OK, in an effort to lighten the mood around here, I’m posting an open thread on nonpolitical phobias. What do you irrationally fear? I know I should not admit this in a public forum, but I have a near paralyzing fear of whales. There. I’ve admitted it. Whales scare the bejesus out of me.
I think I always knew this, but never having encountered a whale, it didn’t become clear until I watched the Japanese film Dr. Akagi. There’s a scene where a man and woman row out into the sea in a tiny row boat and there’s this amazing aerial shot of a massive whale swimming right below them, dwarfing them. I nearly had a seizure, and even now, just visualizing it makes me shiver.
My friends find this highly amusing. After all, whales get really good press overall. There’s "Free Willy" and "Save the Whales" and Shamu…but I’m telling you, it’s just not right. Nothing should be that much larger than I am.
There’s a scene in 20000 Leagues Beneath the Sea where Captain Nemo opens the portal covering in his submarine and you can look out into the deep abyss. As a kid watching that film, I nearly freaked out during that scene. I used to think it was the wide open space I was afraid of, but now I believe it was simply a sense that "that’s enough room for a whale to come along in."
This will prevent me from ever taking up scuba diving seriously. Even now when snorkeling, as I love to do, if the distance between the ocean floor and the top of the water becomes, er…well, whale size, I have to turn back. I just know that if I stay, merrily enjoying the adorable (i.e., smaller than me) marine life around me, I’ll bump into this wall that I swore wasn’t there a moment ago, and just as I being to explore the barnacles and bumps on its surface, the really large one will open to reveal a giant eyeball as big as my whole head and I will die right there, on the spot. I can’t explain it.
Feel free to scoff…but only if you offer your own phobias first.
Fix the focus on that photo! And pan to the lower-left corner.
My fiancee has a tsunami phobia. I’m finding it so not funny any more.
Thank God you dont have to deal with whales everyday life, while I have a real rats, snakes, frogs phobia.
You can request a close-up of the babe AND reference your fiancee in the same comment, rilkefan? I’d have a flying heavy object phobia, if I were you.
Murat, just let the snakes eat the rats and frogs, and then all you’ll have to fear is happy fat snakes…
wait a second… is that head out there real, or is it a clever bit of Photoshoppery ?
and for that matter.. what’s a 30 foot whale doing in 10 feet of water?
When a ship is in drydock, it sits upon wooden blocks called ‘ways’ that are aligned with the ship’s keel. Ways are usually about 3 to 3 1/2 feet tall and about 4 feet wide.
Several times, in surveying a ship’s hull, I’d have to get under a ship on it’s ways in order to visually inspect transducers mounted on the bottom of the hull.
When you have a ship weighing 90,000 long tons over you, your mind races and induces phobias.
“You can request a close-up of the babe AND reference your fiancee in the same comment, rilkefan? I’d have a flying heavy object phobia, if I were you.”
She’s sweet-natured (to the extent of saying it’s fine to look if I don’t leer) and not strong enough to dent my thick skull. Yes, I’m a lucky guy.
“happy fat snakes…”
obWallaceStevens: Frogs Eat Butterflies. Snakes Eat Frogs. Hogs Eat Snakes. Men Eat Hogs.
I don’t think I have any paralyzing phobias. Hmm. I used to be very afraid of needles, but my bout with the flesh-eating bacteria cured me of that (IV or die? I’ll take the IV).
I used to fear that someone would take a picture of my bald spot and put it on the internet. But now that edward did that (above) I’m not so worried.
the head in the water in the upper right corner really seems pasted in.
my phobia? room 101.
Francis
Gross food.
Animation, especially animals that speak like humans. CAN’T. STAND. IT.
And could barely get through Orwell’s Animal Farm in HS.
Centipedes. Hell, damn centipedes make me pissed.
Thank God the posting rules have no requirements for value-added.
Spiders. I once found a dead spider and kept it on the table for a week, knowing that it couldn’t do a think and hoping it would help me (overcome fear by facing it). But I still didn’t dare to go near it.
I had the “arachnaphobia” film on video for two years and still didn’t dare to see it….
Oh, and Jaws made quite an impression when I saw the film 30 years ago. I slept with my legs pulled up for about a year and still can get frightened when swimming in the sea.
that it couldn’t do a think
a thing…. preview is my friend. I MUST overcome this preview phobia 😉
I don’t have any phobias. However, I have this possibly related quirk: I cannot stand watching, on TV or in movies, any scene in which a basically decent person has done a truly stupid and embarrassing thing and is going to be found out. I mean: I literally have to hide my eyes. I can look at all kinds of gross or violent things — I once stood entranced for about ten minutes by a skinned donkey’s head which, between the white eyes and teeth, black ears, and red all the rest of it, was really quite beautiful, before I realized that it was odd of me not to be grossed out — but I cannot watch the kinds of scenes described above.
Still, I’m not as odd as Billy Bob Thornton, who claims to have a fear of Victorian overstuffed furniture.
Strange, I can’t watch normal people be forced to do embarassing things either. My roommate was watching some hidden camera show on MTV where in order to win some money a comic pretends to be your new best friend and embarasses you in front of your old friends (Best Friends? My New Best Friend?) and I had to leave the room.
Hilzoy and Sebastian —
One of my apartment-mates a few years back literally had to leave the room when “a basically decent person has done a truly stupid and embarrassing thing and is going to be found out” on TV. Didn’t matter how high- or lowbrow the show — 90210, for instance, did it at least once an episode. (I’ve taken to calling this particular reaction the “Toby face” in his honor.)
My fear: Germs — but in an intermittant, on again off again way. I think, though, that it might qualify because it seems a bit in excess of the norm. Put it this way: While lathering my hands the men’s restauroom at a moderately priced restaurant, I was once asked by a stranger whether I might be preparing myself for surgery.
I’m not Monk (or “The Aviator”) — filth doesn’t disgust or bother me. I’ll happily sleep outdoors or wallow in spelunking cave mud or etc. (Well, maybe not “happily” in cases.) But invisible germs: they’ll get you.
Oh, and things poking people in the eye.
“restauroom”
Although I may have just coined a useful word, there, I meant “restroom” of course.
Cockroaches. Pardon me while I go into a shuddering fit. Also, this is not exactly a phobia, but I’ve developed a serious revulsion for malted chocolate milk balls after eating them during a screening of some black and white documentary of American G.I.’s marching to their deaths in Vietnam, the day after the Moscow theater siege back in 2002. I had to curl up in the fetal position for several hours, and the mental assocations still make me nauseous at the thought of ever eating any ever again.
p.s. – Hilzoy, you should probably never see Meet the Parents. Or, I’m guessing, the sequel out now. It wasn’t unwatchable, but I just pretty much cringed all the way through it.
My one unconquerable phobia: cockroaches. Esp. the tropical kind, the ones that are big enough that you could strap one to each foot and go skittering off into the sunset. I lived in Miami for many years, and had a great chance to get to know my phobia very, very well indeed. Miami cockroaches are particularly nasty, aggressive monsters that fly straight at you when you’re trying to spray them. And, it doesn’t matter how clean your house is: you’re gonna have roaches, because they set up camp in the walls and floorboards.
You wanna know how much I hate and fear cockroaches? Enough to do something really, really stupid:
Once, I was awakened at night by a roach crawling up my leg in bed. To say I freaked out hardly covers it: I went right past “freaked out” to “completely loco.”
I sprayed myself. With pesticide. All over my body.
For the whole next day, I was feverish and delirious, like I had a bad case of the flu. I’m probably lucky I didn’t die or something.
That’s how much I loathe cockroaches.
Upon reading this thread I’m going to have to add skinned donkey’s heads to the list.
My secret fear?
Retarded people. Not in the “Ohmigaw, he’s so retarded” sense of the word, but actual mentally handicapped persons. I know that this makes me a horrible person, but every time I see one, I start picturing myself that way and quietly freak out.
McM: I probably wouldn’t have seen it anyways, but now I definitely won’t.
I had a delightfully cockroach-free first 22 years, and then after I graduated from college I went off to the Bay area to seek my fortune, or something. And the first night after I arrived, cockroaches began to come out of the walls of the rundown dive I had checked into. I had never seen anything like it, and I was trying to swat them, but there were more and more, and when a friend of mine called to say hi, I burst into tears, which I almost never do, and he ended up driving up from San Jose and taking me away.
Fast-forward a few years, and you find me writing travel guides for a living during my first few summers of grad school. I end up working mostly in Greece, the Middle East, the SW US, and Mexico, which is to say a variety of cockroach-y places, and get to know all sorts of cockroaches, including great huge ones in Alexandria that practically set up hammocks in my room.
If you have a fear of cockroaches, do not ever stay in the Alexandria Youth Hostel — cockroaches crawl out of the pillows and mattresses there, and even I, by then very hard-boiled about dubious places to stay, wore sneakers into the shower. I was very, very broke at the time, but even so it wasn’t worth it.
Well its manageable and not that bad, but my fear of heights seems to extend to all “edges”. As I said, not so bad a fear of heights, I can stand on top of a twenty foot stepladder. But heartbeat goes way up and so on.
What’s funny is that it seems the fear of falling extends in a weird way to edges. Cliffs and skyscrapers, of course. But also beaches, open fields, anyplace I can’t see a solid horizon causes anxiety. Maybe just an agoraphobia, tho I am not real uncomfortable in crowds.
I also hate eating with my fingers. I eat hamburgers and hotdogs with a fork. Don’t like chips, popcorn, melting candy bars. Trust me, I am not fastidious.
Slugs, maggots, grubs, pretty much any kind of squishy crawling thing. I saw a documentary a few years back on TV in which a group of explorers were hiking through a rain forest and thousands of leaches came walking, inch-worm-style, out of the ground cover and up nearby branches, drawn to their body heat. That is, for me, the very definition of a waking nightmare, only surpassed by any kind of parasitic worm that burrows through the skin, in either direction.
any kind of parasitic worm that burrows through the skin, in either direction.
reminds me of a news segment i saw on botflies. the person being interviewed was saying he recalled feeling the worm under his skin, munching his flesh: “chomp. chomp. chomp.” he said, while making a little chomping mouth with his fist.
and speaking of parasites and nightmares…
back in 6th grade, i had a dream about my thumb – a piece of broccoli-shaped fungus grew out of it, sideways. i could, and can still, feel the roots wrapped around my thumb bones, and what it felt like when i brushed the broccoli with my hand. it’s like phantom limbs, but in reverse. f’in horrible.
it was caused, i’m sure, by a poster my teacher had in the classroom of, of all things, skin parasites – fungal, parasitic, bacterial, etc.. ugh… time for an alcohol rubdown.
I have some fear of tight spaces, esp. the being unable to move part. I just saw Ocean’s Twelve (skippable) – a character folds himself up into a large backpack and doesn’t get freed for a length of time during which I felt acutely uncomfortable. I once read something about the Russian practice of swaddling babies to the point of immobility – shudder.
cleek — for some reason your dream reminded me of a recurring nightmare that had when I was a kid (6 or so.). — In the Boston Museum of Science, which I loved, there was an exhibit on Kepler’s laws of motion, one bit of which was a sort of horn-shaped metal funnel thing, wide mouth up and narrow neck down, around which a steel ball would roll, at first in great lazy circles around the wide part, each revolution almost imperceptibly lower than the last, but then, as it got closer and closer to the center, it would go faster and faster until finally it fell in. I thought it was cool. Anyways, in my nightmare I was biking around Lake Michigan (why Lake Michigan? I have no idea; and plainly I also had no idea how big it really was), and suddenly I would realize that I couldn’t stop, and I would go round and round, slightly lower and sightly faster each time, until I fell in/woke up. It was terrifying. But it hasn’t led to any lasting phobias, either about Lake Michigan or Kepler’s laws of motion. Although the idea of having a phobia about Kepler’s laws of motion is, now that I think of it, kind of fun.
Used to go catatonic in the presence of creepy-crawlies of any sort — and my parents were big on camping, so that was always a bit traumatic. But then I lived for 20 years in a house surrounded by acres of forest. After cohabitating with every sort of insect, spider, snake (when we redid the roof there were snakeskins everywhere), mouse (with a preference for shredding toiletpaper rolls when they get in cabinets) — I’m totally blase and don’t even go running for something to kill the suckers with.
But I still have a thing about clowns.
I don’t like the sound of people eating. I am a private eater, on the couch, with a book. The sound of the munch munch munch gives me the shudders. I especially can’t stand being around people when they eat eggs.
The only saving grace to reading Hilzoy and CaseyL’s stories now is I still have another five or six hours yet before bed to try and distract myself from the horrid images that that just produced.
I love this thread, let’s never ever do it again.
My weird phobia is crowded elevators. I’m ok with empty elevators and crowds in other contexts, but put the two together and I develop a sudden need to prove my fitness by taking the stairs.
Gee, I barely feel qualified to comment on this thread: like, apparently, most of the commenters, I only hate roaches and other bugs – phobia intensity in direct correlation to size of roach/bug – I can’t think of any intense skin-crawl-inducing –
Oh, wait! Just came to me: Grasshoppers/locusts. I have a country house with an adjacent meadow, and summers with prime locust conditions always make going outside a true cringe-making experience.
I know where this particular phobia comes from, though: when I was a kid, the local TV station (the old KHJ TV in Los Angeles, I think) used to run horror movies in repeated showings on the weekends, and I recall siting horrified/fascinated through multiple reruns of “Beginning of the End” (1958) – hence my lifelong dislike of the Locustidae.
Funny, though” they were also, IIRC, one of the first to run the original “Godzilla” – and my fear of 30-story radioactive reptiloids has never been quite as acute.
