I have a bad case of arachnaphobia...Do you have any phobias?

[fujiyama]

If I see a spider I start freaking out. Not necessarily very tiny ones o skinny ones, but I freeze with fear if I see something larger.

The problem is I've seen a few relatively medium sized (well ok they're not that big) spiders in the basement.

I also can't catch...It's like I'm scared of things flying in front of me. That explains why I'm so terrible at sports...

Do you have any phobias?

[tibbir]

1. I really freak out if I'm out in a thunderboomer

and there's a close lightning strike. The thunder is no picnic either.

[dalfollo]

2. Same with me....

I feel the exact same thing....my doctor calls it Bushpresidenciaphobia

[jpgray]

3. Every few days in my basment I see a big, red spider

I've probably eaten dozens in my sleep. :D

note: "Big" for MN spiders, that is. So about the size of a half dollar.

[ogradda]

4. heights

when i go ove a bridge i have to look straight ahead or i freak out :(

[Archae]

7. Fellow acrophophic here!

On second-floor porches I get dizzy.

I'm also severely shitheadcowardwarmongerphobic, Bush and Cheney scare the FUCK out of me!

[Zynx]

18. Same here.

If I am in the nose-bleed seats of a baseball stadium and am looking down steeply, I get dizzy and nearly faint.

[newsguyatl]

5. so i guess you don't like this pic?

[ariesgem]

10. HELL NO!!!

x(:puke::spank:

[JSJ]

6. phobaphobia- fear of fear n/t

[ariesgem]

8. Spiders totally freak me out

Where I live, there are lots of trees and they come out in force at night to form these huge webs attached to the trees. If I have to go out to the car at night, I have a can of raid in one hand and a broom in another. I have this reoccuring dream that one day one will get in my car and creep down the rear view mirror while i'm driving.

[Spider Jerusalem]

9. Only one.

A very strange one, too. At the age of about twelve or so I read about a tremendously unpleasant, albeit relatively rare, form of trauma that can occur in males, where the vas deferens of one testicle becomes wrapped around the other (talk about getting your wires crossed...heh). This leads to tremendous pain and swelling, and eventually, if uncorrected within a few hours, death of one or both of the testes. Since I was twelve, I've had this weird, back-of-my-mind irrational horror of it happening to me. (One of the reasons I quit wearing boxers in favour of more supportive underwear.)

I expect this will probably be the strangest phobia anyone who responds to this thread has, but I could be wrong.

[enigmatic]

11. 2...

I freak if I have to go across a bridge of any kind; I'm better at controlling it now but when i was a kid i was a basket case..

And Clowns....I HATE Clowns...

[VOX]

12. Did you ever read the John Cheever short story, "The Angel of the Bridge?"

It's really terrific, and uncharacteristically optimistic by Cheever's usual standards.

It's about a middle-aged man who develops a crushing phobia about driving across bridges.

Apparently this is a common phobia -- more prevalent on the East Coast, which stands to reason.

As for the clowns, well...fuck 'em! :toast:

[enigmatic]

14. I haven't; this sounds good...

Thanks for the tip; when I was a small child my family would go visit relatives and have to cross the Mackinac Bridge to get there, and it always seemed to be in the middle of a rain/windstorm and the bridge would sway back and forth....

[Jean Louise Finch]

13. Also afraid of clowns...as well as

Sloths. I don't know why, they just scare me to small bits. They're horrible, with their long nails and humanoid faces. Yikes. And the giant sloth? Gadzuks. If it wasn't extinct I don't think I'd ever go outside.

[enigmatic]

15. Welcome to DU!

[alphafemale]

16. A pic made the net rounds a year or so ago of a giant FL spider

At first you only seen two feet sticking out from behind a wall clock...

At the end the spider revealed had to have been nearly a foot across.

Sound familiar?

[LynzM]

22. Seen it, HATE it

That pic creeps me out...

[Quetzal]

17. Loud Yelling

I can't stand it.

[fudge stripe cookays]

19. SNAKES!

I f'in hate snakes!!

Within 2 weeks we saw two out by our place. We are just up the street from a lake.

One, we think was just a water snake of some kind (non poisonous) that a grackle had up in a tree on the side of the house. I was out gardening, heard the commotion in the leaves, looked up and let out a noise. So the grackle dropped the snake.

I was so stunned I stood there for a moment. The snake slithered up our neighbor's air conditioner onto a ledge, then disappeared through a crack into the outer brick of his house. I had called reprehensor to get the neighbor, but by the time they got back there, the snake was gone.

A few days later, we were out in back talking to the same neighbor over the fence, as we were having it replaced in a few days, so we were taking meausurements etc.

As I went to go in the back door, reprehensor pulled me back; Almost directly beneath where my foot had been was a small Copperhead, and I hadn't even seen him! We crushed his head with a shovel.

I HATE SNAKES!!

FSC

[da_chimperor]

25. So you don't like this photo?

Sumatran blood python, they get up to 7 feet long. Beautiful!

[calico1]

20. I avoid walking over grates in

sidewalks or streets or manhole covers or anything like that because I fear falling in them!

[Lavender Brown]

21. Bridges.

I close my eyes when going over them, except when I'm the driver, obviously.

[LynzM]

23. Erm, the dark

Which I feel quite silly admitting... normally only the dark indoors. I'm afraid of what might be hiding (not like people, more supernatural/monstrous, LOL)... I'm going to attribute it to reading too much sci-fi and fantasy when I was a kid, and now all these creepy things live in my head... It's paralyzing at times, which is really frustrating.

Edit to add that on a bus trip one time, we tried to see how many phobias we could string together, and came up with:

agro-xeno-hydro-peta-homo-acro-podaphobia, which may or may not mean the fear of the feet of large groups of wet, juvenile, gay, foreign spiders. Now, how you'd ever find out you had that fear is beyond me...

[ironflange]

24. Not really

I used to be afraid of heights, but that seemed to go away. Same thing with airplanes; I used to be a "nervous flyer," but that's gone too, though I still don't like landings.

Riding with my son when he's driving isn't one of my favorite things to do.

Bears - I'm scared of bumping into a bear when hiking, but I got a can of bear spray and that's given me peace of mind. Only to be used as a last resort. Funny thing, the sales clerk refused to tell me whether or not it works on cougars and wolves. "It's bear spray!"