Ah! 

All the things that go bump in the night should be scary, right? 

But don’t we tell our children about the tooth fairy who whisks away our teeth at night. Or even santa-claus who jumps down chimneys and delivers presents in the middle of the night. 

So why are we so afraid of the dark? No, it’s not the dark, but what our imaginations conjure up. Especially when we creep along the hallways in the dead of night and the floor beneath your feet creaks just a little. We jump. It’s frightening. Our hearts pound and we sweat, our imaginations jumping to all sorts of conclusions about what it could be. Werewolves, vampires, men with bats and crowbars. Anything but what it actually is. 

A floorboard creaking under our feet. 

Why does this happen? 

Evolution. 

We’ve been pre-programmed oh, so long ago to be afraid of the dark. We weren’t always the apex predator. And most of these apex predators hunt in the dark where we are more or less blind to them. 

It is from some of these predators that a lot of the supernatural creatures come from. Werewolves and Vampires in particular, come from creatures that hunt in the night, Bats and Wolves. 

But they’re not that scary, you say… 

Well, to our ancestors they were. And now we’ve morphed them into even scarier creatures through film and TV programmes. 

So this irrational fear might never go away… But then again, evolution is a wonderful thing, so maybe one day they might not be so frightening… 

Thanks for reading 

S.McC 

P. S

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