What scares you? I’m a bit of a fraidy-cat, I’m scared of a lot of things. I’m not big on watching horror or even reading it, yet what I write is often based on real-life horrors.
I’ve never been a fan of Freddy Kruger or Jason (except my own Friday the 13th Jason), and I shudder at Michael Myers and Leather Face. I remember watching The Exorcist on television while home alone, a butcher knife in hand. I read the Amityville Horror in my bed at night and still have nightmares.
Everyone who knows me, knows I’m terrified of spiders, and can’t even watch commercials for Arachnophobia or Tarantulas.
As a child I used to watch a show with my daddy that had short horror stories. I’d often crawl into his lap and watch between my fingers while he tried to tell me it was just make-believe. Forty some years later, I still remember some of those stories. One, where a woman sees a woman being hanged when she looks into her bathroom mirror, has left me with an eerie feeling about looking into mirrors late at night. Of course now a days, the only thing terrifying in the mirror is my own reflection but that feeling of what’s just out of site, peeking over my shoulder, still lingers.
I can count the number of haunted houses I’ve gone to on one hand. I was so traumatized as a young child over one put on by a local college that I had to be escorted out. I nearly passed out. It was over a baby doll with an arrow through it’s chest. It looked so real. Even now, I can remember that doll and that fear. I finally allowed myself to be talked into going to a haunted house while in college. It didn’t terrorize me. I’d performed in one of the haunted houses put on by our local JC’s when I was a teenager and learned some of the tricks. It took some of the scare out of it.
I’ve forced myself to do things that frightened me because I knew I couldn’t live my life in constant fear. Publishing my first book was one of those leaps into the darkness. Thankfully, with the support of friends and family, I have landed on the other side stronger and less afraid.
What scares you? Do you like to be frightened? Do you rush headlong into danger or stand back and wait? Do you do things that terrify you? I challenge you to be brave. Ignore that noise that goes bump in the night, that shiver of fear as you walk through the fog. Walk out into the graveyard at midnight. Just remember, never wear high heels while running from monsters, use those spiked heels as weapons.