Halloween Fears

In honor of the upcoming Halloween holiday, and my recent adventures at Frightmares, I have decided to post about some of my fears. Now I have always been a scaredy-cat. That’s just the truth of it. Even when I was a little girl I was abnormally scared of things. To give you an example, the day I found out that Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny weren’t real was the happiest day of my life. You see, my Dad, being the wonderful Dad he is, used to spend the night before Easter putting little bunny prints (made of baking powder) all over our house that my brother and I would then follow in the morning to find our hidden Easter baskets. One year my Dad made the horrific mistake of putting some of those prints in my bedroom. Well they got a lovely surprise Easter morning of my blood-curdling scream as I woke to find the bunny prints near my bed and pictured a six foot tall satanic bunny looming over me only a few hours earlier. Needless to say, those bunny prints stayed far, FAR away from my room in future years. In all of my pictures on Santa Claus’s lap I am either crying or there is a look of utter terror on my face like I’m being attacked by a bear, I didn’t ride my first roller coaster until I was about 14yrs old, and I must admit that I still hear the “Unsolved Mysteries” theme music and a shudder of fear runs through me like there are aliens ready to abduct me at any moment.

Yep, this was me......

But beyond any of these fears, my greatest fear has always been haunted houses. This fear originates back to a very traumatizing experience I had when I was about eight or nine years old. My dad took my brother and I to a haunted house at Knotts Berry Farm. I believe it was just a very basic haunted house – this little dark shack that you walked through and people jumped out at you from the corners. I have absolutely NO idea how my dad convinced me to go in there with him, but he did. Now my brother Jordan is the complete opposite of me; afraid of nothing. So of course he starts going through the haunted house laughing at all of the people jumping out at him like he’s at Disneyland, while I’m huddling behind my father trying to hum “I am a child of God” so no one will kill me. Toward the end of the haunted house my brother goes through a door to a different room and for some completely illogical reason my dad tells me to stay put in this pitch black room until he comes back. So there I am, standing alone in this room, ready to pee my pants and praying that there is mercy and I will just die before anything kills me, when suddenly a light in the corner of the room clicks on. As my eyes adjust I now realize that I am standing on the other side of a jail cell and there is a very deranged looking man sitting there in the corner. I’m just glued to the floor staring at this man when he suddenly stands up, pulls a chainsaw from behind his back, and walking towards me revs up the chainsaw. Of course that is when I start screaming. But instead of being like any other normal person who would scream and run out of the room into the bright light of day, I just stood there…screaming. And he just kept walking toward me, revving his chainsaw and laughing like a maniac. Finally one of the workers from the haunted house actually came in and carried me out of the house to my family who was waiting, completely mortified that it was their daughter who was screaming so uncontrollably.
It took me a few years to recover from this event, but I am happy to report that since highschool I have tried to face this fear by going to a haunted house (or similar venue) almost every Halloween. Usually I am a great source of entertainment for all of my friends with how terrified I get, and I have had several awkward date experiences where the boy took me to a scary movie or venue and probably thought I was completely in love with him with how often I jumped into his arms when scared. I tell you these stories because I have decided that this year is a year of change. And one of the changes I want to make is to stop being so jumpy and freaked out by things. I went to Frightmares last weekend at Lagoon and in the haunted houses I honestly only screamed once…or maybe twice…..but it was progress :)

Happy Halloween!!