Sunken Fears: A Woman’s Struggle with Submechanophobia

Welcome to the spookiest day of the year,

and if you’re reading this from the future, hi! Is everything ok?

On Halloween, I like to take in as much spooooooky content as I can. Ghost videos on youtube, horror movies on netflix, and of course scary stories.

BUT the things that scare me, might not… in fact I’ll go as far as to say WILL not scare you.

My biggest fear, aside from the crippling fear that the world is falling into a deep dark abyss and we have no control or knowledge of what lies beyond the veil, is man made objects underwater.

You heard me right. Man made objects underwater.

The scientific term for it, is Submechanophobia, and it is as silly as it sounds.

The Wikipedia article defines it as this:

Submechanophobia is a fear of submerged human-made objects, either partially or entirely underwater. These objects could be shipwrecks, statues, animatronics as seen in theme parks, or old buildings, but also more mundane items such as buoys and miscellaneous debris.

I can’t look at pictures of the titanic, I can’t look at photos of sunken planes, and I even have a hard time look at photos of the canals of Venice for fear of seeing something just a little bit submerged. I had to find a picture for this blog post and, in doing so, freaked myself out.

It’s awful and hilarious and it’s ok to laugh.

I don’t know what started this fear, but I have a feeling it kicked off when I first played the underwater level in Super Mario 64.