I personally have seen multiple women of varying ages go into shrieking hysterics at the sight of a mouse. On one occasion I had a school bus driver ''leap out of the driver's seat while the bus was moving'' upon sighting a mouse down by her feet (the bus mercifully coasted to a stop) and would not return to the front of the bus till one of the high school seniors chased the mouse out the folding doors. ''Stereotype'' is far too often another way of saying ''uncomfortable truth.''

This troper's middle-school bus driver reacted the exact same way towards a cicada. She at least slammed the bus into "park" before jumping out of her seat, though.

It's only the truth if 100% of all women ever do that, so I think "stereotype" is still the right term. And yeah, fuck cicadas. Mice are fine.

In a high school English Class this troper watched a hulking, 6 foot something inches tall basketball player freak out climb onto his desk and then bolt out the door all because a small mouse some how got into the room. It doesn't seem like much written but if you saw how strong and scary that kid looked normally in comparison to him hunched up on top of a desk and bolting out the door at breakneck speed it was quite a sight.

This troper's world history teacher is a perfect example. Even say the word "mouse" in conversation, and she stops you short. Even if you're talking about a ''computer'' mouse.

For this troper's grandmother, it's frogs. To the point that a picture of one has elicited this reaction.

This troper's niece picked up a rather nasty viral infection from chasing after and catching rats instead of avoiding them. She got better. Really, any rat slow enough for a 5-year old to catch probably has something seriously wrong with it.

This Troper found out one day that mice and my mother don't mix. While taking a shower I realized that there was a mouse in the bathroom. I decided to set it free afterwards. I told my mother what I was taking out, to which she screamed. She wanted to kill it but I managed to set it free before she got my brother to kill it. :)

This troper is that way with any sort of insect especially spiders. She's done things like stand on top of a toy chest for hours, refusing to use one bathroom in the house for months, and not sleeping in her room if she sees something crawling/flying. Even though logically she knew the insect should be gone She once called a relative from their house to kill a wasp in her room while she cowered under the covers in 90 degree weather. This troper acknowledges she has issues.

Spiders are arachnids, not insects. You're also never more than a few feet from some sort of arthropod (that's an urban legend about spiders, but true when you factor in ALL exoskeletal invertebrates) so you may as well leave the planet. This troper can't believe anyone on Earth finds insects scary or gross and will lecture people endlessly about how stupid that is.

This troper wonders why the hell she wasn't told she had a sister somewhere, as she does pretty much the same thing. She's getting a bit better though (as long as whatever it is stays out out a certain radius).

And This (male) troper wonders why no one ever told him he had two long lost sisters, because damn if that isn't just like him.

This troper thinks there may be some sort of conspiracy to keep his long lost siblings away from him. Exactly the same reactions, even down to hiding under the covers.

This troper knows how you feel about the covers. It had to have taken me close to an hour to finally get a bumblebee out of the house, including lots of screaming, over-the-top reactions and actually ''talking the bee through'' the procedure. If it had been a wasp, I would have waited outside til my parents came home.

This troper's Dad is this to a point where he wouldn't go in the basement because they ''might'' have been a mouse (it was a leaf).

This troper is unabashedly arachnophobic. Once, when a spider crawled on my arm, I leapt off the couch (which is harder than it sounds, because my laptop was being put to the use its name suggests) and just stared at the couch, perfectly prepared to wait until the spider was finished with it, until my roommate called me a coward and killed it himself.

This Troper has (or had) this with roaches (mostly dead ones for their extra-Squick nature), the mere sight of one would send him running the other way, including refusing to go upstairs to his room because there was one on the stairs and cutting his bath short because a live one was lurking, it was one of those sick buggers that fly and when he was reching for the bottle of shampoo it glided between his hand and the bottle, he automatically cut the water, grabbed a towel and got the hell out of there.

This troper sympathizes. You ever get up at 2 am to use the sink only to find a roach ''crawling inside your cup and all over your toothbrush''? After spending half an hour managing to trap it under another cup (accidentally crushing its head in the process), another half an hour cleaning the entire bathroom, twenty minutes or so of applying detergent and soap to my cup, throwing out the toothbrush, and working up the nerve to throw the dead roach away, I realized that I have a real fear of roaches.

I once found a cockroach in my hair when I was five years old. I recall that this was followed by lots of screaming and flailing.

I will stay away from rooms that might have bugs sometimes, but only sometimes. One day I'll be scared off small bugs, the next day I'll be stepping on a moth barefoot, a moth that could've easily been smashed with a fist, because the moth was on a counter.

