Here's the Dirty Dozen:
1) Ants- Imagine being buried in a sandpile up to your neck with sand. Along come a bunch of ants from an ant colony, and they crawl all over your head, in and out of your nose, your mouth, your ears, your eyes, and all thru your hair. And they're those red army ants, and they're biting and stinging you all over, so much that you think you are going to die.....
2) Bats- You are exploring caves, and along the way you find yourself in this cave that's filled with bats. Hundreds of thousands of them are hanging upside down from the ceiling. One of them swoops down and gets caught in your hair. You are jumping up and down, trying to get this bat out of your hair, as you charge out of the cave......
3) Bees & Wasps- You are climbing a tree, and half-way up you bump a branch which happens to have a wasp nest. They get mad, and start swarming around you and start stinging you repeatedly. You can't get out of that tree fast enough, and when you do, you find you can't outrun them.....
You are working in a greenhouse full of flowers. You look up and you see hundreds of bees flying around the room, and they are swooping past you. You duck, and you are so frightened, you have to quit your job.....
4) Birds- Remember that Alfred Hitchcock movie "The Birds". This woman gets a lovebird from a pet store as a gift, and she keeps it in her house. After a while, some birds start to hang out near the house. As the movie progresses, scene by scene, more and more birds come around. The residents notice that there are birds all along the telephone lines, and poles and have saturated all the trees. They are collectively cooing and watching all the people down below. Suddenly they begin attacking the school children, and then all the citizens. People have to run for their lives, and many people die from being pecked to death by the birds.
I often go for walks down the street, and once in a while I hear some real commotions with birds fighting and swarming in the sky and in the trees. It makes me shiver thinking about them, as I walk gingerly thru the neighborhood.......
5) Cockroaches- Those little suckers get in every little nook and cranny of your home, and are very difficult to get rid of. I saw a documentary on T.V. once about cockroaches, and it pointed out that they are one of the oldest and most successful creatures in evolutionary history. They showed colonies of cockroaches behind walls, living there. They would come out at night, looking for food. There were so many of them, the wall looked like it was alive. They said that for every cockroach you could see, there are probably a hundred you don't see. And they keep on multiplying. It gives me the heebeegeebees just thinking about them.........
6) Flies and Maggots- These filthy, disease carrying, ugly faced winged creatures are disgusting. If one lands on me, I want to go scrub where it landed. One person told me that they looked into the face of a fly, and they saw the face of the Devil.....And those maggots crawling in and out of those dead carcasses. I can't think of a more disgusting sight.............
7) Grasshoppers and Locusts- Have you seen those documentaries about those huge swarms of locusts that eat everything in their path, and destroy miles and miles of crops and vegetation. Imagine being on the ground right when they all landed where you are. There is nowhere you can walk without stepping on bunches of them, and they would be all over you as well...
As a small boy, I used to pick up grasshoppers and let them sit on my hand. When I tried to lift it off my hand, it gripped me like it had suction cups on its feet. It felt creepy. It was even more creepy when I let it sit there, because it would spit out little brown droplets of what looked like brown blood. That was disgusting.............
8) MIce- Ever catch a mouse running across the floor in your living room like a bullet? Those little characters hide most of the time during the day, and come out at night looking for food. They like to leave their little "tird deposits" all over the place where you keep your food. I just want to throw everything out. I worry about a mouse crawling on me when I am sleeping............
9) Mosquitos- In summertime those things are all over the place, especially when it rains, and there's lots of water and puddles and stagnant pools where they lay their larvae for the next crop. The scary thing to worry about is that they can be carriers of the "West Nile Virus" which is deadly to humans.....
10) Rats- Remember the "Black Death" that swept across Europe! They are carriers of disease. They are also flesh eaters. Imagine being stuck in a room with a bunch of rats, and you are injured and can't move. Suddenly these rats start nibbling on your body..... I can't believe some people actually buy these from pet stores and keep them as pets!!
11) Snakes- In my hometown, there are snake dens where these things nest by the thousands. During mating season they entwine themselves with a females, and form these huge "snake balls". Once I saw one ot these snake balls rolling down the hill, and snakes were falling off as the ball was rolling. I was very worried about these snakes hiding in the bushes and the grasses, and biting me as I walked along....What would you do if you found a snake crawling around in your house?.....
12) Spiders- Have you seen the movie "Arachnaphobia"? Imagine a main "black widow" controlling a whole nest of baby spiders, and they start running around, hiding everywhere, just waiting to come out and bite you....Have you ever walked thru a dark corner in a basement, and you walk right into a spider web, and as you are trying to get the web off you, you discover a spider is now crawling on your body. Talk about panic.........
Tell us about what scares you, and what you have experienced.
Rod P.