Pupaphobia
What we like to refer to as Sesame Street phobia, pupaphobia is the fear of puppets, regardless of whether it’s a hand puppet, ventriloquist’s dummy, animatronic creatures or kids’ show character. Not as common as the fear of clowns (coulrophobia) or dolls (pediophobia) but it still affects a lot of people. It also falls under the category automophobic, which is the fear of things that falsely represent a sentient being.
This phobia undoubtedly originates from childhood as puppets are mainly designed to entertain children. However, adults can still feel the same fear of non-child related ‘puppets’ such as robots, mannequins and wax statues. In very extreme cases this can transfer into fearing corpses, otherwise known as necrophobia.
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