Children's Chanting Games

I love the chanting games kids play. Some of them have been around for years, some are new. They are invented by children and some survive with minimal changes for generations; others get reworked and change rapidly.  Often snippets from one chant work their way into another.

The benefits of chanting games are hand-eye co-ordination and memory training, but most of all friendship bonding. It's interesting to me that they are mostly played among girls.

Skipping rope chants

This one was what we chanted jumping rope when I was a kid, and I heard it all through my primary school years - but my kids had no knowledge of it (until I taught them):

Cinderella dressed in yella

Went upstairs to kiss a fella

Made a mistake, kissed a snake

How many doctors did it take?

One, two, three....

Here's one my kids do know:

Teddy bear, teddy bear, turn around

Teddy bear, teddy bear touch the ground

Teddy bear, teddy bear jump up high

Teddy bear, teddy bear say good night! [jump out]

Hand Clap Chants

Years ago I taught my kids the classic Pat-a-cake chant:

Pat a cake, pat a cake, baker's man

Bake me a cake as fast as you can

Pat it and prick it and mark it with B

And put it in the oven for baby and me

That one appears in every nursery rhyme book and was probably written by an adult.


But more interesting are the chants that are made up by children and passed around between them, from primary school to primary school, between cousins and friends, and morphing with generations.

These come with more complicated hand-clap routines, which I was never good at as a kid. I learned the chants in my head but rarely got to say them as I couldn't do the hand-clap routines.


I remember this one from when I was a kid:

Under the bamboo bushes under the trees, boom-boom-boom

True love for you my darling true love for me

When we get married we'll raise a family

Of fifty children, all in a row-row-row your boat, gently down the stream, 

Throw your teacher overboard, listen to her scream [make loud scream noise]

My kids don't know that one.  They do this one:

Armela

Kiss a fella

Naughty boy

Ping pong

Armela, kiss a fella, naughty boy, ping pong

Turn around, touch the ground, push your friend, freeze!

...and this one. I remember my cousin's daughter chanting this with her friends years ago, too:

Apple on a stick
makes me sick
makes my heart beat two-forty-six
not because you're dirty, not because you're clean
just because you kissed the boys behind the magazine
Girls, boys, having fun
here comes the baby with the big fat bum
with a jiggle and a wiggle he can do the splits
but I betcha, I betcha, you can't do this:
Close your eyes and count to ten,
if you don't muck it up you're my best friend
One, two, three..... [continue complicated hand-clap routine with eyes closed]
You didn't muck it up so you're my best friend! [hug]
[or]
You mucked it up but you're still my best friend! [hug]

I have a video of my kids playing Apple On A Stick (with cameo from Harry the dog) - I haven't been able to upload it here (too big, and having trouble compressing it) but you can see it here on my Flickr.

Here are some other kids doing it:

Counting games

These are the chants you use to count off among a group of friends to see who will be "it".  They're variations on Eenie-Meenie-Miney-Moe.

Ibble obble black bubble 

Ibble obble out

Turn your trousers inside out

If they're black, turn them back

Ibble obble black bubble

Ibble obble out

Or:

Mickey Mouse had a house

underneath the movies

when the movie started 

Mickey Mouse farted 

What colour was it?

[child landed on chooses a colour, then all spell out the colour to finish counting off]

Songs

At our primary school in LA we learned this one:

Great green gobs of green grimy gopher's guts

Marinated monkey's meat

Carbonated birdies' feet

Ten bear eyeballs floating in a pool of blood

Oops, I forgot my spoon

But I have a straw.... [make gross slurping noise] 

The kids have learned a couple of variants on Happy Birthday, the most recent one being:

Happy birthday to you

Put your hands in the loo

If you feel something squishy

It's a present for you: poo!

I love this stuff!

Do you know any more? Remember any from your own childhood?

Edit: here are a couple more.

Here's another hand clap game my kids and their friends play:

Two kids face each other and do hand-claps saying: 

Tick tack toe, give me a high give me a low

Johnny got hit by a UFO!

On the syllables "UFO" they do rock paper scissors.

The loser then turns around and the winner pokes the loser in the back with one or more fingers, then holds their hands out in front of them.

The loser turns back around and has to guess which finger or fingers were used.

This is pretty funny, because it's impossible to work out which finger has poked you in the back.

But they all look over the winner's hands and try hard to guess.

