Matthew King

Load of crap. This happens with ALL release 1.8 versions, including 1.8.9

I suspect it is one of the "idle" files since the freeze occurs as soon as the enderman is within hearing distance to the player.

I navigated within that directory to the enderman sound files and deleted all of them. New files were downloaded and the problem disappeared. (minecraft/resources/sound3/mob/endermen/)

Yes. That solved the problem. Thank you.

I updated the LWJGL as per the instructions, but it didn't seem to have any effect – the freeze still happens the same as before.

So, it's a mod that installs mods? That hardly makes sense.
But this is basically inconsequential to my original point: I only used MCPatcher as a tool to obtain (what I thought was) a crash report by following the instructions on the Minecraft Wiki. By using MCPatcher in this capacity, it did not modify the Minecraft jar file in any way whatsoever. It has the ability to modify the jar file, but it has other functions as well that do not.
And, as you can see from the crash report I attached earlier, my Minecraft application is not modded at all, so there is no contradiction in what I stated earlier.

As for the freezing issue at hand, updating to Java 7 is not feasible for me since it will not run on any version of OS X older than 10.7.3 (where Java updates are handled at the system level and there is no update available for my version of OS X - 10.6.8).

That's an antagonism

That doesn't make sense here – there is no hostility in what I said.
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/antagonism
I think you mean 'contradiction'.
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/contradiction

MC Patcher is a mod.

No it's not.
"MCPatcher is a tool that allows you to install mods into minecraft, create backups and add full support for HD and semi-HD texturepacks." (http://www.minecraftwiki.net/wiki/Mods/MCPatcher)
It's a 3rd party tool/application designed to help install/uninstall mods. It itself is not a mod. It also has other functions like testing the stability of Minecraft (modded or not). This is the purpose I used it for here as I followed the instructions here in order to attempt to obtain a crash report.

The method you indicated to obtain a crash report doesn't seem to have any effect after the game has frozen/locked up. But, I did this before any crash happened, obtained a report and attached it here. Although, since the game hadn't crashed at the time, I doubt that this will be useful in determining the source of the problem.

Strangely, at the time I was holding down F3 and C, there was an enderman in my field of view and the game didn't freeze. But, when I tried to spawn an enderman from a spawn egg, the game froze immediately.

Anyway, I hope this helps.

I am having the exact same problem on OS X with a completely unmodded Minecraft 1.4.6. This seems to be the common issue: an enderman comes into the field of view and within 3-4 seconds, the application completely freezes permanently, requiring a force close. Happens consistently in both creative and survival. Easily triggered by attempting to spawn an enderman from an egg. I have attached a crash report from MC Patcher.