I said I had no phobias, but on reflection I wonder whether my reaction to PBS pledge week might not count. I turn on the TV and all the PBS shows I like — history, science, drama — are replaced by musicians I’ve never heard of and try to instantly repress, like Yanni, or alternative health gurus, or the horrible Suzy Orman, whose show with the amazing title “The Courage To Be Rich!” is probably what transformed my reaction from annoyance to full-bore screaming horror.
My wife has a phobia about butterflies. Being the helpful spouse in the tell me about it mode, I asked her to tell me about it. ‘They…flutter! And they have that powder if you touch them…yuck!” or words to that effect. It still ticks me off a bit, because our daughter (6 years old) freaks because my wife does. Now, I have a bit of arachnophobia, but I no longer do St. Vitus’ Dance when one gets close to me and I was really going to try and have our daughter not wimp out when she encountered an insect, but I guess we’ll have to try with the next one.
A lot of the spider and snake things freak me out, but not an out and out phobia. Most of those creatures I can handle if I see them coming. Don’t like surprises though, and little leggy things crawling across my body in the middle of the night would not be good. I’ve got a little agoraphobia – large expanses of water make me nervous. I dream about that some times. I’m definitly deathly afraid of suffocating. No speluncking (sp?). I remember crying like a sissy when I got piled on once as a kid. That’s it for me, buried alive. The AFLAC commercial with Santa stuck in the chimney gives me a shudder. What was the movie ‘Deer Slayer’ (darn I don’t want to look it up), help me blogosphere, where the guys go to Viet Nam and are captured and held in submerged cages with just an inch of air at the top. They’d be coming to take me away, Ha! Ha!
Couldn’t stand it, The Deer Hunter, 1978, DeNiro and Walken. Great movie.
Not sure it is a phobia, but I absolutely cannot sit through a horror movie. I think the music has something to do with it, but it has long been a family joke that I have to leave the room, and leave them to their horror. They can have it!!!! I cannot bear it!
Edward, were you dragged to the Museum of Natural History at an early age? I remember refusing to walk under that giant blue whale at the hall of ocean life.
I have a fear of serious mental illness. And on a lighter note, bears, which is only a problem on camping trips but oh boy can I be annoying. I am also a pathetic wuss about scary movies, and have a weird aversion to bell peppers.
Thanks, mc_masterchef! Any day I can render hideous for others by sharing my traumas with them is a day not entirely wasted, says I 🙂
Back to whales: My wife and I were kayaking off Oahu and saw a humpback whale breaching. We headed out that way for a closer look. Of course the whale sounded long before we got anywhere close, so we just sat out there scanning the horizon seeing nothing. Our boats drifted about 50′ apart. It was quite a shock when a whale surfaced right between us. Didn’t last long, but a really scary moment. Its breath smelled pretty bad.
I haven’t posted in this thread because I’ve had trouble thinking of any phobias of mine that answer the original question “What do you irrationally fear?” And as far as I can tell, neither can most of the contributors to this thread. Cockroaches, heights, pledge breaks, these are all perfectly rational fears to have.
I guess my biggest phobia is making any kind of mistake or foolish remark in a public venue. I distinctly remember the sweats I got as the time approached for my first (and last!) academic article to be published — even though I knew full well that mistakes, omissions, etc., are part of the game, I just couldn’t stand the idea that hundreds (well, OK, let’s be honest, dozens (optimistically)) of readers would spot an obvious, silly, only-an-idiot-could-write-that goof and (gasp!) realize that I wasn’t perfect.
Hate to query your psyche since mine is obviously a bit twisted, but do you include my clown phobia in the “rational” category?
do you include my clown phobia in the “rational” category?
Well, there is a word for it. coulrophobia
do you include my clown phobia in the “rational” category?
Well, I sure as hell was scared of the one in Poltergeist. And I would fear to entrust my safety or well-being to Krusty. So, yeah.
LJ
Now, I have a bit of arachnophobia, but I no longer do St. Vitus’ Dance when one gets close to me and I was really going to try and have our daughter not wimp out when she encountered an insect, but I guess we’ll have to try with the next one.
Be carefull what you wish for. I tried to NOT pass on my arachnaphobia and ended up with kids putting their hands under my nose: “Look mamma, my friend spider”.
I am still proud that I managed to control the twitching and shuddering…
LJ — spectacular link. I am no longer alone with my affliction!
Heights. The first time I had to back over an 80-foot cliff with nothing but an absurdly narrow bit of nylon between me and spattered all over jagged rocks at the bottom, I froze. It seemed like hours. And just when I think rock-climbing has gotten me over it, I do something like the Red River Gorge in Kentucky (which is not all that tall, really), traverse around a corner and come to a complete stop from the exposure.
So I think there’s a touch of agoraphobia in there, too. Once I was on the base of the cable route on Half Dome (just my first look around, there) and everything was just so HUGE and the wind was whipping so hard that I just had to lay down and hug the ground for a while. I could just see myself being swept right off and splattered somewhere in the valley.
KenB – No, I think the point about a phobia isn’t whether there’s a rational reason for it, I think it has more to do with how irrationally we behave in the face of our fear-object. Being afraid of falling from a great height is rational; refusing to fly in a plane, despite the fact that plane travel is still considered safer than motoring, is an irrational behavior. In my case, I’ve already told the story of my irrational response to roach-induced fear 🙂
My ex, an almost stereotypical big strong brave man, was (and still is) an arachnophobe. As he put it: “Spiders, when they’re outside, are god’s creatures doing god’s work; when they’re inside, they’re the devil’s spawn.” Since I like spiders, and am not afraid of them, it became my job to catch them and put them outside.
He and I moved to a new house. We had unpacked, arranged the furniture, and settled in. We’d decided to use papa-sans as living room furniture, because they can easily be stacked and moved out of the way (we used to have fencing lessons in the living room).
So: there we are one evening, me on the papa-san sofa, and he in the papa-san chair, talking.
And there, overhead, spinning its way down from the ceiling, was a big fat old spider; on a straight-shot trajectory for the top of Mike’s head.
Mike doesn’t see it. I do. And I’m trying to figure out what to say or do that won’t start a panic. Leaping out of the papa-san and lunging for the spider isn’t an option, because papa-sans aren’t the most stable pieces of furniture in the world.
Well, Mike notices me glancing up towards the ceiling a lot, and he notices my worried look, and he says, “There’s a spider coming down, isn’t there?”
“Uh…yeah…”
So he looks around, and up, and the spider must’ve been a lot closer than he thought, because before I can do anything, he has lunged sideways to get away from it and overbalanced in the papa-san, and the top cup of the papa-san (the part you sit in) overbalances with him, and he and the papa-san cup both topple over backward onto the floor. His legs are sticking up in the air and everything, just like in a cartoon.
And I can’t do anything to help him because I’m curled up in a little ball laughing so hard I can hardly breathe.
See? Irrational behavior.
I’m a little afraid of everything mentioned here, except for cockroaches.
I don’t like heights, but I don’t mind flying. I’m afraid of taking off and landing. Or rather NOT taking off and NOT landing. What really scares me is the burning and the screaming on the way down.
I hate peas. I mean I hate them in an irrational, shuddering way.
I can’t think about eating a bologna sandwich on white bread without gagging since eating a spoiled one about 50 years ago in the back seat of my mother’s car on a sweltering day.
Old rickety wooden roller coasters, especially on the curves, creep me out.
I’m irrationally incompetent and, I guess, scared about trying to fix a computer software glitch. So my wife tells me, as I race from the room cussing loudly.
Grizzly bears. Running faster than horses and their jaws snapping.
I really don’t want to ever open the paper again and read that another Beatle has died.
Having met Sebastian at Christmas and had a nice chat over coffee, I’m now slightly scared in retrospect now that I find out he’s had the flesh eating bacteria.
Just kidding 😉
I’ve never thought about skinned donkey heads, but now I am and probably will tonight when I awake to see one hovering at the foot of my bed …. in the night .. or sitting on a shelf in the closet, cackling … in the night .. when the lights have gone ….. in the night.
I am afraid of sliding down slopes. I used to have nightmares when younger about not being able to climb up a hill without sliding back down, and when I was in San Francisco visiting a cousin we were going to a choir performance at this beautiful big church that was on one hell of a hill and we had to park on a really steep slope and i was shaking so hard my knees were literally buckling. Also, I am so happy to see that other people besides me have a total inability to watch those shows based on being embarrassed like “Hidden Camera” and those movies based on people doing horrible things by mistake like “Meet the Parents.” I thought this was an abnormal thing about me, as everyone I associate with loves these types of things and I either cringe by myself or leave the room.
In Norway we have these flying things that make my skin crawl. They are just like daddy-long-legs…but they fly. And they don’t just really fly, they, uh, bounce in big arcs against the wall, the window, the ceiling, your face. Just the thought of suddenly getting a large daddy-long-legs bouncing in your face is so horrifying to me that if I have just a hint that one could be in the house there is no way I am sleeping until I kill it.
And my wife gets chills and and runs away if she hears someone brushing their teeth. The sound drives her nuts, so of course I try to brush my teeth near her at every opportunity 😉
I am going back to the whales! Never thought of them before (and will never look at them in the same way again) but I really dislike those huge aquariums. Like at Seaworld. Where you can go down three stories and look at Shamu. I am terrified that the glass will crack and I will die or I will be crushed or even I will get eaten by Shamu (yes fear even before the edward post. not frightened of wild whales, but whales in captivity). And if that isn’t irratinal enough, I have always been afraid on bridges or piers with gaps between planks of wood that I will slip through. Or now that I am grown and about to start another new year vowing to lose weight/be more active, that I will trip on the crack and go falling over the side. Likely to be eaten by Shamu.
Seaweed. And being burned alive.
Up until I was 16, I had a phobia about seaweed. I didn’t want to touch it, I didn’t want to go near it, and I hated swimming from beaches where seaweed was growing.
I’d been learning sub-aqua swimming for about four years by that time (in a salt-water indoor pool) and then a group of us went on a week-long diving trip. I wasn’t certified to use an aqua-lung independently at that point, so I and most of the rest of us kids were just going snorkelling in wetsuits.
The first morning, I went out with my swimming partner (we were of course required never to go swimming alone in the open sea – always two by two) and we were to swim from the beach to a rocky headland where one of the instructors was standing. This would just prove to him and to us that we were able to swim in the open sea.
I got about halfway, realized I would be swimming right over the biggest, nastiest, scariest looking seaweed growths I’d ever seen in my life, and turned back.
I’d got back into shallow water before it dawned on me that the rest of the week was going to be pretty boring for me if I stayed away from anywhere there was seaweed, and I turned back, resolved to swim all the way over to the headland, telling myself firmly (and I had to be very firm) that however ghastly it looked, the seaweed could not actually hurt me.
And I did, and it didn’t, and furthermore, at the point when I turned to swim back from the headland, it dawned on me that my phobia about seaweed had just gone away. And it never came back. I had a lovely week diving in the open sea, and I’ve never been scared of seaweed since.
Of course, I’m still phobic about being burned alive. And I have no intention of getting myself trapped in a burning building to find out if that one will go away.
John Thullen: Having met Sebastian at Christmas and had a nice chat over coffee
I really envy you this.
On another thread, I offered kenB a virtual cup of tea: I meant basically that while I have no interest in finding political common ground with people whose political beliefs are completely at odds with my own, I’m always happy to find non-political common ground: if nothing else, for example, that Stan LS and I both detest sugared tea.
kenB, CaseyL is right – “irrational” here should be read to mean “unreasoning”, both in terms of the reason for the fear and the reactions associated with it. An irrational fear does not necessarily have a rational source – even if there are potential rational sources – and inspires abnormal feelings and behavior.
For example, I have a fear of falling. This is not a fear of heights; I have no problem being very far off the ground (I’ve been to the top of the Empire State Building, and fly regularly, with no problems), as long as I can’t fall from where I’m standing. It’s edges – even edges with railings and bulletproof glass – that inspire unthinking terror in me; the possibility of falling is too much for me to bear. (The height of the edge only matters in that it changes the intensity of the fear; a ten-foot drop scares me much less than a balcony on the sixteenth story.) The worst instance of this fear that I can recall was getting to the top of the Temple of the Moon at Teotihuacán and suddenly realizing that, due to the grade of the stairway – it’s a very steep climb – I wasn’t going to be able to get down again without significant mental effort.
Others of my fears, incidentally, are of spiders, insects that creep (such as millipedes), and damage to my eyes and hands. I also have a mild neurosis about washing my hands any time anything gets on them – mud, oil, ketchup, what have you – but that’s less a fear and more a compulsion.
Snorting wth laughter through this whole thread. Thank you. What makes it so funny is that I can sympathize with so many of the fears listed.
Unable to watch on-screen embarassment — check. I’ve mostly conquered that, but my 8yo will jump up and run out of the room rather than watch anything potentially embarassing. Maybe it’s genetic.
I’m not afraid of heights, but I fear the sensation of falling (rollercoasters, elevators, etc).
As for cockroaches, if you’ve never seen 6-inch roaches flying around madly in mating season, count yourself lucky.
But my biggest fear is going blind. Waking up in a pitch dark room I will start to panic because I start wondering if I’m actually blind. Seeing even just a pinpoint of light will calm me down.
Well, you’ve wasted a lot of my time, I’ll have you know, as I found this
Some choice ones
Arachibutyrophobia- Fear of peanut butter sticking to the roof of the mouth (for me, it’s hot pizza cheese, but that’s rational)
Bolshephobia- Fear of Bolsheviks (quite unfair! I can’t find the inverse, unless it is Heresyphobia or Hereiophobia- Fear of challenges to official doctrine or of radical deviation)
Enosiophobia or Enissophobia- Fear of having committed an unpardonable sin or of criticism (ahh, my dating problems explained)
Ephebiphobia- Fear of teenagers
Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia- Fear of long words
Novercaphobia- Fear of your step-mother (also Pentheraphobia, much more common than Vitricophobia- Fear of step-father)
Porphyrophobia- Fear of the color purple (no mention of Whoppi Goldberg in this though)
The whale fear isn’t here, but if you combine
Large things- Megalophobia and Fish- Ichthyophobia.