And here's a "new" song for them:

While looking for a YouTube video for Apple on a Stick I came across "Sally was a baby", and I thought my kids would like it.

So I taught it to them and they LOVE it, and they have taught their friends.  Yesterday it was going around the playground and one of their friends performed it for their PE teacher.  It's a hit!

)

What's the difference?!

The modern (wealthy) world is a world of surplus and too much choice. We have to fend off salespeople trying to get us to switch energy billing provider, and spend time resentfully comparing phone deals, insurance packages, mortgages, credit cards, etc.

Then we hit the supermarket and are confronted with whole sections of aisles devoted to different brands and permutations of very specific things.  I'm pretty sure this has got worse as I'v got older. I remember when we moved to the US in 1979 and being amazed by the variety of types of thing in the supermarket. What amazed us there then has long been the norm here now, too.

But I'm pretty sure I remember, when I was young, that supermarkets could fit all the tins and bottles that related to 'tomato' (tomato paste, tomato puree, tinned tomatoes, bottled sauce) in one aisle. Now they're spread out among at least two. (Oh, the difficult lives we lead!)


Then there's this stuff:

Panadol

WHY are there a million types of Panadol? I'm not talking varieties of painkillers or brands, but different types of the SAME brand of the SAME kind of painkiller.

I understand choice of delivery system: some people prefer soluble tablets, some prefer traditional tablets, and some (like me) prefer "caplets". (Capsules are no longer sold as they can be tampered with).  But still, aren't a couple of choices enough? As long as one of those includes caplets?

As for type of pain targeted and speed of relief: headache vs osteo, normal vs "rapid relief": do they really work differently?  It doesn't seem plausible to me, and if you turn the packets over and read the back, they seem pretty much the same.  But apparently I am wrong: there are apparently (small) differences which you can read about here.

Band-Aids

When I was a kid, I'm pretty sure there was just one kind of Band-Aid. That one kind was one size, and came in little paper envelopes threaded with red string that was supposed to tear the envelope open when you pulled it down, but usually did not. They stuck to your skin like glue, left a grey residue outline, and were ripped off by your mum when a corner came unstuck and they started to tug at your knee hairs but you were still too chicken to tear them off yourself.

But I'm on board with child-friendly band-aids. I've bought my share of Dora, Wiggles and Barbie band-aids, marveled at how easily they peel off, and stifled impatience at kids rifling through the packet searching for the one they want or refusing to wear Dora when we've run out of Barbie. I'm kind of glad we're past that now, and the kids will only wear regular band-aids.

But the shapes - so many shapes! When did it ever get so complicated?

Dog mince and Cat mince

Here is beef mince for dogs:

Here is beef mince for cats:

They are actually not different colours though it looks that way from my photos. (You try taking surreptitious product photos in a supermarket).

Since they're both made of minced beef one can't help but wonder, what is the difference?

Well, it's not much. Both are mostly beef and contain the same ingredients. They both contain kangaroo and seaweed extract, and the cat mince has a little more of those in it. I bought one pack of each and feed my dog and the cat both from the same pack. We used the dog meat first and then the cat meat. No preference was shown by either animal, of course.

The only important thing for both pets is that meat from the other animal's bowl generally seems to taste better.

What kinds of consumer choice make you happy, and which ones make you crazy?

I've unfollowed all the gurus

samarttiw/FreeDigitalPhotos.net

I've unfollowed all the 'live your best life' and family / planning blogs I used to read.

I still like some of them. But I don't want their stuff on my Facebook / Twitter / blog feed anymore, and here's why:

They mostly don't resemble me.  While I admire anyone who is managing their life well, has changed their life or is energetic, achieving things, healthy, happy or what have you, I think of the people that run some of these blogs the same way I think of those motivational salesman of the eighties and nineties: admirable but basically of a certain personality type, once called "Type A", who is kind of wired that way.

Their lives are not mine. I'm not saying my life is more difficult or complex (it's not), but my life is my life, and the way I live it is basically working for me as is.

I've already found my methods. It's been trial and error, like everyone's life, and I'd never claim it's perfect, but through years of living it, I've found what works for me and my family, and the limitations of every method.

Their stuff doesn't work if you work full time in an office with a commute. All those slow-cooker recipes, housework schedules and the like, don't work if you work full time and don't work at home. I know these blog writers work hard, and they juggle as all of us do, but managing what you do before you "sit down to work" [in your house] is honestly very different from having to commute to work somewhere else, and do that every day.

