Halloween is just a week away and while the holiday gets us excited for candy, it also makes us more aware of the creepy things in life. Whether you like (or not) horror movies, haunted houses or other scary things, many of us have some kind of fear or maybe even more severe, a phobia.
I asked my fellow Z staff what they were scared of. Tiffany has a fear of public speaking. Yet, she’s been doing radio for years! I can relate a bit thou as sitting in a room alone and talking to the public is entirely different. Ryan has a fear of heights. Mo has a fear of snakes. For me, my fear is clowns. But I also have a phobia called trypophobia which makes me super freaked out by clusters of small, closely packed irregular holes. And apparently, it’s related to OCD, as Ryan taught me this afternoon. He looked into it because he thought I was just being weird. He even asked me if I had a Lite Brite when I was a kid and if that bothered me. Well, yes, I had one, I played with it often and no it never bothered me. Because all those small holes are exactly the same in size and distance apart.
So I came across an article today about some of our favorite rockers and THEIR fears and phobias and thought, well this sounds like a fun topic. That then lead me down the previously mentioned rabbit hole, Ryan looking up trypophobia, because I couldn’t remember the word for it, then in turn a photo popped up, I ran out of his office with my skin crawling. But I digress.
Ultimate Classic Rock put together a list of 28 fears that many of our favorite stars, and us, have. Guess this proves, they’re just like us!
One I find hilarious is Ozzy Osbourne who, while accidentally biting the head off a live bat in 1982, has an actual fear of RATS.
“I tell you what I am scared of … rats. They’ve got so many diseases we don’t have the cure for,” Osbourne explained in a 2018 interview with ‘The Guardian.’ “It’s crazy that anyone would think I’d be in league with the devil, because I’m terrified of all kinds of shit. I’m very superstitious. I have to try not to be, otherwise I wouldn’t leave the house.”
Slash has a fear of hand injuries which makes sense considering he’s one of the best shredders in the world. He even says he gets the “heebie jeebies” when watching movies and bad things happen to hands. You also will never find him driving with the window down and his hand surfing the breeze.
Think about how many people Guns n Roses play in front of any given night on those sold out arena shows. Axl Rose has a fear of people known as anthropophobia. This is why he refuses to do interviews and disappears from the radar completely.
Dave Grohl of Foo Fighters is claustrophobic.
I have crazy claustrophobic dreams, weird elevator dreams where the elevator closes in and all of a sudden I am lying down — oh my God, it’s a casket. Just freaky stuff like that.” The feeling also cropped up while traveling. “Sometimes in airplanes I can’t stand that fact that I can’t get off if I want to,”
Grohl owns his own plane these days so I’m sure that helps. But man, what do you do when traveling in a tour bus and having to sleep in a bunk?
Joe Perry of Aerosmith, one half of the “Toxic Twins” as he and Steven Tyler used to be called, oddly has a phobia of needles! In an attempt to shoot up coke, that went very wrong, Perry said:
“I don’t know if it was my needle phobia or injection inexperience, but I somehow turned myself into a blood donor,” the rocker recalled. “Blood was spurting everywhere – my clothes, the counter, the floor. I made one horrible goddamn bloody mess.”
There’s plenty of other fears out there like flying, germs and spiders. Even ones they share with me, like clowns, and like Mo, snakes.
Check out more here. And if you’d like to really get creeped out feel free to do an image search of TRYPOPHOBIA