One gets Megaloichthyophobia
kenB, CaseyL is right – “irrational” here should be read to mean “unreasoning”,
Well, I was being a little bit facetious.
The whale fear isn’t here, but if you combine
Large things- Megalophobia and Fish- Ichthyophobia.
One gets Megaloichthyophobia
Hmm, but whales are mammals, not fish…
BTW, did any see the story about the woman with an “irrational” fear of whales that was attacked by one?
Edward, were you dragged to the Museum of Natural History at an early age?
Yes, I’ve seen that giant blue whale there. For some reason, that one’s OK. Maybe because it’s not real and doesn’t move. If it were to ever move, I’d never get within 25 blocks of 79th Street again.
Our boats drifted about 50′ apart. It was quite a shock when a whale surfaced right between us. Didn’t last long, but a really scary moment. Its breath smelled pretty bad.
I like to think something like this would perhaps exhilarate me right past my phobia, but I somehow think it’s equally likely I’d have a heart attack and die right there.
The creepy-crawly thing I kind of get, but fascination usually wins out for me. No fear of rats or snakes or frogs or slugs or that kind of stuff. Normal people in embarrassing situations, I get that one too, although that’s gotten better as I’ve gotten older and perhaps a bit more comfortable with the idea that I have the skills now to recover socially should I find myself in that situation (yes, I think it’s a bit induced by empathy and projection).
Heights, no. Edges where I could fall though, comes and goes. There are days when I could bungee jump off a bridge and others I couldn’t…not sure why.
Getting trapped in a tunnel or other restrictive space: totally get that one. All those prison escape movies or cave explorers…fuggedaboutit.
Snorting wth laughter through this whole thread.
Me too. Thanks to everyone brave enough to share here. This goes in my e-scrapbook of favorites…
Well, I think that Edward would be frightened of any very large marine animal, a whale shark, giant squid, or even, if he encountered one, an ichthyosaur
I’m also curious if edward has any opinion of Monstro in Pinocchio. If so, do avoid Les Voyages de Pinocchio at EuroDisney…
a whale surfaced, flipped its large black tail out of the water and struck the Hancocks’ brand-new boat.
[…]My wife has this terrific fear of whales and every time you go near a boat she is always talking about ‘Don’t go near whales,'” Regg Hancock says.
“I used to always laugh at that and say, ‘There is no way a whale will come near a boat.’ Well, she proved me wrong.”
Brenda Hancock is recovering from her injuries at Charles S. Curtis Memorial Hospital in St. Anthony.
SEE!!!! SEE!!!! I’m telling you…they’re evil!!!
Thanks for making my fear seem less irrational kenB.
e
BTW, did any see the story about the woman with an “irrational” fear of whales that was attacked by one?
I’m telling you, they can *smell* fear…
I’m also curious if edward has any opinion of Monstro in Pinocchio.
Jonah and the whale, too, don’t forget that Biblical horror story.
Aren’t they supposed to be from another planet in some theories, whales? Can’t we help them contact the mother ship and send them all home? They’re so creepy. And people who hug them or ride them (“Whale Rider”…what a nutjob she was). {{{shudder}}}
Speaking of whales, I was at a party that was also attended by a killer whale trainer from Sea World. Part of her job had to do with artificially insemination – the collection part. Of course, I had to ask: how on earth? Giant, inflatable killer whale love dolls? Manual stimulation on a much larger scale? A souped-up (but suitably waterproofed) vibrator?
The answer was of course much more bizarre and less…bestial than I was thinking: they’re trained to ejaculate on command.
they’re trained to ejaculate on command.
This is me not saying ANYTHING.
they’re trained to ejaculate on command.
yeah, that sounds all nice and clinical, but HOW do they train them to do that???
Decent people doing highly embarrassing things on TV – one of the worst possible scenarios to sit thru. I cant do it. Sadly I love cheesy teenage drama so I spend about 1/2 the time covering my face with a pillow or running for kitchen to get away from the horror.
I am also extremely afraid of the door handle on public men’s restroom. I hang on to the paper towels I used to dry my hands to open the door. Sad. Even worse is when they have one of those air dryer deals and no paper towels in sight. Shaking just thinking about the nastiness.
I hang on to the paper towels I used to dry my hands to open the door.
same here.
and then i walk down the hallway to our office door – open that with the paper towel, too. then i drop it over the wall of an unused cubicle into the garbage can that i’ve cleverly positioned on the other side.
but, what makes it OK, is that i’m not the only one who does this. there are other people in my office who refuse to touch the bathroom door handle, and the office door handle, and who also drop their paper towels into that garbage can.
germ-phobics unite!
Trade secret, I’m sure. If I remember correctly, there was a fluffer involved, so it wasn’t entirely hands-off, so to speak.
“Arachibutyrophobia- Fear of peanut butter sticking to the roof of the mouth”
About 25 years ago, I watched a woman choke to death on peanut butter. Heimlich didn’t work, nor a tracheotomy.
What is the command?
I have a fear of the command “Hup!” because I’m afraid of what might happen.
My partner (who’s been reading here occassionally) is also germaphobic (so I’ll try and be gentle about this just in case). We literally have dozens and dozens of cleaning products in our apartment. The cupboard under the kitchen sink makes most supermarkets look understocked.
I believe germs are unavoidable and most measures to try and avoid them are actually more bad than good for you. Antibacterial soaps and the like drive me nuts. As a species, our immune systems will weaken to the point we’ll need to live in bubbles if this continues. Personally, I believe firmly in the five-second rule for food dropped on the floor, have no problem touching doors or bannisters or the poles on the subway, and kiss an average of 30-80 people a week (depending on whether I’m attending art openings or not) and I get no more than one or two colds a year and the flu only every four to five years, so clearly the germs out there are not as evil as some people think they are…
“If it were to ever move, I’d never get within 25 blocks of 79th Street again.”
My partner works at the AMNH so I’ve been there after it closes. I don’t know about the whale, but I’m pretty sure the dinosaur skeletons walk at night.
“If it were to ever move, I’d never get within 25 blocks of 79th Street again.”
My partner works at the AMNH so I’ve been there after it closes. I don’t know about the whale, but I’m pretty sure the dinosaur skeletons walk at night.
Ack! I also have a rational fear of double posting.
rilkefan –
I’m with you from way upthread. I have a recurring dream of waking up to find that someone, for some reason, has encased me in a block of plastic, but left one inch of space in the body-shaped cavity. Oxygen is somehow supplied, denying me that easy out. It’s the extra inch that really makes it horrible and wakes me up screaming – that tiny extra space allowing me to thrum my hands helplessly about and thrash ever so slightly, but denying my muscles any real release except inward frustration, as more and more adrenaline dumps into my system…ak…I’m going to go outside now.
Oh, and fire. I check my gas stove at least twice every day before leaving the house. Maybe a mild bit of OCD, but hey, if you have to be compulsive about something, fire prevention’s not so bad, I guess.
kenB:
Well, I was being a little bit facetious.
I figured, but I have epistrophimania, you see…
(The fear of whales, by the way, is phallainophobia, as I recall.)
Perhaps I should change my germ fear to irrational fear of watching people using a public restroom and then walking out without washing their hands.
I’ll kiss babies, eat food that has fallen on the floor (given that it hasn’t landed in something alarming), use hand railings, etc. I don’t worry about these things. But failure to mind basic personal hygiene, in particular not washing your hands after using the restroom disturbs me on a fundamental level.
Instead of compartmentalizing this fear and exploding in a fit of rage at some point on the future I project this fear onto the door handle of all public men’s restrooms. It’s much healthier in my opinion.
To those of you with germ phobias: do not eat those mints at restaurants — at least not the ones that aren’t wrapped. One of the things that really stuck with me from my Epidemiology class was that when tested, they turned out to have residues from all major types of bodily fluids and secretions. All. Think about it.
I’m a big-time arachnophobe. Actually, any crawling or flying bug much larger than an ant sends me into near-hysterics if I find it on me. Last year, I was driving somewhere with my wife, and a large bug flew into the back of my shirt. I literally had to jerk the car onto the shoulder and stop before I killed us both in the wake of my panic attack.
Also, I’ve never been afraid of flying, or of heights, but I’ve always had a low-level fear of falling off of tall structures, so I’ve always avoided edges, or looking over observation points, etc. But ever since 9/11, I’ve developed an almost pathological fear of being out on a balcony. We live in a fourth-floor apartment, and last summer, we were eating lunch out on the balcony. I found myself edging my chair closer and closer to the door until I had to just get up and go inside. I can’t be out there now without panicking. And I’ve become a very nervous flyer, too.
As for the AB soap: when’s the last time you had any sort of bacterial infection? Not saying AB soaps are bad, mind you, but they aren’t really proof against viruses like cold and flu.
Perhaps I should change my germ fear to irrational fear of watching people using a public restroom and then walking out without washing their hands
errr… yeah… now that you mention it, ilet me amend my germ-phobia post..
the reason i open the office door with a paper towel is because the office door in question is the way people get from the bathroom back to their cubicles (it’s not the main public door) – if someone doesn’t wash their hands before they leave the bathroom, that door handle is the very next stop their hand makes after the bathroom door handle.
i’m not actually a germ-phobic… i just don’t want other people’s piss on my hands. 😉
i just don’t want other people’s piss on my hands. 😉
I don’t want it either, but that same person goes on to use the copy machine, touch the outside door, open their office door, etc, etc. In the end I assume that if it hasn’t killed me so far, there’s more important things to worry about…like all those whales out there, plotting against us. 😉
Oh, God damn, the public restroom. This will undoubtably destroy what remains of my dignity, but I’ve been known to try to open public restroom doors with my left pinky finger — on the assumption that it’s the finger least likely to come into contact with food, etc.
My wife’s attitude towards all this is pretty much the same as Ed’s: nothing really bothers her — “I have an immune system!” is one of her favorite retorts.
But failure to mind basic personal hygiene, in particular not washing your hands after using the restroom disturbs me on a fundamental level.
Yes. Yes. Absolutely. Yes.
“I have an immune system!”
My sentiment exactly. Although I just got a back channel warning to lighten up on the “eaning-clay oducts-pray” talk because there are clearly lots more someone hasn’t tried yet…we so-o-o-o-o need a bigger apartment.
My father likes to tell a humorous story about being at a urinal next to a young Marine private, who, seeing my father leaving the restroom without washing, said, “Sargeant, aren’t you going to wash your hands first?”
“No,” he replied.
“Why not, Sarge?”
“Because in the Army they teach us how not to piss on our hands, that’s why.”
I can’t believe no one has mentioned a crippling fear of public speaking. You mean it’s just me?
I also have a phobia/recurring dream about my teeth falling out.
I also have a phobia/recurring dream about my teeth falling out.
In most popular dream interpretation books, teeth falling out represents death…which seems a rational fear to me.
Public speaking? Eh, gets easier with practice, like most things.
Cool picture, Edward. Having just watched a Series of Unfortunate Events, I’m glad you’re not afraid of, say, Realtors. Tornadoes are what freak me out, goes back to my early childhood watchings of the Wizard of Oz. Later, it was nuclear bombs and radioactive fallout after reading On the Beach.
Hmmm – I don’t really have any phobias. However, I share Hilzoy’s & Sebastian’s feeling about watching decent people do embarassing things on tv. I never knew other folks had the same reaction. I’ll also sometimes have to temporarily put down a book when I get to a scene in which such an embarassment is about to take place.
Cool picture, Edward.
Thanks, but I suspect, like others above, it’s been photoshopped around a bit.
Tornadoes are what freak me out
Ditto. Three mean sunsabitches struck my county when I was 18 and I still have nightmares about them.
I’d meant to chime in on this: I don’t fear it so much as refuse to waste a single additional second on it. My own descriptor for this is “excruciating”. It started with Ellen DeGeneres’ show, and continued with The Married Guy, Will & Grace, and Three Men. I’m sure there’s a large number of shows that also feature this sort of activity that I haven’t ever laid eyes on.
It’s interesting to know that there are so many other people out there who share my inability to watch decent people getting caught doing embarrassing things — I had always thought this was my personal oddity. (My sister always thought so, and who was I to disagree?)
Public speaking definitely gets better with practice. I am a recovering shy person — I have basically spent my entire adult life forcing my way past it, and now no one believes I wasn’t born outgoing — and I used to throw up before teaching. Now, however, I have no problem with it at all. (Well, minor residual stress, but nothing worth mentioning.) Having to do it for a living, there was no real alternative to just learning to deal with it.
Hilzoy: Now there’s a weird thing.
I was, when a child, cripplingly shy. When I moved out into the wider world, I started to learn techniques to get me past that shyness – since otherwise I’d have spent hours at perfectly nice gatherings just staring at my feet.
I discovered how well it had worked when I went to a big family party given by a cousin – where my whole immediate family were there, but we knew hardly anyone else. My cousins had foreseen this problem, and everyone had namebadges, which I thought was an excellent idea. So I did what I usually do at parties like that: wandered round the room saying hello to people I didn’t know, having a few minutes of conversation, and moving on.
I came back to the table where the rest of the family were sitting to find my mother, sister, and sister-in-law sitting staring at me in consternation; “But we don’t know anyone here! What are you DOING?” to which I said, rather annoyed, “I’m shy! When you’re shy, you have to learn HOW to do things like this!”
