A 71-year-old African man has been living in an isolated house surrounded by a 15-foot fence for over half a century because being close to women terrifies him.

Callitxe Nzamwita was only 16 when he decided that his fear of women was too much to bear. He couldn’t stand being around members of the opposite sex, let alone talk to them, so he built a wooden fence around his modest home and hasn’t stepped outside the property since. Instead of shunning him, the women of Nzamwita’s community have always looked after him, throwing all sorts of things like food and clothes into his locked yard. Although he never opens the door for them, he does use the things they give him.

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Indian media recently reported the bizarre case of a young couple who has shifted 18 houses in just 3 years, due to the wife’s extreme cockroach phobia.

Let’s be honest, few people genuinely like cockroaches, especially the ones they find crawling through their kitchen, but how many people do you know who have moved out of their home repeatedly because of cockroaches? Well, that’s exactly what this couple in Bhopal, India’s Madhya Pradesh state have been doing for the past 3 years, hoping to finally find a cockroach-free house. However, after no less than 18 moves in 3 years, the wife’s extreme fear of cockroaches has taken a toll on their marriage, and the exasperated husband is now preparing to file for divorce.

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Poppy Johnson, a 23-year-old woman from the UK, claims she has been suffering from an irrational fear of pop legend Michael Jackson for 18 years, ever since she saw the Thriller music video for the first time.

The London-based bar tender was only five when she saw Michael Jackson’s iconic Thriller music video. She recalls being freaked out by it, especially the artist’s face change from the wolf. Ever since then, every time she sees or hears anything related to Michael Jackson – a song, an interview or even a poster – she has flashbacks of that traumatic experience and an unexplainable fear sets in. Poppy says she experiences sweaty palms and starts to feel shaky. To make matters worse, Poppy’s parents are big Michael Jackson fans and have lost of memorabilia around their house, but she never told them about her phobia.

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The Fuxi Mountain Skywalk, a glass, horseshoe-shaped glass bridge standing 360 meters above a canyon floor, was recently the scene of one of the most bizarre wedding proposals in human history.

Xiao Jing, a 23-year-old woman from Xinmi City, in China’s Henan province, decided to pop the big question to her boyfriend of three years on the beautiful glass bridge of Fuxi Mountain. While lovers arrange marriage proposals here all the time, Jing’s reasons were a bit unusual. You see, her boyfriend, Xiao Yu, had always had a fear of heights and she could never really get over his “cowardice”, so before she married him, she needed to make sure that he was strong enough to conquer his fear.

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For most people discovering the secret to eternal life, or reaching heaven and living forever in a blissful afterlife is the ultimate goal, but for some, concepts like life without end and infinity are apparently terrifying to the point where they cannot lead a normal life. These people suffer from a little-known and even less talked-about condition called “apeirophobia”.

You won’t find many scientific or medical information about apeirophobia online. It doesn’t even have its own Wikipedia entry, and popular medical information websites like Mayo Clinic or WebMD have no mention of it either. But when it comes to anecdotal evidence of its existence, the hundreds of forum threads, social media posts and blog entries by people sharing stories of their struggle with the fear of eternal life or infinite space, and asking for help in coping with anxiety, sleeplessness and depression, are enough to convince anyone that apeirophobia is more than a made-up medical condition.

Unlike other phobias, aperirophobia is a lot harder to explain, which is why most people tend to keep it a secret. It’s one thing to tell that you’re afraid of snakes, or heights, and another that you’re afraid of living forever or of the infinity of the universe. While most people find the fear of death perfectly understandable and even relatable, the fear of infinity and eternity is apparently much harder to grasp.

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