Are you afraid of your basement at times?

As a child – fear…yes.

When I was seven – there was this enormous bug that was at the bottom of the stairs that slowly died over a period of what feels like years now. I don’t know how long it was – but I’m pretty sure that it was long enough for my parents to leave it there because they thought it was hilarious. fucking parents.

Now – well, I find true, old-school basements unnerving at times – solely because there could be bugs and other stuff down there.

When I was a little girl I was.I learned to talk myself out of my fears.
I can still take the steps three at a time though.;)

The house I lived in until I was 8 was built on a rocky area, and the basement wasn’t completely finished. The furnace room had a lot of rock and in a lot of places it was more a crawlspace – grown-ups couldn’t stand up straight in there. I was afraid of that room, because the lighting wasn’t good in there and I couldn’t see into the corners.

Also in that basement was a storage closet off our playroom, and on the door was a poster of Darth Vader. My sister told me that Darth Vader lived in there, and so I was terrified.

That is what I remember @lucillelucillelucille taking the stairs qfuickly and not looking back. LOL That was when I was young it doesn’t bother me at all now.

Basements are archetypal symbols of the unconscious. In dreams, for example, houses nearly always symbolize the mind, and the basement of the house is the unconscious part of the mind. That makes basements mysterious and spooky on a level which transcends any kind of rational thought. It’s unsurprising that so many horror movies take place in basements and cellars.

I’d like to add that when I was young, my brother and I experienced some very disturbing things in our basement, which is where the television set and rec room were. We would often hear thumps from the storage area, followed by waves of cold. Once, both of us simultaneously got feelings of terror for no reason we could explain—and then a clock simply flew right off the wall. And on another occasion, the extension cord to our television set began spraying a huge, bright fountain of yellow sparks, like an angle grinder working on a piece of metal. We stared at it incredulously as it just kept going, lighting up the whole room with its almost cheerful brightness. We charged upstairs to tell our parents, but by the time they got downstairs it had stopped, without leaving any sign of what had happened.

I should add that our basement also repeatedly flooded. After the second time the basement flooded, the landlord paid to have the entire water main dug up and replaced… after which it promptly flooded again.

I don’t believe in “the supernatural,” but I have to admit that I don’t have an explanation for what we experienced except that, as I noted, basements are powerful archetypal symbols, and we may have been having a sort of joint hallucination through the collective unconscious.

When I was a child my sister locked me in my basement and told me there were mummies down there that would eat me or something.

Scared the crap out of me. I outgrew it at about 12 or so though.

Hahaha! No basement in my building! Basements don’t frighten me.

But there is a multi-level garage. So many bad episodes of Starsky and Hutch as a kid has made me wary of multi-level garages. You don’t know when some car’s gonna race around a corner and mow you down! Or who’s gonna pop up from the boot end and train a .357 on you!

When I was little I use to like to play under the house, not to my parents’ knowledge. I suppose if that place didn’t bother me, I would be okay with a basement. We didn’t have a basement though, but I never did like the tool shed. Very creepy…

We have a small lab in the basement. It was considered off limits to the kids because of the chemicals, sensitive equipment, high voltage power supplies, UV sources, etc. One time I overheard the kids talking and one mentioned “the scary corner.”
Twenty years later we still use that name.

@SmashTheState I just wanted to say that I think your connection between basements and the subconscious is really intriguing.

@wundayatta Don’t give me the credit, it was Freud and Jung who found the connection. Jung’s first inkling of the existence of a collective unconscious, for example, came during a dream when he found a trap door leading to a deeper sub-basement under the basement in his house.

I have a basement and I’m not afraid to go into it. There have been a few bugs, but that’s what shoes are for.

I’m not afraid of basements now. However, I was scared of the basement as a child in a very specific way. When the hostages were taken at the 1972 Olympics, I saw the news footage. For years, I was convinced that if I didn’t get back up the stairs and into the kitchen before I turned off the light, those kidnappers would “get me.” I was sure that they lived under those stairs. Here’s the really strange part, I could play in the basement, go in and out of it to the backyard, or get canned goods from the pantry down there without any problem. It was only coming back up the stairs that was frightening. Weird kid!

