I’m scared of large groups of ants to this day because of something that happened when I was about 10 or 11.
My older sister and I got into a fight when we were home alone (I belive it was about whether Boy George was a man or a woman) and she slapped the HELL out of me. I ran out of the house, around the corner to the next block, and sat on a big lump of dug-up concrete that wasn’t quite on the side of the road but also not quite in someone’s yard.
I sat there sobbing my little-kid heart out, face in hands, until I felt something bite my right side. I looked down and I was covered from the waist down in gigantic red wood ants.
Aka carpenter ants. Credit embedded in the photo – that is what I looked down on! Those jaws.
I do remember running. I don’t remember screaming.
My sister heard me from a block away (I remember her saying she never heard screaming like it) – from inside our brick, air conditioned house – as I ran for home. She had me strip naked in our back yard and used the garden hose to get the ants off of me. I don’t remember what happened afterwards, but I think our stupid fight was quickly forgotten and I am still grateful that she forgot our silly fight and helped me so quickly and efficiently. Even when I still had her perfect red hand print on my face!
It’s been a few decades since this event, and if I am ever surprised by an ant, or worse a colony of ants, I calmly freak right the hell out. Or at least I think I am calm when falling over backwards to get away…
What scares you, so long after the immediate threat is gone? We likely all have some serious flashback memories – I will never ask for those. I don’t mean real trauma, but small things like this that have never left you.
heretherebespiders 
Hello lovely lady. For me it is spiders. Ark is trying to get me to be more comfortable with spider pictures, but I still freak out over them. Bugs in general I dislike. I tend to introduce them to the nearest heavy object with a flat spot. For my beloved Ron it is snakes. He is terrified of them. Be well. Hugs
Automobiles. For some reason, as a child I imbibed the idea that cars were not just dangerous and to be treated with the appropriate cautions of looking both ways, not playing in the street, etc. but that all cars other than my parents’ which I rode in were semi-sentient beings hell bent on murder. (And as a kid I had no concept of how cars got you to places; it seemed to me that just turning the wheel back and forth powered something like the Transporter from Star Trek which eventually put you where you wanted to go and it was a secret only adults knew, since I couldn’t quite see out the window.) I honestly held the belief that cars were actively trying to kill people, like a pack of roving predators, and it was down to me to be quick and attentive enough to save my own life. That has never entirely left me and not been helped by a couple of really freakish accidents (you might remember on my blog about a year ago when my senile next door neighbor took off my front bumper). If I’m not driving, I’m the world’s worst passenger because it looks to me as if every car on the road is deliberately coming straight at the one I’m in and I have to look fixedly at something entertaining on my smartphone to keep from yelping “Look out!” every thirty seconds or flinching in terror. My recurring nightmare, from the age of four, has always involved a situation where I was in a moving vehicle and had to take over control of it, and either didn’t know how (because I was four) or couldn’t reach the controls because the actual driver was still in the seat and just refusing to steer or brake, or some other thing was impeding me. I wake up in a cold sweat.
Of course, the way a lot of people drive, I’m not sure mine is a foolish perspective. I hate driving and working from my house has been the best thing that I ever decided to do. I gave away my last 22 year old car with just over 75,000 miles on it.
That is quite a hard one to have in the USA! Or anywhere, these days. I’ll remember this if I ever come to visit 😊
Whoa – what a horrible event. (shivers from the creepiness – bet you did scream)
What scares me? The ghosts I’ve encountered at various points in my life and have been protected from by other spirits standing between them and those dark ones. Well, you asked. (And it’s not just because it’s Halloween…guess its time to post another one of those encounters. Seems like Oct has been so short this year)
Oh please do! I never have anything out of the ordinary or unexplainable happen. Bah.
A wolf spider sauntered across the floor while I was sitting down having a pee one morning. Awful.