This troper's sister is scared of spiders, and will react with horror to even hearing about them; this troper frequently exploits this for her own amusement.

This troper's 5th grade teacher was apparently scared of lizards. During one field trip she literally jumped in the air and screeched ontop of her lungs because there was a really big lizard sitting on a rock right infront of her (which she hadn't notice untill she was really close and the thing moved).

GreatPenguin goes to great pains to avoid anything that flies and has a stinger. (bees, wasps, whatever)

This troper didn't know he had a brother. Then again, he did run into a bee hive when we was young and his mother is deathly allergic to bees.

For this troper's friend, it's birds. And the birds seem to know this. One time, a robin managed to fly into the house ''through a window'' apparently for the sole purpose of terrorising her. This troper managed to chase it out of the door eventually, and has never before or since seen a bird do that. (Also, apparently the size of the bird doesn't matter. Protests that it was only a sweet little robin didn't go down well.)

This troper's all-girls middle school had gerbils in the science room. Once, a cute little gerbil escaped and made its way to a room where this troper's class had study hall. Around half the students in the class acted this way, climbing onto desks and shrieking. This troper, who loves rodents and kept gerbils for years, quickly rescued the poor frightened critter and brought her (her name was Velvet) back to her home in the science room. Cue questions like "Ew, how can you touch it?" This troper freely admits she preferred the company of the gerbil to that of most of her middle school classmates.

This troper understands completely, as she has had a succession of hamsters over the past five years and rescued five different mice on two separate occasions from her science classes. She is also the one who tries to catch the mouse in the tack locker instead of running the other way. She can't stand bugs.

This troper is utterly terrified of spiders and stinging insects. Either of them will drive her to jump away in terror. In her defense, a nest of bees attacked her on a vacation and there's a hive -somewhere- in her backyard. And spiders are just creepy. Unidentifiable insects that crawl inside the lampshade and project giant shadows cause her to scream and run, too, and so does said insect moving to the bottom edge of the shade and becoming visible. This is, of course, before she grabs the PS3 remote and proceeds to ''beat it to death with extreme prejudice.'' It was also extremely gross to remove, as it had a hard shell that could be felt through the napkin she removed it with.

This Troper will shriek like a little girl and run away from a spider or one of those weird hairy-lookin' centipedes (or a lot of bugs, really) but I used to have pet snakes. They fall under the "Four Legs Or Less" rule.

Funny, this troper is the opposite; she has a "must have limbs" rule.

This troper still hasn't ''quite'' gotten used to the panicked gasping that his coworkers give off when they spot an insect walking around the office.

This troper can face down a 6'4", 300 lb man holding a knife with no problems. Show her a moth or a spider or a daddylonglegs or any kind of creepy crawly however and she'll leave a this-troper sized hole in the wall and a dust plume getting away from it.

The ads on these pages are based on page content. Does anyone see a problem with a banner full of.... 8-legged concentrated evil at the top of the page?

A stupid bitch in This Troper will literally stand up and yell AHHHH!!! a fly!!! at the top of her lungs, luckily (for her, as seeing her hurt and humiliated makes me feel great) second period is my "special class" and not a normal class so it doesn't warrant much attention.

Bees for this troper, ever since she was over at a friend's house. We sat in a circle on the floor and this troper leaned back onto her hands, right onto a bee crawling past. Twelve-odd years later when she has since become a grown woman, this troper is still scared stiff of the things.

This troper's mom screams like she's being killed at the sight of a mouse. Then, this troper catches it with her bare (well, gloved) hands and places it on the front steps. She has done this since she was fourteen, yet to this day, when she is in her twenties, she will squeak loudly and run away at the very sight of even the smallest dog.

This troper is perfectly manly. I do not shriek like a little girl ''ever''. Now, granted, I'm an actor, and I understand there is a stereotype about adolescent actors not being very manly (IfYouKnowWhatIMean), but I assure you I am one hundred percent masculine in my thinking and my--'''''OH JESUS MOTHERFUCKIN' CHRIST THAT'S A SPIDER ON MY PLATE GETITOFFGETITOFFGETITOFFGETITOFF SOMEONE KILL IT KILLITKILLIT KILLITWITHFIRE GAAAAAAHHHHHHH!!''''' ...stop looking at me like that.

