Chiroptophobia

I am afraid of very few critters and creatures. One of them is bats.... Now being afraid of bats may seem like a totally irrational fear, but I promise it is not. I have a legitimate reason.

When I was a teenager I gave tours in a local cave. As part of tour guide training, they tell you there are no bats in the cave. Well, they lied and I found that out the hard way. There may not regularly be bats in the cave, but there are sometimes.

One day I was giving a tour, a huge tour, with sixty people on it and I are only sixteen. Keeping the attention of 60 people as we walk through a cave is not always easy. That day as we were walking and the family next to me asks me what is back in this one hole. I had shined my flashlight back in that hole hundreds of times so I shined it back there and something flies out.... in my face and then flies around and gets tangled in my hair a little bit. Mind you as this small bat is flying around I started screaming. Not just screaming but a bloody murder terrified kind of screaming. The bat was IN my hair, flapping and freaking out as much as I was.

In reality, whole ordeal lasted less than a minute, but to me, it felt like an eternity. Let me tell you screaming a blood-curdling scream will get the attention of all sixty people on a tour. Right past the hole where the bat frightened me is a room that we stop to talk about formations in. The entire time we stood in that room the bat flew round and round with me watching it and hoping it would go away.

A few years later my family went on vacation and went to Carlsbad Caverns. While we were there we watched the bats swarm out of the cave one evening. It was another terrifying event. You stand near the mouth of the cave and wait and as the sun sets the bats to start flying out. As they start flying out there are only a few and then all of the sudden there are hordes of them. The employees remind you repeatedly to be quite so the bats can use their echolocation to fly. As people get quite the bats fly lower and lower, which means they get closer and closer to people. The bats started getting closer and I tried really hard to ignore them. It didn't help especially when it flew so low that it knocked my dad's hat off his head. He was sitting next to me so that was way too close for comfort.

I won't even look at the bats in the zoo. I walk right past them and wait outside while my son and husband watch them. Looking at them even in their little glassed-in cage makes me anxious. Bats may eat bugs and creepy crawlies, but I do not like them even if they are useful. I have chiroptophobia. Yup, I do, I am afraid of bats.

Avoiding bats at the zoo