In conjunction with last month’s theatrical release of IT: Chapter 2, BuzzFeed posted a fun little piece titled “Everyone Has One Great Fear: This ‘It’ Quiz Will Reveal Yours.” My photo selections from the various prompts resulted in the Magic-8-Ball-like answer of “Fear of Flying.” While I am no white-knuckler, I’m hardly a relaxed traveler of the friendly skies, so I suppose this was an appropriate designation (although, technically, it’s not the flying, but rather the fiery crashing, that concerns me).

But if I were ever to encounter the terribly shifty It from Stephen King’s epic novel, I have no doubt what fearful, me-tenderizing shape the monstrous entity would assume.

With questionable 70’s aesthetics, my parents furnished a corner of our living room with a life-size lamp of a topless, onyx-skinned native woman standing on a gold pedestal. I am told that as a toddler, I would look at this figure and scream hysterically, to the point where my parents would have to drape a sheet over the lamp in order to quiet me down (in hindsight, it’s interesting that I found this ghostly alternative relatively comforting). As I sprouted up and my imagination ripened, my toleration of this horror did not grow at all: the Lamp Lady starred in a series of bad dreams, and formed a childhood-long source of dread.

Here’s an old photo that I somewhat-reluctantly dug up that shows the lamp in the background. Perhaps mercifully, the figure’s head is cut off in the picture, since it was the part about her that spooked me the most. Her glaring white eyes and stoic (to me: stern and menacing) expression seared their way right into my psyche.

So to all the (non-dancing-clown) denizens of the Macabre Republic, I say: Welcome to my nightmare. You can keep it for yourselves; I don’t want to have it anymore.