365 True Things: 5/Creepiness

Not much creeps me out. Skittering cockroaches and earwigs do. Sticking my hand into a dark tree crevice and encountering slime or simply cold wetness does. A dead thing writhing with grubs does. Though death itself does not. Death may be sad, or harsh, but it's not creepy. The grubs on the other hand, ewwww. Tomato worms can be creepy if they're as big as my index finger and I have to pluck them off my tomato plant with my bare hands.

Not long ago I posted a photo that I thought was rather whimsical and sweet. It's the drinking fountain in the park at the end of the street. A little the worse for wear, sure, but just look at that happy blue eye! My sister-in-law Patty, however, objected that it's creepy. Plain creepy.

Not long before, I'd encountered a painting hanging in the forest that I found fascinatingly mysterious (who had painted it? who had left it there? why?), but my walking companion Annie said it creeped her out. She felt like she was being watched, stalked even.

Those experiences got me wondering about creepiness—and then actively looking for it. I soon started finding it in the form of dolls—discarded, out in the world; or not discarded, but carefully placed to (I can only assume) provide spook value. I started collecting the dolls in images. My gallery isn't large, but it's growing. It's surprising how often I come upon a creepy little doll.

The blank eyes, the severed body parts, the distorted positions, the hangings, the sad faces: they remind me of things that humans do to one another. I don't mean to get dark here. After all, I watch my share of police/mystery shows on TV—I'm just finishing up the first season of the BBC series Luther, and recently watched the Danish-Swedish show The Bridge—and at least in those fictional worlds (and I believe in real life also), the monsters are complex, exercising evil but having arrived there by paths I can't begin to imagine.

They also remind me of loneliness, neglect, being lost or estranged. Even the cute little jumping blonde in the lower left corner. Trying too hard and always failing. What brings us to despair?

Perhaps my creepy-doll imagery is an attempt to express my unease with both the darkness and the complexity of the world. All the stories that have gone off-kilter. Our ultimate lack of control. The ghosts that swirl around us. Our untetheredness.

I don't know.

But the next creepy doll I see, I will certainly be taking a photo of it.

[10/14/21: Today I ran across a Smithsonian article from 2015 devoted to this very subject, "The History of Creepy Dolls." It's definitely a thing.]