1) “Scarborough Fair”—Simon and Garfunkel. Ages 3-9, probably. This song was unavoidable in my childhood. At some point along the line, I came to believe the lyric was Are you going to Scarborough Fair, Where the dead live and die? And instead of self-interrogating what it might exactly it might mean for the dead to keep dying (those lost souls in Beetlejuice, perhaps?), I decided this song was about a skeleton carnival and I was sure I neither wanted to go there nor hear about it. At peak fear (approx. age 5), I was convinced that simply playing this song would summon the skeleton, who would then appear in the sunroom by the stereo and drink tea with their legs crossed on the edge of the old leather sofa. That felt like the worst thing I could imagine.
Subscribed
2) Johnny Cash. Ages 4-12. This is entirely based off a performance of “Ghost Riders in the Sky” that I happened to catch on “The Muppet Show” (I’d forgotten about that confederate flag, ps). Again, stay dead and out of the g-d stables, dead people, horses are scary enough on their own. Because of “Ghost Riders,” I found Cash an unsettling character for years. I used to avert my eyes if I came across his face in a magazine or in a stack of records because I was afraid his eyes would come to life. By the time I got around to the fact that he sung about shooting people just to watch them die (see below), Cash had become a pretty lovable character. I can’t explain it either.
3) Folk Music, in general. Probably 50% of country music. Ages 3-? I contend that this is a fully rational position TO THIS DAY and I listen to folk music. You guys know that 90% of those songs are about murderers or people getting murdered or relationships that end with someone getting murdered or someone trying convince you into a relationship them so they can murder you, right? Parents used to get all worried about us doing psychic damage to ourselves after accidentally running into an Ozzy Osbourne song in the wild (not scary, ps) and I was like, my dudes, we live in Appalachia and I’m getting dragged to events all the time where seemingly well-intentioned adults inflict In The Pines on me for so-called “educational purposes.” I mean, WTEverlovingF.
4) Mountains. Ages 4-15. The logical trigger here the “Night on Bald Mountain” section of “Fantasia.” But this really started with a film strip some teacher showed me in Kindergarten-ish about a young boy from Mexico who went to sleep on night looking at the peaceful mountain outside the window at his family farm and woke the next day to see molten lava consuming his home, the landscape, the livestock, his entire culture. Pretty sure they didn’t show anyone burning alive, but even at five I got the note, and I was already afraid of fire. The second unconventional trigger for the mountain thing was “Sound of Music,” and the realization that mountains will serve as a natural impediment should I, a clumsy, non-athletic kid, need to escape Nazis, or Zombies, or Nazi Zombies, etc. What if I couldn’t easily and quickly blaze a trail and climb over a treacherous peak, would that mean that I was doomed?
And that was before I hit on the Donner Party at around age 8.
This was a weird and complicated fear for a kid growing up in Asheville, probably intensified by the fact that my absent-minded father sometimes “took a short cut” or ran out of gas in remote areas in the mountains, making desperate escape over a dark and treacherous peak feel like a reality I might actually have to deal with. There is a special kind of trapped that comes from being in the middle of nowhere on top of the world. You can be totally exposed, with a fantastic view, and still feel like you can’t get enough space. I remember sitting and watching the sky darken over the three large mountains across the lake from our house and having the sense every night of I’m trapped. It would be years, and 35 very long minutes of stuck in an elevator in a New York City hotel later before I knew I was a teense claustrophobic (a grown-up fear), but in the weirdest way this played into that as did:
5) Fire. Ages 4- I grew up in a charming old house built in 1920 that was more of a time-capsule, infrastructure-wise, than my ever-worried grandmother might have liked. Her continued nagging to my mother about the wiring and whether it or it constituted an actual firetrap mostly went over my head until I was maybe four . That’s why my mother encountered a house burning down on the hill near downtown. We were in the car. Mom pulled over the watch, because she had been mesmerized by a barn burning when she was a kid. I, instead, sat in dawning horror as this house collapsed on itself, acutely aware that it could happen to my house and my things and my family at any moment. The next year one of my neighbor’s houses would be gutted by fire and coincidentally a few months later I’d end up in a ballet class with a sweet girl a little older than me who wore the very real scars of having barely survived a fire.
I’m still afraid of fire. This is reasonable, I think.
6) Volcanos. Age 5-? See above. Also, watched a documentary on “Pompeii” on PBS when I was about seven. To date, I will follow up anyone’s assertion that a thing is an “inactive volcano,” with are you sure and what’s the evacuation route?
7) Men with Beards. Age ?-9. I was really born at the wrong time in the wrong place for this one. I don’t know how this started, but I do know that certain men/family members/neighbors thought kids would think it was cool to touch their beards. Which was not cool. And, of course, Santa Clause, is/was clearly up to no good. I figured the he longer the beard, the scarier the dude (an Indiana Jones level stubble was completely safe). I literally had nightmares about ZZ Top, and I have to tell you this really complicated the Bible for me. The only clean shaven people were either women of whoever Yul Brynner was playing at the time. And he was always supposed to be evil or a robot or whatever. So who was I supposed to root for? What eventually set me right here was Blackbeard, who I loved from moment one, and Isaac Hayes, who my parents loved, and whose bearded visage on the cover of “Black Moses” no longer intimidated me after age 8 or so. No comment on ZZ Top. Still not a fan.
