When I was really little we lived in the country and my bedroom was at ground level.  I was always afraid of anything looking in the window, especially vampires and dinosaurs.  I think I have that scene in Salem's Lot where the vampire boy is floating outside the window to thank for the first one.  For the second one, one night I heard a noisy truck do the down shift/engine brake thing.  It was really quiet out there, so this sound was loud, and really stood out, and it was new.  I had no idea about engines and stuff, so I heard a dinosaur growling out there, and nothing anybody said could convince me otherwise.

When I was five we moved to town and my bedroom was upstairs.  We had a satellite dish cabled to two TVs, one downstairs in the living room, and one upstairs in my parents' bedroom.  Back then you didn't get a separate setup in each room, you had one box that controlled everything, and all the TVs hooked to it showed the same thing.  There was this werewolf show on USA on I think saturday night which my mom always liked to watch and I watched too.  When it was over, it was my job to go turn the stuff off downstairs.  There was one light switch at the top of the stairs, and another at the bottom.  So you had to have both switches turned on for the light in the stairs to be on.  I had to run out of my parents' bedroom, hit the light on the way past, run through the spare room at the bottom of the stairs, into the living room, turn the stuff off, and head back to the stairs as fast as I could.  Now, there were no other light switches in a direct path from the stairs to the satellite boxes, so I had to do it in the dark with the werewolves all around me.  I think I even took to not turning on the light in the stairway, because I couldn't turn enough lights on to keep them away from me, and that way they wouldn't see the light come on and know I was coming.  I'm pretty sure I got to where I could do all that in under six seconds.

Our basement was a real doozy too.  It was an unfinished stone basement in a hundred year old house.  By stone, I mean big blocks of rough-hewn sandstone like the pyramids might have been built out of.  It looked like a dungeon.  There were no light switches there, you had one light with a pull cord in the middle.  So you had to go down the steps, find the light in the dark, do what you needed to do before the basement dwellers woke up and saw you, turn the light off, then find your way to the stairs and run up those as fast as you could in the dark, with the creepy crawlies right after you.  And you could actually hear them chasing you up the steps.  When you got to the top you slammed that door behind you as fast as you could.

Ah, the joys of growing up in an old house.  And absolutely nothing weird ever happened in that house, but that was almost worse because then you wondered what it was up to.