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The second thing that produces a very odd physical response when I discover it unexpectedly, even as an adult, are things growing unexpectedly, like potatoes in the fruit bowl, or mold, or finding a mushroom in a house plant. The feeling is just like when you see a particularly creepy spider, or earwigs come scattering out from underneath a potted plant, or cockroaches. Except no one I’ve ever met feels this way when they discover something growing –it doesn’t really make sense when I think about it rationally, but when it happens I still feel my stomach flip all the same.
When I was a kid, my parents bought my little sibling and I a bright red, crab shaped sandbox. Each of the arms was a pincher of the crab that you could sit on and dig around in the box. I played in it all the time, and we had it for years even when we got a little older and moved across town. At some point, I had a bean bag that I would kick around, and a few of the beans slipped out of it and fell into the sandbox. I definitely saw them drop in there, but I couldn’t see a reason to pick them up, they’d just become part of the sand and they were pretty dried out anyways.
A week later I was playing in the back yard and to my utter horror, the beans had sprouted in the sand box and were growing up little green stalks out of the sand. I had thought the beans were dead, and it never occurred to me that they would ever grow. I can’t really explain why this upset me or surprised me, except that I was a little kid and I didn’t understand it and it made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up, and my stomach do that little flip. It's definitely irrational. But I guess on the list of things that are irrationally upsetting to all sorts of people, it's not that odd.