The puppets at my preschool didn't terrifyme, but I didn't trust them. I'd pass their rack the way a kid passes a spooky dilapidated house, nervously, stepping faster.
No teacher or kid played with them. Most were ratty hand me downs that nobody wanted to stick their hand in. They guarded a doorway, hanging inert, like bodies on a gibbet.
The white one freaked me the most. He was a crude home-made thing with a flat, spoon shaped head and a crooked red smile. He'd stare at me with tiny eyes. I could see part of the back of his head- he had blue green fabric for hair. That creeped me too. No one, I thought No puppet or person should have hair like that.
I wonder who made the thing? Who was it supposed to be? Did it have a name? Did any kid ever like it as much as I hated it?
Weird coincidence : decades later I ended up working at the same preschool. The puppet rack (and many of the toys, and one teacher) was still there, but the scary puppets were gone.
7 comments:
I was scared of so many things at that age! (and every age?)
Hi Stray,
What things scared you? Anything unusual?
Well, when I was REALLY little, my slippers that looked like animals scared me.
That is so weird that you ended up at the same preschool. And an interesting creepy story about the puppets. I once took a tour of a Waldorf School and the dolls they gave the children had no faces-- supposedly to inspire imagination, but seemed creepy to me.
Stray g, were the slippers designed to look like animals? Or did they just remind you of animals? To this day an empty shoe looks like a gape mouth creature with six eyes.
Faceless dolls, Sally? That would have terrified me! I remember being spooked by a magazine photo of a faceless, life sized cloth man. My dad called it a dummy. I thought, That's not a dummy. That's a scary!
I forgot to add this...
The preschool posted photos of each student on the wall. When I worked there, I slipped in a photo of myself at that age.
The slippers were designed to look like animals.
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