church. I was always afraid I was going to meet him in the dark.Also when I was a kid my room seemed to creak and ping so much that I was convinced there was something malevolent creeping around to get me. I used to picture this thing with a face the size of a dinner plate and a huge sausage smile. Eww. I don't think it ever did though, thankfully.Also deep water, though that's something I've only started noticing in the last ten years.Ah, that's better. Thanks for letting me get it off my chest.

It does a bit... I should really have offered a bit more explanation. It was about 6 inches tall, plastic but wearing felt clothes. Dungarees. It was a gnomish looking man with a little cigar in its mouth, a crazy smile and closed eyes. When you wound him up a little wobble mechanism in his feet made it shuffle along while making a shrill "unwinding" sound.I can't say that it causes me sleepless nights but at the time I had never seen anything quite so repulsive. Which, I suppose, goes some way to demonstrating what a great early childhood I had!

Oh totally - they are seriously weird animals (in a good way). I just meant that it was unhealthy in the sense that of all the creatures to develop an intense distrust of, it took more effort than most because I was in the same place as it nearly all the time!

Its weird - with these fears there's always a a trick or ritual that enables you to overcome the projected malevolent force. If you pay the right dues then you can control it, or least keep it at bay.When you look at it like that its almost a mechanism for finding comfort. There may be many things in your life that you can't control and that leave you scared and unhappy, but at least you can stop the bipedal wolves or the blood-sucking bat-devils from draining your essence.Mmm. Essence.

I'm totally with you on the prepubescent dream-hell. I can still remember many of my nightmares from childhood, including my "first" and "second" nightmares (that's what I thought of them as at the time anyway) from when I was three. They are still quite creepy to me when I think about them.My first nightmare began with me and my father in some strange museum (I was crazy about the Natural History museum in London at the time), going down some steps. It was made from a rough yellow stone, and at the bottom were some dessicated heads hung high up on the wall. When we got to the bottom, there was a turn into this huge gallery room with an impossibly high ceiling. It was all empty except for a little glass case right in the middle. There were hardly any people in the room, and it was very cold. Anyway, in the case there was a white ghost, translucent and with a really unhappy expression on its face. It wasn't looking at me but seemed rather to be experiencing some unimaginable private grief. That moment seemed to stretch on for ages, with the cold and the ghost and the sadness.This all sounds pretty cool, but in fact there is one thing that always undermines the story when I try to tell it to people - the ghost looked almost identical to a Pac-man ghost. I had obviously just been introduced to the idea of ghosts after going to an arcade and then asking what the villains were! Ah well. Young minds. Like sponges they are.

That stuff fascinates me. How the hell do you get into that line of work?