Pioneering comedian and I Love Lucy star Lucille Ball barely needs an introduction these days. Her delightfully elastic face, appetite for creative risks, and uncanny talent for throwing her body around to produce laughs rightfully earn her consistent and undying admiration. While her front-facing life featured an assortment of tightly produced and deeply relatable foibles, there were some idiosyncratic tendencies in Lucille Ball’s private life that never made it to the stage — namely her deeply-rooted fear of birds. Like many phobias, Lucille Ball's fear of birds stems from a tragic event that happened during her childhood. Ball's father, Henry Durrell Ball, fell ill with typhoid when she was just 4 years old. In her memoir, "Love, Lucy," Ball recounts her mother telling her about her father's death as one of her earliest and most difficult memories. "And I remember at that very moment, a picture suddenly fell from the wall," Ball writes in her memoir. "And I noticed on the kitchen windowsill some little gray sparrows feeding. I've been superstitious about birds ever since. I've heard that birds flying in the window are supposed to bring bad luck. Pictures of birds get me. I won't buy anything with a print of a bird, and I won't stay in a hotel room with bird pictures or bird wallpaper."