I don’t have a basement but I have been in houses that do have them and this pretty much sums up my feelings about them altogether.

I have never lived in a house with a basement or cellar. The house I live in now has a space under the floor that’s about 2 feet deep into the foundations, with nothing but mud at the bottom. When we moved in we needed to replace some of the floor, and in the space underneath we found an old newspaper, dated May 1939, the headline of which declared “There will be war by September”. It was right, too. Sadly the newspaper decayed shortly afterwards.

The only other thing in there is slugs, which have been known on at least two occasions to crawl up through the wall cavity and squeeze themselves into the wall sockets, where they get electrocuted. Electrocuted slugs stink.

My aunt lives in mine. If she has to sprinkle holy water on me, then yes I’m afraid. She doesn’t do that much anymore.

If I was a kid I’d be afraid of our unfinished, low ceilinged DIRT cellar. The house was built in 1910 so there is nothing legal about the steep, steep stairs with no hand rail! Dark and spooky down there. My kids were convinced the original owner kept slaves down there! I kept telling them that Kansas was a free state but they wouldn’t listen.
Had to run down there last fall in total darkness, during a tornado, no lights, total power outage..surprised I didn’t break my neck.

I have always found basements (even badly lit spooky ones) to be a place of refuge. When I was little and my sisters would get bored they would do the sibling torture thing and I would hide in the basement. It was really big and had lots of weird little rooms and places to hide where they couldn’t find me. They tried to convince me the basement was scary and had monsters but I knew who the real monsters were. ;-)

I’ve never been afraid of basements or cellars, and I had both when I was a child. The only thing that scared me was the giant rock that hung over the cellar door as a counter weight to help open the door. I was afraid the rope would break and rock would fall on me.

I wasn’t afraid out in the farmhouse basement, but the city house basement was scary. It had those open back stairs and the light that turned the whole basement dark, including THE SPACE UNDER THE STAIRS. I would climb up as far as I could while still being able to reach back for the switch and then bound the last few, usually careening off the wall at the top into the kitchen. This lasted into my 20-ish years.

We have an extremely creepy basement. It’s got a rickety set of stairs with no handrail, it’s dark and gloomy and almost 100 years old. It’s more of a cellar than a true basement… mostly dirt floors as opposed to cement, and has an outside entrance (like Dorothy’s storm cellar in The Wizard of Oz) in addition to the inside entrance from the kitchen. So, hell yes I’m afraid of it!

I hate going down there when no one else is home, even during the day, and pretty much refuse to go down there by myself at night. I did have to once, when a circuit breaker flipped. So, there were no lights at all! So freaking scary. I tiptoed down with my flashlight and walked through several cobwebs to get to the breaker box in the far corner, right next to what I call the ‘serial killer room’ (really, it’s a tiny room where our oil tank lives, covered by a crude planked door). Ack!

^Wussy^

Totally.

“Serial killer room”? Still not as scary as mean big sisters.

—We have twin basements, @augustlan! Tell you what will get you over your fear, at least for a bit, and that’s a tornado comin’!

@Dutchess_III Absolutely. I’d go down there in a heartbeat for that. Some things scare me more than others. :p

Yup! Down the no-railed steep stairs when the power is out and no flashlight…..I was GONE!!

My sisters and I used to think of the devil being down there. We had the image of this red slimy guy with horns and a barbed tail coming to get us! Like a lot of other people said here, for some reason it was only scary coming up the stairs, not down. I guess because you felt like he was behind you and you couldn’t see him. So we would run up fast and be scared that he was there right behind trying to catch us by the ankles!

@Earthgirl That reminds me of another fear I always had, about those open staircases (which is what we have in the basement). I remember being so afraid when I was little, that a hand was going to reach through from underneath the steps and grab me. <shudders>

When I was a wittle kid in Seattle we had a basement. It scared me to go down there. I felt like someone was watching me and following me. Mom told me not to be afraid because it was Jesus watching over me. So, that night, I prayed for Jesus to not watch over me any more when I went downstairs!

I’m still scared of my basement, but for all the typical reasons. It smells musty and is damp, cold, and frequently floods. Open staircase, cobwebs everywhere, and just one dim light bulb. That said, musty basement is one of my favorite smells. Go figure.