Some things go bump in the night. Some things slither onto the scene in a way that just gives you the willies. And some things are just creepy for no reason at all.

Childhood fears may be the most irrational, but they may also be the easiest with which to cope.

“I’m scared somebody will come into my house — a ghost,” said 4-year-old Maci Jones. “When I get scared, I just cuddle with my mom.”

Brenden McMillin, 5, also has fears but faces them the best he can.

“I’m afraid of the dark,” he said. “But when I get afraid of it, I walk out of the bed, I walk down the stairs and I fix myself a drink. I drink it up, and I walk back in the bed.”

And while 4-year-old Jayden Vacco maintained that he wasn’t personally afraid of anything, he did know a few things about fears.

“Girls are afraid of spiders and lobsters,” he said.

Sometimes, though, fears develop and grow into a person’s adulthood.

Natchez resident Tracy Reed knows some of her reactions are irrational, but she said the older she gets the more afraid she gets.

“Any kind of bug, anything that flies, crawls or slithers, I am afraid of,” she said. “Not that I am afraid they will hurt me, they just creep me out.”

And it doesn’t even matter if the insects are alive or dead, she can’t go near them, Reed said.

Keeping the insects out of her house means that Reed has adopted a routine, spraying insect control chemicals around the windows and vents as often as she feels necessary. It also means she doesn’t go outside very much.

When she had the house moved less than the length of a football field, Reed said she became so afraid that it picked up bugs during the move that she called an exterminator to spray the house.

And that may have been overkill, she admitted.

“I had to go to work,” she said. “When I got home, I had two dead mosquitoes.”

But that day, when she went to work to escape the insects that may or may not have been in her house, Reed had to face another fear — traffic.

“Just being in traffic makes me a nervous wreck,” she said. “I drive like a granny because I am afraid somebody will run me over.”

She lives south of Natchez, but works on the north end, and Reed said that means she will drive through neighborhoods to avoid traffic as much as possible. But sometimes even that isn’t enough.

She turns down travel invites, and hasn’t been to see her brother, who lives in Baton Rouge, because of the route she would have to take. If she can avoid going to the grocery store for two or three more days, that’s all the better, she said.

“I am thinking about moving to Monterey because Natchez is getting too big for me and has too many cars on the road,” she said. “It will have me shaking.”

Some fears find their origin in past experiences, said licensed therapist Joe Swoveland of Swoveland and Simons Family Therapists in Natchez.

“Some fears are triggered because we choose to fear something,” he said. “It is something we have experienced before and we have made a rational choice that we don’t want to be around it.”

An example of that would be someone who, following a bad accident at an intersection, intentionally chooses to avoid it or is extremely cautious when they come to that intersection, Swoveland said.

Other fears are learned through associative learning, he said.

“With this kind of fear, there is no thought process here, it is a paring of two things that were not previously paired.”

A baby might play with a balloon until it pops, and after that the baby will not play with balloons because it has associated the popping with the balloon, Swoveland said.

Then, there’s phobias.

“A phobia is an irrational fear and the person knows it is irrational,” he said.

The phobia may be caused by an extreme reaction to a single event, or it can just be learned through observation.

“We learn from society and our environment, and we incorporate it into our beliefs,” Swoveland said.

The thing to remember is that when people run from something they fear, Swoveland said they are not running from the thing itself, but the feeling the thing gives them.

“They are running from, not the phobia, but the fear reaction within their body themselves, the queasiness, the rapid heart rate,” he said. “Rationally they know their size 10 shoe can stomp a spider.”

The easiest way to treat fears is through desensitization — essentially exposure therapy.

“This would be where — if someone is afraid of spiders — you take someone in a room with a spider in a glass case, and every day they take one step closer to that spider,” he said. “They overcome their fear by being exposed to it over and over and over.”

But the treatment is only as good as its participants.

“Most people aren’t willing to go to that uncomfortable a level,” Swoveland said.

And while Reed isn’t sure about spending a lot of time face to face with her fears, she said she’s determined not to let her fears rule her life.

“You think about it, you are afraid of it so you dread it, and I think that over time I have let that turn into an anxiety,” she said. “I am not going to let myself get that way. I just have to deal with it.”