at home

Oh oh, when I was little my mom and dad told me that our garage door could be opened either by pressing the button, or counting to ten. For years I counted to ten to open the door. When I started learning Arabic, the door stopped opening until I counted to ten in Arabic.

At a friend's party when i was really young, his father played us some humpback whale songs - very creepy to a youngster! I said some emboldening thing like "ah, who's afraid of a whale!" the father said, "I am. they can come through the tap into your bathtub!" How I cried!

I used to think there was a set of disembodied skeletal hands under my bed, lying in wait to grab me by the ankles. I had to take a run down the hall and fling myself into bed from the doorway in order to avoid them.

The monster under the bed stayed with me until my teens, but I'd steel myself to walk in front of my bed.

The monster finally left when my bedroom was moved into the basement. I think I'll be seeing it again when I have kids.

When I was six, in order to keep me from climbing the railing on the 3rd story appartment balcony, my mother showed me a package of hamburger meat and told me I'd look like this if I fell off.

I would contemplate the precipice and try to imagine myself as a little pile of hamburger.

As a child I couldn't sit on the edge of my bed. I lived in constant fear of a ghostly hand snapping out from underneath and grabbing my ankle. I used to stand up on the bed and leap to safety.

Also, I knew never to turn my back to a window at night as the monsters would break through and grab me from behind.

When I was about two years old, I no longer slept in a crib, but on the bottom bunk of a wooden bunk bed my parents got me. I saw two "faces" in the wood, on opposite sides of the bed. One was good, the other (who I named Dun-dun, as I still remember) was evil. I also used to wake up in the middle of the night, and since it was dark, I couldn't see which was the open side of the bed (there was solid wood at the head and foot, and one side was against the wall). Feeling every side but the open side, I screamed, thinking the bed had closed up and sealed me inside.

Long, long ago, sometime before I was in first grade, I'd occasionally watch the Dungeons and Dragons cartoon. There was one episode where a little boy got out of bed in the middle of the night. The floor around the bed started glowing, and he got sucked underneath and into whatever alternate dimension the cartoon took place in. For quite a while, I was afraid that if I stepped too close to my bed, the same thing would happen to me, so I'd jump on or off to avoid that 2-foot buffer of floor space. I can't remember what made me figure out that there was nothing unusual about my floor. I just stopped doing that one day, I guess.

As a kid, I believed duct tape was in fact called "duck tape," although I don't think I ever tried to rationalize that with any bizarre belief.

When I was small I was afraid of bath tubs that didn't have a screen on the drain hole. In the back of my mind I was afraid that I would get a toe stuck or something scary would come out and get me.

When I was little I was afraid of monsters at night. I thought they would crawl out from under my bed and eat any of my body parts that were not covered up by blankets except for my head. I figured that monsters wouldn't want to eat someone's head.

As a child, I used to believe that if I wasn't completely covered all the way up to my neck with the blanket, little men in big russian hats with clevers would decend on me and chop up my body. And take them back to a big fat king who turned the body parts into gold. I have no idea where this idea came from, but it had me tightly under the covers for many years.

I used to believe there were witches under my bed, and that if I lay exactly in the middle and didn't hang my arms over the side, they couldn't reach me, because they couldn't get out from under the bed.

I used to believe that the water overflow in the bath had some connection to some kind of water police. If enough water went down, the water police would be contacted and an emergency water van sent to your house. I was terrified of splashing any water down it as it might result in the water police surprising me whilst I took my bath.

When I was young my older sister told me that if I took a shower the fireman from the brave little toaster would come out and kill me. I took baths for a long time

I used to believe that a monster lived underneath the blankets at the foot of my bed and if I put my feet too far down it would bite my feet. I always slept near the top of the bed.

In the shower, when the water dripped down the drain, the light caught it in such a way that it looked like eyes glowing back at me. For years, I thought there was a frog living in the pipes beneath the shower.