#oneaday Day 134: Layers of fear

I finished the Silent Hill 2 remake this evening. Aside from some truly infuriating boss battles towards the end — which is, at least, true to the source material — it was a fantastic, respectful experience that pays wonderful tribute to a horror classic while adding enough mechanical tweaks to make it a bit more palatable to a modern audience. But I don’t want to talk about that today. Instead, I want to talk a bit about fear, because while I was playing Silent Hill 2, I got thinking about things I’ve been irrationally afraid of over the years.

Fear is a strange thing — and, indeed, often irrational, hence the existence of the word “phobia”. I suspect there’s a lot for psychologists to unpack by looking at the things we are irrationally afraid of — or even the things that we feel a bit uneasy about.

When I was a child, I was afraid of quite a few things. The main one was spiders. I still don’t like spiders and will likely do anything in my power to get myself out of a situation involving a particularly large hairy spider, but I have mellowed a little in that regard over the years. That’s a pretty common, boring one though; most people spend at least some time in their life being afraid of spiders, and it’s not a particularly unreasonable fear, I don’t think; while obviously little house spiders aren’t going to do anything to harm you, the aforementioned large hairy spiders can absolutely do some serious damage to you, and thus I think it’s just fine to want to say “fuck that” to all spiders.

A more unusual fear I had was a fear of passing by my bedroom window in the middle of the night. In my childhood bedroom, my bed was in a sort of little “alcove” at the side of the room, and in order to leave the bedroom (to visit the toilet, say) I had to climb out of the alcove and pass by the window. For some reason, I was absolutely convinced that there was something lurking somewhere in the vicinity of that window, so if I needed to get up and go for a wee in the middle of the night, I’d often leap past the window so I spent as little time as possible exposing myself to the unknown evil that was lying in wait.

An equally bizarre fear that I think was related to the window thing was a fear of a plush toy pajama case I owned, known as American Brown Bear, because he was from America and he was a brown bear. I was absolutely fine with American Brown Bear in the daytime, but at night-time I was convinced he was possessed by some unknown evil presence, and I suspect at least one of the things I feared with regard to my bedroom window was American Brown Bear jumping out and “getting” me.

I sort of know where that one came from. And I mean “sort of”, because the thing that I think caused that fear couldn’t have possibly happened, making me think that it was some sort of dream, hallucination or other false memory. Or perhaps it’s an actual memory of something someone did that I’d come to have peculiar associations with. Either way, it’s a strange one. Are you ready?

I was convinced that when American Brown Bear would jump out and “get” me, he would shout “MRS. LINCOLN PUPPIES”. And for some reason, I found this absolutely terrifying, despite it obviously making no sense whatsoever. I have no idea who Mrs. Lincoln is, or indeed why I should care about her puppies — or what American Brown Bear had to do with the puppies, for that matter. But what I do know for sure is that that phrase struck the absolute fear of God into me as a young’un.

For the record, American Brown Bear never “got” me, to my knowledge, and likewise the ancient evil lurking in the vicinity of my bedroom window never showed itself, either. And, as a result, I eventually left those fears behind — particularly once my brother left home and I was able to move into the larger bedroom at the back of the house. The windows in that room weren’t scary.

Another completely irrational feeling — I’m not sure I’d call it a “fear” as such — that I’ve had for as long as I can remember is another oddly specific thing, and that is that I feel distinctly uneasy around toilets with a very high cistern. You know, the kinds you get in sort of Victorian-era houses that have never really been updated; the kind of toilet that looks ridiculous if you draw it, because the cistern is comically high up compared to modern toilets.

I don’t know why I have this sense of unease around them. I don’t know what I think is going to happen. Perhaps it’s more a fear-by-association sort of thing; toilets like this tend to be in old houses, which tend to be in varying states of disrepair and often have lots of spiders lurking in dark corners. Whatever the reason, I don’t like them and will generally avoid having to spend any time in a toilet with a high cistern. I’ll have a wee in one no problem, but I’d rather not go for a poo on a toilet like that. I have no idea why, but that is the reality of the situation.

A related fear that I had as a child which I subsequently got rid of was an irrational fear of extractor fans in bathrooms. Oddly enough, I remember the exact circumstances under which I developed this fear. At the time, my language skills were still developing — I was about 4 or 5 years old at the time — and we were visiting America. My Dad had, I think, been doing some work out there, but because he was out there for some time he was able to bring the rest of the family along. It was a great (and long, from what I recall) trip, during which we took in, among other things, Disney World in Florida.

The reason I mention my language skills developing at the time is because I didn’t know what an extractor fan was called, so I called it a “dotch”. More accurately, an extractor fan which came on when you pulled a cord to turn the light on in a bathroom was a “wim-dotch wib hamdongs”; “dotch”, meanwhile, was a more generic term that could just mean “ominous-looking air vent”, as seen in the bathrooms of my grandparents’ houses.

Anyway, the reason I became frightened of the dotch was because of a Muppets movie we had watched on television. The Muppet Movie, as it happens, and specifically this scene:

Yes, that is Kermit the Frog being put into what is essentially an electric chair — sorry, an “electronic celebrectomy” machine. I found this scene intensely traumatic when I saw it as a kid, and I was horrified to discover that the bathroom light in the motel we were staying at at the time — the Edison Motor Inn, Poughkeepsie, NY, if you were curious — resembled the glowing circular light at the top of the “electronic celebrectomy” machine. For some reason, that then led me to associate the wim-dotch wib hamdongs that came on at the same time as the light with this “electric chair”, which then caused me to be afraid of dotches for a good few years afterwards.

I don’t think I ever told anyone the specifics of that because even then I knew it was a ridiculous association to make in my head — in fact, for many years, I was convinced that I had completely made up the above scene, and wasn’t able to confirm it was real once and for all until YouTube came along. But that’s the thing with irrational fears: they are completely irrational, and make no sense. However stupid you know they are, if they’ve taken a hold, they will still frighten you, even as part of your brain is frantically telling the scared part “you are being ridiculous“. And it seems I was particularly prone to this sort of irrational fear as a kid.

You will be pleased to know that I am no longer afraid of dotches. Spiders, no thanks. Toilets with high cisterns, only if I have to. But dotches? I think I’m fine now. Probably.

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