When I was six years old, my life was fairly idyllic. Then came the Halloween of 2001. I was dressed up as Scooby Doo (with his big goofy head on top of mine) and went with a group of family members, aunts, cousins, my mother, and the like to a corn maze. It would be fun, they said. Corn mazes are super kid-friendly, they said.

They were wrong.

The first warning sign should have been that while waiting in line, there was a movie playing, projected on a thirty-foot high screen. That film was the miniseries of Stephen King's IT. I saw a man slit his wrists in a bathtub and write a message in his blood, and saw a clown devouring a young man who was thrown off of a bridge. The line moved painfully slow and I could not look away from the horror unfolding on the ten yard tall screen. Then we went into the maze. It was not a corn maze. It was a haunted murder maze. We rounded the corner and someone leaped out at us. My cousin, who was dressed as Raggedy Anne, and I began crying and the guy felt so bad that he took off his murder mask and led the whole gaggle of us out through an employees' only door.

The jump scare was not fun, but the movie had a much greater effect on me. My young mind jumbled together the images I saw and made a critical connection: clowns plus bathrooms equal murder. I proceeded to spend the next six years measuring how comfortable I was in a location by weather or not I was willing to go number one standing, because to do so would leave my surroundings unwatched and I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that if a murderous clown was going to get me, it was going to come out from behind the shower curtain while my back was turned. Fortunately, my fear of clowns has since metamorphosed into hatred, which is a much stronger emotion.