My problem with public speaking is that I get absolutely terrified of doing it before I do it, but once I start, I’m fine. And by this time I know that’s how I am, and I just keep telling myself that. Ignore the sweaty palms and the cold ripples of terror, I tell myself: you’ll be fine, you’ll be fine…
“watching decent people do embarassing things on tv.”
Isn’t this almost the definition of a sitcom, and most “reality” tv? We have to like the characters, and can’t have them doing anything actually wicked, so writers drive plots by having Ralph Kramden or Rob Petrie make an idiot of himself. It isn’t as if you actually have to check out a new sitcom to know what it will be like.
Is why I don’t watch any mainstream tv. Except of course Married with Children and the Simpsons, who were having fun with the formula.
To those of you with germ phobias: do not eat those mints at restaurants — at least not the ones that aren’t wrapped. One of the things that really stuck with me from my Epidemiology class was that when tested, they turned out to have residues from all major types of bodily fluids and secretions. All. Think about it.
I was gonna say that exact same thing about peanuts in public bars. I think I read they discovered on average 7 different kinds of urine on them – yuck.
The germ thing I don’t have. But I do have a telephone treshold. Not a phobia; I can do it if I feel it is necessary —- but I will find a lot of excuses before I deem it absolutely necessary…
ouch sorry for the italics. Are they off now?
Public speaking definitely gets better with practice.
That’s absolutely correct. Also, knowing your subject through and through. I went from being absolutely terrified of public speaking to kinda enjoying it.
I still nearly throw up every time I have to argue a point in Court, though. But that’s for fear of losing — and the cause of the loss being me — not because I’m afraid of public speaking.
I was gonna say that exact same thing about peanuts in public bars.
Aaargh. And Toby, if he’s still around, will remember this:
My favorite bar of a few years back in Chicago had this peanut machine, which was essentially one of those 25-cent gumball machine except that it was filled with peanuts. As I drink I become less germ-phobic, so I’d sampled the fruit of the peanut machine (so to speak) on several late occasions. One day, early to (and belly at) the bar, we watched the guy load up the peanut machine. Big, grubby (as in back-tar dirty) hands reaching in a dirty, digusting sack and grabbing individual, de-shelled peanuts and stuffing them haphazardly in the machine.
Never ate peanuts from that machine again.
“It’s interesting to know that there are so many other people out there who share my inability to watch decent people getting caught doing embarrassing things — I had always thought this was my personal oddity.”
I wonder if the tv/movie execs know about us intolerants – judging from this thread there’s a big segment of the populace repulsed by their wares. Or perhaps bloggers are self-selected to prefer the lower-risk social interactions on the web.
However, I have this possibly related quirk: I cannot stand watching, on TV or in movies, any scene in which a basically decent person has done a truly stupid and embarrassing thing and is going to be found out. I mean: I literally have to hide my eyes
Me too.
And marionettes, not singularly, but enmass. There’s this shop in Prague…..shudder.
Never ate peanuts from that machine again.
I once, by dint of colorful adjectives alone, managed to turn someone off frozen yoghurt for life. Five of the most fun minutes of my life, though I doubt he’d agree.
Oh god, I’m so happy I was directed here. I thought I was the only one who couldn’t stand watching people embarass themselves (it’s almost worse if they don’t realize they’re embarassing themselves). It doesn’t matter if they’re decent people or not. I can hardly watch any of “The Office,” because David Brent is pretty much all my fears personified. And I can’t really watch most of Ben Stiller’s movies for the same reason.
I’m afraid of heights and dogs and normal things like that, but one of my close friends has the coolest phobias ever. She’s afraid of empty abandoned office buildings, and patterns. As far as I know, there isn’t even a word for the fear of patterns, but she had a serious problem with an orange that had cloves put into the skin on a regular pattern. Something about that frightened the hell out of her. Maybe she was attacked by wallpaper as a kid or something.
I’m definitely with all of you on the embarassing-situations thing. Even shows that I think are really funny (Family Guy, Simpsons), I often can’t watch because I also find them painful. The other sitcoms, that aren’t even funny…I avoid those completely. Makes it hard to watch tv for half an hour straight.
A funnier one is the song “You Are My Sunshine.” My mother used to sing that to me when I was an infant, and I’d always burst out crying (this was before I could talk). Finally she realized that I didn’t like the song. For years later I couldn’t listen to that song without crying…it was so sad! I finally got over that when I was maybe seventeen.
Hidden terrors
Obsidian Wings is running an unofficial “admit your deepest fears” comment thread, attached to a post in which Edward_ reveals his fear of whales. Good material here for anyone looking to break into sadistic psychological torture.
Whales scare the bejesus out of me.
Obsidian Wing
Check on the embarrassment thing. I think I also have a unique one. The sound of water pouring into a glass – like the sound used in every beer commercial – makes my skin crawl. I’m tortured all day at work, as I sit next to the water cooler.
What Stu said above about Ben Stiller movies, although I’m not afraid of them, I just find them excruciating.
My 3-year-old son currently has a fear of elephants in the closet, and all my explanations about how nice elephants are, not to mention the plain impossibility of it from a Newtonian-physics standpoint, haven’t made a dent. If he saw the photo above, I’d have to be dealing with whales in the closet, too, I’m sure.
On the decent-people-doing-embarrassing-things topic – my specific variant of this that I can’t stand is kind of plot that is based on a misunderstanding, whether deliberate or accidental. For instance, I happened to catch a showing of the 80’s movie “Working Girl” recently, and around the point when Melanie Griffith is pretending to Harrison Ford that she’s really at her bosses level, and not a secretary – I just couldn’t deal with it anymore. The sitcom “oh I thought you were plotting to kill your mother, not have a surprise birthday party for her” kind of plots are unbearable, too.
Decay. Especially maggots.
Cancer. Especially brain tumors.
Emerging infectious diseases. All of ’em.
Being executed for something I didn’t do.
Wow, Grant. The sound of beer (or soda) being poured into a glass on commercials has always icked me out. No idea why, and didn’t even remember it til I saw your comment.
Other than that, very mildly claustrophobic and agorophobic with occasional fits of vertigo (though no real fear of heights). Have a completely unreasoning reptilian-brain reaction to having my hands restrained, even in fun.
Bridges, but specifically if I’m in a car and driving. I’m irrationally convinced that every bridge is going to collapse just as I reach the middle of it. Living next to rivers and streams as I have my entire life, not to mention large urban areas, I’ve become desensitized enough to be able to cross them without becoming totally apoplectic, but I still have to recite a quiet mantra to keep my nerves from feeling like I’ve just had three cups of coffee. And I involuntarily think of things like how much I love my family.
Several years ago in San Francisco, I had to… I can’t say it. THE BRIDGE THAT SHALL NOT BE NAMED. Let’s just say we wanted to go to Sonoma. If wine hadn’t been waiting on the other end, and my girlfriend, now wife, stroking my arm for comfort, it wouldn’t have happened.
Boy, that was cathartic. Do I pay the receptionist on the way out?
and speaking of parasites and nightmares…
back in 6th grade, i had a dream about my thumb – a piece of broccoli-shaped fungus grew out of it, sideways. i could, and can still, feel the roots wrapped around my thumb bones, and what it felt like when i brushed the broccoli with my hand. it’s like phantom limbs, but in reverse. f’in horrible.
it was caused, i’m sure, by a poster my teacher had in the classroom of, of all things, skin parasites – fungal, parasitic, bacterial, etc.. ugh…
I thought I was the only person in the world with a phobia of this sort. As a child I used to detour far out of the way if I saw mushrooms growing on a lawn. I wouldn’t eat them, of course. Now I will eat table mushrooms, but if I find any mold growing in leftovers or in a jar of something, my instinct is to throw the entire container away instantly, even if it is a dish.
My nightmare is the “house mold” that has been publicized in the last few years. There are the most horrible pictures of “mold houses” on the web (Google images), with black mold all over the walls.
In a medical textbook I found a description of a very rare mold infection of the brain: it grows through your nose, into your sinuses and into your brain. You have to have very severe uncontrolled diabetic acidosis and be unconscious for this to happen.
and speaking of parasites and nightmares…
back in 6th grade, i had a dream about my thumb – a piece of broccoli-shaped fungus grew out of it, sideways. i could, and can still, feel the roots wrapped around my thumb bones, and what it felt like when i brushed the broccoli with my hand. it’s like phantom limbs, but in reverse. f’in horrible.
it was caused, i’m sure, by a poster my teacher had in the classroom of, of all things, skin parasites – fungal, parasitic, bacterial, etc.. ugh…
I thought I was the only person in the world with a phobia of this sort. As a child I used to detour far out of the way if I saw mushrooms growing on a lawn. I wouldn’t eat them, of course. Now I will eat table mushrooms, but if I find any mold growing in leftovers or in a jar of something, my instinct is to throw the entire container away instantly, even if it is a dish.
My nightmare is the “house mold” that has been publicized in the last few years. There are the most horrible pictures of “mold houses” on the web (Google images), with black mold all over the walls.
In a medical textbook I found a description of a very rare mold infection of the brain: it grows through your nose, into your sinuses and into your brain. You have to have very severe uncontrolled diabetic acidosis and be unconscious for this to happen.
fear of germs on the door handle of public restroom?
I’m sorry to tell you that you aren’t nuts.
20 years ago, visiting a friend in the hospital, I went into the bathroom and while I was completing the job, I read the poster on the wall: How To Wash Your Hands. Steps 1 thru 4 were the usual, wash, lather , rinse, dry with paper towel. Step 5: Holding on to your paper towel, open the door with it, and drop the paper towel into the watebasket as you leave the restroom. If hospitals are afraid of germs on toilet door handles, you’re in good company.
Someone – I don’t recall who – wrote that the greatest improvement in human health came when the germ theory of disease was widely accepted. doctors, nurses and ordinary people began to wash their hands well and thoroughly. human life expectancy increased dramatically. Nothing since that has equalled the good that hygiene and germ awareness brought.
I HATE cockroaches! I don’t like killing them or going anywhere near them but they can do everything, fly, run, walk, jump! Super roach! YUK! Its embaressing when i see one when lots of people are around but I freak out if someone picks one up and walks near me like they are going to put it on me! .. Big spiders like hunsmans are the same! … Its not a “phobia” but I dont like being in tall buildings, im afraid of them collapsing, I also freak out about paper cuts, and as beautiful as I think whales are I also think i would be freaked being near one!
I just wanted to say, that you and your fear of whales…is not something you are alone in. lol. I am deftly afraid of whales. My friends who know that tease me to no end. Although I have never encountered one, and don’t live near the ocean, I am frightened for the same reasons you are. we should start a group. nowhales anonymous. 🙂
I just wanted to say, that you and your fear of whales…is not something you are alone in.
Thank You! What’s wrong with these other whale-hugging nuts? 😉
nowhales anonymous. 🙂
NWA…nope, that’s been taken.
I don’t actually want any harm to come to the creatures…so long as they coordinate swimming elsewhere should I go swimming in the ocean…that’s not too much to ask, is it?
Thanks for letting me know I’m not the only one!
e
ohmygod. I’m so glad I’m not the only one– I am absolutely terrified of whales, as documented here and here.
It’s not like I’m going to open the pantry door in the morning and Moby Dick is going to be peering out from behind the box of Cheerios or anything, but it’s a completely horrible fear nonetheless!!
How about the scene in “Cast Away” where Tom Hanks is asleep/sun-delirious on the raft and he is woken up by a loud WHOOOSH and then water comes pounding down on him? DAMN DIRTY WHALE. I almost peed myself in the theater– I wasn’t prepared for that.
i am also absolutely terrified of whales. i can’t even watch finding nemo! i was the only one in the theater covering my eyes during “that part” while everyone else was like “ooooohhhh wooooow!” i almost fainted. then, while driving thru cleveland (i moved with my fiance and daughter from montana to new york and we drove) at nite, we came over a hill and there, on this giant building was a freaking whale painting! a huge one! i almost crashed.
i am also absolutely terrified of whales. i can’t even watch finding nemo! i was the only one in the theater covering my eyes during “that part” while everyone else was like “ooooohhhh wooooow!” i almost fainted. then, while driving thru cleveland (i moved with my fiance and daughter from montana to new york and we drove) at nite, we came over a hill and there, on this giant building was a freaking whale painting! a huge one! i almost crashed.
OMFG, I have that exact fear. I don’t get freaked out by much, but night I was sitting there writing in my diary when I had a sudden revelation about how freaky whales really are. Swear to God, the thought of being in a boat and having one go underneath it is enough to make me crap my pants (haha, charming stuff)
My friends think it’s hilarious too…
BUT WHALES REALLY ARE GOD DAMN SCARY!
I’m so glad I’m not the only one out there who thinks so!
I too am absolutely terrified of whales, as in I cannot even look at a picture of one. Thank you for proving that I am not the only person with this. My friends often tease me about this, but its seriously not funny! My worst whale scene is probably “cast away” too, but I’m not such a big fan of that bit in “finding nemo” either. Sometimes when watching films with ocean scenes, or even just general underwater scenes, I freak out and cannot look, suspecting a whale to grace the screen at any moment. I have nearly always been correct since a whale always appears, but luckily I am not looking. This has even been known to happen during the news; it’s just a feeling I get. Does anyone else get this “spidey sense” or precognition which protects them from their fears?
I get phobia premenitions! But thats probably because Im scared of a peice of music, and they usually get announced before they come up on the radio or something. Unfortunately some stupid advertising companies have started using it for things like dishwashing tablet adverts! Does anyone else get totally freaked out by ‘O Fortuna’ by Carl Orf? Or any other piece of music? I have panick attacks.
seaweed!
im realy scared of seaweed. once i almost stood on some, i screamed and ranaway.
