Another common superstition is “don’t walk under a ladder.” Clearly, there are some practical reasons for not doing this, but Pappas writes about other historical beliefs surrounding this caveat, “One theory holds that this superstition arises from a Christian belief in the Holy Trinity: Since a ladder leaning against a wall forms a triangle, ‘breaking’ that triangle was blasphemous. Then again, another popular theory is that a fear of walking under a ladder has to do with its resemblance to a medieval gallows.” What can Creator tell us?

Here again human behavior is given a prosaic explanation, based on cultural phenomena, as a ready explanation for something that is actually strange and improbable on its face. There are certainly potential risks if one walks under a ladder and bumps into it. That is simply common sense. But to do so carefully and still have something bad happen requires some external agent to set things in motion to have a physical consequence. Here again, there is a strange but logical mechanism behind the origin of this superstition. When people do things and take risks, it will often end badly because there are dark forces watching you. So someone walking under a ladder creates a tempting target for mischief if there is a dark spirit seeing what is going on and wanting to have "fun," simply by distracting the mind of a person while taking a small risk of walking under a ladder, to misguide their senses causing them to bump into the ladder, can get an accident going. Many, many auto accidents are caused by possessing spirits distracting drivers within the mind, and that momentary inattention, at just the right moment, can end in tragedy if their car wanders over the centerline or fails to react to brake lights on the car in front of them, and so on. So this is not something esoteric and a remote possibility that people could experience what they feel is "bad luck" from going under a ladder. The object lesson, from the existence of this superstition, is that people are vulnerable to outside manipulation and need ways to keep that in check to safeguard their personal safety.