Fears

So I scared the crap out of a small child this weekend.

It was completely unexpected, and certainly unintentional. I was dressed as Little Bo Peep, for crying out loud. I had a little pink bonnet and a basket full of friendly plush sheepies on my arm. My crook was hanging off the back of my chair, so I wasn’t even armed. Still, as I stood up to give the boy a reward for braving the chilly October night, he opened his mouth and let out a wail so terror-filled and pitiful that I may as well have been a monster.

Fear comes in many shapes and sizes, and as the small child reminded me, what’s perfectly benign to one might be hysteria-inducing to another. I have several friends who can’t watch horror movies without having nightmares for weeks afterward, and a husband who watches gore as a way of lulling himself into the Land of Nod. Spiders, on the other hand, make him squeal like a girl, whereas at the age of ten I caught a black widow spider in our backyard and named her Charlotte (despite my protests that she’d get cold, my mother would not let Charlotte in the house. Mysteriously, the coffee can habitat I built for her on our back porch vanished overnight).

Halloween time, with its haunted houses and horror movie marathons, is always interesting to me because it helps us explore our fears in a generally safe environment – we get the thrill of fear while deep down knowing that at the end of the night, we’ll still be okay and everything will go back to normal. Baron knows that those three-foot-long giant spiders dropping from the ceiling in the haunted house aren’t real, unless you go to Australia (sorry, Shinzon). My friends know that the likelihood of the dead popping out of their graves and chasing them down the street at speeds that rival that of James Kwambai are practically nonexistent. Yet, the idea of facing the supernatural – and triumphing – appeals to our sense of adventure as well as our ingenuity. Who hasn’t spent an October evening with friends plotting out the ideal anti-zombie bunker, or debating situations where one would or would not succumb to the advances of a vampire¹?

But in addition to the silly, Halloween also provides a jumping board for discussion about deeper fears. For my Halloween costume a few years ago, I tried a social experiment where I dressed as a scarecrow, but with a twist. What I did was ask all of my coworkers and the people I interacted with throughout the day to anonymously write their fears on a little slip of paper, and we pinned the papers all over my costume. At the end of the night, it was interesting to see what people wrote: answers ranged from the silly (sparkly vampires, zombies) to the topical (ebola and swine flu both ended up on the list). One rather honest reply was that they feared getting stuck in a nine-to-five that would never let them achieve their full potential. The most common response I received that day was people worrying about losing a spouse or child, with one more memorable one saying “I’m afraid of dying before my son is grown up and able to take care of himself.”

Personally, the thought of death doesn’t scare me – experience tells me there are far worse fates in this world. Likewise, with a few choice exceptions², I’m not afraid of spooks and ghosts. I’ve loved and collected ghost stories as long as I can remember. The idea that the soul could live on after our corporeal bodies crumble to dust is both comforting and fascinating to me – comforting in the sense that it implies our lives (and choices) do in fact have a purpose, and fascinating in the context of how those choices affect the story of our world. I know a lot of people who don’t want to believe in ghosts, and a lot who say they don’t believe, yet are afraid of them anyway³. From my experience, the living are a hell of a lot scarier than the dead. Terror to me is more about the sinister and depraved things people do when they think they’ll get away with it, and not being able to protect the people you care about from those actions.

Which is why I enjoy watching people during the Halloween season facing their lesser fears and using them as a conversation piece for how to react to the more tangible dangers of life. We might not need to prepare ourselves with a bunker for a zombie onslaught, but those conversations get us thinking about what we would need to survive an emergency. We might not ever find ourselves the prey of a literal bloodsucking creature of the night, but we may find ourselves in situations where we encounter other predators. Exploring fears in a safe hypothetical environment gives us the ground work for planning how to react to decidedly more real situations. Halloween, and especially the traditions of ghost stories and costumes and trick-or-treats, provides a fun and ultimately very useful platform for getting those conversations going.

Of course, it takes a while to ease people into those discussions. This is why in an attempt to provide a brief moment of respite for the wee ones navigating the spooky ghouls and goblins lining our normally lively neighborhood, I tried for a costume that was personal and light-hearted. A safe haven of comfort and candy on an otherwise dark and blustery night. Instead, I ended up making a poor two-year-old relive what must have been some disturbing imagery of a warped, horror edition of a classic children’s character.

Which just goes to show, you never know what people will be afraid of.

*****
¹ I always thought it would be entertaining to do a short film about a guy who becomes a ridiculously attractive vampire, only to consistently be turned down because every single one the beautiful women he tries to seduce are lesbians and therefore not interested. The dialogue in my head for these situations makes me giggle inappropriately, and I think it’s starting to scare Baron.

² See episode 78 of Ghost in the Podcast – the story starts at about the 2:09:50 mark.

³ It never ceases to amuse me how many people will argue that they don’t believe in ghosts, yet privately tell me about very personal experiences they’ve had that they can’t explain and want to know if I think it’s otherworldly. My usual answer – possibly. If you’ve explored the situation from all angles and ruled out other options, it doesn’t prove something that happened is supernatural in nature, but it certainly might lend credence. At that point, the question becomes: what does the person want to believe? Because that answer dictates what happens next in their story.