I’m terrified of whales too!! I didn’t think that anybody else would have this irrational fear. I sometimes even get scared around lakes or swimming pools and even if I’m not around water, thinking about how big they are just makes me terrified. Anyways, I am glad I found this site because now I realize that I’m not alone and I’m not crazy. So I can show this to all of my family members that think my fear is funny.
OH MAN! I watched The Life Aquatic and if any people with whale phobias have seen that movie then you just automatically know what I’m talking about. It made me cry… I was shocked.
You’ve heard this before, but I just had to say, you’re not alone. A very good friend of mine (a zoologist, in fact) has the same fear. He says it’s terrible durring ‘whale week’ at the zoo…
I’m a little bit of a weirdo. I have an intense fear of butterflies, and even though they’re different, even a tiny moth makes me nervous and jumpy. I’m also afraid of horses, heights, and dark water.
I’m a little bit of a weirdo. I have an intense fear of butterflies, and even though they’re different, even a tiny moth makes me nervous and jumpy. I’m also afraid of horses, heights, and dark water. Oh yea, I don’t like whales either. ugly, scary, blimps of animals…
ooops, that one posted by “mouse,” infront of the first smelldepitts post was me. I made a muckup.
oh wait, sorry, the names r underneath the posts! i feel stupid
Cockroaches, cockroaches, cockroaches. Saying the word makes me uncomfortable, picturing them in my mind makes me uncomfortable, seeing the word written down makes me uncomfortable, seeing a picture of one is nerve-wracking, and seeing one in person?? FORGET ABOUT IT. My boyfriend teases me incessantly (insensitive creep) and gleefully chases me with dead cockroaches, laughing and yelling, “Eeeeeee! A roach, Megan, a roach!! Looooooook!!” while I race away at max speed, screaming at the top of my lungs. (He repeated this unbearable performance last night, which is why I did a Google search on “cockroach phobia” and found this forum.) He must realize I would bash his car windows in with a baseball bat if he ever actually put one on me, which is probably the only thing saving me from physical contact with those disgusting, freakish nightmare bugs. Once, when I was about 15, school let out early (right before winter break) so I came home and started unpacking all the Christmas ornaments from a cardboard box that my mother and brother had brought in from the garage the night before. Something moved in the bottom – SURPRISE! It was an enormous cockroach. I live in Texas, where they get to be horrifyingly big and they fly and have long, thick legs and long whips for antennae. A cockroach matching this description came out of the box, and I couldn’t leave because then it would run away and I wouldn’t know where it was and it might pop up on me later and give me a heart attack, and no one else was around to kill it, so I was FORCED to stay in the living room with a can of Hot Shot and spray this roach!!! I could barely force myself to get close enough to spray it, and I kept having to avert my eyes because I can’t stand to look at them and see the way they move, but then I’d have to look again to make sure it wasn’t running at me or something. It was awful!! THEN, to make matters worse, after that roach had flipped over on its back and was twitching, I had already retreated to the top of the couch (which was probably very damaging to the furniture) and was on the phone with my mother (at work), crying and shivering as she tried to console me…just as she was saying, “Now don’t worry, Megan, roaches don’t travel in groups, there are no more roaches, it’s over,” I tearfully glanced back at the box to find YET ANOTHER MONSTER COCKROACH sitting on top of the box!!! I unleashed a scream that I’m surprised didn’t result in police arriving at the house, and jumped about a foot in the air (using nothing but my buttocks to propel myself, since I was sitting), then promptly burst into fresh tears. Meanwhile, the scream had apparently scared the roach, which raced forward, fell off the box, and took a few seconds getting itself reoriented while I seized the opportunity to run forward, phone in one hand and Hot Shot in the other, and drown the roach with about a third of the can’s contents. I then flew through the air and landed back on the top of the couch, shaking uncontrollably and whimpering, while my mom kept loudly saying, “OKAY! OKAY! IT’S OVER! CALM DOWN!” Not forty-five seconds later, I swear before God in Heaven, a THIRD cockroach erupted out of this accursed box! I went physically loco (having already gone mentally loco with the first roach), flailing my arms and legs in panic and shrieking in terror before having to chase the evil bug across the floor (this one wasted no time after falling off the box). I barely had time to perch precariously back on the couch, by this time hoarse, teary, shaking, muttering to myself, and wild-eyed, before a fourth (no, I am not making this up), albeit smaller roach popped out of the box, fell off, turned around, and ran straight at me!! My very loud response prompted my mother to jump up from her desk and shout into the phone “JUST KILL IT! JUST KILL IT!” actions which (I later learned) earned her some very weird looks from the people in the cubicles around her, and a private talk from her manager. I used the rest of the can (which had been brand-new only twenty minutes earlier) on this last roach, which never had the sense to stop running at me even though I was spraying it directly in the face, which must have made it hard to keep going forward. Trying till the last to carry out its diabolical plan to touch me, and thus kill me, of course. My mother finally hung up the phone in complete frustration and annoyance (I don’t know why; she’s afraid of them too) so I called some friends who lived just a few streets away. I don’t think I was making any sense, but somewhere amongst the inane babble they must have caught the word “cockroaches,” because they arrived at my door within five minutes, one of them carrying a handkerchief and all of them looking intesely sympathetic (my phobia was no secret). I was still shaking, presumably from fear, but to this day I hold the private belief that it was mostly because I was trapped in the house for half an hour with the contents of a full can of nerve gas. Anyway, I refused to go back home until my mother bought some bug bombs and used them throughout the house, resulting in one more dead cockroach and a pile of filmy dishes that she hadn’t had the foresight to cover first. And you know what’s really odd? I have no recollection of ever being afraid of roaches as a kid. We must’ve had them, but I don’t remember a single incidence of me worrying over a roach until I was about 11. It’s like all of a sudden it just kicked in, out of the blue. It’s the most bizarre thing. I’m fine with snakes (used to have a pet snake), lizards (cute!), spiders (helpful!), frogs (funny), whales (never heard of being afraid of whales before), muggers (hey, whatever, they’re not roaches, that’s all I care about), but I cannot, cannot, cannot deal with cockroaches. I’m so afraid that it’s debilitating. And as a side note, I never thought that anyone else had a problem with seeing people put in foolish situations either. It’s not real bad for me, but I have to force myself to stay in the room and watch. It’s okay if it happens in cartoons, but seeing real people get made fools of (especially if they don’t realize it right away) is hard to watch. I still might laugh, but I’ll have to look away while I do it. I wonder why so many people have this problem with seeing others in these types of situations?? Yes, I know, this was a very long post. 😉 Sorry.
I too am gratified to find a number of people who share my “can’t watch other people’s embarrassment,” thing.
This is true for me with T.V., it is true for movies as well. Often, in any kind of socially awkward scene in a movie, I will close my eyes and stick my fingers in my ears and make little sounds to drown out the sight and sound of the awkwardness. My girlfriend hates it. It makes her mad. Sometimes I literally have to walk out of the movie theater, go have a cigarette or go to the bathroom, and then come back.
It also happens in real life though. If someone in a social gathering is being socially awkward, I will do rediculous things like speak over them or interrupt them or try to steer the conversation away from whatever it is they are talking about. In other words, I become socially awkward myself, just to prevent them from being awkward.
Is there a name for this?!
I really want to know?
I can’t believe I found other people with the same fear.
I have a terrible fear of whales. I can’t even look at that picture, doctored or not. I think my fear stems from a bad experience with an NJ mini golf course, where a whale emerged from the ground, attacking a boat. (Ocean City Boardwalk for all you east coast shore go-ers) And a combination of Moby Dick, Pinocchio, and Free Willy.
I’ve always hated whales.
I guess the fear is totally irrational, because there’s no official “phobia” phrase for the fear of whales, but there’s true reason to be afraid.
ketophobics unite.
(ketos is the greek word for whale. Cetus was a mythical whale-like monster — this is so a rational fear)
I work with a girl who has a fear of whales. We give her a pretty hard time about it in the office. The doctor that she works with & I are thinking about playing a trick on her…it’s not cruel, she does that kind of stuff all of the time. Any suggestions?
I have the same phobia. The fear of whales. I go into seizures everytime i see one even on tv or in a pic. Thanks for the seizure by the way with the photo above.
gasp! I honestly thought I was a freak. I am petrified of Whales, big time. I can’t move whenever I see them on tv or in a pic and then I feel like spewing everywhere. There’s this ‘save the whales’ ad on tv at the moment and every time it comes on I run away and hide. I HATE THEM. I’m glad there’s others out there like me… yay.
I am scared of whales too. I have more nightmares about seaworld than anything else. I am not even kidding.
omg. whales. i get the piss taking out of me for it too… but seriously. actually my friends stopped when they started talking about being stranded with a whale and i starting to hyperventilate. but whales scare the hell out of me. i went to an aquarium the other week and i was up all night. like someone thats posted, i dont want them to come to harm but id be somewhat comforted if i knew that if i came across one i could kill it, just to know i could. but i cant, maybe thats why i hate them.
When I was about 7 I was dismissed by my mother as retarded because I ran back home after I saw a roach crossing my road. I couldn’t continue walking because that ugly, that hideous creature was running really fast, not towards me, but just crossig my road. I felt like any movement I’d make could compromise my position. I felt like the creepy creature would crawl on me if I advanced and I would paralyze and die.
I’m still absolutely terrified of roaches. Pretty common but it’s painful.
I’m afraid that roaches will corner me and attack me. That they’ll crawl up my legs to my head, into my mouth and nose and ears and into my hair. **shudder
I’m also afraid of choking on peanutbutter. As much as I love it, I can’t eat peanutbutter by itself. I usually have to eat it with huge slices of kiwis or bananas or strawberries.
🙁 I’m also afraid of my own poo. (very embarassed at this point) I wouldn’t call it a phobia but pooing is scary. I always dread having to go to a public washroom to poo. As pleasurable as it is to rid yourself of all that shit (lol literally),I try to limit myself to shitting only once every two days.
Ugh, I have a huge fear of cockroaches…they just disgust me and fill me with a horrible nervous feeling. I saw a really huge one today just walking along and it really made me feel awful physically – increased heart beat, shaking and basically a feeling of terror in my stomach! I wish I could find a way to overcome it. I can’t go near them, or kill them, even though I’d like to (kill them, that is). I know that it’s a common fear, but it doesn’t make it any easier to bear! And it freaks me out, those stories that they can withstand a nuclear blast. So I totally commiserate with all you other roach-phobics that posted. There are some awful ads on tv at the moment for bug spray that show them, and I can’t even watch the screen when they come on. There are also some AWFUL CGI ads on for V Energy drink that show cockroaches having fun and flying under hairdryers…I hate the people that came up with those ads…damn them! If I’m eating I want to throw up !
…:-P On another note, I’ve never before heard of a fear of whales, but it’s interesting that a bunch of people here have it. But seeing as how some people apparently fear ice, ideas and peanut butter sticking to the roof of one’s mouth, anything goes!
<3 Good luck to all with your fears...
Burned Buildings! (And burned cars). On fire doesn`t bother me, But Burnt ones are like Hell…..
I’ve recently found that I’ve got a fear of whales too and reading that kinda freaked me out imagining whales. That picture even freaked me out! I dont mind killer whales, its just the HUGE whales that just make me shiver. My friends all think its funny, but my boyfriends a keen scuba diver and I also feel as though I cannot rely on a machine to breathe for me, and I freaked out in a Biology lesson when I had to put a nose plug on and breathe into a machine to the extent that I burst out crying. Anyway, my boyfriends teaching me very slowly to breathe with scuba diving gear, but I know I’m going to find it very hard whales freak me out!
meg072983
I read through your entire post, and I completely understand everything you were describing. I felt like I was there ~ shudder. I am deathly afraid of cockroaches. Insects in general freak me out [the only exceptions being ladybugs, and ants and maybe butterflies – moths just look like evil butterflies, though]. But cockroaches fill me with a revulsion and fear that I can’t convey. I just imagine them if they were our size — they’re monsters!!! Seriously, I think God is merciful and made them small.
I live in southern California, and in this climate you hardly see them. At least I don’t. But I lived on the east coast as a child and for two years in Pakistan, where I had the horror of seeing giant flying cockroaches [only the females fly, from what I understand]. They were so large there that to kill one by crushing it would make a crunching sound. ARGH. ARGH, ARGH! I’m dying just writing that. I’m not sure what this stems from — I think it might be when I was a child in Virginia, I used to go swimming every day one summer. One day I put on my swimsuit which had been laid out to dry the day before. After I put it on, I felt this weird prickly thing at my right hip, under the suit. I think I went to touch it, or something, and this ugly black cockroach crawled out down my leg. I don’t understand why ALL human beings aren’t afraid of cockroaches.
I have no problems with snakes, other than fearing they might bite me. I don’t even mind spiders [but I have to say watching the movie Arachnophobia actually gave me a mild case of it]. But cockroaches are truly horrifying, seeing that they can survive nuclear radiation. They are a gruesome, fearsome creation. And truly underrated.
I also have that unbearable feeling when I watch someone doing something humilating/embarassing. I will change the channel. But I never thought of it as a phobia before coming here. It seems ALOT of us share that phobia.
Glad I found this site… My fiancee has a severe, paralyzing whale phobia. I don’t mind covering her eyes when one shows up on TV, but when one pops up by surprise she will literally start sobbing for minutes. Often it ruins the whole night. Her absolute nightmare is the idea of flying whales, and of course some genius just came up with a commercial featuring a whole freaking flock of them–that was not a fun moment in our apartment! I understand that phobias are just something people live with–I have a fear of dolls, especially porcelain ones, and Raggedy Ann/Andy–but hers is so severe that it really worries me. Anybody here have any luck getting over (or at least alleviating) your whale phobia?
