Happy October, nearing Halloween and Nanowrimo...both scary
themes for me.
Which is why I'm asking our Musers...what scared you as a
child. You know those are the fears that stick with us, even if only in
memories.
When I was a child, my grandmother lived with us. I had the
bedroom next to hers and the entrance to a concrete storm cellar (built because
of her fear of storms) was right outside my windows. It had a heavy steel door,
rigged with a hanging weight to make it easy to operate.
After I got to high school, I'd stay up late, reading. One
night I heard the weight move, scraping against the concrete walls next to the
steps like someone was outside, opening or closing the door. It never happened
unless everyone was in bed, asleep, and it didn't start happening until after
my Grandmother died.
As a little girl, my family lived at my old house down the
street. It's white, two stories, and generally cute. Built in the 20s or 40s
(positively ancient to a six-year-old), its stone basement is cramped, damp,
and interwoven with enough hanging spiders to tie up and suck the life out of
any child. It would flood. If we needed winter coats/boots/etc., we'd have to
tramp down the rickety wooden stairs, gagging on must, and reach up on tiptoe
to yank the lone, hanging bare bulb on its chain. When I was REALLY little, the
door concealing the basement was this narrow, sickly yellow thing with one of
the old locks you'd yank into its recess in the frame and then twist into
place. Our only bathroom at the time was downstairs...directly across from the
door. Imagine being a child and having to pee in the dead of night! I'd flip on
ALL the lights: hallway, living room, bathroom, and sometimes even keep the
door wide open so I could make sure the basement door wasn't creaking open and
some sinister monster wasn't waiting in the shadows to claim me. Then I'd
flush, wash my hands, and flip off lights while scampering as fast as I could
back upstairs because, as all children know, as soon as you turn off the
light's you are free game. We also had a barrel, in the basement, that
reputedly had been there even before the previous owner. Smallish and sitting
on a wooden stand in a far corner, it wasn't very terrifying. But we never
opened it. Not even as teenagers. We joked how, if we DIDN'T open it, it would
be filled with gold, treasure, old clothes. But then we'd remember stories of
people finding old wine casks, drinking them dry, and then finding a preserved
body hidden in the dregs. Surely it held a curse, a demon, a child's corpse. I
was about seventeen or sixteen when we moved, I think, and my entire family
joked about cracking the thing open. We never did.
The door to the cellar was in the kitchen. We kept it shut
so we wouldn't smell the musty odor. Heavy, prolonged rain flooded it and the
concrete walls and floor kept in the chilly dampness. One ceiling bulb couldn't
brighten the room. I wasn't just afraid of the cellar. I was afraid of walking
down the staircase. They weren't just steep, they were opened on one side. I
was a temptation to whatever evil lived under those stairs. A tasty morsel
waiting to be grabbed.
Funny story about the cellar...
Senior year in high school, my parents were out of town and
I had a couple of girlfriends spending the night. Of course, we invited some
guy friends to hang out. It's late, we're watching The Shining, Jack Nicholson
is terrifying his wife when suddenly the house goes dark. I mean pitch black,
no electricity. We screamed, and it wasn't just us girls either. I'm sure it
was only a minute or so, before the lights and TV came on but it felt longer.
Turned out one of the guys thought it'd be funny to sneak into the cellar and
flip the breaker. Ha! We laughed once our hearts stopped racing.
What didn’t scare me is more accurate. I was afraid of
spiders, snakes, heights, strangers, clowns, creepy crawlies, dark places, and
sleep walking and waking up in the pitch dark basement. I’m sure there’s more.
The sad thing is most all of these things still bother me. At least I don’t
sleepwalk anymore. Of course I have new fears as an adult, because I have more
knowledge about the dangers in the world. I suppose my biggest fear (or maybe
anxiety is a better word) is something happening to my teenage daughter with
autism.
I graduated college in 1989. I still sometimes have nightmares
about showing up for class unprepared, or getting to finals without ever having
attended class. At least now I have enough control over my dreaming that I tell
myself, still asleep, “Shut up, you graduated. You have a degree. School is
done.”
Top fear – worries about my daughter. Second place, still
those bleeping clowns.
