Got any odd or somewhat ridiculous phobias?

[MrBehemoth]

[mild claustrophobia] + [mild vertigo] + [mild childhood issues around body-weight and the perceived inability of man-made constructs to support it] = [phobia of elevators]

I used to have nightmares about being in a falling elevator, or worse: the floor of an elevator opening up or falling out.

Also, spiders. They're eldritch and otherworldy and they just move plain wrong. Kind of a standard phobia, but here's a story for you.

Spoiler below!

Nine year old kid in a new family home, I go to take a shower for the first time. It's a free-standing shower with curtain on three sides. I reach in without looking, turn the tap and let it warm up. I get undressed. By now it's nice and steamy, so I reach in again to check the temperature. It's just right. I step straight in, pulling the curtain closed behind me.

That's when I notice them. They're not huge, but they're everywhere. There must be between ten and twenty of them. They're above and below me, on either side of me, they're on the tiles in front of me and they're on the curtain behind me. One is on the underside of the tap where my hand had been.

My sudden splashing knocks some of them off and I watch them flounder beside my feet, frozen by fear until one of them touches my foot.

Ripping the curtain out of the way I stumble out, screaming, frantically checking my body and shaking out my hair. A few seconds later both my parents are in the open door. I shakily point to the still running shower and tell them about the spiders. They look. My dad turns off the shower. There are no spiders.

Later, I rationalised it to myself thus: we'd just moved in and I was the first person to use the shower. Maybe there was an egg-sack in there or nearby that had gone unnoticed and had recently hatched. The spiders were washed away by the shower, so nobody else saw them. At the time I firmly believed this. My adult self doesn't buy it however.

The only reasonable explanation is that it was a hallucination.

Now what's worse than spiders? Giant, amphibious, armoured spiders with pincers. Image search for "giant spider crab", coz I'm not gonna.

Just thinking and writing about has made me need to check the room and put socks on.