The Season of Fear

It's not just about Halloween

It was an old historic house in southern Pennsylvania, one built in the 1700s. Part of it had been turned into an inn and a restaurant, but a section of it was a kind of museum. George Washington once slept there, it was believed. That part of the old stagecoach inn could be toured while you waited for your dinner table. I was just a kid when I came to know this place. Most of it bored me back then. But my senses were snapped into focus when on the tour, my parents and I stepped into one of the bedrooms. There, all over the bed, on the bookshelves, covering the tops of the night table and a tall dresser, and neatly stacked together on the old hardwood floor were hundreds, yes, hundreds, of porcelain-face dolls, expressionless faces seemingly made of stone. Yet, the eyes, those eyes seemed to follow me, every pair watching my every move. I quickly stepped out of the room and back to the hallway, my face ashen.

Then and now, nothing unsettles me more than the porcelain face of an antique doll.

There’s a lot to be scared about these days. The Middle East, Ukraine, global warming, Congress in chaos, Covid, and on and on. So why do we need more to frighten us?

In comes Halloween.

A holiday that is all about scary. And we love it, most of us. Plus, it seems we might just need it to keep our wits about us.

In a recent Washington Post article, the director of the Recreational Fear Lab at Aarhus University in Denmark, Mathias Clasen stated that having fun with fear is an “extremely important tool for learning.” Through the dangers of the world, he said, we learn how it feels to be afraid, and then we learn something about our responses—fight or flight and everything in between. In a survey Clasen conducted, he found that more than half of the Americans asked were fans of horror films. Many others loved true crime podcasts. Even babies love a little peek-a-boo, he concluded. All of us, he believes, like some level of recreational fear. It’s innate in the human condition as we use it to learn how to best react when real threats arise.

So how are we doing so far?

With the world seemingly full of fear in one way or another, are we learning anything? I say we are. If you are old enough, you know this is certainly not the only time in history that the fear level has boiled over. In the 1960s, it appeared as if the world was about to implode. Assassinations, the Cold War, and Vietnam. Pretty frightening material. But hasn’t it always been this way? Every era has its scary experiences, incidents, and cultural upheavals. It’s the nature of humans. Fear is always, and it’s everywhere.

And again, Halloween.

The difference is we can control the fear during this fall holiday. We can confront it as closely or as far away as we can handle or want to handle. We can turn the dial to 1 or to 11. And most of the time, we can regulate the fears as we wish. The world is not like that. We have little control over many of the scariest things. But maybe we should all agree that fear is something we can try to embrace. We don’t have to love it or crave it, but we should recognize it. Do not turn our heads from the fearful moments emerging before us—Gaza, Ukraine, the rain forests, chaos in Congress, the migrant crisis. Instead, accept them as tools for understanding and learning.

Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, “Always do what you are afraid to do.” In his essay, “Heroism,” Emerson recommended this to readers as a way to overcome trepidation. Some fears are justified, he wrote, and this guidance does not encourage foolish self-destructive acts. What it suggests is that you should break away from monotony or the well-mannered world for a time and stand before your fears, so you know exactly what they look like, and then challenge them and yourself.

I love this philosophy. It’s a way to learn about ourselves, our world, and grow in our emotional life. Still, I have no plans to stand in front of a bevy of porcelain-face dolls anytime soon.

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Photo: U Nerd It We Have It