It’s so nice to know I’m not alone in this whale phobia. I get so much shit for it from everyone and, while I will admit it sounds like a funny phobia and I can laugh with the best of them, it is not a laughing matter for me at all when we get right down to it. My phobia started as a result of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. In the summer of 1999 my family and myself took a trip to Hyannis, MA [Cape Cod.] During that trip we went on a whale watch where they pretty much guaranteed whale sightings or you’d be refunded the full 40$ price of your ticket. We must have seen over twenty whales that day, and I was fine with it. The only thing I found unnerving was, at one point one of the whales stuck its giant head out of the water and was just eyeing up the boat. That was rather frightening, but I loved loved LOVED whales at that point so I shook it off.
Skip to two weeks after we’d gotten home. I was sitting on the sofa, minding my own business, when a commercial for a whale watch in Cape Cod came on the TV. I had a panic attack and that was the day the phobia began. That was almost seven years ago now, and it’s only worsened for me since. I am now at the point where I freeze up completely and cannot move or breathe when I see a picture [or anything!] of a whale. Like that guy up there said about his fiancee, I have these horribly irrational thoughts about flying whales.. Like what would happen if there was a storm down the shore and a whale was catapaulted out of the ocean and landed in the middle of the road? I’ve had so many nightmares involving whales over the years.. It’s horrible. It’s gotten to the point where seeing an AIRPLANE sends me into a panic spiral, because in the sky they remind me of flying whales. And while Free Willy used to be an all-time favorite movie of mine, I can’t even look at the cover of it anymore. A WHALE jumping over a boy’s HEAD? Are you kidding me? I found that movie the other day when I was cleaning and I had to dispose of it quicker than a cheating ex. Woe is me and this phobia, man. I’m telling you.
This post just keeps on giving.
When I try to sleep some nights I wake myself up obsessing about giant sheep leaping over me.
I wish Edward were around, but this has to be, meantime, the creepiest thread ever on ObWi.
These people give me the willies. I really don’t want to know about their neurosese. Call me intolerant, I guess. Sorry. They make my skin crawl.
The cockroachaphobes may enjoy this Creepshow movie trailer.
Or not.
A good way to alleviate a phobia, is to remind yourself that you WILL be afraid. But think about it, do you really want to alleviate something about you that makes you so very different? (unless it’s debilatating) I’m not suffering much from my fear of butterflies, (the worst 1), so I avoid doing anything about it. I use that trick on roller coasters though. lol.
Oh my dear god. I am so afraid of whales, my friends think it is the funniest thing ever. Not dolphins, just whales. Orcas aren’t so bad, but blue, sperm, humpbacked, right, nar-, etc whales all make me want to pee myself scared. Nevertheless, I am so deeply fascinated. I just finished In the Heart of the Sea by Nathaniel Philbrick (about the whaleship Essex) and I loved it. Its the masochist in me, but I love tempting my fear and reading about the beasts.
My best friend found this site for me; unfortunately he missed the HUGE FREAKING WHALE TALE in the picture. I died a little.
I’ve been terrified of whales as long as I can remember. I can admit it’s totally irrational and even silly, but if people start sharing their “whale stories” (I live in Massachusetts and thus people around here have a lot of them) with me, or start talking about specific types of whales, I start crying.
I found out this morning that for one of my classes this fall I have to read Moby Dick, and I’m terrified to the point where I don’t think I can do it. I am going to talk to a therapist in hopes of documenting this fear, so maybe I can approach my professor with some sort of proof that I CANNOT read this book. However, it makes me sad because I love American Romantic Literature, and was thinking about focusing on it in grad school, but I know I can’t if I haven’t read Moby Dick.
I’m so glad I’m not alone; I’ve met maybe two or three other people with this fear, but none as extreme as mine seems to be (with the exception of Chris’ finacee, posted above). I would love to be able to get over it, but I know that that would require a rigorous exposure to whales that right now I just can’t deal with.
Edward, you said it exactly. I would die, right there, on the spot if I ever came face-to-face with a whale. I’m crying just thinking about it.
I’d love to find some scholarship on this. Some scholarship WITHOUT PICTURES.
FINALLY!
My entire life, i have been waiting for someone to share this exact phobia with me. I too am deathly afraid of whales and so with the 2% of the worlds’ population. Everything you’ve written is how i felt all my life but i would never knew how get it out right, i usually sound insane but you’ve said it very well. Maybe i am insane but at least i can use it as a phobia as an excuse. I’ve always been the victim of a whale joke but i never really laughed. Yes, it is kind of funny but when faced with it in reality or even thinking about it i get the shivers & all jokes will cease. i really can’t seem to remember all the details why and how i am afraid but i vaguely remember going to a museum and there was a huge life-sized model of a blue whale. Im not sure if i freaked out because it was hanging from the ceiling hoping to God that it wouldn’t crush me to death or the fact that when i was 6 years old, and i was the size of this creatures eyeball. Sometimes i make myself look at pictures or watch movies to get rid of this phobia but nothing seems to work. Maybe getting hypnotized? I guess it’s just something i have to get used to? It’s funny how some people say “it’s not like you see a whale everyday” but the truth is, when you’re afraid of something it doesn’t matter if you see it or not, it just takes one little thing (or BIG thing in this case) to trigger it. An ex-boyfriend of mine always joked about it and one anniversary of mine he tried to be funny by surprising me in going on a Whale Watching Tour, sure i would go just to get over it but just the evil look on his face gave it away, I knew that he would be laughing at me the whole time while i would be having a panic attack (hence him being my EX boyfriend). I also discoverd that i didn’t like ANY huge object i.e a rocky mountain at night, just the look of it reminded me of a dinosaur. And that’s one thing too, WHALES ARE DINOSAURS OF OUR TIME how does that not freak anyone out. I don’t know maybe i’m just crazy about that one but i think it’s a BIG THING phobia esp if the object is ALIVE & BREATHING. Someday i would like to cure this phobia of ours but until then i would like to get it under control because i don’t want to limit myself in anything in life due to being afraid i.e scuba diving. I also would like find out what this phobia is called. If you have any idea i’d like to know, it could be the first step to curing it. Thanks for the story, well put. Nuke the Whales.. haha jk!
– Aimmie
ps. is it me or are there A LOT of whale commercials out there now. i.e The Mountain Dew Whale commercial. God Save us all!
I apologize.
i seemed to have had many typos in my last comment. I’ll just blame it on my seizure while reading and writing about this subject. There, I’ve cleared the air.
Nuke the Whales.. again!
> on this giant building was a freaking
> whale painting! a huge one!
Yeah I know that painting. It’s on the side of the Cleveland Public Power building along I-90, a little way east of the Route 2 interchange and Deadman’s Curve. Cetophobics should detour around there. I used to live in and around Cleveland. I’m glad I don’t have a whale phobia. That would be scary seeing a giant painting of something you have a phobia of and I probably would crash. I don’t think cetophobia is funny, but I do think whales are kind of funny. Like how they used to have legs and go around on land, and they evolved to be huge and have no legs because the water holds them up.
My phobias are phobias of house centipedes, werewolves, people that look like werewolves, deformed people, disfigured people, becoming disfigured, and going insane. I don’t know what the phobias are called.
I just remembered this! A whale news story, http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20060816/sc_afp/scienceaustraliafossilanimal_060816072143 “Savage ancient whale was ‘marine T-rex’, researchers say”. Whale-phobic people should turn off images before going to this page, but for those of you now afraid of whales, isn’t it funny-looking? I try to imagine what they looked like when they lived on land though.
Esp. cool pics of Bolivia at the above link.
I’m glad to know that I’m not the only one who is afraid of whales. I remember watching Free Willy when I was a kid and not being afraid. I think I developped the phobia when I actually went whale watching in the Saint Laurent River, in Canada. Ever since, I can’t look at a whale picture, nor submarine pictures of even pictures of bombs…It’s weird.
Hi – I just learned about ‘cetaphobia’ this morning from an e-friend on another website. I never knew it existed. How interesting! I am awed by whales, quite naturally, they are so imposing and have a healthy respect for them of course, could that be construed as a fear of them? I don’t know.
I agree with meg and the other people that have an immense fear of cockroaches. I am absolutely terrified of them. And i agree. The people who come up with ads and movies like Joe’s apartment are so freaking inconsiderate. And meg, you boyfriend is an a-hole for doing that to you I would seriously punch him in the face (after I threw up and had convulsions). On top of the fact that I fear seeing them, hearing them, hearing the name, or anything associated with them, I have an added fear of being punished when I die and having them crawl over my decaying body while I FEEL IT!! omg i dont know how many nightmares I;’ve had. They are huge and ugly and so goddamn unnecessary. I had one fall out of a 15 ft palm tree into my hair and get tangled. I have also woken up with them on me. Found them in my bathtub. In boxes. In shoes I HATE FLORIDA!!!! Shows like fear factor give me nightmares. MY fear is so intense that I cannot eat at most restaurants for fear that a cockroach will end up in my food or walking around in the restaurant. It’s gone so far as to make me buy my own food and only cook at home. I fog my apartment every month and sleep with my face covered by a pillow or sheet so that they don’t crawl on my face. I cannot kill them like you all say and seeing one drives me over the edge. You couldnt pay me enough money to eat one or lay in a bed of them. NO WAY IN HELL. I might touch one for an exorbitant amount of money (something over $2000). but only for a second and with my eyes closed and with one finger. I can’t even beign to describe what it is like going thru everyday of my life worrying that I will be seeing one. It is debilitating and I have had to learn from living on my own that I need to deal with it. Sometimes if a stray hair falls on my face or a hair on my body tickles a leg or arm I swap my arms like a crazy person and freak out!!!!!!! people think im out of my mind, but i will automatically think its a cockroach.
I’m ok with other insects, some of them of course gross me out and are hard to kill but i can do it. But there is nothing in this world like a cockroach and what it does to me. I would much rather bungee jump off the eiffel tower than lay in a bed of roaches. 10 x over and for $1
OMG i also have a huge fear of whales! i found this site when trying to find the scientific name of the fear of whales on google, so i would know what to call it when im asked if i have any phobias. People ask me all the time how can you be sacred of whales an i really cant explain it, but i tink its mostly their size. the fact that if they wanted to kill it would be so easy. call me crazy but i swear i would rather be in a tank with a shark than with a whale. well just wanted to tell ya your not alone!
I understand completely. I’ve never had a bad experience with a whale, but if I saw one at Sea World in the big aquariums with nothing but a pane of glass separating us, I would probably die. I don’t know what brought this on, but the thought of being next to something with an eye as big as me really freaks me out. And I definitely do no enjoy the mountain dew commercial. It definitely has to do with size, maybe some underlying issue with power…They should call it cetaceaphobia. Thats a great name.
I dunno if you’ll read this coz it’s an ancient thread, but I was searching google for fear of whales and I was shocked to come across this. As I have the exact same phobia, even reading your post has made me feel uneasy… and i thought i was the only one! I’m not taking the piss if it looks like I am, I’m actually genuinly terrified of the mammals…
E-mail me back if you can.
Steve.
OMG i cant believe im not the only one who is deadly afraid of whales it all started witha dream of me being in a big pool of humback whales all staring at me. and i cant even watch the whale part in finding nemo its really sad =[ but im really scared of them:(
Of course I am scared of snakes and sharks, a lot of people are but my #1 nightmare (recurring) is of whales. I also freak out when I see worms, but whales take the cake. I saw the movie Orca when I was 4 and seeing the Orca’s eye up close scared me so bad. I played some Donkey Kong country or something video game and you had to swim down and a freaking whale came out or it may have been a large eel…doesn’t matter, I couldn’t finish playing. My husband and everyone laughs at me for being afraid of whales.
By the way, I too came across this thread by searching for the name for “fear of whales”.
I can completely relate to the Whale phobia..As a child I LOVED whales and wanted to be a marine biologist…one day I was suddenly terrified of them…I can’t swim in any body of water larger than a bath tub by myself with out thinking there is a whale in it about to grab my ankles and suck me into its mouth….You are not alone…Is there a name for this phobia??
one day I was suddenly terrified of them
I’ve always been terrified of marine biologists. If they can train killer whales to ejaculate on command, think of what they could do with humans.
omggggg im sooooo afraid of whalessss like om humback whales make me cry
I agree with you 100%. I just recently told my dad this, and he found it funny. I honestly am terrified of whales. I have never seen one in real-life though. Well, I went to Seaworld when I was little, but I don’t remember that at all, and I don’t even think I’m afraid of Killer Whales or anything. Just Blue Whales, and the big ones like in Pinocchio. I can’t handle it. I think what scares me most is seeing footage of just their tales above the water. I shiver, and get teary-eyed and have no idea why. It’s very very odd, and I think that if I were to ever witness something like that for myself, I would have a seizure…. Really.
I agree with you 100%. I just recently told my dad this, and he found it funny. I honestly am terrified of whales. I have never seen one in real-life though. Well, I went to Seaworld when I was little, but I don’t remember that at all, and I don’t even think I’m afraid of Killer Whales or anything. Just Blue Whales, and the big ones like in Pinocchio. I can’t handle it. I think what scares me most is seeing footage of just their tales above the water. I shiver, and get teary-eyed and have no idea why. It’s very very odd, and I think that if I were to ever witness something like that for myself, I would have a seizure…. Really.
Wow. I love this thread. I always thought I was weird for being absolutly terrified of whales, and dolphins as well, but I guess I’m not as bad as I thought.
My friends always get a good laugh out of me. A whale comes on T.V. and my breathing and heart rate speed up. A close up of a whale, especially if some mildly insane human is swimming next to it, and I start whimpering. Possible a good example of the first time I noticed my phobia was when I was younger in girl scouts. We went whale watching and I spent almost the entire trip pretending to be sea sick and lying down as far away from the edge as possible.
