What animal is Indiana Jones most afraid of?

Indiana Jones is most afraid of snakes. His fear is one of the character’s defining weaknesses, creating a comic contrast with his courage around Nazis, traps, gunfights and collapsing temples.

The origin of the fear is shown in the opening of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. In 1912, a teenage Indy falls into a circus-train car filled with snakes while trying to escape a grave robber. The incident leaves him with a lasting fear that follows him into adulthood. The film also links this sequence to the origin of his chin scar, bullwhip and famous fedora.

Snakes repeatedly turn that fear into suspense. In Raiders of the Lost Ark, Indy faces a huge number of them in the Well of Souls, where the Ark is hidden. His famous reaction—“Why did it have to be snakes?”—became one of the franchise’s best-known lines.

The fear is sometimes confused with his father’s fear of rats. Henry Jones Sr. dislikes rats, while Indy’s signature animal phobia is snakes. The clinical term for an intense fear of snakes is ophidiophobia.