I don't need relentless motivation and positivism. I'm not depressed (been there), and I'm motivated to get up and go every day by the need to keep my career going and keep a roof over my kids' heads. I get pleasure from the things I like and I keep active and interested in the world. That's all I need to keep going and achieve what I have to achieve.

Their stuff is repetitive. If you read any of these blogs for any length of time you'll tend to read the same intros, tips and pep talks over and over again. These blogs are designed so that anyone can pick them up at any time; the downside of that is they can irk you if you read them regularly.

We have a basic difference in life philosophy. I believe you can get nuggets of helpful information from just about anything you read. So these blogs can provide some good tips. But I also think life is messy and sometimes hard and you can't create a system that will keep you on top of it all the time.

I kind of resent what they do.  I'll admit it. There's something about running a blog about how to blog, or how to work or how to live, or how to manage family/home life, that seems like a bit of an easy out to me. I know that's irrational and unfair. Some of these people have really good blogs. But there are some I read which make me totally understand the existence of GOMI.

There's so much more interesting stuff out there to read. I read news, online magazines, blogs, tweets, fiction, you name it. I download podcasts and listen to them while I walk or while I lie in bed (but then I tend to fall asleep halfway through). There's so much to read, and so much to make you think and keep you busy, engaged and entertained. THAT'S where I prefer to direct my internet energy.

I prefer reading small blogs. Tiny ones in fact. I love reading the regular blogs I follow to read how people like me manage life, work, family and existential despair. Yes, that means you!

Do you read any of the 'big' blogs?

Do you follow any gurus?

12 Resolutions: March

This year I'm playing along with #12Resolutions on Twitter and Facebook. The idea is to set yourself short-term, achievable goals, one each month. 

January started out really well. I stuck to that resolution and am still doing it: I walk the dog at least once a day and occasionally even twice. The dog is happy, I'm happier, all good. 

February? Oh dear. Not so good. I am ashamed to say I did not even pick up my pen/laptop to write those stories I intended. 

I was full of confidence and enthusiasm at the end of January, but I overestimated myself with this goal. Despite constantly writing notes and story snippets and thinking of fiction in my head, the truth is I am a novice writer and that goal was probably too lofty or me.

I hummed and hawed about whether to discard this goal for something else, or to stick with it, and I have come up with a middle way: for March I will attempt to write ONE short story, and it won't matter if it's not publishable or even the final draft; it will be enough to have something notionally complete on paper, and I can improve on it later.

I have also paid for and enrolled in an online project management course for work, and promised myself to start that in March, so my plate will be full this month.

Image by Africa/FreeDigitalPhotos.net

What's on your to-do list this month?

#12Resolutions:

January: walk 5 times a week (done - I now walk daily)
February: write 2 short stories  (failed!)
March: write ONE short story; begin Project Management course

Mr K's busy day

This happened one day last month.


My husband Y had a very stressful Friday. It ended with an eventful evening for our neighbors, a shock for us, and a very lucky outcome.

Y was busy that day. It was one of the first school days after the holidays, and my first day back at work. Y had to get the kids up and ready and off to school.

The kids were tired because they had been awake till late the night before, due to the heat (see: Melbourne Heatwave of 2014).

After a couple of hot weeks our front lawn was about a foot and a half in length and covered in prickly weeds and dandelions, and Y had promised to mow it.

He was also working that night and had a lot to do to get ready.

At around 1pm he rang me in consternation, asking how you look after newborn baby birds.

While mowing the lawn he had come across two tiny baby birds on the ground, with no nest anywhere in sight nearby. He picked them up and put them in a plastic container. Should he take them to the vet? he wondered.

I had hazy ideas about liquid food in eye-droppers and warm quiet boxes. I knew the neighbors across the road had once cared for a sick bird so I suggested he ask them, but they weren't home. I asked a couple of colleagues who said to ring the local council who would have a local wildlife care number. I looked up the council website and found nothing, so I Googled it.  It turns out, you can indeed take newborn wild birds to a vet, and in fact you definitely should do this if you are not experienced with baby birds, as they are very intensive to care for and obviously very fragile.

I rang our vet and they said they would take them. However - if they were really very little (newborns) they would most likely be put down, as they have to be fed every hour and need experienced care, and they would not survive the time it would take the vet to send them to a carer.