Also, I’ve become steadly terrified of the ocean itself. It’s only got worse and worse sense then, and now I don’t even like going into to the shallow water of the ocean very much.
The funny thing? I’m not as afraid of sharks- just whale sharks, whales, and dolphins.
I guess I also have a little of the following:
Gamophobia- Fear of marriage. (Well. Maybe not. I just don’t trust it)
Pediophobia- Fear of dolls.
And like said before, I’m one of those people who can’t stand having anything on their hands. I have to wash my hands whenever I get something on them, kinda like a compulsive habit.
omg, im not the only person afraid of whales!
i thought i was wierd.
i actually just dont like any lare aquatic animals at all but whales are worst.
Wow, I can’t believe there are so many people who are afraid of whales.. I thought I was the only one. My mother thinks it’s too irrational and doesn’t think I’m really afraid of them. I don’t know why I am, I used to love whales – I went whale watching when I was 6, and it seems as if one day for no reason I was scared to death of them. I think it’s their size, it’s mostly the really big ones, blue whales, right whales, humpbacks, etc, not so much orcas.. I’m getting really paranoid just typing about it. Oh, and that picture really doesn’t need to be on this page..
I’m scared of several ridiculous things (ridiculous as other people see it)
-Large sea creatures, which include big turtles, whales and giant sharks. I saw a video of photoshops on youtube a few days ago, and there was a man on a yacht with a huge shark underneath. I went in fits just seeing it.
-Nuclear Fallout deformities, especially Uranium Infanticide. If you saw it’s effects I’m sure it would make you shake aswell. Warning- the following link is extremely disturbing.
http://www.tetrahedron.org/articles/gulf_war_syndrome/uranium_infanticide.html
The intro to the new hills have eyes sent me in convulsions.
-Sleep paralyisis, where you wake up but are paralysed. Also, people can sense an evil force in the room which is creepy.
-Anything happening to the soft skin underneath fingernails.
-Little girls with very pale faces and black hair.
-I have a horrible fear of loss, especially death but not me dying, people I know who I’m close to.
-Graveyards
-Sea creatures such as crabs, sea anenome or seaweed
-Mental Institutions. This stems from the film ‘House on the haunted Hill’
-Mentally Ill patients, they’re unpredictable and scary
-Hallucianations, where I always think I’m decomposing while I’m still alive.
-Being buried alive
-Dead Bodies/Zombies/Cemetery’s/Mortuary’s
-The Dark, or more what it hides
-War
whenever I encounter any of these things, strangely I feel as though the whole world is closing in on me, I become shivering and almost pass out. My vision goes blurry and I can’t think straight.
i have a lot of small fears:
and i also have a few fairly big fears:
and i sometimes freak out when theres like… a large mess around me… once i got home from melbourne n there was stuff around mah feet on the floor… and i got a bit freaked n couldnt breathe too well… same thing happens when its too hot… :S
*(now feels fair stupid for even thinking of posting this)*
Ok, too many stupid people are making comments on the picture being fake…THAT’S NOT THE POINT! The point is, somebody with a whale phobia (me included) would look at that picture and instantly feel their stomach tie itself into a knot! I have been terrified of whales my whole life. I would not like to meet ANY whale while in the water, but the ones that really scare me (all I have to do is see a picture) are the baleen whales and the Sperm Whale. Porpoise-like ones don’t bother me that much. I read once that a fear of whales, or nightmares about whales are the manifestation of a fear of the unknown. If anybody else has a fear of whales, feel free to contact me! I like to know I’m not alone!
I think, though im not totally sure, that i got my phobia of whales when i was either 3 or 4. I saw the disney version of pinochio. I loved to movie and i watched it over and over. But after the seconned time i just couldnt watch the scene with monstro anymore. Its weird, the first time i see somethign scary in a movie or something it doesnt scare me the first time as much as it does the second time. I think its because im dreading that its comming and i get so worked up about it that when i do see the effect is much worse. Anyways, I watched the scene again just reccently to see if i could convince myself that they really wernt that scary. I have enough common sense to know that whales really arent as dangorous as i think they are. WHile i was watching it my dog barked from behind me and I lept out of my chair and fled into the other room where i hid behind the sofa until my heart beat slowed down and i was calm again.
My friends think is really funny. On occasion theyll yell “LOOK A WHALE” as if im supposed to think is funny or something. Acctually, it makes me really angry and upset. I feel no shame in admitting that im afraid of them because i really dont care what people think of it, but when people start making fun of me it seems to only make it worse. This thread helped alot because now i know im not the only person who has a phobia of whales.
Just so you know, when you type Whale Phobia in on google this is the second page, so its probally gonna keep getting used for a while.
ok, i have a weird one… and i have never met anyone with the same phobia as me..i feel really stupid.. but here it goes… im terrified of rooms with open cupboard doors… i have had panic attacks a few times.. one about 3 weeks ago was the worst one yet.. i know what ur all thinkin.. lol and yes i am a weirdo… but i dont think that there really is a lot i can do about it.. i cant even watch it on tv.. or see pictures.. even now.. im kinda freaking out.. but i try not to think about it.. and i am fine… if anyone is intetested in it.. go to your kitchen.. open all your doors.. and stand in the middle.. then you mayy slightly understand how i feel.. if not.. its still terrifying to me.. but i’ll live with it… if anyone has the same.. or similar phobia.. PLEASE let me know… so im not alone.. :S
omg reading about those cockroach phobias deff make me feel a little bit better..
i’ve never met anyone that was as scared of those things as me.. i thought i was insane, which i may still be. but at least i know that i am not alone.
Omg reading Megan’s story really, really, reeeaaalllly freaked me out. I was sitting here reading it, laughing and in tears at the same time.. i know exactly how she must’ve felt cuz i feel that same way all the time. and it’s funny cuz if you think about it, it’s kind of ridiculous but there’s nothing you can do about it.
Any time I see one, I freak out and start crying hysterically.. every one just laughs but they don’t understand how i feel..
I’m also deathly afraid of frogs.. eww.. i think it’s because my friend threw one on my back once when i was little, and i guess ive hated them since then.
back to cockroaches…
I have had them crawl on me.. once while in the shower.. up my leg! =[ i thought it was a hair or something so i went to brush it off with my other foot and realized it was a goddamn cockroach.
then i woke up the other night, and a HUGE, FREAKING ENORMOUS cockroach was on my arm!!
I FREAKED OUT!! i jumped up and started crying.. called my dad in to kill it. He couldn’t find it but i couldn’t sleep with it in the room. NO WAY!
he finally found it and killed it after it went all over my clothes and in my closet and on my bed!!
another night, one was on the wall next to me, like 2 ft away from where i was sitting. It ended up on my bed.. i flipped out.. omg it was hell..
my brother, who usually kills bugs for me, wasn’t home.. so i had to kill it. i got that spray and after i realized it was dead, it was drowned in that bug spray, i changed my sheets, put my bed in the center of the room, away from EVERYTHING, where it still is today..
But anyway, i’m glad i’m not alone and crazy. lol..
now I can’t even go take a shower to go to work.. i’m scared that there’s one waiting for me there. I feel like they’re crawling all over my body now.. damn this sucks.. thanks for starting this guys.. lol
I have quite a few odd phobias, most of them are already mentioned by someone (which makes me feel a bit better about having them). Ill try to remember them all….
-Whales (of course)
-Lion Fish – seriously, google those things and look at em!
-Watermelon – something about the texture makes me gag
-Eating a hamburger and finding one of those little hard things
-Walking past an open door especially if the room is dark
-Falling into the ocean and just sinking forever and watching all the sea creatures swimming around me
-Clowns – enough said
-Any person in a costume – halloween is not a good time for me
-Things that move of their own free will that really shouldnt like mechanical robots, parade floats, and the like
-Manequins or dolls – i always feel like i see those things moving.
-Watching someone do something embarassing, on tv or otherwise
-Being buried alive
And i keep having these recurring nightmares about being on a beach and HUGE waves comiming from both sides to swallow me whole. Anyone have any idea what that means?
OMG! I have a major fear of seaweed. One time it got so bad that I wouldn’t go anywhere near the beach or pool for fear that I would find seaweed. I also wouldn’t drink bottled water or water from a tap because I was sure that I would drink seaweed. But of course waters a necisety (not sure how to spell that) so i would have to drink it as fast as I could bcuz about ten seconds later I would pass out.
I also have Autophobia- the fear of being alone. A fear of ciggerates and alcohol and have just gotten over my major fear of being touched. ( I was suspended it got that bad!)
I think it is cool how this thread keeps getting revived. 🙂
Whales are incredibly scary to me. I agree, nothing should be that big, ever! They’re just so… ominous. Especially the noises they make. They sound like they’re everywhere. The first time I noticed my fear wasn’t until I watched Finding Nemo. That scene with the whale far in the distance… it’s just so frightening.
I also have a paralyzing fear of hyenas. I don’t know, they just seem evil to me. And before anyone says anything, I know they’re not evil. At one point, I thought that if I knew more about them, I wouldn’t be afraid of them, but it didn’t work. Now I’m afraid of hyenas and I know stuff about them. I can’t even look at them, on tv, or in video games of anything. Except the three cartoony hyenas in the Lion King. The rest of them, though, are scary.
Also crows. I feel like they’re watching me. Plus, you see crows all over the place, but how do you know it isn’t the same crow over and over…?
Oh my goodness, I totally agree with you, and everyone else who had commented about whales. I’m only fourteen, but ever since I saw the Mountain Dew commercial when a man is in a little boat and suddenly a whale jumps out from the water and swallows him, I just can not look, hear or think about whales without being very afraid. All of my friend ridicule me because whales are “nice creatures” but the thing that scares me is the fact that they are just so enormous. Sometimes my friends as a cruel joke show me pictures of whales when I don’t expect it, but I never think it’s funny, I’m just afraid. I covered my eyes in Finding Nemo, and ran out of the room while my friends and I were watching Fantasia 2000. I’ve never came across someone with the same fear as me, and I feel very comforted to know I’m not alone. The worst situation I could imagine being in is swimming along and suddenly seeing a dark figure coming towards me. I know this sounds ridiculous, but I won’t even go swimming in a regular swimming pool, I’m too afraid that a whale could be in there with me.
I think I have it worse than you…I was just trying to find the name for the phobia of whale when I came across this and whne i loaded the page and saw that tail i jumped in my seat and got dizzy..Its not just BIG creatures, its big creatures under water.When I swim in the Spokane river thers this giant tree under water and its been there forever. thats the same area I learned to swim and I think it fucked me up…nice to know theres someone else.
I don’t have a fear of whales, but I do have a strange fear of patterns. Well, I use the word “pattern” pretty loosely. I mean, if there was a puddle on the ground and someone dropped some grass clippings on it, the way the grass would interlock with each other would freak me out. And the fear is pretty random. If I were to mess with that puddle and the grass clippings shifted, the new “pattern” they made might not even faze me…. But anyway, seeing a “pattern” that fit that description, I become paralyzed, and I can’t stop staring at it until I do something about it. Once, I guess some juice had spilled or something in the refridgerator and when it dried up, it made this weird jagged image, I couldn’t stop thinking about it, I just kept freaking out and seeing it, long after I cleaned up the mess. That’s my weirdest phobia (I wish it had a name)
I also have a fear of any insect larger than a dime. I’ve finally gotten to the point where I can kill centipedes if I see one come into my room (though with a Swiffer in hand) I could never kill anything with a hard shell like a beetle or a cockroach (which I used to have to see them all the time when I lived in Florida…. *shudders*) My grandfather would get mad when I would get scared of them, even if they were dead. IT’S NOT MY FAULT YOU’RE NOT AFRAID OF LARGE INSECTS!! Sorry…
I also used to have extreme paranoia, and once, I was absolutely convinced that while I was sleeping, someone was using a special camera to see right through my blankets. I saw this 20/20 special about apartment owners putting cameras in people’s bathrooms and watching them, and ever since, I still get paranoid before I take a shower in an apartment. It’s especially strange, because I don’t have a fear of being naked in front of people.
My last phobia (I didn’t realize my list would be this long…) is my fear of heights, or rather, my fear of falling and seriously hurting myself. Then again, I might just be afraid of pain, but when I’m playing video games, and I have to jump over an endless chasm, I get a little nervous…
On the subject of video games, I used to have a fear of video games when I was a kid. I was afraid of what would happen to me if I ever lost or died in the game, and for that reason, I wouldn’t play them between the ages of 5 and 9. There’s even a specific song from a game that to this day gives me a minor anxiety attack. It’s from the Donkey Kong Country game, in the first level when you burst out of Donkey Kong’s house, and go into the cave at the bottom of the cliff. If you haven’t beat the game, it plays this melody… Ugh, I don’t want to think about it….. It makes me cry.
That’s got to be the most unique fear of all.
