How I Overcame My Fear of Heights

As a child, I was scared s***less of heights. More specifically, I was scared of falling from heights—any height. I was terrified that something would go wrong and that I would be sent tumbling to my death, or at least to some great pain. I couldn’t even stand on a chair without my heart racing and my legs shaking. Trampolines, flying too high on the swing, slides (burning my legs on a metal slide once did not help), the zip line in my friend’s vast backyard, heights were not for me, and that made me a less-than-adventurous child.

However, there was one thing that could get me to push beyond my fear of heights (sometimes): roller coasters. Maybe it was the adrenaline rush, maybe it was the nostalgia attached to my fifth birthday having been at Disneyland, but roller coasters were my loved ones’ best chance of getting me to go that high. Even that came with a boatload of anxiety and trepidation. Nevertheless, I would do it, and once I went on a roller coaster, you would not be able to get me to stop. Just ask my parents; I once made them ride the Matterhorn Bobsleds repeatedly until we had to catch the final monorail for the night.

Then I went on the GhostRider at Knott’s Berry Farm.

At 4,533 feet long and 118 feet tall, the GhostRider is the longest and tallest wooden roller coaster on the West Coast. Let me tell you, waiting in line for this ride at ten years old, I was more anxious than I had been for any roller coaster in my entire life. The only one to come close since then would be when I first rode California Screamin’—now The Incredicoaster—at California Adventures, and that was only because that was the first ride that I ever rode that had a loop in it. No roller coaster—no ride, period—has ever given me the same level of anxiety as the GhostRider did. And yet, I did not back down from it.

In hindsight, backing down might have been a good idea.

When I finally got in the car, I couldn’t get my seat belt buckled. My mother, who was sitting right next to me, tried to help, but she was having problems with it, too. She called out and motioned for the ride attendant, and they barely stopped the ride to help me. Well, more like they slowed it down long enough to ensure that my mother and I got it. Once we thought that we had it buckled, the ride attendant proceeded with pulling the ride forward, hardly giving my seat belt a glance to make sure that it was properly secured.

Off we went at 56 miles per hour, whipping around this creaking monstrosity. I slipped and slid in the seat, no matter how much I tried to plant my feet, as my mother instructed. My heart raced, and I gripped that lap bar like it was my lifeline—and it probably was.

As we came to a halt, I looked down at my lap. I paled.

“Uh, Mom,” I said to my mother. “My seat belt’s undone.”

You can bet that my mother wanted heads to roll. At the same time, she also wanted to make sure that I was okay, so we just got off the roller coaster as quickly as possible—my father following close behind us—and never went on that ride again. In fact, we never returned to Knott’s Berry Farm again.

That ride was both the greatest thrill and the worst scare of my life. I had faced one of my greatest fears—that something would malfunction while I was far off the ground—and had survived. True, I hadn’t actually fallen from that height, thankfully, but I had survived something going wrong while barely even noticing it. Suddenly, subconsciously, other heights did not seem so bad, especially if they were better secured than the GhostRider.

Did I become a thrill junkie after that day? No, definitely not. I still feel some anxiety when I approach a new ride or a ride that has something that I don’t like—going upside-down, for example—but I can now stand on chairs without a problem. I have grown out of my fear of heights, and I think it is all, in part, thanks to a malfunction on the GhostRider, one of the few roller coasters that I would never, ever ride again.