My parents and I lived in a three storey house with a
basement and attics. My cosy bedroom was on the top floor. I used to kiss my
mother goodnight, then go upstairs on my own where I would sit on a stair on
the flight below the one leading to my bedroom, frightened because there was no
light to guide me up those last stairs. Finally, I would pluck up my courage,
dash up to my bedroom door, open it and terrified of the witch, who I imagined
lived under my bed, literally jump up onto the comfortable mattress and bury my
head under the blankets.
It was no use turning on the bedroom light before I got into
bed because I couldn't sleep with it on. If I had switched it on before I
settled I would have had to get out of bed, cross the floor with the phantom
witch at my heels to turn off the switch.
Years later, I told my mother about my fear. Her reply. 'If
you had asked your father would have installed a light on the third floor and I
would have put a lamp by your bed.'
What really scared me as a child was not usually anything
"real", but movies...like the villains from Disney movies. I was
mortally afraid of the organ from the Beauty and the Beast Christmas movie, as
well as the witch from Snow White during and after she turns into a hag. I used
to have nightmares with her chasing me, and I still remember two of them
vividly. There was also a horror movie called The Others that I watched at a friend's
sleepover, and I was afraid of that for years. Even now, I don't watch horror
movies, because I get scared too easily!
What really scared me as a child? Night. Dark. Loud voices.
Loud voices in the night.
I gave the antagonist in "Broken Bonds" my
night/dark phobia.
No, I don't sleep with a night light. I like to sleep with
it totally dark, though I'm perfectly capable of dozing off with the light on.
What scared me as a child? The great, black, unknown.
Falling down a rabbit hole, like Alice, and never hitting bottom. The sound of
my parents fighting on the other side of my bedroom wall. It wasn't until much
later that I developed a fear of graduate school mathematics exams; for years
after I was out of grad school, I dreamed I walked into a calculus exam for
which I had done no studying {shudder}.
Here's one of my many night-themed poems:
Winter Night
A silver sliver of slender moon
hangs high in a darkening sky.
Barren branches of empty trees
watch moonbeams as they waft by.
Broken breeze blows through empty trees.
Dead foliage flutters and flies.
Echoing dark swallows the light
of stars that flicker and hide.
A few clouds float across bright stars.
There is no light to see
a trail that twists through lonely woods
thick with layers of leaves.
Icy branches heavily droop
down over a rambling road.
A few break off and fall to earth.
A gale continues to blow.
Flakes of snow sail slowly down
to cover lanes and fields.
Fog drifts slowly across the ground
but no one is there to see.
Oh boy, you're reaching, aren't you? *laughs* Okay, okay,
I'll reach. The dead walking...zombies... As a child, my family lived a couple
blocks from a cemetery. We couldn't play in the yard without seeing the back
corner of the cemetery and it's stones. Luckily, it was the newer section, so
the deceased weren't...well, that deceased. Unfortunately for me, that was the
shortest distance to school every day and the way I walked. So, I would start
at the newer addition and work my way toward the older/oldest part as I got
closer to school. Needless to say, when it was still dark in the mornings, I
hated walking that way. It was creepy! I couldn't keep my imagination from
running wild and taking off in the direction of the dead climbing from their
resting places and walking out of the cemetery.
Now, they say to overcome your fear confront them. As a
teenager I did. Sadly...those experts didn't know what they were talking about.
I DID NOT overcome my fear of zombies and the dead walking until I was a grown
adult with children of my own. However, on a side note...my imagination is
still wild and if I let it run away, well, I'd be curled up in a ball crying my
eyes out each night I watch a horror movie in the dark.
The movie Jaws did it for me. We have a local lake/beach
where is pretty much only reaches your waist forever. Mom and I don't swim but
we walked out and out and out, till I started to look around and think Jaws.
Yup, hightailed it back to shore.
Then there was going to see Amityville Horror for the first
time...the first movie...spent the last 15-20 minutes with eyes closed and
fingers stuck in my ears. Would you know it, I had rearranged my bedroom that
day, so now my bed was smack in the middle of the room with no walls to protect
my back. Yup, bad night for sleeping.
Mostly though my fear as a child was losing those around me
or being lost from them.
And spiders...any multi-legged thingy.
Dear
reader, thank you again for joining us and we’d love to hear from you. Keep
smiling and have a fun week. Never stop believing. See you next Sunday…nothing
better than being cozy in bed with some Musings.
If you have a question or comment you’d like us to muse upon, do not hesitate to contact me Christine Steeves-Speakman at MuseChrisChat@gmail.com
