Most physical phobias make sense on some level. It's just a matter of how deep you have to dig into our ancestral grab-bag of anxieties until you find a fear that logically explains it. For heights you have falling; the dark hides predators; confined spaces can trap and suffocate. Even trypophobia - the fear of closely packed holes on a surface - can be explained by similarities between that pattern and certain manifestations of disease and decay.
I have a couple of the usual phobias: spiders, buttons, eye drops, maternal affection (the last one being distinctly British), while many other common aversions don’t bother me at all. When I visited the Sears/Willis/whatever-it’s-called-now Tower in Chicago, I jumped up and down on the glass floor of a glass box hanging 1,353 feet above the sidewalk. I find snakes and sharks and bats variously fascinating and beautiful, though I wouldn’t want to be bitten by any of them.
But I have one phobia that isn’t like the others. In fact, I only recently learned its name. I’ve experienced it all my life, often in dreams, but like many aspects of human experience, the internet has turned a trickle into a flood.
Traum/Trauma
Imagine you’re floating in the tropical waters of the Marshall Islands. The beach is only a hundred yards or so away. You have a snorkel and fins, enough to keep you paddling and breathing comfortably for as long as you want. The sun is high and everything is shimmering: the lapping wavelets, the apron of sand, the green palmtops lining the shore, even the wet skin of your arms where they break the lagoon surface.
Everything except Prinz Eugen. Every exposed inch of her is rusty, and rust does not shimmer.
Prinz Eugen is a German heavy cruiser from WW2, seized by the allies in victory and used for nuclear testing in 1946. She survived two blasts designed to find out whether atom bombs could sink warships, but radioactive contamination meant that a small unrepaired leak eventually caused her to capsize. She sits upside down, almost perpendicular to the shore at Enubuj in Kwajalein Atoll. Her stern lies in relatively shallow water, her bow juts out into the deeper blue. She is almost 700 feet long and weighs nearly 20,000 tons. That's the size of a modest skyscraper toppled off the beach. Anyone who wants to can just swim out to her and take a look.
At low tide, what you would see as you bob on the surface of a crystal sea is about two hundred feet of upturned hull protruding from the water, an oblong rudder looming twenty feet or so above you, and two bronze propellers, one partially submerged. Inevitably, your head would dip below the water from time to time, revealing the rest of the wreck as a vast tapering shadow reaching much further than you can see. Blue whales sometimes visit the Marshall Islands. The largest ever recorded was 110 feet long. If one was in the water with you and the wreck, it would look like a calf swimming beside its monstrous mother. Your presence would barely register.
But you are alone and only the length of your own body separates you from the hull. If you had scuba gear you could dive down, enter the ship through an open hatch and explore. After that you could descend to the bow and swim beneath it, the entire mass of the ship poised above you, overhanging a coastal slope. But even if you don't dive, you can still swim across those last few feet. You can still touch Prinz Eugen's steel hide. Press both hands against the corroded metal. Above the surface or just below, it doesn't matter. She hasn't moved in over 75 years and you won't be the one to budge her. In fact, between the hull's dead weight and the immeasurable ocean, are you the one pressing or are you being pressed?
Spooky action at a distance
I have not visited the wreck of the Prinz Eugen. I’ve only ever seen it in photographs, some of which have made me feel so uncomfortable that I don’t like looking at them alone or with my back to the door. Pictures of that particular wreck have triggered some of my strongest phobic responses, but really any large man-made object under water will do it. For a long time I assumed it was something only I felt, perhaps because my father was away at sea a lot when I was young. But as it turns out, I’m not alone, and my fear has a name: submechanophobia.
Submechanophobia is a fear of fully or partially submerged man-made objects. This alone separates it from my other phobias, the majority of which respond to some primal element that existed long before I did. Instead, it is anthropogenic: without human ingenuity and creativity - and human failure - it wouldn’t exist. Some people connect it to thalassophobia - fear of large bodies of water - and there is a definite kinship. But while drowning, attack by aquatic beasts and a healthy reverence for the inky unknown provide this anxiety’s background radiation, they don’t account for the otherworldly dread it inspires.
Though it can’t be just any man-made object. Size is a factor, but so is modernity. Undersea rock formations are ruled out, as are antiques. If they discovered Atlantis tomorrow, and the news channels looped endless footage of ROVs zooting along its stone boulevards, I doubt it would cause even a flicker of worry. Likewise the skeletal remains of lost barques and galleons, which have more in common with dead cetaceans than the ocean liners of the golden age. Like climate change, submechanophobia isn’t just anthropogenous, it’s post-industrial.
Are you lost?
Most of our irrational or inhuman fears have to do with things being where they aren’t meant to be. At a basic level, ghosts are unexpected human figures glimpsed in the dark. Possession involves unfamiliar voices or behaviors surfacing within the personality of a friend or family member. Morgellons and other parasitic delusions arise from a real terror of bodily infestation being triggered by stray hairs or synthetic fibers.
Is this why a sunken ship or the wreckage of a downed and drowned plane provoke such feelings of despair? We know their true purpose without having to think, so we understand the grotesqueness of their fate without thinking. The uncanny is a favorite stomping ground of armchair philosophers. It’s often described in terms of disorientation - a sense that something once familiar has been set slightly askew. We may not know the exact angle of dislocation, but we can tell that something is not where it should be. Of course, there’s nothing subtle about finding a ship that should be floating on the surface at the bottom of the sea. But there was never anything subtle about 20,000 tons of steel to begin with.
But perhaps the strangest aspect of this phobia is its allure. It has a subreddit with over 500,000 members who share triggering videos and pictures. There’s something oddly celebratory about it. An admiration, almost, both for whoever went down and got the photographs, but also for the wrecks themselves. It’s hard to imagine Reddit’s arachnophobes swapping pictures of funnel-webs, or its germophobes watching time lapse videos of staphylococcus aureus multiplying on agar. But for whatever reason, the submechanophobes are compelled to explore their fear.
When trying to unpick the unconscious it’s hard enough speaking for yourself, let alone half a million people. But deep down (where else?) I suspect it’s to do with a sense that some of our magnificence as a species has been let down or led astray. A disconcerting sadness that some of our greatest creations are lost and unrecoverable except in this imperfect, perilous form.
The attraction of human ingenuity, the repulsion of human frailty - it’s enough to make anyone shudder.