Getting Spooked by Mom
My mother once accidentally spooked the bejesus out of me, placing my nine-year-old self directly in touch with “the uncanny.”
Have you ever been spooked in a way that is not only frightening, but also weirdly familiar?
Perhaps you’ve been lost on a strange highway late at night, yet at the same time sensed that you’d once been lost on this exact highway before. Or perhaps you’ve fallen asleep on a commuter train, and been tapped awake at the end of the line by a conductor who looked exactly like your late uncle.
This strange feeling of fear mixed with familiarity is called “the uncanny” – a topic of intense fascination for authors, artists, psychoanalysts, and even roboticists. From Wikipedia:
The uncanny is the psychological experience of an event or individual being not simply mysterious, but rather frightening in a way that feels oddly familiar. This phenomenon is used to describe incidents where a familiar thing or event is encountered in an unsettling, eerie, or taboo context.
While such experiences can be sincerely spooky, I also think they offer rich insight into our individual and collective psyches.
Uncanny moments startle us, yes – but they also help us get to the heart of what it means to be human. Furthermore, they can provide life-affirming comic relief and humor, provided we aren’t taking ourselves too seriously to miss it!
Below, I’d like to share about one such uncanny moment that happened in my own life, which continues to hold meaning, memory, and humor for me.
Spooked!
Looking back, this incident was actually pretty funny – some might even say heartwarming. At the same time, I have never forgotten the eerie sense of familiarity which spooked me in the moment, placing me for the first time in contact with “the uncanny.” Thanks, Mom!
First, the basic sequence of events:
One day, when I was about nine years old, I walked across my family’s townhouse and descended alone down the staircase to our cavernous, unfinished basement. I’m not exactly sure why I went down there. Maybe I was looking for my baseball glove, or grabbing a t-shirt from the dryer, or feeding our guinea pigs. Who knows?
What I do recall is being 100% sure the basement was unoccupied at the time. Imagine my surprise then as I turned the stairs, set foot on the cool cement floor, and looked up to find a six-foot tall, bright pink rabbit standing beside the ka-thumping washing machine.
Transfixed, I stood in dumb silence. The rabbit said nothing for several long beats. Then, it simply raised a white-gloved hand and waved at me, before slowly raising one finger to its lips in a “Shhh!” motion. That’s about when I high-tailed it and disappeared back up the steps.
Okay, why was there a six-foot-tall rabbit in my basement?
Simple. My mom (ever the good sport) had volunteered to play the Easter Bunny (E.B.) at a party the local parents were throwing the following week. So, she had ordered an adult-sized bunny costume, and was in the middle of trying it on in the (relative) privacy of our basement. That’s when I stumbled in on her, then split.
Afterwards, we didn’t talk about it (a point I’ll come back to).
The next week, Mom successfully played E.B. at the party – which was a smash hit, judging by the many smiles in the photos. On that sunny, egg-strewn lawn, she fully exudes the friendly-neighborhood-mom-in-a-bunny-costume look she’d been going for.
Nothing like the unblinking fever dream bunny who’d loomed silent in my basement days before, like some Junior Reader version of Joseph Campbell’s “threshold guardian” archetype.
Those are the basic, objective facts. Now here is my subjective experience.
Like I said, I was 100% sure the basement was empty that day.
Thus, running into anyone would have made me jump out of my skin – let alone a person in a bunny costume. Even mom in her normal clothes would have terrified me. Furthermore, I’m positive the dim lighting helped me NOT to notice her for a few heartbeats longer than I might have in a well-lit room.
Basically, it was a Hollywood jump-scare waiting to happen. That said, I think being surprised by someone in a room you thought was empty is a fairly common human experience.
No – what turned this incident into an uncanny Twilight Zone moment was not just being surprised by my mom in disguise. Heck, it wasn’t even necessarily the bunny costume.
