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I was really scared to stay home alone when I was kid, and I would freak out whenever there was a noise after my parents left.

The first several years of my life were used to upload incredible amounts of fear, and I just became afraid of everything. I was afraid of my parents, afraid of my classmates, afraid of the streets of Washington, D.C. I would flinch at every gesture.

When I was younger, I was ready to go off at any time. My wife, Linda, and I would go out to the Limelight in New York, and I would see people and be able to freeze them with a look. People were even too scared of me to tell me that people were scared of me.

From nine years old, I lived with fear. I saw our neighbours disappearing. I was scared that I would come home from school and my parents would not be there.

I have mostly been terrified of listening to scary stories around a campfire. We camp a lot as a family, and at night my dad would try and tell us scary stories. This made eating s'mores difficult. The story would start with something like... 'and the old man who lived in these woods...' I would then run back into the camper terrified.

As a kid, I was scared of losing my mind. In Terrell, Texas, where I grew up, there was a guy that would walk down the street talking to himself. And I used to watch him and feel uneasy. And there was a sanitarium where people would say, 'That's where all the crazy people go.' It really sort of frightened me.

When I was coming home from school as a youngster, and I saw my dad's car in the driveway, I would go to a friend's house. I connected my dad being there with fear.

The only time I had what you would call life-threatening fear was when I was on the Moon. Towards the end of our stay, we got excited and we were going to do the high jump, and I jumped and fell over backwards. That was a scary time, because if the backpack got broken, I would have had it. But everything held together.

I love getting scared. I find myself putting myself in situations like haunted houses or going to a haunted hospital for my birthday. Yes, I've actually done that.

My neighborhood was like 'The Wonder Years.' We played until 10 o'clock at night. We used to tell scary stories. I was the one scaring them. We used to play football by this place called the Myer's House. It was a big, spooky house with the gables; we'd hang out there and scare each other.