Scared of the Bogeyman!

When I was a lot younger I used to think that a monster lived at the bottom of the toilet, and that whenever you flushed the loo it would come out and drag you down. Cue one small boy flushing the loo and running for dear life out of the bathroom before it could get me.

Which leads me on to the excellent article by Charlie Brooker over at Guardian Unlimited.

"It's late at night, pitch black outside, and you're in the house alone. You switch off the television. All is quiet. It's bedtime. You walk to the window to draw the curtains. And there it is!

Face at the window! Aaaaarrgh! A scraggy-haired lunatic with googly eyes! Maybe he's glaring, maybe he's grinning - whatever he's doing, this isn't good news. Because he's either actually there, in which case he's about to burst in, hack your face off and use it as a hanky, or you're hallucinating, in which case you've lost your mind, and you'll have to spend the rest of your life wandering shirtless into traffic, screaming about MI5 and geese and phantoms..."

Read the rest here.

In particular have a look at the comments to see how common this type of fear is.