After one final search for the nest, Y had no choice, so he took them to the vet.

That was very very sad.  Knowing Y I know this would have upset him hugely, and of course it added stress and took a bit of time out of the little time he had.

He picked up the kids who were hot and tired and after the initial happiness of coming home and having a snack, quickly set to grizzling and "I'M HUNGRY!" for the rest of the afternoon.

As Y was running around, loading his car and trying to get the kids to hurry and change so he could drive them to Grandma's house and then go to work, they were dragging their feet and complaining they were hungry, so Y put some eggs on the stove to boil, while he got everything done.

At this point the kids (I learned later) were giving him grief, arguing and saying "We're not going to eat the eggs!" and Y was saying "Yes you will!" and still trying to get everyone ready and out the door.

Eventually after much yelling, threatening, pushing and complaining, they all got out and off they went.

With the eggs still boiling on the stove.


Meanwhile, I was having a lovely time at work. We finished at five, and it was just one of those things, there were drinks on and four of us ended up having a really good conversation, so I was there almost an hour later than usual, without really noticing the time.

My mobile was set to silent and I didn't notice three phone calls, until I picked up the messages two hours later at my mother's house.

Two were from a policeman at my house, and one was from the school.

Long story short:

The eggs had boiled dry and started to smoke, setting off the fire alarm.

Our neighbors heard the alarm, came to check and saw smoke, and not having my mobile number or a spare key, had had to call 000.

The police and fire brigade arrived, and had to break the door to get in. They turned off the stove, put the ruined pot on the front porch, and opened every window to get the smoke out. Searching for a mobile phone number, they got mine off the name tag on my daughter's schoolbag.

In a weird co-incidence, they first mis-dialled and rang the mobile number of a parent of one of my daughter's classmates, who then rang the school.

The school tried to reach me, and as I didn't answer the assistant principal drove round to our house to check if everything was alright.

I got the messages at 7.30 and rang back the police, and got the full story. I rang the school and filled them in and thanked them profusely. I asked who the other parent was who had alerted them, and it was someone I don't even know. I asked them to please pass on my thanks as well.

We went home and I thanked our neighbors profusely - not only did they potentially save our house from burning down, they were even apologetic for having to call the fire brigade and getting the door busted.  Are you kidding?? Don't even worry about it!


We did previously have a spare key at the neighbors - until I locked myself out one day and got it back, and just hadn't got round to returning it.

I am going to give the neighbors back a spare key and my mobile number, but I didn't do it straightaway because I didn't want it to look like "Here's our stuff so you can save our bacon next time we stuff up."  Does that sound paranoid?  I was a bit embarrassed though.


But: thank goodness for community. I am so glad - again - that we know our neighbors and are on good terms with them all, but everyone involved was magnificent, and they don't all know us. The other parent who alerted the school, the school itself which went out of its way to check we were ok, the police and fire brigade who went out of their way to minimise damage and did more than they had to to clear the smoke from the house. When we got home two neighbors seperately apologised for not being able to do more. Of course I apologised for the hassle and thanked them so, so much - as far as I'm concerned everyone involved saved our house.


And Mr K?   He had been so stressed out and busy that he never even recalled he had left eggs cooking on the stove. I had to wait up till after midnight till he came home to tell him, so he wouldn't freak out at coming home to a busted front door.

Not our house fortunately.
Photo by OldOldliner via Flickr Creative Commons

Words for Wednesday: Winter

'Words for Wednesday' is a writing prompt held by Delores at Under the Porch Light.
Use some or all of the week's words, write a poem or a story or a fragment, and visit Delores' current week's prompt to let her know you've joined in.

I've only ever spent two winters in snow, once in Boston as a child (magical) and once in Fussen in Germany in my twenties (first couple of days magical, thereafter just a long, cold winter). So I have limited to zero experience living with snow and ice.  I've had a go at describing it here, hopefully it's not too laughably wrong. 

This week's words were:

incarcerate

phlegm

damp

groan

knife

blessing

Winter

The winter was like an incarceration, trapped in the house and everywhere you looked out the window was white. It was not silent. There was the wind and there were snapping twigs and icicles and sometimes the groaning and creaking of ice on the roof.