This troper's 6'4 240lb. football lineman brother who spends more time at the gym than at home has the exact same reaction. Only it doesn't even need to be on the plate. It will be across the entire length of the room and he'll make This Troper, his Women's Studies-majoring brother whose manliest trait is that he forgets to shave sometimes, kill it.

This troper...shall we say, has a significant dislike for centipedes and stinging insects. Spiders are tolerable at a safe remove, flies are simply annoying, but dragonflies are singularly cute, especially when really big. While I have no problem with mice, on reflection, simply mentioning the presence of a mouse downstairs to my mother while she was in the kitchen (upstairs, opposite side of the house) led to one of the first times I've seen someone try to ''surreptitiously'' climb up onto a countertop.

This troper is afraid of Insects with a body larger than 1cm (although spiders are less so) and stinging ones too.

I (Jinxed Blackcat) am just like this with spiders. Once one speedily ''crawled'' across my hand. I shrieked so high my friends noted I could now try my hand at Christine's part from Phantom of the Opera. I also wouldn't touch the popcorn for the rest of the night cause it crawled in that direction.

I have a thing about bees.

Ants: Ignore.

Snake: Catch, and put on sister's neck (I was twelve and it was hilarious, alright?).

Mouse: Open door and let it run out.

Spider: Squish from arms length with a newspaper.

Bee: OH GOD OH GOD RUN LOCK THE DOOR AND STUFF TOWELS IN THE CRACKS IT'S COMING FOR ME AAAAAAAGH!

And don't even get me started on hornets and wasps. I'm not even allergic, and I've only been stung once. I did, however, twice find bees in my hair (once dead, once alive) and one time a bee somehow flew up my pants. While I was in a car. Thank god that wasn't the one that stung me.

One of my college friends once saw a daddy longlegs in his house and killed it. With a shotgun. By ''firing'' the shotgun. Both barrels. Good thing that wasn't a load-bearing wall.

Did you do the intelligent thing and wear a flak jacket when in that friend's company?

Subverted with me. There was a rat in our house (that we think was from my cousin's boyfriend's mom's house) that everybody saw except me. I wanted to see it. Then it died. I wanted to see the dead rat. Mom already put it in the trash. :<

Almost the same thing happened to me. I was sitting in the kitchen with my dad and brother, who saw something and told me not to turn around because there was a big bug behind me. I was curious, but listened, and my brother went and got the "bug" and dropped it over the backyard fence. It was a mouse. They called it a bug because they didn't want my mom freaking out, presumably the same reason I was told to stay where I was. I was annoyed because I wanted to see it.

This Troper thinks the mice/rats/birds his family's cat brings in are cute, and, being the only one in the family who doesn't mind them, is invariably called to 'put it outdoors!' However, he can't STAND picking up the ''dead'' mice/rats/birds (the ones that die of shock while the cat's playing with them.) This Troper's mother, the same person who, while not fitting the stereotype of getting on furniture and screaming, will quickly leave the room if a ''living'' mouse or rat is on the loose, is actually the one who gets rid of the already-dead critters.

This Troper is so arachnophobic, it's ridiculous. He once walked around in cirlces in the driveway because there was one on his stair and another one that made a huge web in the path to the back of the house - he had to wait for his dad to come out to kill one or the other, since he couldn't bring himself to approach either door. He doesn't like things with more than four limbs in general, mind, especially the weird feeling when they crawl on him.

Snakes. I hate them. One day, while walking home from school, I saw a baby snake. It was about the size of your average earthworm, and I know enough about snakes to identify it on sight as a harmless garter snake. In retrospect, I can see how it could even possibly be classified as cute. So what did I do? I yelped like a wounded puppy, ran away, and spent the next few hours whimpering uncontrollably and jumping at shadows. The next day, I saw an earthworm of approximately the same length. My reaction? "Oh, cool. A worm."

This troper's sister, mother, and maternal grandmother have this precise reaction to mice (as well as rats, opossums, and ferrets) and will go to great lengths to avoid noticing such creatures in places where they can be expected to be found. They also tend to react to bats by crouching and covering their heads. Somewhat amusing, since many of the animals in question merely look similar but are not actually closely related at all.

This troper's mother is a tough-as-nails SassyBlackWoman, but when a garter snake got inside the house once, ''it was on''. Shrieking, standing on the desk chair, throwing her ashtray at it, you name it. This troper managed to catch it (ignoring his mother's screams that it could bite; garter snakes are harmless), but all inquiries about keeping it as a pet were shot down violently. Come to think about, she has also gone into hysterics over mice (real ''and plastic''), cicadas, and spiders, but to be fair, one doesn't expect to find giant wolf spiders in one's bathtub in Ohio.

