The whole neck thing–when I was a kid, I’d gag if I tried to wear turtlenecks, and I was given the same thought, that I was hung or strangled in a past life. With the number of people I’ve met since then with similar issues, I’m of the theory that it’s just a primitive survival feature. Our necks are very vulnerable, what with housing major veins and arteries and that breathing pipe, and the desire to keep things away stems from the desire to stay alive!

Chicken feet fear = unique and unduplicable. We love you just the way you are, Shan!

The only other thing my demented mind can think of at this hour is cockroaches and maggots. On me. I don’t like em, hate em to be specific, but if you wanna see a person freak like Shan confronted with chicken feet, tell me there’s a cockroach crawling up my leg. Now, has this ever happened? No. Same with maggots. I do recall a horror move I saw as a kid in which some guy was locked into this tiny room and it was filled with cockroaches and he was buried alive. He’s screaming and they’re crawling in his mouth, up his nose… *pauses to have an anxiety attack*. So I bet that’s it.

No fear of water, fire, or any other general means of death.

Thinking now… there IS this stretch of highway between here and the next town. It’s a fourlane, pretty straight stretch of road, about 15 miles long. I’ve driven it numerous times, ridden in it far more. It’s got railroad tracks running parallel on one side and is wooded with occasional breaks for house plots on the other. There’s not a time I go down that road that I don’t have goosebumps and am frozen by a fear I can’t explain. One time we went down there on the motorcycle and I held on, closed my eyes and tried NOT to cry. When we got off I was shaking and insisted we take a longer way home. Guess that’s fodder for your past life regression.

Fears?
I have an irrational fear of swinging bridges. Don’t remember ever being on one, but I verge on panic attack at the thought of it.

Potato peeler?
Hmm. It’s very much like whittling, isn’t it?
Maybe, in some lifetime, you were carving out a ladder, and…

And the chicken feet… wow. I think I would have freaked too, even without having watched the movie.

:lmao: That’s even cooler….umm…more cool?…than being scalped!

And, speaking of the car wash, I can’t use those awesome car wash vacuums anymore. Two or three years ago I had my head down in the car, vacuuming the floor and it occured to me that would be an awesome way for a serial killer to sneak up on a woman. (I might have even blogged about it. Or mentioned it somewhere.)

But you can’t hear anything, you can’t see anything, and nobody would find it odd if a van pulled up to the vacuum next to you.

I’m now the proud owner of a mini shopvac just for vacuuming my car.

Yep. Those big scary blue monster brushes coming at your car? Won’t go near em with a ten foot pole.

I guess in pastlife regression, I was mistaken for a cookie and eaten by cookie monster. teehee.

:lmao: That’s AWESOME!!! I bet that’s it!

I’m definitely glad I’m not the only one freaked out by space. Being surrounded by VERY science-minded menfolk, that’s probably the fear they understand the least.

And…the chicken feet…

While I find them extremely unattractive and will suffer a shudder or two, they don’t bother me overly much when attached to the chicken.

Eons ago, I accidentally saw a few minutes of a movie which I’m 99% sure was The Deep. I believe I was too young to watch it and might have come downstairs for something. I don’t know. I’ve also never worked up the nerve to watch the movie again. Watching the voodoo guy stick a dried chicken foot claw into the woman’s stomach…it felt like my whole body seized up. Scary stuff.

There were several opportunities for my chickenfeetphobia to make itself known—enough so my family figured out it’s NOT something you want to spring on me as a joke—but the kicker came when I was seventeen.

We’d moved to EBF Missouri and my mom was house shopping. We went up some back dirt road and there was a really cute house with a black iron fence—the kind with the pointy spears on top. Behind the house was what looked like a miniature schoolhouse. Me being 17, I immediately dragged my cousin to check it out, hoping I could talk my mom into letting me have it.

After stepping inside, it took a few seconds for the horror to register. I don’t know what the hell they used that building for, but there were hundreds of dried chicken feet—hanging from the walls, the ceiling, you name it. The next thing I knew, I was locked in my aunt’s van, hysterical, with my mom knocking on the window trying to get me to open the door.

I’m told I went running past the house, screaming bloody murder and actually vaulted over that spear-topped fence, and locked myself in the van. Now, even though my clothing size was single digit back then, leaping over anything wasn’t something I did.

We left and she bought a different house. In all the time we lived there, I never even drove up that road again.

Even the photo of the chicken feet on Alison’s blog a couple weeks back freaked me out enough I snatched my hand away and knocked my coffee over.

Doesn’t matter, I still hate flying. Does this mean that in a past life I was Daedalus or Icarus?

:lmao: It just might! Or maybe you were a goose and you fell out of formation and got lost and ended up being dinner?

Clearly Charli lived through a horrific coffee shortage in a past life.

Lemme think…

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I’ll have to get back to you…

I also have a fear of fire, but I can trace that back to when I was 9 years old and the apartment house we lived in had a bad fire.