My son has a fear of dressed up people.
The first memorable incident happened at a children’s festival where a man was dressed up as a St Kilda football club mascot. He had an oversized foam head and a pointy chin. My two-year-old son sat on my lap, crying, shaking, distressed, craning his head back, trying to keep an eye on the perpetrator, repeatedly saying ‘where’s the man?’ I put it down to my son being overtired and having had too much sugar.
But these sorts of incidents kept happening. At my daughter’s kindergarten break-up party, Santa Claus arrived wearing a white beard and ringing a bell. My son was so distraught we had to leave the room. Last year, three months before his 3-year-old kindergarten break-up party, he started fretting, ‘will Santa be there, will Santa be there?’ I told him yes, probably, Santa will be there, but we don’t have to meet him. He asked about it so much that I decided to speak to his teacher, to see if we could somehow manage the situation. I didn’t want my son not participating in the end of year performance because he was fretting about the arrival of Santa.
The teacher told me that after Silent Night was sung, we’d hear some bells, and Santa would appear. We had it all planned out, after Silent Night I’d swing in, collect my son, and escape outdoors before the big guy arrived. However, it went a little wrong, no one told me which direction Santa would be coming from, and as we tried to dart through the toilets, there was Santa, big, red and round, and very dressed up. It was like finding myself in a horror movie with my son, the very person we were trying to escape from was the person we’d bumped into. Needless to say, we turned around and ran through the audience, as well-meaning parents were shouting ‘wait, wait, Santa is coming!’ We continued to flee.
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My daughter has the exact same thing and as a small child the same experiences ended in terror. Hers started after a house fire and the firemen arrived wearing masks. I was very distressed and that caused her (age 2 at the time) to feel insecure. All phobias are learnt responses (except fear of needles which are genetic) so it's likely something happened to trigger this fear in early life. We consulted a psych who suggested exposure therapy and I introduced her to images of masks etc online before putting some fairly benign ones on my face to show it was me. At 14 she is doing much better with things like Santa Claus because his face is partly visible but she still isn't quite ready to face the Easter bunny!
As phobias go, that one seems pretty reasonable to me. Robotics professor Hiroshi Ishiguru found, when he built a robot identical to himself, that people were spooked by it because it looked realistic. It looked closer to human than robot, and that triggered a kind of anxiety in people- they were uncomfortably aware of the deception. By contrast, most people felt less threatened by robots that appeared less human because there was clearly no attempt to deceive.
I think it's probably instinctual to be apprehensive when we encounter people who are hiding or disguising their physical identity. It takes experience to discern the fun costume from the sneaky disguise, and the cultural savvy to know Ronald McDonald from John Wayne Gacy.