When I was four, I saw the movie The Great Race, which includes a scene where Tony Curtis swims across a lake at night, climbs into a dark tower and challenges a baron to a swordfight. That scene scared the daylights out of me! I also remember seeing a movie of Oliver Twist where the scene where everyone chased him and yelled "Stop, thief!" made me freak out.
I also remember hearing the the story of Hansel and Gretel on a record and getting scared. (But most people must have been scared by that story.)
At the beach near our cottage seaweed sometimes formed big clumps and I was afraid to go near them.
In gym class we once played battleball, a game like dodgeball but with a whole lot of balls being thrown at once. Near the end of one game everyone was out except for me and one guy on the other team. I suddenly got afraid and ran in a panic, and he got me out easily, so the other team won and I was the Charlie Brown.
When I was little, we had a Classics Illustrated comic book of Victor Hugo's The Man Who Laughs, about a 17th-century freak whose face had deliberately been made grotesque by early plastic surgery. The look of his face still gets to me today: I bought the comic on Ebay but I still can't get up the nerve to read it again.
I used to swin when I was young. Our pool had a low diving board and a high one. I could jump off the low one, dive off the low one and jump off the high one easily. But I only dived off the high board a few times. I was afraid that when I bent over and prepared to dive, the board would snap in two just before I did.
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