Inside the house the heater was on all the time, and the air grew thick. Our breath hung in the rooms, stale and close. There was constant illness, the rattle of phlegm in damp chests.

Spring sliced through all this like a knife. The sun was not warm but the season had turned and the gleaming wet of melting ice was like a blessing.

Breaking the magician's code

The kids are eight and are into magic tricks at the moment.

Do you want to see a magic trick M. showed me?

Here it is:

Pick a card, any card.

I picked this one:

Then I had to put it back in the deck (without M seeing it of course), and M. mixed up the cards.

"Okay," she said dramatically. 

"Is THIS your card?!"

How did she do it?

Ta-da!

Things that threw me off course

Golly gee, look at me: a blog post after almost a month. It's been so long that I've put it off even longer thinking about how I should start a new blog post after so long. Apologise? Explain myself? Just blog a new post as if nothing happened?

I personally yawn and roll my eyes when I read a blog post that starts with "Wow it's been awhile, I'm so sorry, I hope my readers are still here?!.."  So I won't do that.  Except I kind of just did.

I was on a good roll in December-January. I was pretty organised, life was rolling along, and blogging was fun and easy. So what dire things happened to throw me off?

Here they are:

1. School started again. I know, I know - I work, my KIDS are in school, what's the difference? But it makes a difference. Lunchboxes. Homework. Notices. Trying to attend meet-the-teacher events. Somehow school holidays can be easier to manage while you're working than school is.  I love our kids' school, and it's very exciting having the kids in Grade Three - but there has been a flurry of busy-ness this last month.


2. Heat. Oh my god, the Melbourne Heat Wave of 2014 will surely be written about in history books. If this is what our kids and grandkids will be living with every day due to global warming, then can I just say to them all, I'M SORRY!  I know, it's summer, and summer is hot. We get taken by surprise by this fact every year. But as every Melburnian knows, though summer starts in December, December and January are variable, and the real heat hits in February. Except this year it hit in January, and it kept going all the way through February, until ... three days ago when it suddenly turned cold and rainy.

Literally three days ago I was sitting slumped at the kitchen table saying to Y, "I'm so sick of the heat!" - and verily the gods heard my call of despair, for the next day, weirdly, it was suddenly over.

But the heat, my god, the heat... it affected everything, sapped our energy and left us discombobulated for weeks. You couldn't do housework - it was too hot. You couldn't go out - it was too hot. You couldn't blog - it was too hot.


3. Broken door. I'm saving this story for next time, but suffice it to say for now, we had an incident, and our door got broken and needed to be fixed. These things take up time and mental energy!


4. Telstra. F...ing Telstra. Ever since we've been in this house, we've had recurring phone faults. Usually after rain, sometimes after nothing at all. Our phone will go crackly for a couple of days, and then dead. It has happened easily six or eight times, and each time I have to contact Telstra and go through the same old crap to get it fixed, until next time. Last year in June our phone was out for two weeks. This January it was out for a week. Then it was fixed and two days later it went out again, for another 3 days.

Last June I "escalated" the problem and insisted the history be looked at and the underlying problem addressed... yeah, that clearly didn't happen.  This time, when I reported the fault, I escalated it straight away and every time I called I asked the operator to look at our phone history and please fix the underlying problem.

All up technicians visited our street or our house four times. And that's not including the time one came round unknown to us while we were at work and Telstra sent me a text saying "A technician visited but was unable to gain entry to your house to fix the problem. If you still have a problem please report the fault to Telstra."  I got that message and just about went through the roof. I called them - sitting in my car, melting in the heat - and honestly I struggled not to cry huge fat tears of rage and frustration and self-pity, while still being polite and fair to the operator, because the phone operators are young and keen and always lovely and helpful, and it's not their fault.

You might think a dead landline is not a problem these days, but it is. For one thing, what about people who don't have mobiles? There are still some. How on earth do they get on if this happens? What about older people living on their own?  For another thing, it knocks your ADSL internet out, and being without the internet these days is unreasonable! I complained to Telstra about having to use our mobiles to make local calls and they adjusted my mobile to landline rates for the duration, but what if my mobile was with a different carrier? Our broadband is through a different carrier, so we still had to pay for our internet while we couldn't use it. Also, when you lose your mobile, you can't use the landline to call it to find it!

As it turns out, we had two problems: a faulty outside line (duh - we knew that much) and a faulty phone socket.

