If you still need to leave the door open just a crack, you’re not alone. Stylist investigates why so many grown women are still spooked by darkness.

Do you still jump at things that go bump – or creak, or screech – in the night? Is that shadowy area around the curtains, the open door of a wardrobe, the suggestion of a silhouette in the doorway, enough to make you curl up, with the covers over your head? As adults with savings accounts and sophisticated views on current affairs, we should be far too sensible to still be afraid of the dark. And yet who hasn’t lain rigid with fear after hearing a strange noise they can’t quite explain, or felt their heart leap out of their chest upon seeing a ‘spooky figure’ which turned out to be simply a dress on a hanger? Once spooked in the dark, our out-of control imaginations can run wild.

If you can identify with this, you aren’t alone. A survey of 2,000 adults conducted this year by Go Glow found that 40% of us are scared when walking around the house with the lights off. One in 10 admitted they were too terrified to even get up for a toilet trip in the darkness. It’s something Katie Johns*, 39, a Londoner who works in communications, knows well – she can still vividly recall what prompted her lifelong fear of the dark when she was a girl. “I was half asleep, and I thought I saw someone standing at the top of our stairs, just looking at me and my sister. I lay there in the dark, staring and being scared, not wanting to move. After that I slept with a crucifix for about five years and shared a bedroom with my grandmother. I couldn’t sleep alone.” Now an independent and confident woman, Katie is still not comfortable sleeping in a pitchblack room, and leaves her door open with the landing light on.

Universal Fears

Fear is one of the earliest and most universal emotions. A study has shown eight-month-old babies were able to recognise snakes faster than other objects shown to them in pictures, suggesting that we might be hard-wired to recoil from things that have historically threatened our ancestors.

According to child psychologist David Foulkes, young children don’t appear as characters in their own dreams, so if they wake up terrified in the night it’s usually because they’re disoriented, rather than because they’ve had a Wes Craven-worthy nightmare. It’s by associating this confusion and helplessness with the pitch black that we first learn to fear the dark. About 90% of children experience this at some stage. At around the age of seven, when our dreams begin to include emotional responses, this can reinforce the fear. Most grow out of it by puberty, by learning to calm themselves after waking terrified. But for some, the terror follows them into adulthood.

There are also very practical reasons why we are averse to the dark. Firstly we are more likely to injure ourselves in a pitch-black, unnavigable world (in Go Glow’s survey, 45% of those scared of the dark were primarily concerned about something unexpected happening). Plus, although it is actually a fallacy that in the dark, our other senses improve or become heightened, we do rely on them more, which means we are naturally listening out for noises which may indicate danger.

Are you still afraid of the dark?