at home

When I was about 5 years old, we moved into a new house. It had a big room with a built in bar. When we had our house warming, my (older) cousin told me that the bar used to be an actual pub, where people came to drink. He said that they had to close it down because someone was murdered there, and buried in the wood panelling on the walls...

As if that wasn't scary enough, a few years later (I was around 9) my family went to Paris. My sister and I had our portraits sketched and my dad hung them in the dining room, on the other side of the wall with the "body". The eyes of the portraits used to follow me around the room, and i thought that the ghost of the murdered man was watching me through my own picture! For years i couldn't walk through those rooms alone if the light was off!

when i was little i used to belive that if i got to close to my bed at nite little garden nomes would come out from under my bed and shoot me in the ankle with an arrow.

i used to believe that there was a witch at the end of my bed, that would come out at night and try drag me away. since then i have not been able to sleep with my legs straight.

I used to love sloshing about in the bathtub, but I thought that if I overdid it, I would summon up "the Kraken", a huge, blood-red octopus with fangs. So, whenever I thought that i might be sloshing uncontrollably, I would hop out for a minute or two.

I used to think that there were foxes under my bed, and that if you had a hand or foot hanging off the edge they would drag you under the bed and eat you. the only way to beat them was to jump off the end of the bed and make it out the door. I'm in my 20s now and I still don't sleep with any part of me hanging off the edge of my bed!

As many kids, I believed that monsters lived under my bed. But since they never came out, I figured that God had put a force-feild under my bed and that they could not escape, so I sometimes taunted them by putting my hands down just next to my bed.

I was about eight years old when the towers had been hit and the search was on for Osama Bin Laden. One night, as my parents and I sat down for the news, a man came on the air and said "we have looked everywhere for him." I was stunned. I knew they had missed a spot: under my bed. For months after that I was scared to death of going anywhere near my bed because i was convinced it was Osama Bin Laden's hiding spot.

When i was little I used to seriously believe that Frankenstein lived in my closet. Every night I looked in the way back (where there was a small crawl space) and never saw anything, but I insisted that he came out after the lights came out. Then my dad told me that Frankenstein is over 7 feet tall and couldn't possibly live in the closet, So I thought he must be able to magically shrink and needed to get out and stretch at night!

I used to believe that during thunderstorms the boogieman was in my closet. For some reason I had a mental image of him looking like a mummy, wrapped in bandages. No wonder I slept with my mom as a kid.

I used to believe that if you touched the breaker box in your house, you would disintegrate into a big pile of ashes. My parents had told me never to touch it & that was what would happen. When I was 24, my husband's grandpa came over and was for whatever reason was about to open our breaker box. I started freaking out & told him not to touch it. He looked at me like I was crazy & asked why. I relayed to him what my parents had told me when I was young and he and my husband started laughing at me. (The breaker box had been in my room when I was a kid and since I had never had any dealings with one when I was older, still didn't know any different.)

I used to believe that the flying monkees from the Wizard of Oz lived in the closet at the top our stairs. Every time I would go down, I would try to go at least two at a time so they would not get me.

I had a nightmare one day that there was a man hiding in my closet and no one believed me and he ended up killing my entire family. For a couple of months I made sure to put various objects around the knobs of my closet to tie it shut. I however still can't sleep with the closet open.

When I was little I was watching a movie (can't remember what movie now) in which a man tells a story about mirrors. He says when he was kid he was sitting on the toilet in a bathroom that two mirror facing each other. So he started to count the reflections back. When he got to around the 17th reflection he saw a little troll waving at him. I'm 31 yrs old now and even to this day I will not look into the continued reflections whenever I look in mirrors that face each other

When I was about six, I used to believe that ceiling fans had two settings; hot air and cool air. I thought that if it was spinning one way, it produced a nice breeze, but in reverse it would spit out warm air. Sounded like a good theory.

When I was little, I thought that vacuums were for smoothing out the carpets, not cleaning them. Whenever my mom would vacuum I would tread as lightly as I could across the carpets because I didn't want to ruin them.

I remember I used to always think that the wetsuit that my dad kept in my closet was a person waiting to get me the minute I fell asleep.This must have been when I was really little, I think this must have been when I got my first "big girl bed" because I couldn't see the closet from where my crib had been. I remember lying in bed too afraid to move staring at that dark humanoid shape until I would finally pass out. I would go into the closet fearlessly during the light of day and knew that the shape I saw at night was the wetsuit but I must have thought it transformed after dark, once the bedroom door was shut. I'm still freaked when alone somewhere, I check every closet in my apartment each time I come home so I guess I was destined to be paranoid from a young age.

I used to believe that there were monsters under my bed and in my closet. The monsters under the bed were bad monsters who would get me but the monsters in my closet were good and would protect me from the bed monsters so I always had to have the closet door open when I went to bed.

When i was little, i used to make sure my arms and legs wouldn't hang off the bed because i was scared that if they did, then whatever was living under my bed would grab me in my sleep