My (Not so) Secret Fear of Basements

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This morning, I did a very brave thing. Our power had gone out, Ken was at work, and I was the only adult in the house.

I have a laptop, but it didn’t have enough power to last all day, and the modem and router didn’t have power so I couldn’t use the internet at all!!!

Arrrgh! A full day without being able to get online and see what was going on in the rest of the world?!? No, the thought was unbearable. I had to face my fears and brave the dark basement where the fuse box was hidden.

Now, to explain why I don’t like basements, I need to go back to before I was born. My mom (Alice) likes to sew, so Dad (Jesse) decided to buy her a mannequin.

Not, please understand, a dressmaker’s mannequin. Instead it was a full body humanoid like you’d see in the window of a store.

Mom wasn’t sure what to do with the thing, but it definitely needed to be dressed, so she put one of her outfits on it and threw a wig on it’s head. Then she asked Dad to take it to the attic.

Photo by Colin Rose

Mom and Dad lived in a duplex at the time. Two families were separated by a thin wall, but they shared the attic upstairs.

Sue and Herman had just moved into the other duplex. Sue was up in the attic working, when she happened to notice the mannequin against the back wall.

When it didn’t respond to her, she rushed back downstairs and phoned her husband at work. “Herman, you have to come quick. Jesse’s killed Alice and hung her in the attic!”

When I was 12, we moved into an old house with a large, dark, basement.

I had always been a little scared of the dark, but old houses make noises. Lots of creaky, creepy groaning noises…which sound especially loud in the dark.

Did I mention that my dad was a practical joker?

He thought my fear of the dark was rather silly, so one day he sent me down to get something from the back corner of the basement…where it wasn’t very well lit, and where the mannequin was also being stored.

Guess who was hiding behind the mannequin?

I think I jumped a foot in the air. Dad laughed and laughed.

Even guests weren’t immune to Dad’s mannequin pranks.

Dad would take them down to the basement on some pretext or other, and watch when they discovered the “woman” in the corner. I can still hear him laughing and as soon as they realized what it was, they’d join in. 

I don’t know what ever happened to the mannequin. But I still can’t go down into a dark basement without thinking of it.