Spirits, Religion & the Supernatural · 12 entries
Supernatural, Religious and Spirit Fears
Ghosts, demons, God, hell, curses and the places associated with them. This is the group where the clinical record is thinnest and the historical record is richest, and where the proportionality test the diagnostic manuals apply does unusual work: the disagreement is not about how dangerous the feared thing is but about whether there is one.
Several of the strongest entries on the site sit here, and none of them is a phobia in the ordinary sense. Sleep paralysis is one physiology reported for centuries, with the figure sitting on the chest supplied locally each time. Sinbyeong ends with a ritual that is also a career, so the cure and the vocation are the same event. Wendigo psychosis names a fear whose second symptom is the fear of the first. Voodoo death rests on Cannon's 1942 claim that fear alone can kill, in a case where nothing was actually done to the person. The filing rule is the mechanism: numbers and dates go with symbols, however strong the superstition behind them.
In this category
All 12 supernatural, religious and spirit fears
12 entries
- Fear of Being Cursed to DeathA man fell ill after a bone was pointed at him and recovered the moment he was told it was a mistake. Cannon argued in 1942 that fear alone can kill.
- Fear of Being HexedTwo colonial statutes, in 1748 and 1749, record a fear of hexing by Black folk practitioners. The tradition they targeted was mostly used for protection.
- Fear of GhostsWikipedia calls fear of ghosts very common and names no survey. What stands in for a research record: a Wari' spectre, a Papuan funeral racket, one philosopher.
- Fear of GodIn every tradition here the phrase means awe and reverence. Catholic writers have spent a century correcting it: servile fear against filial fear.
- Fear of Religious SinOnly somebody inside the tradition can tell devout practice from compulsion, so clinicians work with clergy. Its prognosis is worse than other OCD cases.
- Fear of the Evil EyeAmulets against it go back five thousand years, and the Latin charm used to deflect it gives the English word fascinate. Where it is absent is the map.
- Fear of Turning CannibalIts two symptoms are a craving for human flesh and a fear of becoming a cannibal. The second is a fear of one's own capacity, which cannot be avoided.
- Fright SicknessDSM-5 lists susto as a Cultural Concept of Distress rather than a disorder. The account is soul-loss after a sudden fright, and the treatments follow that logic.
- Ghost SicknessA federal ban removed traditional mourning practices, and a Lakota expert connects that loss to a later predisposition to pathological grief.
- Holy AnorexiaBrumberg argues it vanished because the coding changed, not the motives. A woman fasting to commune with Christ today would be recorded as anorexia nervosa.
- Old Hag SyndromeThe weight on the chest, the paralysis, the presence and its hostility all have physiological accounts. Up to half of people experience it at some point.
- Spirit SicknessThe ritual that ends this Korean spirit sickness is the one that inducts a new shaman. Symptoms last an average of eight years and sometimes thirty.
Keep going
The other categories
- Social & InterpersonalFears whose object is other people: being judged by them, being among them, or being without them.
- The Body, Illness & DeathDeath, dying, disease, contamination, ageing and the body itself.
- Abstract & ExistentialFailure, the future, change, infinity, being forgotten.
- Places & SituationsEnclosed spaces, crowds, bridges, lifts, tunnels and flight.
Common questions
Questions about supernatural, religious and spirit fears
What is the fear of ghosts called?
Phasmophobia. The word is barely older than the web while the fear behind it is documented across centuries, which is the pattern most of this group follows: a rich historical record and almost no clinical one.
Is sleep paralysis a supernatural experience?
The physiology is ordinary and the figure is not. Sleep paralysis has been reported for centuries with one consistent bodily account, and the presence sitting on the chest is supplied locally each time: the old hag in English folklore, and a different figure elsewhere. It is the clearest example in this catalogue of a setting shaping a presentation.
Can fear alone kill somebody?
Walter Cannon argued in 1942 that it can, and the entry on voodoo death takes his claim apart: the case it rests on is one in which nothing was actually done to the person. The catalogue records the claim, its date and its evidential problem, and does not settle the medical question.
Why are religious fears not treated as ordinary phobias?
Because the proportionality test does something unusual here. A specific phobia requires fear out of proportion to actual danger, and for a fear of hell or of a curse the disagreement is not about how dangerous the thing is but about whether it exists. Scrupulosity, the fear of religious sin, is mostly treated as a subtype of obsessive-compulsive disorder for that reason.