The house is on a gentle slope so the ground floor at the front door is only just above garden level, but some six or seven feet above-ground at the back.
Dad opened access through walls to the entire area, creating "rooms" of standing-height at the door from the back garden, but low crouching height under the front room; all with electric lighting. This enabled installing central-heating pipes and new electricity cables, and created convenient store-rooms.
The lighting was in sections. I had no qualms about going right to the far end, switching on the lights ahead of me; but on exit would turn and face the daylight from the open door before switching off the lamps now behind me, and marching very rapidly to "safety".
I have no idea why I was so nervous - there was nothing dangerous there - but this lingered even in my early-teens!
I put it down to having read a ghost-story book Dad had bought when I was about ten, too young and innocent to recognise the literary trick that made even its daftest fantasies seem "true".
@ArishMell I still get nervous about my own basement. It is a typical dingy basement, not much down there, cob webby, pretty big, but I hate going down there.
@HoeBag I've always been more nervous about man-made than natural places, though I think the fear is of who might be there, or of some nasty dog off its lead, than the place itself.
@Thodsis Funny thing is some people actually claimed years before that he was up to sketchy stuff. I believe it was the guy from the sex pistols who got banned from the network for saying that.
@SpectralMourning So was I, thanks to being bitten very young by Grandma's dog, and this fear lasted for many years but eventually became replaced by normal caution.
I was once convinced I was a robot for a few hours as a kid.
I was about 6 years old, nd playing outside in the snow with my friends. After sitting in the snow for a while I got up, and saw what looked like oil leakage in the snow where I had sat.
After checking if anyone else had that same marking in the snow, and checking my clothes for anything that could make such markings, I came to the only logical conclusion: I was in fact a robot who up until that point thought it was a regular human child.
@NativePortlander1970 I lived in Georgia and we had no warning sirens or anything. Our tornadoes were usually small ones with little damage, but I didn't know that when I was a kid.
My grandmother had a coat with a real fur collar and and she would hang it on the back of my bedroom door and i would watch it until I fell asleep. I thought it would get me.
@tobynshorty I've occasionally had something similar, as an adult: hypnagogic nightmares triggered by ordinary objects seen while in only partial awakening, in very low light, in the bedroom.
Probably my dad finding us at the movies.. i was scared.. my mom took me to the movies but we weren't allowed to watch tv and i was scared my dad would find us.. so i cried.. he was out of town tho so..
The other silly thing was my brother told me if people kissed they would have a baby so i got scared i was going to be pregnant because i ate a donut that they said had some other guy’s germs on it.. no wonder i was such an extreme germaphobe as a kid
Pictures of things like trees with faces on them. After seeing a children’s book with the story situated in a cedar forest. The story had the wind blowing and twisting the trees around and they started dancing. Every one of them had faces. It weirded me out a lot.
@NativePortlander1970 yeah. And what about the Canary Islands. One of the islands has a volcano that they say could cause such a horrible tsunami if the dome collapses in the ocean. It could take out most of the East Coast of the USA, the island countries and Morocco, Spain, Portugal etc.
@cherokeepatti I grew up in the Pacific Northwest, smack dab in the ring of fire, Mt. Hood, Mount St. Helens, Mount Ranier, Mt Adams, Mount Tabor sits smack dab in the middle of the Portland city limits.
Th coathook on the landing wall at the nursery school I attended when I was four years old. I was reluctant to go to the toilet upstairs because of this thing. It was kind of big and menacing and I had to walk past it to get to the toilet.