Subverted by my sister and inverted by her boyfriend. He's so afraid of mice and rats that he locked himself into the bathroom for 20 minutes until my sister could get there and release the tiny mouse his cat had brought inside.

Mice are fine, just don't show this Troper any Rats!

This troper's sister. She is normally fairly bold and sassy. Get her anywhere near a mouse, and she instantly turns into a textbook example, complete with standing on chairs/tables. Not a single other person in the family harbors this strange phobia.

Also: This troper used to be this way with spiders. Now they're more of a berserk button. Case in point: Just now, she spotted a spider hanging in a doorway, and stood and had a brief, cheery conversation with it: "Hello, spider-filth. I haaaate you. You know, I'm holding a cup of boiling hot coffee. I could easily pour it over your brainless little head and boil you to death." ... Then my mother thought I was talking to my little brother, and hilarity ensued. (Note to spider lovers: I can hear you screaming. It's okay, I put it outside. Sheesh.)

My mother never screams. Once, I was a kid, lying on the living room couch, and my mother screams and runs into the room. Here I am, half-paralysed, wondering if there's an axe-murder or a fire, and: 'There's a mouse in the dining room!' After realising she was dead serious, I started laughing. Then, I offered to try to catch it. She quite firmly told me that I was not to go anywhere near it.

Subversion: This troper is fifteen years old, female, blonde, constantly wears skirts, and loves to cook, and she thinks small rodents, snakes, lizards, amphibians, bees, moths, and most spiders and beetles are adorable. When there's a bug indoors (this includes large spiders with very visible fangs, but excludes silverfish and mosquitos, which I consider evil and therefore smash), I catch it with my bare hands and gently carry it outside to the nearest shrubbery. The sight of a mouse or rat elicits squee.

I am terrified of bees. For that matter, anything with a stinger. Some of the crueler kids in my group caught on to this, and played it to great effect. All they had to do was yell, "Oh my God a hornet!" and watched me shoot into the air and run like hell. When there actually WAS a hornet, one of the kids sadistically held onto my shoulders while everyone ran away and watched me have a panic attack. Once I had a dream that my town was swarming with bees, and everyone was getting stung. I couldn't go anywhere because there would be bees there, too. When I woke up, it was 10 minutes before I could MOVE.

Dude, your friends are ''assholes''.

For this troper, it's any small little insect. Whether it be cockroaches, bees, insects, spiders, mosquitoes, flies or just anything else. He thinks he's afraid of mouses, but he's yet to test that. It's more the fact the germs the creatures may carry with them than anything else usually. Except with spiders and bees. He's afraid they'll hurt him. ThisTroper does not like to be hurt.

This troper is this way with ticks and spiders bigger than half a centimeter. If she sees a tick anywhere near her or on her body, she will, in this order: Panic, try to get it off as fast as possible, almost immediately try to burn it, attempt to crush it, and once it's dead she'll apply as much hand sanitizer as she can and go into her bathroom and shower for about three hours. And huge spiders are just plain squicky.

This troper isn't usually too bad with bugs (as long as there's someone around to inspire heroics, because otherwise the centipede is welcome to her sink/bathtub/kitchen/whatever) but she must admit that skimming this page in a dark room has got her twitchy. Anyone else?

This troper's brother's Science teacher once had a gerbil when he was in 5th grade. The gerbil once got out into the hallway and into his English teacher's room. When the teacher saw it she screamed bloody murder and jumped onto her desk. They got it out and caught it eventually.

This Troper: OH GOD WAAAAASPS KILL IT WITH FIRE! Bees are okay, because they have the decency to die a horrible death after they attack you, but wasps don't even die during ''winter''. They sting you and sting you and then they make horrible deathnests in the eaves of your house and then you get your insect killing spray and you sit there with the button pressed and the nasty-smelling liquid flying at them until the can is empty and they're '''STILL ALIVE'''. DIE!

Inverted for this troper; because when he was little, his older sister (Who was a tomboy) loved to chase him around the backyard with a frog. Considering how I was back then, maybe ''I'' should have been the one wearing a dress...

This troper's brother is like that with cockroaches -- he jumps, runs away, then returns with a wooden plank and a bottle of almost chemical warfare-grade lawn insecticide. The troper in question doesn't fears them at all!

