The Icy Breath Of My Scaredy-Cat Past//October 105th, 2022

 Sometimes it’s funny to think about what a walking contradiction I was in childhood.

If there was a children’s book written about me when I was young, it would likely be titled something like “The Little Girl Who Was Scared Of Everything But Somehow Loved Halloween”. Perhaps I should write that! But today, I’d like to share just one silly story; an example of my extreme scaredy-cat-ness despite my obsession with Halloween.

Our family tradition when I was small, was to spend a long weekend down the Jersey Shore in late summer. Despite my dislike of the heat, I enjoyed the change of scenery, and knowing I’d always be getting a buttload of new toys thanks to my father’s almost eerily perfect claw machine skills.

Occasionally, other events would go on on the boardwalk as well, specifically “Family Fun Nights”, which I clearly remember being sponsored by Pepsi back in the day. These nights consisted of all sorts of fun activities, mainly geared toward kids, and culminated in a little beach party where you could win prizes in things like limbo and dance competitions. I never won anything, but I enjoyed it, like any kid probably would.

However, one of these fateful weekends, they decided to kick off their Family Fun Night with a puppet show at the end of the boardwalk. I can’t remember exactly how old I was, but I was more interested in the beach party stuff, but my parents took me to watch the puppet show anyway. It was a performance of Hiawatha, and it started out fun. It was all about a Native American boy and his journey of self discovery, there were talking animals and a couple of silly little spirit characters that I thought were super cute.

But then, the main villain appeared.

She was called “The Wendigo” (a term I would later become very familiar with through other sorts of media, though those examples looked very different from this one) and she was an ominous ghost with a blue face and menacing look in her eyes. Her appearance, combined with her talk of her “icy breath of death” and that sort of thing, absolutely terrified me. And the thing about me in childhood was, once an image like that got into my head, it sometimes could take quite awhile to forget about it. I knew instinctively that if I continued to watch this Wendigo character, odds were good that she’d be haunting me, quite literally, for a fair amount of time.

Of course, I didn’t want to admit to being afraid of this character. I didn’t want to hear my parents’ reassurance that it was “just a puppet”, or have my father tease me by bringing this character up as I was about to fall asleep that night. So, I did the only thing I could think to do:

I pretended to need the bathroom. This was my standard procedure for avoiding the scary parts of movies at home. When the abominable snowman appeared in Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer, or the Wicked Witch of the West came on screen during The Wizard Of Oz, the simple solution was always just to leave the room, and usually, by the time I returned, the “scary” part would be over. So, I told my mother I had to go to the bathroom, and she took me. I dawdled, hoping that the Wendigo would be defeated by the time I was done, but sadly, that wasn’t the case. She kept appearing, so I kept faking the urge to pee…and it ultimately resulted in my father getting fed up and my mother worrying that something was really wrong, and so we went back to the hotel early, before the end of the play and before the beach party that I had been looking forward to.

The image of the Wendigo stayed with me that night, and for the remainder of the summer. Looking back on it, I definitely had some sort of issue with characters with strangely colored faces back in the day.

Anyway, I’d forgotten all about this until yesterday, when my artist friend Donella, aka Everett’s Attic on Instagram, posted a picture featuring a doll’s head with a blue face. Suddenly the entire scene just came rushing back to me. I can’t even remember the last time I thought about that experience, even when the word “Wendigo” came up in shows like Hannibal and Grimm, but I suddenly got the urge to try and find a picture or something of this nightmare monster of yore.

I figured it would be quite difficult, as I thought this was just a random production some people at the boardwalk put on, and this was probably a good twenty-five years ago. But lo and behold, I found the website for Catskill Puppet Theater, recognized the imagery immediately, and it seems that their production of Hiawatha is still being shown to this day! 

Since I know you’re probably dying to see her at this point, here are the two pictures I was able to find of the Wendigo, via the Catskill Puppet Theater Facebook page:

The funny thing is, I actually find her immensely beautiful in these pictures and would most likely buy a Halloween prop that looked like her if there was one. Such is usually the case with things that used to scare me, I grow up to love them.

You can also see a tiny snippet of her in action at about 6:30 in, in this video, and I have to tell you, she’d definitely be my favorite character if I saw this now. She also seems a bit more helpful here than I remember her, but I suppose that’s what I get for hiding in the bathroom for most of her performance.

It’s always interesting when these strange stories of the past come back…sometimes I don’t even recognize myself as the little girl who had these experiences!

What were you afraid of as a child? I’d love to know!

Stay spooky, my friends.