8) Gene Simmons. Age 3-8. I never worried about clowns (I thought they were boring and anodyne) until Stephen King told me I ought to, and I was twelve by then. But I was afraid of Gene Simmons from a very young age. Not the rest of Kiss, mind. Just Gene, who just struck me as an extremely suspicious character, who really needed to keep his tongue INSIDE HIS MOUTH.
9) My Mother Is a Lizard. Age 5-9. Readers of a certain age will remember a low-budget kid’s show called “Land of the Lost,” in which a family on a raft was whisked thorough a portal to an alternate dimension that was also dinosaur times. There, they lived alongside a big-eyed humanoid reptilian species called Sleestaks, who sometimes wore statement necklaces. Somehow I spent a year or two, maybe because of the statement necklaces, convince that my mother was secretly a Sleestak, who only wore a human suit when I was around. I’m not sure I ever worked out what her secret Sleestak agenda was, or that I was even afraid of it. Mostly I figured if did my part to maintain the illusion she probably wouldn’t hurt me. But I spent years terrified that I might happen upon her in process of turning from lizard to human and she turn on me. I mostly worried this might happen if somehow I got home too early and suprised her. The good news is I grew out of it and I am 99.999999% sure that neither of my parents (or my stepfather) are secretly lizards. The best news is that I’d still love them even if they were.
10) Zoot from The Muppets. Age 3-11. I think it was the permanent sunglasses thing, and the fact that he never talked. I used to leave the room when he came on screen.
11) Skeletons in knitwear. Age 3-9. Especially woven capes and sweaters, at Scarborough Fair-themed carnivals or elsewhere. Just felt wrong. Still feels of wrong. If you’re cold and you’re a skeleton and you want to make me feel more comfortable, I’d appreciate it if you’d wear, like, a puffy coat if you come around this winter.
12) Communication Arts Magazine. Age 6-10. Dad worked in advertising and so we always had a few copies around. I used to like to look at the pictures. There was always some weird shit in CA n the early 80s. Spooky landscapes. Unsettling typefaces. George Hamilton in a cigar ad. I once happened upon an illustration in one of a hairy ear with a bug in it and literally believed the issue was cursed, so I hid it for the sake of the whole family, and found it again in the secret hiding eight years later, months after dad had left, and just before we moved into a new house. I willed myself to look at it, realized it wasn’t so bad, and kept it with my stuff until it disappeared with my old paperdolls, YA novels, and Sassy Magazines sometime when I was in college.
13) The Easter Bunny. Age 4-8. I don’t feel like I should have to explain this one. Honestly if you are a child and untroubled by the thought of a silent, man-sized, biped rabbit with giant, unblinking eyes and a horror movie grin wandering through the predawn landscape to break into the homes of children to hide hardboiled eggs and marshmallow chicks, I don’t know what to say to you. The basic details of Easter are ABSOLUTELY SCARY ENOUGH without this grotesque monstrosity haunting the backdrop.
14) Turning Into A Boy. Age?-Puberty. It is a well known fact that my parents so expected me to be a boy that they had a great southern golf lawyer/19th century poet-ish name (Thomas Butler Fields) picked out and the Peter Rabbit-themed nursery ready to go when I arrived biologically female. I tend to think that some this underpinned some of my anxiety, like I worried I’d somehow managed to sneak out as a girl, and that it would take nothing to shatter the illusion and my true nature would be revealed I’d have to pretend to like polo shirts and sports, and be forever exiled from the empire of tulle, sequins, and divine wisdom. This was a very immature and unenlightened view of gender (especially for a kid coming up in a relatively queer-friendly milieu for its time, at the end of the disco and glam rock era), but I was three. And thought most of my friends were boys, all the most interesting (and some of the most powerful) people in my world were women. I wanted to be one of them. I mean, sure, pop culture didn’t always do a great job reflecting this reality, but in my heart of hearts, I suspected that all thrones were made for Queens, and that the world was full of boys who secretly knew that too and refused to accept it.
This took on some fairly intense dimensions in the way it played out (I basically refused to wear a pair of pants between age 3 and age 9, to my parents’ chagrin) and would get super complicated when I finally decided to accept both blue jeans (pleated) and a trendy mid 80s Molly Ringwald-inspired short haircut into my life around age ten and found myself immediately and regularly misgendered to my intense shame and horror. This was compounded by the fact that I was kinda fat and definitely weird and seemingly unable to intuit what my fellow girls were intuiting and become what they were becoming. Maybe I wasn’t male or female? Maybe I was just a monster?
Puberty, of course, sorted all this out, more or less. I’d grown out of my turning into a boy fear well before I late-bloomed into definitively young woman, with a whole new set of anxieties about sex and gender and what it all meant.
I have, however, refused any job that required me wearing a polo shirt to date.
15) Top open freezers/Walk-in freezers. Age 6-?. If you’ve watched any movie from the 1980s, you’ll know that only reason to have a large freezer in your home (or your long-abandoned restaurant) is to hide bodies. There’s probably a folk song about you. I don’t want to hear it. If I was a kid, and went to your house for a sleepover, I would 100% fake a stomach cramp and call my mother as soon as I saw it, because, I believe I have the good sense to leave that horror film before I end up its first casualty. I don’t care how much ice cream your dad/uncle Jimmy/youth minister says he keeps in there. I AM NOT HERE FOR IT.
Tiny Commotions 