Students have always enjoyed gossiping about teachers. They think of them as boring, rule-following robots, but little do they know that teachers are human enough to have hilarious phobias, just like a phobia of pennies that chorus and drama teacher Adam Fry admitted to the class of 2028 during the 8th-grade retreat. So let’s see some of the Westminster teachers’ strangest phobias.

8th-grade Grade-Chair and English teacher Catherine Zidow cannot stomach the idea of wet hair on the wall. Zidow says that even dry hair would still freak her out, something she discovered on the volleyball team. “Laying on the floor . . . I could always see if there were hairs on the floor and it used to really freak me out,” she says. Zidow believes that her fear of hair started in college. “I don’t think I knew it was a thing until I went to college or sleep-away volleyball camps and it was just like the general hygiene,” she says. Zidow’s phobia of hair was so strong she took precautions. “I would sweep the floor before every practice in my high school just to make sure it was a clean floor because I’m rolling around in it.” Zidow self-proclaimed herself  “a little obsessed” back then.

8th-grade Grade-Chair and History teacher Patrick Egan used to be terrified of open doors when he was a child. He describes the fear as “the chill goes down in the back of your neck when lights are out.” Egan says that his phobia started when he was a child watching hockey with his dad. “It goes back to this one point of trying to get from our basement where I was watching the hockey game with my father to my room because I had to get to bed and [I was] skipping past those open doors because of that fear.”

 Middle School Drama teacher Adam Fry has the famed intense dislike of pennies. Fry doesn’t like to touch pennies and doesn’t know why, but he has a guess. “I don’t know if it has something to do with the denomination of the money” because Fry has no problem with change. “Change is okay for some reason, like quarters and dimes, and they’re okay . . .  nickels and then especially pennies, I can’t stand to touch them.” Fry has had this phobia or dislike for his entire life. “I wouldn’t say it’s like super serious, but I have always kind of had it.” Fry says that students have never pranked him with pennies in the past but, “this year they have because I happened to mention it at the retreat.”

8th-grade Spanish teacher and XC coach Ted Sadtler experiences what he calls the “alligator heebie-jeebies.” Sadtler cannot be alone at night in a hotel pool without being terrified that a shark or alligator will get in—and eat him. Sadtler was very surprised when he started feeling the “alligator heebie-jeebies” because he had been going to hotel pools his entire life and never got scared. Sadtler said the phobia started in 2001 when he was chaperoning a course called Field Geology in Moab, Utah, with teachers Mr. Meyer and Mr. Shafer, and they were staying at the Best Western Lands Inn. Sadtler got in the pool at about 8:00 at night and remembers being stricken with panic and thought of a popular movie. “I thought about this movie called The Living Daylights. It was a Bond movie starring Timothy Dalton, where the bad guy captures someone, a spy, and they throw them in a pool and then a little door opens and a shark comes out and bad things happen,” he says. Thoughts of that movie made Sadtler scared enough that “I just thought, what if there’s a shark in this room?”

Spanish teacher and Assistant Head of the Middle School Vielka Reina cannot stand the thought of worms. Anywhere. Reina is mainly afraid of worms, but her phobia also encompasses other critters and bugs that move mysteriously. “Things without like legs, like slithery things or where you can’t quite see the legs,” she says. Reina had a moment of complete fear that occurred because of worms when she was interviewing at this school around twenty years ago. Reina was walking through the quad when she heard students shouting in disgust at what she believed at the time to be pine straw. The second she double-checked and saw that it was not pine straw but actually worms she freaked out. “It was that moment, like in movies or cartoons, like boom,” she says. All in all, Reina believes that she would not and could not go anywhere near worms, even for absurd amounts of cash. “If somebody said I will give you like $10,000 if you take your hand and like put it in a bucket of worms, I would not be able to do that.”

7th grade Boys Grade Chair and history teacher Dr. Robert Cochran has a phobia of stickers. “I think they’re the most disgusting thing ever,” he says. Cochran describes this phobia as “more disgust than fear.” He developed this disgust for stickers back when he was in second or third grade. His parents had told him a story of how some houses gave out stickers with candy, but not just any stickers—these were laced with drugs that caused multiple kids to go to the hospital for hallucinations and nightmares. This story made him so cautious of stickers that it “created this deep-seated, it’s it’s almost even more disgust than fear.”

So, the next time you see your boring, rule-enforcing robot teacher, keep in mind that they could be hiding a secret hilarious phobia. Why not ask them to share?