This troper has this reaction to spiders and almost any creepy crawly, much to her mother's amusement. Her mother, however, reacts this way to mice, rats, gerbils and many other small animals, such as ferrets (which this troper loves but can't have as a pet because she doesn't want to freak out her mother). However, there is one type of rodent this troper's mother can stand - hamsters. Probably because they don't have long tails and generally look like cute little fluffballs.

This (male) troper is like this with hamsters sometimes, other times I get an urge to kill it. Violently. This only applies to hamsters, and started when I was holding a friends hamster and it bit me so hard you could see the bone. I was five.

This troper is really afraid of mice, though she fall into this trope once (to be fair, she thought said mouse was a toy until she picked it up and realized that it was dead). ''Spiders'' get her to play the trope straight and she nearly had her mom crash the car when one crawled on her leg during a car ride.

This troper has it in spades, even normal stuff that I KNOW doesn't hurt... like moths flying around a light and stuff like that. Although, I think it was because I was younger and babysitting my cousins, and we saw an earwig crawling around on the floor. It crawled under the couch. My aunt and I lifted the couch to try and kill it... and the bottom of the couch ripped out, and it POURED earwigs and silverfish. I had been sleeping on that couch for a good three weeks and didn't know. Still gives me the shudders thinking about it.

Congratulations. You've just either squicked me out or given me NightmareFuel. I don't experience either one very often, so I don't know which one I'm feeling right now, but I guaran-damn-tee it's one of 'em.

The presence of a mouse doesn't bother me much, it's more a matter of how to get rid of it. I can pet it, but dear lord, don't ask me to pick it up and bring it elsewhere. If you pick one up it thrashes, it wiggles, I scream, I come close to accidentally flinging it, I end up dropping it and slumping to the floor, panting with both hands clasped over my mouth dramatically. A while back, there was a mouse in the apartment, and I wound up chasing it out with my plastic light saber...Still not sure how that worked. ON ANOTHER NOTE, there as a cockroach in my friends kitchen, so I screamed and barracaded myself...on top of her kitchen table. Said friend proceeded to pick up the cockroach in her bare hand like it was nothing, drop it into her kitchen sink and turned on the garbage disposal. The crunching was awful, and after the fact there was goop all around the drain and a stray insect leg...Oog, I'm nauseated just remembering it...

Somewhat subverted with this troper. If I shriek when I see a mouse, snake, spider, or other creepy-crawler, it's only out of surprise, not because I'm afraid of them (To All Living Things}} quite the contrary). If I see a spider in my house, I'll try to catch her and escort her outside (I have yet to see a snake or mouse in my house).

Parasites of any kind make this editor shudder with disgust -- fleas, ticks, worms vomited up by the cat, I've had to deal with them all. It's the fact that they lay eggs that are too small to see. The second worst time was when I pressed a key on my laptop and heard a chitinous *crunch* (bookmite). The worst was when I found a white crawling... thing on my hairbrush ''after'' I'd brushed my hair with it. AUUUUGH!

My mother has a fear of mice, for perfectly reasonable ... reasons. As a girl, she lived in a house with an outside toilet. Once she went to the toilet, reached up to pull the chain, and a mouse ran down the chain, into her sleeve, through her dress and out down one leg. *shudders*

Oh, and someone I knew at University had a major fear of spiders. And was quite fond of the band Space. Whose album was called ''Spiders'' and the cover art features lots of the titular critters in a bath. The CD lived on the top shelf out of sight, and when she wanted to listen to it, she knocked on her neighbour's door and left the room while her neighbour got the CD out, put it on, and returned the box to the top shelf.

Mira-chan hates flying roaches, but she's usually just deadpan around one on the ground (that didn't keep her from leaving the couch when one crawled under it, though). She also hates termites and ant lions (because of one particularly terrorizing event two summers ago), but around other bugs and lizards, she's fine. To the point where three lizards in her house have been given names. #QUOTE#'''Classmate''': *throws a plastic roach at Mira-chan* #QUOTE#'''Mira-chan''': Cool, can I borrow it?

HilarityEnsued once when Mira-chan had two friends (G-chan and J-chan) over to do a project. G-chan discovered a scarab beetle that had been killed in the garden a few days ago and asked if she could keep it. That was when they discovered that J-chan hated bugs, and the rest of the night was spent happily terrorizing her with the beetle. G-chan brought the beetle with her to school the next day, and she and Mira-chan had fun scaring people with it.

