Th snake got me thinking about something - the "s" sound. Why is it in so many stories that snakes always get the bad rap? Is it the fact that they're slithery and strange and they bite?

I actually think it's the noise they make.

When I was thirteen, I once wrote a book that I modeled after Christopher Paolini's "Eragon" about two girls and their winged horses, instead of dragons (my love of strong feminine hero characters and horses had been coupled together). "Eragon" was one of those books from my childhood that really inspired me to words, and made me want to tell stories. I took this story about my strong feminine characters and gave it to numerous people to read, to edit, and to comment on. Shelley Freese, the wife of my elementary school principal, is an author, and I greatly respected (and still do) her opinion. There was one comment that she made about the lead villain in my story that still sticks quite clearly in my head with relevance to the scaly creatures above: "Great name! It must be out human fear of the "s" sound that causes us to have so many villains who start with an S!"

I remember thinking, Huh. That's interesting... and doing nothing about looking into that. But now that I think about it, it's quite true. Sauron and Saruman from The Lord of the Rings, Shan-Yu from  Mulan, Sweeney Todd, Sianel from my own story... We do seem to have quite a few villains in literature and pop culture. Or what about sharks or spiders, two other commonly feared creatures?

What is the myth behind the "s" sound?

While I'm not sure that this directly falls into the answer for this question, it makes a lot of sense on some other levels. The term I kept stumbling upon was "infrasound." Infrasound is a hertz frequency below 20 Hz - which is undetectable by human ears. They're bass waves and vibrations that are felt, which, according to the Skeptic'sDictionary, "have been shown to produce a range of effects in some people including anxiety, extreme sorrow, and chills." Another interesting tidbit said that because these sounds are not heard, they can, "make people feel vaguely that odd or supernatural events are taking place." They're also the frequencies that people associate with white noise/EVP. 

Interesting. Maybe not directly connected, but there's some interesting psychological going-on's here.