14 DAY TRIAL // We learn about weird phobias every day, and today is no exception, as we have just found a story about a 20-year-old girl from Merseyside who is afraid of wardrobes.
Kirstie Hughes says her pathological fear of storage units appeared when she was 10 years old and she is so terrified of wardrobes that she can't even look at these pieces of furniture in shops, while at home she has to turn her wardrobe away from her bed at night to avoid facing it.
According to Daily Mail, the barmaid has developed this unusual phobia of wardrobes after watching the 2004 horror movie Godsend, which includes a scene where a boy hears a suspicious noise when he is left alone in the room and is dragged into the wardrobe.
The horror film traumatized her as a child and since then Kirstie panics every time she sees the bedroom furniture. That's why she only bought her own cupboard at the age of 19 and painted it white to make it “look less scary.”
The girl tried to explain her phobia saying that she simply fears that something might jump out of the closet and attack her.
“Old wardrobes like the one in Narnia are my biggest fear,” Kirstie says. “They just look really creepy. I have to walk straight past the wardrobe aisle in big furniture stores.”
“I use drawers as much as I can to avoid using them and I have to have my bed facing away so I don't have to look at them,” she adds.
However, Kirstie cannot always avoid wardrobes and sometimes she just has to face her irrational fear. She experienced such a situation a few months ago when staying at her boyfriend’s house and heard noises and scratches coming from inside a closet.
“I was staying at my boyfriend's house and I didn't know but his cat had got into his wardrobe,” she said. “I could hear scratching coming from inside it and I just froze up and couldn't move. It took me a while to go back in his room because I was that freaked out, it was horrible.”
Because this type of phobia is so rare, it doesn't even have a scientific name. However, the fact that Kirstie accepted to have a wardrobe in her room is a step forward in getting accustomed to the thing she is scared of, which is exactly what specialists advise patients to do in behavioral therapy.