Is Ombrophobia Real? Anna's Condition In The Woman In The House Explained

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Caution: Spoilers Ahead for The Woman in the House Across the Street from the Girl in the Window

Netflix’s The Woman in the House Across the Street from the Girl in the Window stars Kristen Bell as a grieving woman who suffers from ombrophobia, but what exactly is this fear, and is it even real? In the series, ombrophobia is the disabling, irrational fear of rain. For Anna, this means whenever she is caught in the rain, she faints within mere seconds. The fear began after the tragic death of her young daughter, and is so extreme that she refuses to drive long distances because she’s afraid a potential downpour could make her pass out at the wheel. Because of this, she usually stays home, spying on her neighbors and drinking her favorite wine.

Anna’s daughter Elizabeth (Appy Pratt) was killed three years before the start of the TV show after being murdered by a serial killer who then began to eat her. She was accidentally locked in a room alone with the cannibal after joining her dad and Anna’s ex-husband Douglas (an FBI forensic psychologist played by 2 Fast 2 Furious’ Michael Ealy) for Take Your Child to Work Day. Anna blames herself because she had convinced Douglas to take Elizabeth with him against his initial wishes and developed a fear of rain because it had just begun to fall as she was telling them goodbye, causing her to associate it with the death of her child.

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Ombrophobia is a very real condition that generally develops not from a fear of rain itself, but a fear of the negatively perceived effects that follow rainstorms, such as thunder and lightning. Because of this, it is sometimes interchanged with pluviophobia – the fear of anything related