The towheaded boy and the whale.

And this towheaded boy, he would grow up to hate and fear the thought of whales. Creatures of epic proportion that loved to loiter around boats filled with people, their high pitched whines and clicks that you can feel within your very bones.

It's rather sad that this boy hasn't watched Moby Dick yet, and become really disturbed by the thought of Gregory Peck's Captain Ahab, dead and tangled up in the harpoon ropes that were wrapped around the Ivory nightmare.

He hasn't been scared by the scene where Ahab's lifeless body appears to move and gesture causing a crew member to shout, "Do you see? Do you see? Ahab beckons, he's dead but he beckons!" He hasn't been thinking about that wrathful leviathan when he was little and how it would terrify him at night when he tried to sleep!

Cut to now, he's older and those thoughts have no hold of him anymore, or so he thinks.The fear breaks the surface again when he's looking at pictures of a diver admiring a pod of sleeping sperm whales. He gets a cold feeling in his stomach, and he feels suddenly sick and his heart beats faster.

Then he realizes that it's not all whales that scare him, it's just these abominations. These alien looking, mistakes of nature.

He knows it all stems from Moby Dick. But you have to admit. They are creepy!
(also it stems from an adult telling him when he was very young that a man was swallowed up by a whale and was rescued. The rescued man's skin was all sort of odd colors due to almost being digested by the whale's stomach acid.)

Here's the chilling clip from Moby Dick
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eLTlfljynV4

Here's the link to the legend of the man being eaten by a whale.
http://www.ycaol.com/swallowed.htm