Sometimes the mind plays tricks on you.

Especially - and studies will back me up on this - if you're a really smart person with a vivid imagination.

This type of person will, for example, become more frightened while watching a horror movie than, say, some brainless dullard who gets lost in the plot.

So, technically speaking, the smarter you are, the more active your imagination and the greater your "fear factor."

And this is not only true as it relates to movies. It's also true in your everyday, ordinary, regular, day-to-day life experiences.

As I have previously mentioned in other writings, we have a couple of cats at our house. We keep two little bowls of dry cat food in the mud room so they'll have something to munch on between feedings. In the closet at the end of the mud room is kept a large (18-lb.) bag of dry cat food and in the bag is kept a little plastic cup used to scoop the food out.

The bag is ALWAYS in the same place and the little plastic cup is ALWAYS INSIDE the bag, so usually I don't even open the closet door all the way - I just open the door a little and feel for the hole in the top of the bag and reach inside it until I find the cup and then scoop it full of food.

I do this all the time. However, my wife occasionally places things in certain locations where they've never been before and this almost always results in great angst on my part.

The other day I went to the closet to perform this routine task. I cracked the door open and reached inside to feel for the cat food bag. At some point between this time and the last time I performed this task, my wife had placed one of those Swiffer duster things (it's sort of like a feather duster, only softer and more fuzzy) in the closet on top of the cat food bag.

So instead of the familiar feel of the top of the cat food bag, there was this very furry and somewhat lifelike entity into which my hand suddenly disappeared.

Well sir, try to imagine what went through my mind.

"IT'S A RACCOON!" my over-active imagination screamed at me. "IT'S A RACCOON THAT HAS SOMEHOW GOTTEN INTO THE CLOSET FROM UNDER THE HOUSE AND IT'S PROBABLY RABID AND AT ANY SECOND IT'S GOING TO CLAMP IT'S RAZOR-LIKE TEETH ONTO YOUR HAND AND THEN YOU ARE SO DEAD MISTER!"

Well, I did what any normal, rational, calm and collected adult human being would do in a case like that.

I screamed like a little girl.

YAA-AAA-RRR-GGG-HHH! AAAHHH! AAAHHH!

I jerked my hand out of there and the duster thing somehow got stuck between my fingers so here I went running outside (JUST IN CASE IT WAS A RACCOON, IT MIGHT SEE THE TREES AND REALIZE IT WAS BEING SET FREE AND LET GO OF MY HAND AND RUN OFF AND MAYBE I WOULD SURVIVE AND MAYBE THE DOCTORS COULD SAVE MY HAND - THEY'RE DOING WONDERFUL THINGS THESE DAYS WITH RECONSTRUCTIVE SURGERY).

So here I went a running and a screaming and a trying to beat that duster thing off the end of my arm with my free hand.

I ain't lying y'all. That danged thing nearly scared me to death.

Fear is a powerful thing.

I was flipping through the TV channels Sunday night and the movie "Cujo" was on and I hit the button on the remote that makes the TV display a brief description of the movie. It said, "bitten by a rabid bat, a huge dog traps a Maine woman and her young son in their Ford Pinto."

WOW! HOW SCARY WOULD THAT BE?

That would be way more frightening than, say, thinking you were being eaten alive by a rabid raccoon.

Imagine the horror. Trapped in a Ford Pinto. GULP!

Gives me cold chills just thinking about it.

Klonie Jordan (editor@gaffneyledger.com) is executive editor of The Gaffney Ledger.