This troper has two cats who bring in mice and various rodents very often. He therefore considers them more of an annoyance and will happily gloat at a (humanely) trapped mouse before releasing it. However his sister and mother play the trope perfectly straight, despite there being no logical reason to fear spiders or mice, in Britain at least. He often wonders whether it's actually the stereotype influencing people's behaviour sometimes...

A very old example (it was about ten years or so before I was born) occured when my dad was in Cadazes (I'm aware I've spelt it wrong) in spain. He was talking to a girl (who was NOT my mother: this was before he met her) and he noticed a mouse walking across the table with the sink on behind her. He said something along the lines of, "Don't move." The girl responded, "Why?" My dad said, "There is a little mouse by the sink." She screamed, standing up out of her chair and then (if I recall his telling right) she stood on the chair. Apparently, it was the first time he had seen that happen. Having been to the same house over Christmas, the story makes a lot more sense.

This troper's dad once had a wasp size of his thumb land down on his shoulder on a holiday. He didn't make a sound, but spasmatically jumped right in the pool next to him with clothes on, as soon as it touched him. It was hilarious, but I would have probably done the same thing.

This troper's mother once showed her a series of disgusting closeups of various insects magnified by who knows what. Her response was to scream and run out the door.

Painfully straight with this troper's mother. Literally jumping up onto a chair and shrieking.

This happened when my mom went to Smith College in the cafeteria.

This troper saw a baby mouse in his garage while going to get some soda. I ran back into my house terrified while my mother got the rat poison. I was convinced most of the night that the mouse would chew through the door and get into my room. Meanwhile three weeks later, I went to see Zombieland at a local movie theatre and saw a mouse running around the auditorium. I simply moved back a few rows, quietly scared during an otherwise not very good movie. I think the cleaning crew took care of it afterwards.

This she-Troper's boyfriend is 5'8", 152 lbs., yes? A scaredy-cat when it comes to spiders. Especially those tiny little jumping spiders one sees on sidewalks. This she-Troper thinks they're cute, the cute that Bachuru from Pokemon is, having a pair of eyes bigger than the rest (for depth perception!) and fuzzy little mandibles (that are made to chew up bugs their size, since they have no fangs), harmless as can be. Cue my man climbing onto the bathroom countertop when one finds its teeny-tiny way through the bathtub window onto the windowsill... This Troper's friend has this with spiders simply because she was bitten when she was little. A spider so small that I couldn't see it until I got within a few inches of it was on the ceiling (bunk beds at camp), and my friend suddenly looked in our direction and screeched. We got the bejeezus scared out of us, since we thought she'd seen something in the window we hadn't been able to lock. She pointed at the ceiling; I sighed and squished it with my thumb (I would've left it alone normally, but she was fumbling for her lighter, and I figured squishing was less cruel than burning alive; not to mention, the ceiling was wooden...).

This troper had a pet cat and a pet rabbit, both black. One day, we decided to take the rabbit out of the cage and let it interact with Xerxes. Xerxes was probably too young to be taken away from his mother as a kitten, and we accidentally shut his tail in a door once, so he grew up into a Greebo {{Expy}}, smart enough to recognize when biting and clawing us would get him what he wanted, and when it wouldn't. He knew hurting that rabbit would upset us, so the worst thing he did was plant his paws under its nose and flex his claws ("Look what I've got!"). Finally, he was lying down with his eyes closed when the rabbit hopped up behind him and cuddled against him. Xerxes was obviously enjoying it, and then he saw us watching him. You could watch that cat counting us, realizing that every human in the house was in front of him, and adding it all up. - Classified #QUOTE#'''Xerxes''': One...Two...Three...So, what's behind me? GYAH!

This troper once had to rescue a slow worm, of all things, from a cycle path. There were two girls stood staring at it in horror and refusing to go near it until I picked it up, at which point they were all 'what the heck is it and how can you touch it!' I, personally, am only really freaked out by large spiders.

Even if you're not scared of mice, finding one inside your home can be horrifying - this troper was very shaken the first time she saw a mouse in her flat, and friends concur - mice are cute and fluffy, but not when they could be hiding anywhere in the room!

This troper is rather baffled at the way many women find mice to be "gross" and "ugly". I think they're absolutely adorable! I know better than to pick one up and snuggle one, because they carry diseasesExcept for domestic ones, of course]], but other than that, I don't see how tiny, fuzzy squeaky things with a cheese fetish are so scary. Now wasps on the other hand...