In Minecraft, there are several fearsome and hostile mobs. Perhaps the most fearsome, aside from bosses like the Wither, Ender Dragon and the Warden, is the Enderman. Its ability to teleport makes it extremely challenging to kill. It can hit players and teleport away before they can even react.
Players can go inside their houses for safety, but the potential for the Enderman to teleport inside or remove blocks and walk in is always there. There are very few safe places to go to avoid Endermans, but there is one place they’ll never go.
One Minecraft Redditor, u/S-I-B-E-R-I-A-N, had a theory as to why they don’t like water. They believe it may be due to their home in the End, which has other items with similar abilities:
“I went to the middle of the ocean and ate a stack of chorus fruit in a 1×1, 3×3 and 5×5 area, and it never teleported me to a block that was bellow water level (in addition, i also tested this in the middle a river, just to make sure and same thing). My interpretation of this being that the endermen adopted this property of the chorus fruit by taking damage whenever they touched water (furthermore, i tested whether chorus fruit worked while raining and they did, so take my theory with a grain of salt).”
Whatever the reason, Mojang has remained silent on this and will likely never offer an in-game explanation. After all, there’s no telling why Creepers explode in the vicinity of a player or why baby zombies are so much faster than normal ones.