But finally, after the last technician visited, I was happy. Do you know why?  Because that fourth technician finally told me the truth. It turns out our street has a very old, frayed phone cable that really needs replacing, and Telstra have no immediate plans to replace it. At last! Honesty. It was a kind of relief.

So those have been my first world problems this summer. 

How have YOU been? 

sixninepixels / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Edit: unfortunately, I accidentally deleted this post last week, and lost all the lovely comments!  I recovered the post from Google Cache but had to re-post it, so I will try and recover and copy the comments below as I find them.

Thanks to everyone who visited and commented and welcomed me back!

 

Sunday Selections #157

It's time for Sunday Selections!
Sunday Selections is a weekly meme hosted by River at Drifting Through Life. 

The rules are very simple:-

1. post photos of your choice, old or new, under the Sunday Selections title

2. link back to River somewhere in your post

3. leave a comment on River's post and visit some of the others who have posted and commented: for example:

    Elephant's Child

    Andrew at High Riser

    Gillie at Random Thoughts From Abroad

    

This week it's random again.

Apologies if I've posted a couple of these before; I can't remember whether that was here, or on Instagram / Twitter / Facebook. Anyway it's still 35 degrees in my house and I'm too hot and weary to check.


This is how my daughter insists on wearing a jacket. And hair over her eyes too. So frustrating. I'll be telling her to stand up straight next.

     

Tia

A rainy night in the city back in winter. How long ago that seems now.

                               

Zener cards I made for M.

My little niece's gorgeous chubby foot

These lovely sea creatures were painted by the girls when they were in daycare and they've been blu-tacked to the bathroom wall since then. I have just taken them down, in case visiting little friends might tease over them - and I only felt a tiny bit sad for a short while.

Something tells me the kids found the Nutella.

A gadget from A's spy kit: a tiny receptacle for secret messages.

What message did she write for me?

Meanwhile, things are quiet at M's hamburger restaurant.












Lastly:

While the last few governments have been racing to the bottom on treatment of asylum seekers, church signs like this one are a welcome sight.

This is St Paul's Cathedral on Flinders Road. I took this just before Christmas, but the banner is still there (and will be for some time, I think). You can read about it here.

I'm not a religious believer at all, but I do like it when churches focus on humanity and looking after people instead of moralistic guff.

The Dean said: “I am convinced that future generations of Australians will judge this policy for what it is: inhumane to those seeking our protection, and demeaning to Australia as a nation. These actions will not only be judged by our children and grandchildren but by God himself. Christ's judgement will be based on a simple measure: 'What you have done to the least of these my brothers and sisters, you have done to me' (St Matthew’s Gospel, chapter 25 verse 40).”   (Link)

Why do we need stories that ask why do we need scary stories?

The feature article in the 'Life and Style' section of the paper today was this:

Be afraid.... The enduring power of ghost stories.

THE HAUNTING From ancient tales of mythical creatures to the unspeakable crimes of modern cinema, the ghost story holds us in thrall.In this spectral world where sorrow dwells, why are we unable to look away?

I love scary stories and I love anthropology, cultural history and mythology, so hooray, even though I think this topic has been well and truly covered. It's actually a promotion for new Australian film The Darkside, but still, I feel like this is the fifth article I have read in the last couple of years asking "why do people like scary stories?"

Do a Google search for "why do people like scary stories" and most of these articles will come up, along with a good bunch of blogs and forums answering the same question.

I don't actually think it's that mysterious, is it?  Stephen King answered the question in On Writing, and all these articles, blogs and forum posts answer it too.

People like (or are drawn to) scary stories because:

• they are cathartic, allowing us to feel and release pent-up tension and fear
• they help us manage our fears of the unknown and death
• they allow us to rehearse scary situations
• they provide the adrenaline rush of the 'fight or flight' response which we need to keep us safe
• this adrenaline rush, as a by-product, provides a thrill which is (kind of) pleasurable
• or, encapsulating all of these: as Older Single Mum commenting on this post of mine so succinctly said, they "still the mind".

New Scientist, in its recent Night issue, had a great article called The night: Things that go bump... which says the paralysing terror we feel at noises in the night (and during horror stories) is our animalistic fear of predation, of being hunted and eaten.  That gives me a shiver just re-reading it (and reminds me how horribly stressful the life of many animals must be).

So that's pretty well explained, from my point of view.