Queen, the band

When you think about Queen, you probably see them entirely different from how I thought of them as a kid. I mean, they’re an amazing band led by someone famous for saying, “I am gay as a daffodil, my dear.” I didn’t know that. My fear of Queen started with their News of the World album cover, which my parents made the mistake of leaving on the floor one day. The robot grabbing people (in my mind, out of a mall) gave me nightmares for years. I legitimately thought a giant robot would reach into our house while I was taking a nap and run off with me. My parents didn’t censor me from many things, and I was sensible enough to choose the most realistic-seeming thing to be most afraid of, I guess.

If you believe that Queen somehow endorse evil robots, their other songs start to sound really scary. “Another One Bites the Dust” and  “Killer Queen” both have scary titles, for one. But “We Will Rock You” and “We are the Champions,” both being songs that I associated with winning hockey teams’ fans banging on the bleachers, gave me the impression that Queen was a band of bullying sports fans of the most passionate degree. Being someone who never considered myself on the winning team in a sports scenario, I found these songs intimidating and mean. Listen to “We Will Rock You” and pretend you are three feet tall. It’s pretty scary.

My furnace

I thought that the witch from Sleeping Beauty lived in my furnace. I’m not sure why – it just seemed like some place where she would hang out. I tried to remember this fear when I became a portrait photographer in high school, and had to deal with kids crying for the first 30 minutes of a sitting regularly. For all I knew, they thought my camera stand was Voldemort. When you’re really tiny and don’t know how to use your arms that well yet, big things seem like they hide evil villains.

The gap under an elevator door

Now, children don’t have the best sense of dimensions. I remember repeatedly insisting on drinking juice out of a tall skinny glass over a short wide one because taller was bigger, simple as that. I also believed that I was somehow small enough to fall down the gap under an elevator door. Every time I got on an elevator, I made my dad lift me over that gap. I guess I was right to be scared of something elevator-related, since elevators occasionally kill people in horrifying ways.

Stone Soup

Stone Soup is a folktale wherein hungry travelers trick townspeople into contributing to their pot of soup, which was originally just lake water and a stone. We made stone soup in kindergarten as we read this book, and one “lucky” person in class was supposed to find the stone in their soup. It was me. This caused me to cry the rest of the day. I can’t remember why that scared me so much, other than the fact that I could have (possibly?) eaten a rock.

–Becky Lang

p.s. I started a conversation about this on Ask Reddit if you want to say what you were scared of or see what others were scared of.