The paper is an analysis of ontological metaphors in collocations in Serbian. The aim is to examine the conceptualization of negative events in terms of cross-domain mappings which relate the domains of negative physical experience to the domains of mental/emotional experience. The sample includes three types of lexical combinations: verb + abstract noun, abstract noun + verb, and verb + preposition + abstract noun. Also, three types of ontological metaphors are analyzed: personification, container metaphor and entity/substance metaphor. The analysis shows that it is the cross-domain mapping, rather than the literal meaning of the collocates, that makes the interpretation of the collocations possible.