No, it was the fact that this bright pink rabbit didn’t say a word to explain its presence in my family’s basement. It just stared at me for three long “Mississippi’s” before waving like a pageant contestant and then going “Shhh!” as if to cheekily say, “Tee-hee! Don’t tell anyone about me!”
Years later, my mom shared her own thought process in that moment:
At first, Mom didn’t say anything because she was as surprised as I was.
Next, Mom realized that speaking would reveal it was her and not really the Easter Bunny – so she remained silent.
Then, Mom realized she should do something, since E.B. is supposed to be friendly, right? So, she decided to wave at me like a costumed theme park character might.
Finally, Mom recognized that her eldest child (me) probably knew it wasn’t really E.B. standing in our basement. So, she made the “Shhh!” motion in the spirit of: “Hey, wise older kid. Can I trust you not to tell your younger siblings about this, and help keep the magic of Easter alive for them?”
But in the moment, I didn’t get any of that. Here’s what I was thinking instead:
For the record, I knew right away that it wasn’t a real bunny – certainly not the Easter Bunny. Give me some credit, Mom! Obviously, this was a person in a bunny costume.
However, I was sincerely surprised and still experiencing the “freeze” of “fight, flight, freeze.” In that moment, my brain failed to make the crucial leap from “Oh a person in a bunny costume in my basement” to “Ahh, that’s probably Mom in that costume.”
Yet even without realizing it was Mom, I still remembering feeling an odd familiarity between myself and the bunny person. In retrospect, my unconscious mind probably recognized Mom’s stance beneath the costume, or perhaps the way her wrist moved as she waved. Who knows, exactly. All I know is that I never felt alarm or danger – only an uncanny sense of “I’ve never seen a person in costume in my house before… yet, there is something so familiar about this!”
And of course, it would have been completely different if Mom had intended to surprise me as an early Easter joke, “hopping” out from the shadows to pull a good-natured prank on me. But the fact that it was me who had surprised her instead just amplified the eerie tension of the moment, which stuck us both in place like statues.
Conclusion
As Wikipedia says, “the uncanny” occurs “where a familiar thing or event is encountered in an unsettling, eerie, or taboo context.”
Unsettling? Check. Eerie? Check. Taboo? Maybe not.
But then again, maybe so.
You see, one other subtle element played in the background of this experience: In walking in on Mom dressed as a bright pink bunny, I saw behind The Veil separating children from parents.
When Mom, dressed as E.B., held her finger to her lips, she wasn’t just saying, “Don’t tell your younger siblings about this!”
She was also saying:
“Child, you have now seen the truth: this is how the world of magic works. We the parents spirit away (beneath your noses) to secret rooms in houses around the world, to adorn ourselves in the costumes of beings and creatures which have never lived, so that we may produce the magical effects which indelibly mark the halcyon days of your childhood. Now that you have seen, you have been initiated. And there is no un-initiation.”
As I mentioned, Mom and I didn’t talk about this event after it happened. The next time Mom wore the costume was at the neighborhood Easter party the following weekend. In one photo from that day, I stand before her, half-hugging her and half-showing off my basket of plastic eggs.
In that photo, you can see on my happy face that this is a child who knows that it is his own mother, and not a mysterious stranger, beneath the long-eared mask. In other words, we came full circle, embracing together on the other side of the Twilight Zone.
The photo makes me smile, as does the memory. Yes, I’d seen Mom in a way she hadn’t intended me to see. But instead of chasing me down and Mom-splaining some panicked nonsense about how “The Easter Bunny is real – I’m just one of his helpers!!!” – she instead trusted me to navigate the considerable anxiety of processing this new knowledge.
And you know what? It was okay. We were still able to play and pretend together at that Easter party, despite my loss of innocence.
If “the uncanny” is the strange combination of fear and familiarity, then what is the word for the combination of love and mystery?
Because the latter is what I feel right now and what I’m sure I felt then – gratitude for parents willing to sacrifice their ownership of life’s small mysteries so that I could grow into life’s big mysteries waiting on the other side of innocence.
Cheers, and thanks for reading.