Fear of Tunnels

The word names tunnels and describes bridges

Gephyrophobia is the anxiety disorder or specific phobia characterised by fear of bridges and tunnels, especially older ones, and the term comes from the Greek gephura, meaning bridge, with the usual suffix. People who have it avoid routes that take them over bridges, or travel over them apprehensively as passengers.

The manifestations recorded are all about bridges:

• fear of driving off one
• fear of a gust of wind carrying a vehicle off
• fear that the structure will collapse

The fear is noted to overlap with acrophobia, since it worsens on taller bridges relative to those close to the water or ground.

The encyclopedia article on the term carries a maintenance notice, added in March 2021, stating that the article is missing information about the fear of tunnels and asking for it to be expanded. Years later the notice is still there, which is an unusually explicit admission that half the definition has nothing behind it.

Why drivers get help over bridges but not tunnels

Michael Liebowitz, founder of the Anxiety Disorders Clinic at the New York State Psychiatric Institute, describes it as a situational phobia rather than an isolated one, usually part of a larger constellation affecting people who get panic attacks, with light-headedness, dizziness and a racing heart, and with the central dread being of feeling trapped.

The practical response has been transport authorities driving people over:

• as of 2008 the New York State Thruway Authority would take a gephyrophobic driver's car across the Tappan Zee Bridge if arranged in advance, a service used about six times a year
• the Maryland Transportation Authority once did the same for the Chesapeake Bay Bridge, a role now filled by private companies
• the Mackinac Bridge Authority, which oversees the crossing between Michigan's two peninsulas, drives frightened drivers' cars across for a nominal fee, and about a thousand drivers a year use it

Nothing comparable exists for tunnels, and the difference is instructive. A bridge can be crossed by somebody else while the frightened person sits in the passenger seat. So can a tunnel. The service exists for one and not the other because the fear of one has been recognised and organised for.

What the tunnel fear is made of

The nearest documented description belongs to Claustrophobia, which lists tunnels among its triggers alongside lifts, cars, buses, aeroplanes, trains, underwater caves and cellars. Its key symptom is a fear of suffocation, and the trigger is often not the small space itself but the possibilities of what could happen while confined in it.

A first-hand account published by a naturalist writing for a regional newspaper gives the practical version. He describes tunnel phobia as a fairly recent affliction that begins at the road sign announcing a tunnel ahead and lasts until daylight returns, describes well-lit tunnels as bad enough and unlit ones as a species of hell, and traces the onset to a specific incident on the Blue Ridge Parkway when a driver could not find the headlight switch before entering. He names the tunnels: the three Ferrin Knob tunnels at mileposts 400.9, 401.3 and 401.5.

The political tunnel fear is much better documented

Where tunnels do have a documented history of producing anxiety, it is national rather than personal. In 1882 the British Government halted the South-Eastern Railway Company's attempt to build a tunnel under the English Channel. The pilot tunnel already extended over a mile out to sea, and its promoters had predicted it would meet a parallel French tunnel by 1886.

The cancellation is usually attributed to invasion anxieties. A study using parliamentary records and popular invasion literature argues that opponents constructed an imagined dangerous future in which the tunnel would let France transgress and undermine Britain's sea border, and deliberately described that future in the language of anxiety in order to heighten the perceived risk. On that reading the anxiety was mobilised for political purposes, as part of a wider effort to define what Britain was and what its relationship with the outside world should be.

The same shape recurs in living memory. During the Gaza conflict of 2014, residents of the Israeli town of Netiv Ha'asara told reporters that they knew how to respond to rocket fire and did not know how to protect themselves from militants using tunnels, and that the discovery of one tunnel was making them question whether to stay. Israel said it had destroyed 32 tunnels during the nearly month-long conflict.

A tunnel is a route that cannot be watched. That is a different object from an enclosed space, and it is the one that has produced the documented fear.