Like a female, I talked too much… ^^
i absolutely cannot stand whales. or fish, seaweed, or anything to do with oceans/lakes. even seemingly irrelevant things. leeches, rocks, minnows, turtles, water lilies, mud…if you can find it in a lake or ocean, it’ll probably give me a panic attack. i cant even go into an aquarium at a pet store. just walking past one at a reasonable distance makes me all jittery and paranoid. also attached to this fear is my fear of National Geographic magazine. has anyone else noticed that in almost EVERY edition of this magazine there seems to be a double page spread of a shark or a whale or some god-forsaken underwater being. maybe i just notice them because they freak me out so much but i cant pick the magazine up anymore.
i also fear any kind of insect. mainly spiders, earwigs, and centipedes. when i see one, i am torn between running from the house in terror and watching it–i cant decide whether IT scares me more, or LOSING it somewhere in my house. ugh. just thinking about them makes my skin crawl.
i cant stand caves, either. or any dark crevice. just the thought of what MIGHT be there scares the hell out of me. like even in movies where people pull up the floorboards and find some anonymous hidden treasure; i dont care if it were a million dollars. theres no way im sticking my hand anywhere i cant see it. this compounds my fear of the ocean. all that dark space..and the seaweed…yuck.
also, mental illness…especially people with down syndrome. i know it makes me sound like a complete jerk, but i cant help it. its irrational. i cant be around them.
ive also always been especially creeped out by damage to the eyes/hands/bottom of the foot. i can watch violent movies, but if any of these body parts are effected, i have to look away. i live in constant fear of things like stepping on nails or walking into tree branches.
wow i didnt realize there’d be so many. kind of sad. anyways my main point was, im glad other people can relate to the whale thing.
P.S. i also relate to the person-experiencing-embarrassing-situation phenomenon. what IS that?
I have one of those long list of totally irrational fears – of course I also have rational ones too such as cockroaches, claustrophobia, heights, slight arachnophobia, extreme fear of sharks to the point that I’m convinced they’ll come out of the water and attack me and a crippling fear of frog I’m convinced they’ll jump in my mouth and my teeth falling out terrifies me, but the irrational ones are the worst. I’m terrified of bathrooms, especially when you have to flush the toilet, sometimes to the point that I’ll be at work and know I have to flush it but am so frightened that I stand there for 10 minutes sweating and panicking. The other one is stickers and that one is worst, stickers on fruit or food mean that I can’t eat for at least and hour and stickers on me turn into full blown panic attacks where I can’t breath and I’m convinced I’ll somehow get them in my mouth too
I have the biggest phobia of seaweed!! I absalutely hate it!! I went fishing today with my sister,my brother,my cousin,and my friend. There was seaweed everywhere. Then my brother fell in so I had to jump in a get him b cause he can’t swim. I hated it sooo much. I still have seaweed phobia and i dont think i’ll ever get over it.
I have a phobia of swimming alone in the water when my friends or family are on land! Im scared animals from the water will bite me…Im scared they might come near me! I know they are harmless but im still very scared!!!
~Kaitlyn~
I have a phobia of swimming alone in the water when my friends or family are on land! Im scared animals from the water will bite me…Im scared they might come near me! I know they are harmless but im still very scared!!!
~Kaitlyn~
Hey peeps it’s kayla again!! I Said I have a phobia of seaweed, Im deathly afraid of it!! What I forgot to say was I also have a phobia of the bottom of any place i swim but pools. I always hold my feet up b cuz I don’t wanna touch whatever is down there. I don’t know whats down there and I guess thats what scares me the most. I also can’t swim alone. People have to be in the water b 4 me or I wont get in. I dont know why Im like this so if any one has N E advise for me u can write to me. I have yahoo and aim. The same sn for both it is… Kaylaeviltwin618 and my email is Kaylaeviltwin618@yahoo.com. So if any one has advise or has to talk to me about there problem write to me and tell me who u are and ill be glad to talk to u.
Alwayz and 4 eva,
<3Kayla<3
I am terrified of whales too. Especially blue whales and there long baleen plates.
Greta, thanks for your phobia post.
I, too, have a phobia of werewolves. Exposure to anything werewolf related has me in tears, wanting to crawl under the covers and DIE. As a child I used to have recurrent dreams about werewolves and wolves which freak me out.
Due to the various forms of lycanthropy, I have a hysterical fear of savage wolves as well as humanoid werewolves.
Just make it STOP people, MAKE IT STOP!
CHALK. i know. it’s wierd. but i don’t even want to talk about it. it just seriously disturbs me.
and i greak the fuck out when there’s semi trucks on the highway. i can’t pass them or have them pass me without screaming. once they were on both sides of me, and i started crying and couldn’t breathe. thankfully i wasn’t driving. it’s wierd.
I thought I was the only one with a fear of patterns…I’ve noticed that my fear of patterns only matters if its a natural or random pattern. Like today I had an ice coffee and the pattern that the condensation was making on the side of the cup was really bothering me and I couldn’t stop looking at it until I wiped it off. Yeah, pretty weird stuff. My best friend thinks I’m crazy…
You seriously won’t believe this, but i have that exact same fear!! I have the same insane fear of whales that you have and i know exactly what you mean. i practically have convulsions even when i just see open underwater spaces! i could’ve written that article that you wrote, and i’ve been looking for someone with the same fear for a long time because my friends think i’m insane and i get teased a lot. thank you so much!!!!
Hey, I have a fear of whales and i am trying to find the officail title of it. some peopel say its an extreme case of Ichthyophobia, but i dont know…
I have a slight fear of insects, I hate to say it but i do. Earwigs, cockroaches,centipedes,grubs, and june bugs are possibly the most disgusting specimens on the face of the earth. I’m slowly getting over the earwigs though, in the summer my father and I go to the front step with to pairs of tweezers and feed the nasty earwigs to the spiders that live there. I suppose my fear of cockroaches is from grade five, when there was an insect man who came to school and plopped a genuine madagascar hissing cockroache on my hand,it smelled rank,hissed at me, crapped on me,bite me, and then it was flung back into the face of the insect man. Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Conquerer Worm” turned me off of the grubs, and centipedes? An episode of CSI:NY …. Bleh. June bugs are another case hudreds of them fly around in the summer night, they get caught in your hair, with their barbed legs, soft fleshy bodies and hard wings, ugh! Thank you for letting me share this with you. 😀
Um. I too, am afraid of whales
I know well of what you speak. I used to think it was sharks or even just “thingies” in the water, but what gets to me and freaks me out is how massive the sea is, and some of the things that reside there. Loch Ness scares me not because of “Nessie,” but because it’s 3 miles deep!
I have never been able to get into a pool without first asking “how deep is it?” And even after that all I can do is sit on the steps and after about a half hour get out.I’m terrified that someones lied to me and the pools really 30-40 ft deep like the Army training facilities(My brother is in the army,big gigantic pool,scary).Anyway I can’t swim, I like the water but I hate the feeling of having no control over where Im going.I can’t watch movies about the sea or anything thats got alot of water in it, ie;Jaws,The perfect storm, and the most terrifying of all, Titanic. Then theres my fear of dying which is directly linked to my fear of deep water and drowning. I can’t watch bloody gory films.I like scary mvies but not the bloody ones. I can’t stand the idea of dying a PAINFUL,GRUESOME,death. Im not afraid of dying but Im terrified of being murdered, by humans or by supernatural beings. All of this is tightly related to my fear of being left alone. As a kid I never liked birthday parties or sleepovers because I didnt like being away from my Mommy,but now I’m just plain scared of bing left in a room or house COMPLETLY ALONE. I feel terribly unsafe and unprotected,even though I have no idea what of.
oh my goodness I totally agree with everything about the fear of whales…i am TERRIFIED of them…i even scream if I see a cartoon picture of them….they give me the shivers and make me feel like im going to be sick!!!
Hehe.
I have a huge fear of trains.
And 18 wheelers.
And dolphins/whales.
And butterflies.
Sharks are nice, snakes are cool, I like spiders, cockroaches are okay.
But seriously.
I feel strange.
Haha I’m not sure if anyone is going to actually read this or not, but I’ve just spent the last hour reading over this massive list of peoples’ fears, and I now feel compelled to share some of my own. I share a few of the more common ones with people on here, ex. spiders and gross crawly insects, clowns, dolls, but I seem to have quite a few unique ones as well… Maybe I’m just strange? Here goes…
– blood in general, but more specifically blood tests and needles…
– chainsaws
– the Grinch (cartoon version. I still to this day can NOT watch the scene where he gets the idea to dress up like santa and makes that HORRIBLY creepy smile… Ugh just thinking about it makes me cringe)
– the lion from the Wizard of Oz, when he’s singing the song about how he’d be the king of the fore-e-e-e-st… Eek!
– writing on chalkboards
– but my number one fear of all time is ALIENS!!! Outer space in general freaks me out, but I seriously have panic attacks when I think about creepy supernatural beings coming to earth to take me away… It’s not all aliens that scare me (I can completely handle watching movies like men in black), its just the horrid humanoid looking ones… Tall, lanky, big oval eyes, long creepy fingers reaching out to grab me… AAAAAHHHHH I’m actually freaking out right now… I still cry every time I watch Signs.
So there you go, if anyone shares these completely ridiculous fears with me, feel free to share so that I don’t feel quite so strange…
I am terrified whales. Not killer or orca whales. Big, gigantic, lumbering dark whales. Just the thought makes me shiver.
One night, years ago, I was riding the ferry from Seattle to Bainbridge Island. I was standing on the back of the boat and it was pitch black out, so dark you couldn’t see where the sky ended and the water began. I was really enjoying the wind and the view of the city lights slowly shrinking out of view – and suddenly I thought I saw something huge and dark in the water and I was paralyzed. It wasn’t a whale, of course, but I was convinced that it was – and that it was larger than the entire ferry. I stayed there, freezing, with my knees buckled underneath me, my fingers gripping the bannister, and my eyes fixed to the water, waiting for the whale to breach and knock over the ferry. I didn’t move until we docked at least 15 minutes later on the island. The Most horrifying, crippling moment of my life… And it was completely in my mind.
Fear of whales is a terrible phobia because people mock you all the time and for some of us, it is very, very real.
wow. when i started reading this post i figured there would be no way its still going. anyway i was really shocked when i heard that i was not the only one with a fear of patters. even just thinking about them my throat is kind of closing up. i have no problem with 2,4,6,8 kind of patterns its more like if my arm rests on something and its pattern gets etched into my skin i go crazy trying to rub it off cause it really scares the hell out of me. the pattern in dirt and things like that really scare me to. its cool to know im not the only freak.
im also really scared of butterflies. the cute cartoon ones, ok. but in real life im terrified. i hope i never see one in front of someone im not really comfortable with because i either scream or run, fast and hard.
i meant to say patterns. im also afraid of most other bugs. birds in an enclosed area with me scare me crazy. flying roaches which i didnt even know existed until i moved to florida also scare me but i can live with the ones that crawl. i feel like at least if the dont fly i can kill them. its a control thing. just last night there was a flying roach in my living room and i went into a fit. i did kind of try to kill it but it was kind of trying to kill it in that i wanted it dead but i didnt really wanna kill it so i made some really half way efforts. I also hate killing large roaches cause then you have to pick the up.
omg! im terrified of whales too! and my friends think i’m weird. finally i know im not the only one out there!
i am not racist the hood or ghetto places the reason why is i lived in west Philadelphia for about a year and trust me not a good place to live when your in high school.
im afraid of falling down, when iwas six i fell off my roof, my elbow snagged on a broken pice of the gutter. I hung there for 30 min until the fire department came, my arm wripped all the way down my arm and is a dull red
Thanks for reviving this thread, fml yo. These old threads make for fun reading, seeing the familiar names of commenters and the unknown names (to me) of years gone by.
Freaky Phobia: Stepping on worms. And those big ugly snails. Especially when they come out of the proverbial woodwork and invade the driveway on dank, humid, steamy summer nights.
This is more of a fear than a phobia but I dread takeoffs and landings, especially takeoffs. But it can feel paralyzing, making it hard to breathe and making me wonder if other passengers are looking at the fear flash across my face.
Fear/phobia: walking or driving across high and narrow bridges. I remember as a very young boy taking seemingly forever to walk across the Augustine Cutoff, taking slow, painful steps, trying to get to a semi-pro baseball game. I had adopted a local team and became their batboy for years. I’d walk 3 miles to get to their games. After a few of these long hikes, when the manager figured out how I was getting to and from his games, he was flabbergasted and asked why I just didn’t ask for a ride. Bob Henry, the manager, became my lifelong mentor until his death a few years ago. (An aside: We won’t even let our 10-year-old ride his bike alone to the Rite Aid up the street to get a soda or something; two stories of attempted kidnappings of children emerging alone from two separate local libraries made the paper yesterday. Yet 36 years ago, it seemed perfectly normal to venture out on my own at Danny’s age and, if I hadn’t, I would never had met the great Mr. Henry nor developed a lifelong love of baseball.)
Today I have felt that same gripping fear driving across particularly narrow bridges, especially when traffic is tight or construction constricts the lanes. I felt that way last Thanksgiving driving my wife’s mom to JFK Airport. I guess it is a phobia because my bodied tighted and I felt true tension (none of which had to do with my mother-in-law, whom I love dearly).
As someone else said, however, I do not have a fear of heights in general. I, too, have enjoyed the view from atop the Empire State Building and, last summer, had a blast with my boy on all of the rollercoasters at Hershey Park. I even wanted to try the scary Fahrenheit ride, but after more than an hour’s wait, I saw that my young son wanted to take a pass and played it like I wasn’t up to it, either.
I used to have a fear of needles. But that was cured quickly in 2005 when I sliced off two-thirds of my left thumb in a freak accident at work and was rushed to the emergency room. That morphine the doctor shot in what was left of the thumb felt so good. Now, when giving blood or getting my twice-a-year cortisone shots in my right ankle, it’s almost like I look forward to the needle — and that cortisone needle is a big one.
Used to have an unfounded dislike of beets. My mother ate them all the time and I could not understand how she could devour a food that purple. My wife couldn’t understand why I disliked something I never tried, which isn’t like me, got me to try one, and now I’m like my mom: I love ’em!
I am deathly afraid of whales… I think it has a lot to do with the fact that there is nothing on land or in the air that is that enormous… water in general isn’t our habitat so that makes the whale even more hard to … compare with. there just effing creepy and way too big.